computer science

List of security hacking incidents

List of security hacking incidents is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand List of security hacking incidents rather than just read about it. In short: This list of security hacking incidents covers important or noteworthy events in the history of security hacking and cracking. 1900 1903 Magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne disrupts John Ambrose Fleming's public demonstration of Guglielmo Marconi's purportedly secure wireless telegraphy technology, sending insulting Morse code messages through the auditorium's projector. 1930s 1932 Polish cryptologists Marian Reje…

Key takeaways

List of security hacking incidents belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect List of security hacking incidents to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of List of security hacking incidents from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

This list of security hacking incidents covers important or noteworthy events in the history of security hacking and cracking.

1900

1903 Magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne disrupts John Ambrose Fleming's public demonstration of Guglielmo Marconi's purportedly secure wireless telegraphy technology, sending insulting Morse code messages through the auditorium's projector.

1930s

1932 Polish cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki broke the Enigma machine code.

1939 Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and Harold Keen worked together to develop the codebreaking device Bombe (based on Rejewski's work on Bomba). The Enigma machine's use of a reliably small key space makes it vulnerable to brute force attacks.

1940s

1943 René Carmille, comptroller general of the Vichy French Army, hacked the punch card system used by the Nazis to locate Jews.

1949 The theory that underlies computer viruses was first made public in 1949, when computer pioneer John von Neumann presented a paper titled "Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata". In the paper, von Neumann speculated that computer programs could reproduce themselves.

1950s

1955 At MIT, "hack" first came to mean playing with machines. An April 1955 meeting of the Tech Model Railroad Club has one say that "Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing."

1957 Joe "Joybubbles" Engressia, a blind seven-year-old boy with Absolute pitch, discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of 2600 HZ) would interfere with AT&T's automated telephone systems, thereby inadvertently opening the door for phreaking.

1960s Various phreaking boxes are used to interact with automated telephone systems.

1963 The first ever reference to malicious hacking is 'phreaking' in MIT's student newspaper, The Tech, containing hackers tying up the lines with Harvard, configuring the PDP-1 to make free calls, war dialing and accumulating large phone bills.

1965 William D. Mathews from MIT finds a vulnerability in a CTSS running on an IBM 7094. The standard text editor on the system was designed to be used by one user at a time, working in one directory, and so it created a temporary file with a constant name for all instances of the editor. The flaw was discovered when two system programmers were editing at the same time and the temporary files for the message of the day and the password file became swapped, causing the contents of the system CTSS password file to display to any user logging into the system.

1967 The first known incidence of network penetration hacking took place when members of a computer club at a suburban Chicago high school were provided access to IBM's APL network. In the fall of 1967, IBM (through Science Research Associates) approached Evanston Township High School with the offer of four 2741 Selectric teletypewriter-based terminals with dial-up modem connectivity to an experimental computer system which implemented an early version of the APL programming language. The APL network system was structured into workspaces which were assigned to various clients using the system. Working independently, the students quickly learned the language and the system. They were free to explore the system, often using existing code available in public workspaces as models for their own creations. Eventually, curiosity drove the students to explore the system's wider context. This first informal network penetration effort was later acknowledged as helping harden the security of one of the first publicly accessible networks:Science Research Associates undertook to write a full APL system for the IBM 1500. They modeled their system after APL/360, which had by that time been developed and seen substantial use inside of IBM, using code borrowed from MAT/1500 where possible. In their documentation, they acknowledge their gratitude to "a number of high school students for their compulsion to bomb the system". This was an early example of a kind of sportive, but very effective, debugging that was often repeated in the evolution of APL systems.

1970s

1971 John T. Draper (later nicknamed Captain Crunch), his friend Joe Engressia (also known as Joybubbles), and blue box phone phreaking hit the news with an Esquire magazine feature story.

1979 Kevin Mitnick breaks into his first major computer system, the Ark, which was the computer system Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) used for developing their RSTS/E operating system software.

1980s

1980 The FBI investigates a breach of security at National CSS (NCSS). The New York Times, reporting on the incident in 1981, describes hackers as: Technical experts, skilled, often young, computer programmers who almost whimsically probe the defenses of a computer system, searching out the limits and the possibilities of the machine. Despite their seemingly subversive role, hackers are a recognized asset in the computer industry, often highly prized. The newspaper describes white hat activities as part of a "mischievous but perversely positive 'hacker' tradition". When a National CSS employee revealed the existence of his password cracker, which he had used on customer accounts, the company chastised him not for writing the software but for not disclosing it sooner. The letter of reprimand stated that "The Company realizes the benefit to NCSS and in fact encourages the efforts of employees to identify security weaknesses to the VP, the directory, and other sensitive software in files".

1981 Chaos Computer Club forms in Germany. Ian Murphy, aka Captain Zap, was the first cracker to be tried and convicted as a felon. Murphy broke into AT&T's computers in 1981 and changed the internal clocks that metered billing rates. People were getting late-night discount rates when they called at midday. Of course, the bargain-seekers who waited until midnight to call long distance were hit with high bills.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with List of security hacking incidents

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what List of security hacking incidents claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to List of security hacking incidents before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about List of security hacking incidents ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of List of security hacking incidents

In research: List of security hacking incidents appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses List of security hacking incidents in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: List of security hacking incidents is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Computer security, Computing timelines, Hacking (computer security), so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for List of security hacking incidents outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study List of security hacking incidents in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what List of security hacking incidents means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain List of security hacking incidents out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is List of security hacking incidents in simple terms?

This list of security hacking incidents covers important or noteworthy events in the history of security hacking and cracking. 1900 1903 Magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne disrupts John Ambrose Fleming's public demonstration of Guglielmo Marconi's purportedly secure wireless telegraphy technolog…

Why does List of security hacking incidents matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study List of security hacking incidents?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on List of security hacking incidents.