A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 374

Chapter 12. A Brief History of Cybercrime and
Cyberwarfare
Because security problems are now endemic and in fact seem to be getting worse
instead of better, this chapter includes a discussion of all known forms of software
security problems through 2013, including, but not limited to, botnets, denial of
service attacks, identify thefts, and far too many more.
Cybercrime is a “new” form of criminal activity that did not really exist prior to
the development of the internet in the 1990s. There were older forms of hacking,
such as using tones to gain access to long-distance telephone lines, but these did
not actually steal valuable property.
In the modern world, criminals can steal financial data, drain funds from bank
accounts, steal social security numbers and other forms of identity, shut down
computers, and even cause physical damage to manufacturing equipment.
Cybercrime has moved from being committed by clever amateurs to being the
focus of organized crime groups. Even worse, cyberwarfare has been integrated
into the armed forces of every industrialized nation. All of the armed services now
have cyberwarfare units that attempt to steal information and interfere with milit-
ary equipment and command and control structures. The world is far more danger-
ous today than it was before computers and the internet existed.
A New Form of Crime
New technical devices are always targets for both amateur hackers and profession-
al criminals. Many are also targets for national governments.
Long before computers, other kinds of technical devices were attacked. For ex-
ample, in 1903, during a live demonstration of a supposedly secure wireless radio
transmission developed by Marconi, a hacker interfered by sending his own Morse
code message to the audience.
Later in the 1960s and '70s, telephone hackers found that various audio tones
could be manipulated to gain access to telephone lines and make free calls. These
hackers were called phone phreakers and they used a battery-powered blue box to
aid in penetrating phone systems. Steve Wozniak, later to become famous as an
Apple cofounder, built one of these blue boxes in 1972 while he was a student at
Stanford.