Hackers and the Internet

Hackers and the Internet

Internet Security covers a broad list of topics. I have chosen to cover hackers and their history. I will go through who hackers are and how we define hackers. I will also cover the history of how hackers got started. This was a very interesting topic and may surprise a lot of people who have had misconceptions of what hackers do due to how the are covered by the media.

In the 1960’s at MIT a group of curious students, members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, decided to hack into the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. At this time hackers were encouraged to explore and were not considered malicious like the hackers the media portrays today. These groups of students were allowed access to the MIT AI Lab by the lab’s director Marvin Minsky.

In the 1970’s a trend started with phone hacking. Phreaks exploit phone systems to make free long distance calls. One famous phreak is John Draper, also known as “Captain Crunch”, made long distance calls for free by blowing a certain tone in a telephone. This tone opened a line on the phone system and he was able to make long distance calls for free. Two names that everyone is familiar with are Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; these two gentlemen founded Apple Computer. However, what a lot of people did not know is that they were members of Homebrew Computer Club. While being members of this club they began making “blue boxes”, which are devices used to help phreaks access phone systems. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had handles that they were known by and they were “Berkley Blue” and “Oak Toebark”.

By the late 1980’s computer hacking had grown so much that a magazine was formed called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. This magazine shares tips on phone and computer hacking. The government responds to this growth by passing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and forming the Computer Emergency Response Team. This gives the government more authority in tracking wily hackers. This about the same time that the Media did a lot of coverage on Kevin Mitnik, a well known computer hacker who was convicted of stealing software and was sentenced to one year in prison.

By the 1990 the instances were computers were hacked grew exponentially.