Underground most commonly refers to:
Phrack is an e-zine written by and for hackers, first published November 17, 1985. Described by Fyodor as "the best, and by far the longest running hacker zine," the magazine is open for contributions by anyone who desires to publish remarkable works or express original ideas on the topics of interest. It has a wide circulation which includes both hackers and computer security professionals.
Operation Sundevil was a 1990 nationwide United States Secret Service crackdown on "illegal computer hacking activities." It involved raids in approximately fifteen different cities and resulted in three arrests and the confiscation of computers, the contents of electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes), and floppy disks. It was revealed in a press release on May 9, 1990. The arrests and subsequent court cases resulted in the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The operation is now seen as largely a public-relations stunt. Operation Sundevil has also been viewed as one of the preliminary attacks on the Legion of Doom and similar hacking groups. The raid on Steve Jackson Games, which led to the court case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, is often attributed to Operation Sundevil, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation states that it is unrelated and cites this attribution as a media error.
Chris Goggans, is an American hacker, founding member of the Legion of Doom group, and a former editor of Phrack magazine. He is known as an expert in security, as well as for his statements on hacker ethic and responsibility.
Nahshon Even-Chaim, aka Phoenix, was the first major computer hacker to be convicted in Australia. He was one of the most highly skilled members of a computer hacking group called The Realm, based in Melbourne, Australia, from the late 1980s until his arrest by the Australian Federal Police in early 1990. His targets centered on defense and nuclear weapons research networks.
Electron was the computer handle of Richard Jones, a member of an underground hacker community called The Realm. Jones, born in June 1969, was one of three members of the group arrested in simultaneous raids by the Australian Federal Police in Melbourne, Australia, on 2 April 1990. All three — Nahshon Even-Chaim, Electron and Nom — were convicted of a range of computer crimes involving the intrusion into US defense and government computer systems and the theft of an online computer security newsletter in the late 1980s and early 1990.
In The Realm of the Hackers is a 2003 Australian documentary directed by Kevin Anderson about the prominent hacker community, centered in Melbourne, Australia in the late 1980s until early 1990. The storyline is centered on the Australian teenagers going by the hacker names "Electron" and "Phoenix", who were members of an elite computer hacking group called 'The Realm' and hacked into some of the most secure computer networks in the world, including those of the US Naval Research Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a government lab charged with the security of the US nuclear stockpile, and NASA. The film runs for 55 minutes and was inspired by the book Underground, by Melbourne-based writer and academic Suelette Dreyfus.
WikiLeaks is an NGO owned by Icelandic company Sunshine Press Productions ehf that runs a website that has published news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist, who is currently fighting extradition to the United States over his work with WikiLeaks. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website stated in 2015 that it had released online 10 million documents since beginning in 2006 in Iceland. WikiLeaks' most recent publication was in 2021 and its most recent publication of original documents was in 2019. Beginning in November 2022, many of the documents could not be accessed.
The WANK Worm was a computer worm that attacked DEC VMS computers in 1989 over the DECnet. It was written in DIGITAL Command Language.
In computer security, the Zardoz list, more formally known as the Security-Digest list, was a famous semi-private full disclosure mailing list run by Neil Gorsuch from 1989 through 1991. It identified weaknesses in systems and gave directions on where to find them. Zardoz is most notable for its status as a perennial target for computer hackers, who sought archives of the list for information on undisclosed software vulnerabilities.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and cypherpunk activist. He was convicted in Australia for hacking in 1996. He founded WikiLeaks in 2006; the organisation came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
Bernd Fix is a German hacker and computer security expert.
Suelette Dreyfus is a technology researcher, journalist, and writer. She is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, as well as the principal researcher on an international research project on the impact of digital technologies on whistleblowing. Her fields of research include information systems, digital security and privacy, the impact of technology on whistleblowing, health informatics and e-education. Her work examines digital whistleblowing as a form of freedom of expression and the right of dissent from corruption.
Jérémie Zimmermann is a French computer science engineer co-founder of the Paris-based La Quadrature du Net, a citizen advocacy group defending fundamental freedoms online and co-founder of Hacking With Care, a "collective composed of hackers-activists, caregivers, artists, sociologist, growing quite literally by contact and affinity".
Underground: The Julian Assange Story is an Australian television film produced for Network Ten. It premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and aired on Network Ten on 7 October 2012. The film draws its title from Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, a 1997 book by Suelette Dreyfus, researched by Julian Assange, but the film bears little relation to the book itself, which catalogues the exploits of a group of Australian, American, and British hackers during the 1980s and early 1990s, among them Assange himself. The film was not approved by Julian Assange, Wikileaks or any other member of the Assange family and there was no collaboration with the Assanges or Wikileaks during the making of the film. However Julian Assange subsequently had "a very favourable response to the movie".
In 2012, while on bail Julian Assange was granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he sought to avoid extradition to Sweden, and what his supporters said was the possibility of subsequent extradition to the US. On 11 April 2019, Ecuador revoked his asylum, he was arrested for failing to appear in court, and carried out of the Embassy by members of the London Metropolitan Police. Following his arrest, the US revealed a previously sealed 2018 US indictment in which Assange was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion related to his involvement with Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks.
