A brief history of hacking

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 A brief history of hacking

 December 1947 – William Shockley invents the transistor and demonstrates its use
for the first time. The first transistor consisted of a messy collection of wires,
insulators and germanium. According to a recent poll on CNN’s website, the
transistor is believed to be the most important discovery in the past 100 years.
 1964 – Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny create BASIC, one of the most popular
programming languages even nowadays.
 1965 -it’s estimated that approximately 20,000 computer systems are in use in the
United States. Most of these are manufactured by International Business Machines
(IBM).
 1968 – Intel is founded.
 1969 – AMD is founded.
 1969 – The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) create the ARPANET, the
forerunner of the Internet. The first four nodes (networks) of ARPANET consisted of
the University of California Los Angeles, University of California Santa Barbara,
University of Utah and the Stanford Research Institute.
 1969 – Intel announces 1K (1024 bytes) RAM modules.
 1969 – Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchies begin work on UNICS. Thompson writes
the first version of UNICS in one month on a machine with 4KB of 18 bit words.
UNICS is later renamed ‘UNIX’.
 1969 – MIT becomes home to the first computer hackers, who begin altering
software and hardware to make it work better and/or faster.
 1969 – Linus Torvalds born in Helsinki.
 1970 – DEC introduces the PDP-11, one of the most popular computer designs
ever. Some are still in use as today.
 1971 – John Draper, aka as ‘Cap’n Crunch’ hacks phone systems using a toy
whistle from a cereal box.
 1971 – The first email program is released for the Arpanet. The author is Ray
Tomlinson, who decides to use the ‘@’ character to separate the user name from the
domain address.
 1972 – Ritchie and Kerningham rewrite UNIX in C, a programming language
designed with portability in mind.
 1972 – NCSA develops the ‘telnet’ tool.
 1973 – Gordon Moore, Intel’s chairman postulates the famous ‘Moore Law’, which
states the number of transistors in CPUs will double every 18 months, a law which
will stay true for more than 20 years.
 1973 – FTP is introduced.
 1974 – Stephen Bourne develops the first major UNIX shell, the ‘bourne’ shell.
 1975 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft.
 1976 – A 21-year old Bill Gates writes ‘An Open Letter to Hobbyists’, a document in
which he condemns open source and software piracy.
 April 1st, 1976 – Apple Computers is founded.
 1977 – Billy Joy authors BSD, another UNIX-like operating system.
 1979 – Microsoft licenses the UNIX source code from AT&T and creates their own
implementation, ‘Xenix’.
 1981 – The Domain Name System (DNS) is created.
 1981 – Microsoft acquires the intellectual property rights for DOS and renames it
MS-DOS.
 1982 – Sun Microsystems is founded. Sun will become famous for its SPARC
microprocessors, Solaris, the Network File System (NFS) and Java.
 1982 – Richard Stallman begins to develop a free version of UNIX which he
calls ‘GNU’, a recursive definition meaning ‘GNU’s Not UNIX’.
 1982 – William Gibson invents the term ‘cyberspace’.
 1982 – SMTP, the ‘simple mail transfer protocol’ is published. SMTP is currently the
most widespread method for exchanging messages on the Internet.
 1982 – Scott Fahlman invents the first emoticon, ‘:)’.
 1983 – The Internet is founded by splitting the Arpanet into separate military and
civilian networks.
 1983 – FidoNet is developed by Tom Jennings. FidoNet will become the most
widespread information exchange network in the world for the next 10 years, until
the Internet takes over.
 1983 – Kevin Poulsen, aka ‘Dark Dante’ is arrested for breaking into the Arpanet.
 1984 – CISCO Systems is founded.
 1984 – Fred Cohen develops the first PC viruses and comes up with the now-
standard term ‘computer virus’.
 1984 – Andrew Tannenbaum creates Minix, a free UNIX clone based on a modular
microkernel architecture.
 1984 – Bill Landreth, aka ‘The Cracker’, is convicted of hacking computer systems
and accessing NASA and Department of Defense computer data.
 1984 – Apple introduces Macintosh System 1.0.
 1985 – Richard Stallman founds the Free Software Foundation.
 March 15, 1985 – ‘Symbolics.com’ is registered as the first Internet domain name.
 November 1985 – Microsoft releases ‘Windows 1.0’, which sells for $100.
 1986 – The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in US adopted.
 1986 – ‘Legion of Doom’ member Loyd Blankenship, aka ‘The Mentor’, is arrested
and publishes the now famous ‘Hacker’s Manifesto’.
 1988 – The CD-ROM is invented.
 1988 – IRC is established.
 November 1988 – Robert Morris launches an Internet worm which infects several
thousand systems and clogs computers around the country due to a programming
error. This worm is now knows as the Morris worm.
 1989 – the WWW is developed at CERN labs, in Switzerland.
 1990 – The Arpanet is dismantled.
 1990 – Kevin Poulsen hacks a phone system in LA making himself the winner of a
Porsche 944 in a radio phone-in.
 1991 – PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), a powerful, free encryption tool is released by
Philip Zimmerman. The software quickly becomes the most popular encryption
package in the world.
 1991 – Rumours appear regarding the computer virus ‘Michaelangelo’, coded to
launch its destructive payload on March 6th.
 September 17, 1991 – Linus Torvalds releases the first version of Linux.
 1992 – The ‘Masters of Deception’ phone phreaking group is arrested due to
evidence obtained via wiretaps.
 1993 – The Mosaic web browser is released.
 1993 – Microsoft releases Windows NT.
 1993 – First version of FreeBSD is released.
 March 23, 1994 – 16-year-old Richard Pryce, aka ‘Datastream Cowboy’, is arrested
and charged with unauthorized computer access.
 1994 – Vladimir Levin, a Russian mathematician, hacks into Citibank and steals $10
million.
 1995 – Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema release SATAN, an automated vulnerability
scanner, which becomes a popular hacking tool.
 1995 – Chris Lamprecht, aka ‘Minor Threat’, is the first person to be ever banned
from the Internet.
 1995 – Sun launches Java, a computer programming language designed to be
portable across different platforms in compiled form.
 August 1995 – Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) released. IE will become the most
exploited web browser in history and a favourite target for virus writers and hackers.
 August 1995 – Windows 95 is launched.
 1996 – IBM releases OS/2 Warp version 4, a powerful multi-tasking operating
system with a new user interface, as a counter to Microsoft’s recently released
Windows 95. Despite being more reliable and stable, OS/2 will slowly lose ground
and be discontinued a few years later.
 1996 – ICQ, the first IM, is released.
 1996 – Tim Lloyd plants a software time bomb at Omega Engineering, a company in
New Jersey. The results of the attack are devastating: losses of USD $12 million and
more than 80 employees lose their jobs. Lloyd is sentenced to 41 months in jail.
 1997 – DVD format specifications published.
 1998 -Two Chinese hackers, Hao Jinglong and Hao Jingwen (twin brothers), are
sentenced to death by a court in China for breaking into a bank’s computer network
and stealing 720’000 yuan ($87’000).
 March 18, 1998 – Ehud Tenebaum, a prolific hacker aka ‘The Analyzer’, is arrested
in Israel for hacking into many high profile computer networks in US.
 1998 – CIH virus released. CIH was the first virus to include a payload which wipes
the FLASH BIOS memory, rendering computer systems unbootable and invalidating
the myth that ‘viruses cannot damage hardware’.
 March 26, 1999 – Melissa virus released.
 2000 – A Canadian teenage hacker known as ‘Mafiaboy’ conducts a DoS attack and
renders Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com, CNN and a few other web sites inaccessible.
He is later sentenced to eight months in a youth detention center.
 2000 – Microsoft Corporation admits its computer network was breached and the
code for several upcoming versions of Windows were stolen.
 2000 – FBI arrests two Russian hackers, Alexei V. Ivanov and Vasiliy Gorshkov. The
arrests took place after a long and complex operation which involved bringing the
hackers to the US for a ‘hacking skills demonstration’.
 July 2001 – CodeRed worm released. It spreads quickly around the world, infecting
a hundred thousand computers in a matter of hours.
 2001 – Microsoft releases Windows XP.
 July 18th, 2002 – Bill Gates announces the ‘Trustworthy Computing’ initiative, a
new direction in Microsoft’s software development strategy aimed at increasing
security.
 October 2002 – A massive attack against 13 root domain servers of the Internet is
launched by unidentified hackers. The aim: to stop the domain name resolution
service around the net.
 2003 – Microsoft releases Windows Server 2003.
 April 29th, 2003 – New Scotland Yard arrest Lynn Htun at a London’s InfoSecurity
Europe 2003 computer fair. Lynn Htun is believed to have gained unauthorized
access to many major computer systems such as Symantec and SecurityFocus.
 November 6th, 2003 – Microsoft announces a USD 5 million reward fund. The
money will be given to those who help track down hackers targeting the software
giant’s applications.
 May 7th, 2004 – Sven Jaschan, the author of the Netsky and Sasser Internet
worms, is arrested in northern Germany.
 September 2004 – IBM presents a supercomputer which is the fastest machine in
the world. Its sustained speed is 36 trillion operations per second.
 24 June 2005 – Robert Lyttle (one half of the ‘Synamic Duo’) was sentenced to four
months in prison (followed by three years probation) and given a fine of $72,000 for
hacking into US government computer systems and defacing web sites.
 17 August 2005 – former AOL software engineer Jason Smathers given a 15 month
prison sentence for stealing 92 million screen names from an AOL database and
selling them to a spammer. The spammers then used the e-mail addresses to send
out 7 billion spam messages.
 24 August 2005 – Chinese hacker arrested in Japan for virtual ‘theft’ of online game
goods.
 6 January 2006 – Sean Galvez indicted in Massachusetts on one count of larceny
and 10 counts of unauthorized access to a computer and identity fraud for breaking
into more than 40 eBay accounts and accumulating charges totaling $32,000.
 3 October 2006 – three men sentenced to eight years each in Russia for a spree of
extortion attacks in 2003: the hackers stole up to $4 million from UK companies.
 23 August 2007 – UK man arrested for unauthorised use of a wireless connection in
Chiswick, London.
 18 December 2007 – Hario Tandiwidjojo, a former computer consultant, pleads
guilty in the US to unauthorized access to a protected computer, after breaking in to
more than 60 business kiosks at hotels and stealing credit card information.
 11 June 2008 – Robert Matthew Bentley sentenced in the US to 41 months in
prison, and ordered to pay $65,000 restitution, for breaking into corporate computer
systems in Europe (including those of Rubbermaid) and using them as part of a
botnet.
 11 July 2008 – Yang Litao receives two years in prison in China for hacking into a
Red Cross web site and attempting to divert relief donations to a bank account under
his control (following the Sichuan earthquake).
 5 November 2008 – Ivan Biltse, Angelina Kitaeva and Yuriy Rakushchynets (aka
Yuriy Ryabinin) plead guilty in the US to conspiracy and access device fraud for their
part in a scheme that used stolen Citibank card information to steal $2 million. The
group, that included seven others charged earlier in the year, allegedly broke into a
server that processes ATM transactions from 7-eleven cash machines.
 5 March 2009 – the gang behind the failed attempt to steal $229 million from the
London office of the Sumitomo Bank in 2004 are sent to prison. Hackers were
smuggled into the bank by an insider and used commercial keylogging software to
capture login credentials and transfer money to overseas accounts. The two
hackers, Jan van Osselaer and Gilles Poelvoorde, were given sentences of three
and a half years and four years respectively. The insider, Kevin O’Donoghue,
O’Donoghue was ordered to serve four years and four months in prison. Hugh
Rodley and David Nash, who set up the international bank accounts, received
sentences of eight years and three years respectively.
 28 August 2009 – Albert Gonzalez agrees to plead guilty to 19 counts of wire fraud,
conspiracy, aggravated identity theft and money laundering related to the theft of
more than 170 million credit and debit card accounts from TJX, Barnes & Noble,
Office Max and others. Under the terms of the deal, Gonzalez will spend 15 to 25
years in prison and will forfeit more than $2.8 million.
 17 February 2010 – hacker replaces commercial video with porn on a Moscow
billboard.
 24 February 2010 – hacker leaks data about the finances of Latvian banks and
state-owned firms to Latvian TV.
 The word “hacking” has become synonymous with ill doings and the amount of affected
people might be the reason for that. The meanings of hacking are many and most are
intended to describe the act of engaging in activities (such as programming or other media)
in a spirit of playfulness and exploration. But, the destructive intentions of some hackers
have turned this word into something bad. For a better understanding, let’s have a look at
the hacking history timeline.

It interesting to see that the hacking history timeline really began back in the 1960s as
shortcuts developed to bypass or improve the operation of systems. In our concerned eyes
today even this sounds malicious to a lot of people, but back then it was merely intended to
quicker evaluate and improve faulty systems that had to be optimized. As we know, that’s
not exactly what the word “hacker” stands for today. The word is, however, misused in the
broad perspective and should really be replaced by the word “cracking,” which is the correct
word used in the hacker subcultures around the world. It basically means to force or bypass
security systems that are in place to protect the integrity and information stored within the
systems attacked.

This hacking history timeline is a great overview of the world’s most notorious breaches and
could serve as a reminder how important it is for all of us to stay up to date with our security
updates and passwords in order for our personal information to stay safe.

With mobile devices soon to be the most used and accessible “computer” it’s somewhat
worrying to see that we currently care more about the security of our PCs than we care
about the security of our mobile devices. After having a look at this hacking history timeline,
we are sure you’re going to change your mind about that. 90% of people delete suspicious
emails from their PCs but only 56% do the same on their mobile devices. Why is that? It
could be contributed to the fact that we trust developers and manufacturers too much these
days when it comes to our mobile devices. Even though initially we didn’t see many
maliciously intended break-ins into our mobile devices but that has dramatically changed in
the past few years of the hacking history timeline.

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