Hagbard (Karl Koch)
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Karl Koch (born July 22, 1965 in Hanover, died - probably - May 23, 1989) was a German hacker in the 1980s, who called himself "hagbard", after Hagbard Celine. He is considered by some to be the inventor of the first trojan horse software, and was involved in a cold war computer espionage incident.
As his moniker would suggest, he was heavily influenced by The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Besides adopting his pseudonym from a character in the book, he also named his computer "fuckup", after a computer designed and built by that character. He was addicted to cocaine and became extremely paranoid, convinced he was fighting the Illuminati like his literary namesake.
Koch was loosely affiliated with the CCC. He worked with the hackers known as DOB, pengo, and urmel, and was involved in selling hacked information from US military computers to the KGB. Eventually he and Pengo came forward and confessed to the authorities. The book The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll (ISBN 0743411463) was written about the incident. There are also some interesting news items in Phrack: [1] (http://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=25&a=10) and [2] (http://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=27&a=12).
Koch was found burned to death with gasoline in a forest near Celle. The death was generally considered a suicide.
A movie has been made about his life, titled "23", which has been harshly critized by real life witnesses. More interesting is the documentation written by his friends (see [3] (http://seti23.org/karlkoch/) - mostly in German).ca:Karl Koch de:Karl Koch es:Karl Koch