The History of Hacking and Cyber Crime
Labiba Nayeem Khan, BRAC University
ABC or the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the world’s first computer developed by John Vincent Atanasoff and a graduate student Cliff Berry in 1943. In those days, the ABC was so rare that carrying out cybercrimes was quite difficult. The computer was only available to a handful and was not networked at the time. It has been mentioned in a blog in Avast that even though the actual infestation of a virus in a computer took place a lot later, the theory that computer programs can reproduce was introduced much earlier; in 1949; by a man named John von Neumann.
During the 1950s, the phone “phreaking” phenomenon began. According to historyofphonephreaking.org, some people were highly interested in knowing how the telephone system worked. They used manuals, guides, journals, and listened to every sound a phone made. They even learned how to impersonate phone operators. They looked out for secret documents, solved puzzles, and snuck into phone company buildings to wire their telephones. They built blue, black, and red boxes to help them explore the network and tried to make free phone calls through the networks. Using this medium, they even spread around newsletters and soon, the phone phreaks became a community of their own, including philanthropists like Steve Jobs and Wozniak.
The very first computer hacking took place in the mid-1960s, by when there were a lot more computers, but was kept locked in temperature-controlled rooms, so even programmers had very rare access to them. There were early instances of hacking during this time, especially by curious students who did so just for fun or to dig deeper into the system and tried to improve it as per staysafeonline.org. A group of students was brought to IBM to try using the new computers, and while doing so, the student tried to use other parts of the computer that were not accessible normally, leading the company to learn a lesson and thus begin the construction of the very first defensive measures in the system. Slowly the methods of using electronic lock and keys also became obsolete as more people began to be able to access passwords and thus increase hacking. Surprisingly, the term “hacking” originally meant to find different ways to make a computer more efficient.
1971 was the year when the first replicating computer worm was created. As per a post in sentinelone.com, during an experiment, a man named Bob Thomas realized that the worm could reproduce and move around in a computer network, leaving a trail behind. The program was called “Creeper” and the trail that it left read “I’m the Creeper: Catch me if you can.” This virus was spread around ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), when the inventor of email, Ray Tomlinson, found it and was impressed by the idea. Tomlinson then created the very first antivirus names “Reaper”, which chased the Creeper and deleted it. During the 1970s the importance of computer security increased, especially between 1072-’74 when computer security was discussed more in research papers.
Kevin Mitnick hacked into The Ark, which is the computer at the Digital Equipment Corporation, and made several copies of the software. The article about him at phishprotection.com read that at the time, he was only 16 and was then arrested and jailed for what was one of the very first examples of cyberattacks that he conducted over the next decades.
Attacks increased further in the 1980s, including that at National CSS, AT&T, and Los Alamos National Library, according to the same blog in Avast. Even movies regarding the matter were released in 1983, called War Games, in which a computer program took over nuclear missiles systems disguised as a game. In the same year, the term “computer virus” was first used. Cyber strikes increased more during the Cold War when German Hacker Marcus Hess got access to the ARPANET through an internet gateway in California. He hacked 400 military computers and sold the information to the KGB. In 1987, the Cascade virus managed to infect.COM files appeared and caused texts on a screen to cascade down to the bottom of the screen and increased file sizes by 1701 or 1704 bytes. This incident provoked IBM to begin developing its first antivirus products for sale.
1990 was the year of the virus. In this year, the first undetectable viruses were created, called polymorphic viruses. British Magazine gave away free discs with its edition which contained the DiskKiller virus, infecting thousands of computers. More antivirus software hit the market, leading to cybercriminals responding, with the anti-antivirus. Many antiviruses also created false-positive results and used up a lot of computer power, which led to many frustrated customers. Virus numbers increased drastically in the 1990s, to 5 million per annum by 2007.
The Melissa virus, created in 1999 by programmer David Lee Smith, mentioned in fbi.gov, is still one of the fastest spreading viruses in the world, which entered the computer through a Word document and reproduced to 50 other email addresses via Microsoft Outlook. The cost of damage control for this virus was $80 million.
The year 2000 brought about many innovative ways of carrying out cybercrime, which came with the development of zero-day attacks, which created “holes” in security measures, making them ineffective.
During the 2010s, there have been many national-level security breaches, which put the security of the world at peril and cost millions to many businesses. Some examples include a Saudi hacker who published the credit card information of 400,000 owners online in 2012, in 2013, a former CIA employee leaked classified information of the NSA. In 2014, Yahoo was broken into by hackers, who got hold of the information of 3 billion users which Yahoo did not disclose, for which it had to pay $35 million.
All these instances are just evidence of the fact that the more technologically savvy the world is, the more, and innovative kinds of viruses and hacking techniques. The Bangladesh Bank Robbery cannot be forgotten, where the robbers tried to take advantage of the poor security of the central bank and managed to make a $20 million transaction to Sri Lanka and $81 million to the Philippines. As per wired.com, even though the $20 million was recovered in the end, the money lost to the Philippines was later laundered through casinos and taken to Hong Kong. zdnet.com mentioned many examples of the most recent hacking and breaching incidents. In January 2020, a US citizen had to go to jail for using information leaked through data breaching while filing fraudulent tax returns. Due to middleware security failures, 440 million internal information belonging to Estee Lauder was revealed. In March, Marriott Hotels disclosed a data-breaching incident that had an impact on 5.2 million hotel guests. Who knows what will happen in the upcoming decades?