A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 378

Early hacking and attacks during the 1980s were, for the most part, carried out
by amateurs and often by teenage hackers. In the 1990s, hacking and cybercrime
began to take a more serious turn.
The first cause of the increase in the sophistication of cybercrime is because
the items that might be stolen greatly increased in value and quantity. By the end
of the 1990s, huge corporate databases contained credit card data; social security
numbers; banking information; real estate ownership data; criminal records; mil-
itary records; voter names and addresses; medical records; and purchase informa-
tion about autos, appliances, and thousands of other things.
Not only were valuable data stored on computers and in databases, but the de-
fenses against theft of these data ranged from rudimentary to only fairly effective
in the 1990s. As shown in Table 12.1 , antivirus packages were fairly late arrivals.
Another defense mechanism, also a late arrival, was that of computer firewalls to
filter out attacks.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) wrote the first technical paper on fire-
walls in 1988. Other work was done by Bell Labs circa 1990. Probably the first
commercial firewall product was released in 1995 and was called Gauntlet.
In the late 1980s and early '90s, software defenders began to organize. For ex-
ample, the well-known SANS Institute was founded in 1989 to provide security
training and certification.
Other groups formed to study security in a variety of contexts. Many were as-
sociated with universities such as Stanford, MIT, the Imperial College in London,
and most other large schools with computer science curricula.
Major computer companies such as IBM, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard formed
internal corporate security research labs, as did large software companies such as
Microsoft, Google, and Computer Associates.
There were also many government security groups within existing organiza-
tions such as the Secret Service, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the CIA,
the Department of Defense, and the uniformed services. Later, Homeland Security
would play a major role in cybersecurity.
The larger antivirus companies such as Symantec and Kaspersky and BitDe-
fender found that they needed full-time research groups to keep current on threats,
so this provided another form of cybercrime research.
In 2008, Congressmen James Langevin (a Democrat from Rhode Island) and
Congressman Mike McCaul (a Republican from Texas) formed the Congressional