L0pht Heavy Industries
The Boston hacker collective that told the US Senate in 1998 it could take down the internet in thirty minutes.
It started around 1992 as a rented loft where members stored old hardware and grew into one of the most influential security outfits of the decade. Members included Mudge (Peiter Zatko), Weld Pond (Chris Wysopal), Kingpin (Joe Grand) and Space Rogue. They published their own vulnerability advisories well before vendors were willing to take such things seriously.
Their best-known tool was L0phtCrack (1997), which cracked Windows passwords by exploiting the weaknesses of the LM hash. In May 1998 seven members testified before the Senate under their hacker handles about how fragile network infrastructure was. In 2000 the group merged into the security firm @stake, which Symantec bought in 2004 — an early and fairly typical journey from loft to consultancy.