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History of Internet SecurityThe Story Behind the Great Internet Sabotage
History of Net Security: In the Beginning
The history of Internet security, like most history, is not quite as clear as we would like it to be. Still, there's plenty we do know and it does help to understand where it all started. We do know that the ancestors of viruses really date back to the 1960s which led to serious problems by the 1980s, kind of like Woodstock and, well, the entire 1960s decade. The history of Internet security really starts as the history of ARPANET security, sort of.
History of Internet Security: ARPANET
Back in about 1969, the Internet was a project called "ARPANET". With a name like that, you know it was a government plot of some kind. The name is actually a combination of the agency's name--Advanced Research Projects Agency--and the word "NET". I love that word, "agency"; it sounds so covert and governmenty. ARPANET was built as a network that could still operate even if parts of it stopped working. Part of that design was the ability to easily share information. And that's what the original cult club members did; they shared information through email, newsgroups, and something really sneaky sounding: remote connections. Oooh. Because it was made to share information, security wasn't really part of the plan back then. In fact, no one really thought about it since there weren't any attacks to defend against. You see, it was just a bunch of universities and (scary soundtrack please) government agencies connected together in a grand, sunshiny, information love fest, not unlike our universities and governments today. Later, the love fest began to have outsiders poking their heads in and asking, "Can we play too? The love children shook their heads in disgust because the outsiders wanted to share information that wasn't "research". But, in spite of their wishes to keep the family pure, ARPANET began to get outsiders inside. Now, in the sweet history of Internet security, the love children weren't perfect. They did have an inherent trust of each other up to this point, but being the mischievous lot that computer types can be, some of the users played tricks on each other and violated the sunshininess code. Some of these tricks involved finding holes in ARPANET's armor and the beginning of "security breaches" started right there. These first programs caused a few problems and went by funny names like Rabbit, Animal, Creeper and Reaper. They were mostly fun and games though and did little real harm. For example, Creeper ran through ARPANET via modems and displayed the message, "I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN". Reaper chased the Creeper through the system and deleted it. Ironically, Reaper was a virus itself and it is believed by some that both were written by the same person. Federal agents never found the bloody sickle and black hood that supposedly incriminated the author, however. A great book that talks about some of this is "Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. He tries hard to convince us that hackers aren't all bad.
History of Internet Security: Notables
As the ARPANET child grew, it was attacked from all sides by worms, viruses, and sniffles, or maybe it was sniffers. These childhood maladies stole passwords, email contents, and user names from the poor ARPANET users connected to it and unfortunately, there were no immunizations back then. One of the first viruses, called Elk Cloner, was written by a 15 year old high school student in 1982. It affected Apple computers and wasn't intended to do harm. Instead, it displayed a poem:
That wasn't necessarily a bad thing since it was, after all, poetry, although unrequested poetry (we call it spam now and I sometimes ponder how the makers of SPAM sandwich meat, for which it is named, feel about that). This was one of the first boot sector viruses. No, not the boot section, like at Walmart, it's boot SECTOR. In those days, people used a little something I like to call a floppy disk. OK, so I didn't actually name it, but that's what it was called. Guess I won't make a name for myself in the history of Internet security. Oh well. What was it? Well, it did the job of your USB flash drive, thumb drive, whatever you call it. Only it was bigger, kind of cumbersome, held a lot less info, and was unreliable many times. It's very similar to our public school system in the USA. The floppy disk had this "boot sector". What is it? Not important. What is important is that if a floppy was infected with, oh I don't know, a silly poem maybe, it would copy itself into the computer's memory. Then, when a blank floppy was later inserted, the lonely poem would hitch a ride on that disk and lurk quietly until it was passed around to another uninfected computer. And then this would happen repeatedly. I know what you're thinking: floppy disk herpes. The little virus just kept copying itself over and over and over and over in this way waiting for the World Health Organization (WHO) to step in with some useless advice about "responsible disk insertion practices". But they never did. And since there weren't really any antivirus products yet, the doggone little thing was hard to get rid of once it infected so many disks. So, if the WHO had issued a statement it might have been, "Be careful which slot you put your disk in; it's hard to tell how many disks that slot has had in it before". The history of Internet security is more interesting than you thought, eh?
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Security Tip Of The Week InfoWorld on Aug 5th, 2010, Roger A. Grimes says, "If malware were biological, the world would be in the grip of the worst pandemic in history. In 2009, more than 25 million different unique malware programs were identified, more than all the malware programs ever created in all previous years (see the annual report from Panda Labs). That's a pretty incredible statistic. Malicious programs now outnumber legitimate ones by many orders of magnitude." Wow. |
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