THE FASCINATING HISTORY OF HACKING: IT?S EASIER THAN YOU THINK! By Tadia Rice

The?Timeline of Computer Security Hacker History provides a fascinating look at what is considered hacking, not to mention?how it has been documented.?[1]

As early as 1903 a magician and inventor?named Nevil Maskelyne?disrupted?a public demonstration?of?Guglielmo Marconi's purportedly secure?wireless telegraphy?technology, sending insulting?Morse code?messages through the auditorium's projector.?

In 1932 Polish cryptologists?Marian Rejewski,?Henryk Zygalski,?and?Jerzy Ró?ycki?broke the?Enigma machine?code created to read Morse-coded?radio communications?that had been enciphered.?

War helped propel hacking. In 1939 Alan Turing,?Gordon Welchman?and?Harold Keen developed the?Bombe, an?electro-mechanical device used by British?cryptologists?to help decipher?German?Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during?World War II.?René Carmille,?comptroller?general of the Vichy?French Army, hacked the?punched card?system used by the Nazis to locate Jews in 1943.?

It was at MIT in April 1955 that the term “hack” first came to mean fussing with machines at a meeting of the?Tech Model Railroad Club?stated, "Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.”?

The first ever reference to malicious?hacking?was “telephone hackers” in?MIT's student 1963 newspaper.?The Tech?of hackers tying up the lines with?Harvard, configuring the?PDP-1?to make free calls,?war dialing?and accumulating large phone bills.

The first known incidence of network penetration hacking took place in 1967 at a suburban Chicago area high school where members of a computer club were provided access to IBM's APL network.?Evanston Township High School experimented with four IBM 2741 Selectric teletypewriter-based terminals with dial-up modem connectivity to an experimental computer system that implemented an early version of the APL programming language. The students worked independently and quickly learned the language and the system they were free to explore, often using existing code available in public Workspaces as models for their own creations. The students eventually explored the system's wider context and this proved to be the first informal network penetration effort. It helped IBM to acknowledged helping harden the security of one of the first publicly accessible networks, all from the effort of, “a number of high school students for their compulsion to bomb the system.”

In 1983 the 414s, a group of?six teenage computer hackers?broke into 60 computer systems at institutions ranging from the?Los Alamos National Laboratory?to Manhattan's?Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.?

As a result, the U.S. House of Representatives held?hearings on computer security.?By 1984 the?Comprehensive Crime Control Act?gave the Secret Service jurisdiction over?computer fraud, and after more and more break-ins to?government?and?corporate?computers, Congress passed the?Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 1986 which makes it a crime to break into computer systems.?

In 1989 The Iran Contra affair took down the illustrious Colonel Oliver North who thought that shredding papers and deleting emails would protect him from incrimination from illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents. However, the U.S. government’s IBM Professional Office System (PROFS) and the mainframe support personnel were backing up his e-mails, and all were recovered.?

American spy and FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen used high and low techniques to pass secrets to his Russian handlers, but after a four-month FBI investigation he was busted by computer forensic analysis, substantial covert surveillance, court-authorized searches and other sensitive techniques. Hanssen used old-fashioned mail drops to communicate information to encrypted disks, flash memory cards, and even a Palm Pilot. Hanssen hacked into the computer of the FBI’s top Russian counterintelligence officer in the early 1990s. While the FBI was monitoring Hanssen’s computer use, cell phone calls, and had a wiretap of his home and office phones, he was surfing the FBI computers for references to his name in ongoing investigations.?

Hanssen pleaded guilty in 2001 to charges that included conspiracy to commit espionage, 19 counts of espionage, and one count of attempted espionage. He is currently serving a life sentence without possibility of parole, under a plea agreement in which he pledged full cooperation with authorities.?He?will reside for the rest of his life?in?a?maximum security prison in Colorado, known as the "Alcatraz?of the?Rockies.”

In 1990 Secret Service agents swooped?down on organizers and prominent members of BBSs in 14 U.S. cities,?including the?Legion of Doom, conducting early-morning raids and arrests. The result?was a breakdown in the hacking community, with members informing on each other in exchange for immunity.?

A?1992 movie,?Sneakers,?featured fictional security experts who are blackmailed into stealing a universal?decoder for?encryption?systems.?It?was the?first?major Hollywood movie to focus on the NSA and was a box- office success. In the July 18, 2013 issue of Time Magazine, intelligence section writer, Eli Sugarman, stated in his article?Too Many Secrets?, “Sneakers provides even more prescient insights into the modern surveillance state, especially recently revealed National Security Agency collection programs. Sneakers?centers on the development of an advanced decryption device that can break all U.S. codes — and the NSA’s attempts to obtain the device at all costs.”?

Robert Tappan Morris graduated from both Cornell and Harvard Universities, and in 1989, he created the Morris worm that nearly shut down 6,000 major Unix machines, causing millions of dollars in damage. In 2015?he was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for?“contributions to?computer networking,?distributed systems, and?operating systems.”?

In 1996?Russian?crackers?siphoned US$10 million from Citibank and transferred the money to bank accounts in Finland and?Israel, all from an after-hours work laptop of a 30-year-old?ringleader.?

The new era of freeware?applications welcomed AOHell that allowed mushrooming communities of unskilled?script kiddies?to wreak havoc on of thousands of AOL users who found their mailboxes flooded with multi-megabyte?email bombs?and their chat rooms disrupted with?spam?messages. These kinds of?effective, easily downloadable programs are capable of breaching computers and networks with programs that have included remote denial-of-service?WinNuke,?Back Orifice,?NetBus?and?Sub7?vulnerability scanner/injector kit?Metasploit,, often software intended for legitimate security auditing?were to follow.?More malicious script kiddies have used virus toolkits to create and propagate the?Anna Kournikova?and?Love Bug?viruses.?

Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee copied computer tapes with information related to nuclear weapons.?In 1995,?Lee downloaded 1.4 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of about 400,000 pages, from the secure computer system at Los Alamos while working nights, weekends, and circumventing security safeguards. Lee moved the data to desktop computer and to pocket-sized tapes, made over 40 hours of those tapes in 70 days in 1993, 1994 and 1997. He claimed that he made the tapes due to fear of Los Alamos losing material. When his security clearance was revoked in 1999 he dumped some in landfills. Forensics specialists were able to recover data on the tapes but they were not related to the investigation. Although Lee had erased classified files and transferred them to unclassified computers, he never admitted to espionage. In 2000 the government dropped 58 of the 59 charges, sentenced him to nine months, and freed him. The lesson was that the investigation was mismanaged, and the U.S. District Judge reprimanding the U.S. government and apologized to Lee.

A positive result of these countless cybercrimes led to the first?DEF CON, the world's largest?hacker convention held in?Las Vegas in 1993. It was so popular that it has become an annual event. DEF CON is for computer security professionals, journalists, lawyers, federal government employees, security researchers, students, and?hackers?with a general interest in?software,?computer architecture, phone?phreaking, hardware modification, and anything else that can be “hacked.”?The event hosts speakers, War Games, contests for the longest?Wi-Fi?connection (aircrack-ng), and hacking computer systems.

What happens in Vegas doesn?t always stay in Vegas.

Hackers?did not limit?themselves to private and corporate sectors. In 1996 hackers altered the websites of the?United States Department of Justice?(August), the?CIA?(October), and the?U.S. Air Force?(December).?The U.S. General Accounting Office reported 250,000 hacker attempts to break into Defense Department computer files, with approximately 65 percent of the attempts successful. Since then Electronic Disturbance Theater, an online political performance-art group, attacked the Pentagon website in 1998.?

The group called?Level Seven Crew?(L7) defaced the?U.S. Embassy in China's website in 1998, and placed racist, anti-government slogans regarding U.S. embassy bombings.?L7 was rumored to have been involved in the bitcoin terror attack on the Pakistani intelligence agencies with the help of little known French group The Mozart and an unknown Indian group called the Bafu-moshai. The attack was the most advanced server breach of its kind.

1999 was a banner year for software security and hacking; security software vendors released anti-hacking products for use on home computers.?These were nascent days of the Internet when David L. Smith spread the highly notorious Melissa worm, a mass-mailing?macro virus distributed by email. It was the first malware would be successfully transported through this method, and considered to have caused as much as $80 million in damages.?

The decade of the 2000s greeted the ILOVEYOU?worm, also known as VBS/Loveletter and Love Bug worm, was a computer worm written in VBScript. It infected millions of computers worldwide within a few?one of the most damaging worms ever. It originated in the Philippines and was made by an AMA Computer College student for his thesis.

Canadian Michael “Mafiaboy” Calce took down the websites of Yahoo, Amazon and eBay in 2000 at the age of 15, by using denial-of-service attacks across 75 computers in 52 networks. Calce caused an estimated $1.7 billion in damage. He runs Optimal Secure that tries to find weak points in company networks and helps businesses understand just how vulnerable they are.

Microsoft became the prominent victim of a new type of hack that attacked the?domain name server - the?denial-of-service attacks on the DNS. Dutch password cracker was released with viruses named after?Anna Kournikova. The Code Red worm infected tens of thousands of machines.?The hacking group World of Hell was exposed for breaking into the?Defense Information Systems Agency?computer system on June 2001. Soon more worms with names like Kama Sutra, Black Worm, Mywife, Blackmal, Nyxem version D, Kapser, KillAV, Grew and CME-24 began spreading through e-mail client address books to destroy or delete user files. In?November Klez.H worm became the biggest?malware?outbreak. The hacktivist group?Anonymous?was formed, and at the same time North Korea claimed to have trained 500 hackers who could successfully crack South Korean and Japanese computer systems.?

Perpetrators were caught, and the FBI?Operation Bot Roast?found over 1 million botnet victims; in spear phishing?incidents at the?Office of the Secretary of Defense. U.S. defense information was compromised; the United Nations?website was hacked; Anonymous?attacked Scientology website servers around the world, and 20 Chinese hackers claim to have gained access to the world's most sensitive sites, including?The Pentagon.?

Teenager Sven Jaschan released a series of worms in 2004 that eventually became known as Netsky and Sasser, and accounted for as much as 70 percent of all the malware spreading at that time over the Internet. As a teen he received only a suspended sentence and was immediately hired by a security company to help come up with antidotes to computer viruses.

From around the globe hackers were operating in the U.S., Turkey, India, Iran, Israel, Russia, or on a Chinese Island – anywhere with access to electricity and a web network, the digital world was rapidly transforming with security breach one after another.?In 2010?Symbian OS?was released by a hacker named A0drul3z?to gain access to cell phone data, and soon after?in 2011?Bank of America?s?website got hacked by a Turkish hacker named JeOPaRDY. It was estimated that 85,000 credit card numbers and accounts were stolen due to the hack.?

Bangladeshi hacker TiGER-M@TE?set?a world record in?2011 by?defacing and?hacking 700,000 websites in a single shot.?He also?hacked?the?websites?of?Youtube, MSN, Bing, Dell, Western Union, Linkedin, HP and Microsoft Kenya. When the?YouTube?channel for?Sesame Street?was hacked and?then?streamed pornographic content for 22 minutes, it hit?mainstream America?like never before,?stealing its way into homes and?also?the minds of children.??

Endless?pages?could be filled?with hacking incidents in France, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Egypt – anywhere on the planet, but the point?was that whether it was military, governments, banks, corporations, movie studios, your home, or Apple and Microsoft or LinkedIn, the world had to act.?

In 2014 the White House computer system was hacked and the FBI, the Secret Service, and other U.S. intelligence agencies categorized the attacks “among the most sophisticated attacks ever launched against U.S. government systems.”?

More recent famous hackers include Kevin Poulsen who hacked into the phone lines of a radio station to win prizes; broke into phone systems to reactivate old numbers. He is now a Senior Editor for Wired News.

Whether it was an individual like phone phreaker Steve Wozniak, or The Mentor Loyd Blankenship who authored The Hacker Manifesto, or a group of hackers like the Legion of Doom, the Masters of Deception, or MoD, it seems that the earliest generation of hackers did the world an inadvertent service. By creating viruses, worms, denial of service attacks, or breaking into victim’s systems like AT&T, the digital world woke from the benefits of the internet to the nightmares that can be caused when forensics and security is not maintained.?

Ironically, all of these now former hackers are industry professionals helping to correct the very wrongs they perpetrated.

What magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne?inspired in 1903 spawned a consciousness that will last for an unknown duration, and I doubt he could have ever imagined that.??

References

[1]?Timeline Of Computer Security Hacker History,?10 May 2018.?Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_security_hacker_history

[2] A. Young, M. Yung, 1996, Cryptovirology: Extortion-Based Security Threats and Countermeasures, IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy.?Retrieved from https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/ransomware-modern-day-extortion/