Hagbard (Karl Koch)

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Karl Werner Lothar 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 was involved in a Cold War computer espionage incident.

[edit] Biography

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 (Dirk-Otto Brezinski), Pengo (Hans Heinrich Hübner), and Urmel (Markus Hess), 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 was written about the incident. There are also some interesting news items in Phrack: [1] and [2].

Koch was found burned to death with gasoline in a forest near Celle. The death was generally considered a suicide.

A German movie about his life, entitled 23, was released in 1998. While the film was critically acclaimed, it has been harshly criticized as exploitative by real-life witnesses. An interesting corrective to the film's take is the documentation written by his friends (see [3] - mostly in German).