Richard Pryce

Pryce was 16 when, in the spring of 1994, he used Rome Laboratory as a stepping stone into other military and civilian systems. The headline moment was data from a Korean atomic research institute passing through Air Force machines; until someone established that it was South Korea, not North, pulses in Washington ran high. Air Force investigators followed the traffic to Britain, and Scotland Yard arrested him in 1995.

In 1997 he pleaded guilty to about a dozen offences under the Computer Misuse Act and was fined a little over a thousand pounds. The case became a stock example in US reports on how exposed military networks were, and on how hard it is to tell a curious teenager from a hostile state when all you have are the logs.