What is it about hackers that gives them a certain appeal? We know that the reality of hacking in this day and age is that it’s really all about identity theft, which may not be quite as sexy, but we still remember when the internet was new and there was a certain “cool” to the whole idea of hacking.

It could be that we like the idea of being a computer nerd and an outlaw at the same time, or maybe there was just a novel, science fiction cyberpunk sort of element that we couldn’t resist.

Well whatever it is that gets us all abuzz about hackers, here are the five most famous hackers in the history of the game…

c0mrade, Jonathan James

Codename c0mrade, Jonathan James was the first juvenile ever sent to prison for hacking, sentenced at just sixteen years of age. While taking with PBS, he confessed that he was “just playing around. What was fun for me was a challenge to see what I could pull off.”

What James went away for was hacking into the computer systems of high profile organizations. He put a backdoor into a Defense Threat Reduction Agency server, hacking right into the Department of Defense and playing around with threat levels for nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and special weapons.

When the challenge there was gone, James moved on to NASA, which was forced to shut down all of its computer systems as he stole nearly two million bucks worth of software. Though James himself claimed “The code was crappy… certainly not worth the one point seven million they claimed.”

Had he been an adult, James would’ve been slapped with a minimum of ten years in the slammer, but being just a kid, he was given a six month house arrest sentence and banned from recreational computer use. He wound up serving six months hard time for violation of parole, but he claims to have learned his lesson and hopes to start a computer security company. If anybody’s qualified for that job, it’s got to be the guy who hacked NASA and the DTRA.

The Homeless Hacker, Adrain Lamo

Lamo got his kicks hacking into the New York Times and Microsoft, using internet connections at Kinko’s, coffee shops and libraries. “I have a laptop in Pittsburgh, a change of clothes in D.C. It kind of redefines the term multi-jurisdictional.”

He mainly focused on penetration testing, just looking for chinks in the armor of companies like Yahoo!, Bank of America and Citigroup. Interestingly, what Lamo did really isn’t all that different from what “White Hat Hackers” do. He was just testing out how far he could crack into security systems. However, when you’re getting paid to do it, that’s one thing. When it’s a hobby, that’s something else entirely.

Lamo was ordered to pay sixty five grand for his intrusion into the New York Times and sentenced to six months home confinement and two years probation, which expired in early 2007. Today, ironically enough after his trouble with the New York Times, Lamo is actually an award-winning journalist!

The Hannibal Lecter of Computer Crime, Kevin Poulson

Not as cool a nickname as “c0mrade” or “The Homeless Hacker”, but the Law Enforcement came up with it, not the media, so you take what you can get. Poulsen hacked the phone lines of the LA radio station KIIS-FM, earning himself a new Porsche and various other prizes. Authorities began pursuing Poulsen when he hacked the FBI database, but he egged them on further, hacking federal computers for info on wiretaps (hey, gotta cover your bases, right?).

His specialty focused on telephones, and besides hacking KIIS-FM, he also reactivated old Yellow Page escort service numbers for an acquaintance who ran a virtual escort agency. Eventually, his photo came up on Unsolved Mysteries, and, for some reason, the 1-800 phone lines crashed!

Poulsen was eventually nabbed in a supermarket and wound up serving five years hard time. Today, Poulsen is a journalist and senior editor for Wired News, and a white hat hacker. Most recently he detailed his work identifying seven hundred and forty four sex offenders through Myspace.

Robert Tappan Morris

Sorry, no cool nickname this time, but he’s famous for having created the “Morris Worm” and that sounds kind of cool. Anyways, the Morris Worm was the first internet worm to be unleashed on the web, and Morris wound up being the first person ever prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Morris, ironically the son of National Security Agency scientist Robert Morris, wrote the worm while a student at Cornell, and today asserts that he committed the crime only out of curiosity, using the worm to see “just how large the internet was”. However, he didn’t foresee just how far the worm would go, and it replicated itself excessively, slowing computers to the point where they weren’t even usable anymore. It is estimated that he may have rendered around six thousand computers “bricked”.

He wound up doing three years probation, four hundred hours of community service, and paying steep fines of just over ten large. Today, he works at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer network architectures.

Woz, Stephen Wozniak

The one “white hat hacker” famous enough to make the list. The “Other Steve” of Apple, Wozniak was one of the co-founders of Apple Computer.

“The Woz” got his start hacking making blue boxes, devices that bypass telephone switching in order to make free long distance calls. Wozniak and Steve Jobs did some research on frequencies and then created blue boxes to sell to classmates in college. In one famous incident, Wozniak used a blue box to call the Pope while doing a presumably terrible impression of Henry Kissinger.

Not long after, Woz invented the computer that made him rich and dropped out of college. Jobs decided to sell the computer as a fully assembled PC board, and the rest is history.

Woz has since left Apple, and now focuses on philanthropy, working as the technological fairy godfather to the Los Gatos, California school district, providing the schools with state of the art computer and technological equipment.

Gil Bronson writes about how to apply to forensic science colleges.