Founded by Wau Holland and Andy Müller-Maghun, the Chaos Computer Club, or CCC, is one of the most influential hacker organizations in Europe. The Club says that it aims to be a galactic community of human beings who—­without age, gender, race, or societal orientation restrictions—push for freedom of information across borders. The CCC made media headlines when its members cracked the German Bildschirmtext (BTX) and were able to get a bank to put 134,000 German Mark into their bank account. The next day, and with the attention of the media, the CCC returned the money. In their defense, the CCC said that they just wanted to prove that the BTX system was vulnerable and could be attacked by real cybercriminals.

The CCC has other traces to dark cyber history. In 1989, a group of West German hackers, with Karl Koch at the helm, were involved in the first cyber espionage case to make international news. The group members were charged with cracking the U.S. governmentÂ’s computers as well as industry computers and giving the Soviet KGB (the Committee for State Security) critical operating system source code. They earned several 100,000 German Mark plus drugs over a 3-year period. Karl Koch was said to be loosely tied to the CCC.

See Also: Crackers; Cracking; Cybercrime and Cybercriminals; Hacker Club.