The History of hacking
Looking back to the 86’s when hacking was officially a crime due to an organized
congress where Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act agreed that it’s a crime to ‘’ violate’’ computer
systems. Two years earlier Eric Corley started a business with a magazine called
“2600: The Hacker Quarterly” where he was publishing about telephone and
computer hacking and this magazine it began in short time a guide to the hackers.
Only one year later, the people’s systems of communications and their telephone
networks were very close to a possible end of technology back then, a big damage
that had to affect the whole nation was nearly made by Herbert Zinn who was
living in Chicago also known by the nickname of ‘’Shadow Hawk” hacked from his
bedroom the AT&T’s computer network and broke in the system, after that he’s
got arrested at only 17 years old.
In the same year they discovered the first virus which was called Brain known as
MS-DOS affecting the computer’s system and it was released on the internet and
the unlucky owners of the virus had a ‘’special file’’ created on their hard drive that
was giving their contact information for “ Brain Computer Services” which was
located in Pakistan.
A big shot came in 1988 when a student released the first self-replicating virus
that can affect over 6000 systems and the big problem was with this virus because
it was shutting down the network system for about two days. It was specially
designed to hack security holes in the UNIX systems, this virus was invented by
Robert Morris who graduated from Cornell University before he released the
virus.
After the big shot with only two years, The Electronic Frontier Foundation is
taking birth and it’s major goal was protecting and taking care of the rights of the
people which were accused of computer hacking. Also, “Legion of Doom” which
were four members forming a band in Southeastern United States are getting into
the network and computer systems of
BellSouth’s 911 emergency stealing technical information that could affect the 911
service in the United States and they ended up by getting arrested.
The Secret Service cooperated with Arizona’s organized crime unit developed
Operation Sundevil, a big national project having as goal hunting down the
computer hackers. What a year!
Gulf War was also affected by hacking culture; a group formed by Dutch
Teenagers broke into the computer network in 1991 and got unauthorized access
getting important information about the war and its plan of operations and
personal information about the militaries who were participating and some exact
numbers about the military equipment that was sent to Persian Gulf. Hackers
represented a major problem in that piece of time because by hacking they were
able to make history by changing military operations plans and by making public
some of the top-secret documents.
As the Gulf War, NASA and the Korean Atomic Research Institute got hacked by
two teenagers known as “Data Stream” and “Kuji” broke into a big number of
computer systems directed by the two institutions and after long time researches
some detectives from Scotland Yard got the two hackers that were so affected
emotionally and ended up crying when captured, they turned the whole mission
into a big drama mixing feelings and emotions with skills and knowledge.
Even the British Queen got hacked! and many important persons form the British
government such as Prime Minister John Major and important military
commandants under secret missions got hacked by a employee at British Telecom
who hacked a computer network which contained all the above people numbers,
the numbers were posted on the internet after the discovery and the hacker got
caught by Secret Services in cooperation with Police. The Citibank got a massive
damage caused by hackers in 1995 when Vladimir Levin got illegally using his own
laptop in Citibank’s computer network where he started to transfer big sums of
money to different accounts around the world that were supposed to be his
accounts and the exact number of money stolen and transferred is still a mystery
today but it’s estimated between $3.7-$10 million, after this big shot he’s got
arrested in Britain with a punishment of 3 years in prison and an order to pay
Citibank $240,000.
According to a report released by The General Accounting Office, 250,000 times
only in 1995 hackers tried to get illegally into Defense Department files which
included precious data and documents, 65% of the attendants already succeed.
Hackers were at every step, CIA’s agents noticed a major change applied to the
website made by a group of hackers known asSwedish Hackers Association who
changed the organization’s name into “Central Stupidity Agency.”
1997 represented an important year in Hacking History, the first hacking program
was released with the name of “AOHell”, for few days AOL network was put on
pause and hundreds of thousands of users were founding in their e-mails
multiple-megabyte messages also, chat rooms got invaded by a bunch of ‘’ spam’’
messages.
The Symantec AntiVirus Research Center which was the head of security and
antivirus software gave the nation a report telling us that they are more than
30,000 computer viruses free, traveling and circulating without any restriction in
the Virtual World. As any other domain, aviation is also based on technology and
the use of computers are at every step even in the air where there are three
computers on each plane’s board and each of them is communicating with other
computers that belong to the air traffic controllers, without technology aviation
would be 80% dead.
For the first time in aviation bright history, in 1998 aviation’s got the first massive
attack from hackers, Bell Atlantic airport communications system in Worcester,
Massachusetts got hit down by a hacker which caused a big damage by
interrupting the communications between airplanes and the airport for more than
six hours but happily there were no accidents. Information shared with the public
are telling us he’s a boy but they aren’t giving any other personal information such
as name and age.
Hacking can be dangerous for the Black Hat hackers and it can bring them the
death, in the same situation were in 1998 three teenagers, two of them form
Cloverdale, California and the third of them which was the head of the group, an
Israeli teenager known as “The Analyzer” got a sentence to death by a court in
China after breaking into computer network systems belonging to federal agencies
and banks.
E-bay was highly affected in 1999, exactly in March by hacking when a hacker
known as MagicFX breaks into the site destroying the site’s front page, the
company was so affected because MagicFX was able to change if he wanted to the
prices, add inexistent items for sale and redirect the whole online traffic to
another site. The Symantec AntiVirus Research Center gives us another report in
2000 estimating that in each hour of the day one new virus is born and left free to
circulate in the Virtual World.
Love is a great feeling, it’s a free gift from life to us that we could open every day,
in every hour and every second but does love only come in this form? No! it’s not
because there is also an “I Love You” virus which showed up in the May of 2000
in Philippines then contaminating the whole world in a matter of hours. Before
any solution was found it’s estimated damage about $10 billion lost files
worldwide, how tricky love could be if you don’t protect yourself.
Later in 2001 in May, the several U.S. government sites, Department of Health
and Human Services and the Central Intelligence Agency were hacked by couple
groups of Chinese hackers causing information lack and modifying data. In the
same month, Microsoft websites got interrupted by attacks from DDOS-
distributed denial-of-service.
hack bank 