An unknown Indian hacker has been charged with the greatest cyber-heist in history for allegedly helping a criminal gang steal identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could net more than £2.8 billion in illegal funds. The hacker breached IT defences of Best Western Hotel group’s online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

A look at some of the biggest cyber criminals:

• A former engineer with a Pune-based software solutions company 3DPLM Software Solutions, Anita Sharma, 26, was arrested for transferring vital data from her company days before she quit her job. The company accused her of cyber theft worth $12 million. Sharma allegedly passed on vital data and the source code of programmes developed by it to her husband through an IBM email ID between October 8, 2006 and September 3, 2007.

• An 18-year-old resident of Hamilton, New Zealand, was arrested in an FBI swoop. He was accused of selling a programme he wrote to several criminal gangs. Detectives believe it could have been used to swipe a total of £10million from its victims. The boy was identified as “AKILL”, the kingpin of an international cyber crime network which stretched around the world. The programme he wrote allowed cyber criminals to “take over” other computers using the internet.

• Kevin Mitnick, often incorrectly called by many as god of hackers, broke into the computer systems of the world’s top technology and telecommunications companies Nokia, Fujitsu, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems. He was arrested by the FBI in 1995, but later released on parole in 2000. He never termed his activity hacking, instead he called it social engineering.

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