Slideshow

Everybody knows the Twitter Fail Whale, but Twitter’s hardly the only flaky Web service out there, and the Fail Whale is just one creature in a whole Fail menagerie that’s sprung up in recent years to soothe hacked off Web users. Check out Threatpost’s Fail Zoo: a collection of the strangest fail creatures on the net.

Chung, a 72 year old engineer from Orange, California was charged with eight counts of economic espionage in 2008. According to a statement by the U.S. Department of Justice, Chung, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had secret clearance for work on the U.S. Space Shuttle program that he performed as an employee for both Rockwell International and Boeing. According to the indictment, Chung took trade secrets related to both the Space Shuttle and the C-17 military transport aircraft and Delta IV rocket and attempted to pass it on to the People’s Republic of China.

Ye and Zhong were alleged to have obtained trade secrets, including designs for super integrated circuit chips from a variety of Silicon Valley firms through a front company, Supervision, Inc. a/k/a Hangzhou Zhongtian Microsystems Company Ltd. The two posed as legitimate businessmen interested in creating a joint venture to produce and sell microprocessors in China. The two attempted to recruit others to work for Supervision, claiming that the Chinese government would be backing the company.

Gowadia was a longtime employee of defense contractor Northrup and one of the designers of the U.S. military’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. He is believed to have conceived of and designed the B-2’s propulsion system, which protects the bombers from heat seeking missiles. He was arrested in 2005 and accused of selling classified information to the People’s Republic of China, and sending classified information to individuals in Germany, Israel and Switzerland.

Yu was a Product Engineer and ten-year veteran of U.S. automaker Ford Motor Company who admitted to copying around 4,000 confidential Ford documents to an external hard drive and passing them to Beijing Automotive Company with whom he hadtaken a job. The design documents have been valued at around $50 million.

The granddaddy of all moles, Robert Hanssen was a career FBI officer who spent decades spying for the Soviet Union, including the GRU – the Soviet military intelligence unit- and the KGB. Hanssen worked his way up in the FBI and was charged with a variety of jobs related to intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence for the FBI, selling what he knew to the Russians for more than $1 million in cash and diamonds between 1979 and 1999. That information included the identities of Soviets in Russia spying on behalf of the CIA, Soviets in the U.S.

Lopez was the head of General Motors’ Global Purchasing division when he defected for GM competitor VW to head that company’s purchasing operation in 1993. According to a lawsuit filed by GM, Lopez and other company executives brought with them more than two million pages of top-secret GM documents, which they had culled in the months leading up to their departure. The documents included business plans, automobile designs and factory blueprints. By 1996, VW had opened its first factory that, GM claims, was built using the pilfered plans.