The Internet has a long history of turbulent relations, major maliciously designed disruptions (such as wide scale computer virus incidents, DOS and DDOS attacks that cripple services, and organized attacks that cripple major online communities), and other conflicts. This is a list of known and documented Internet, Usenet, virtual community and World Wide Web related conflicts, and of conflicts that touch on both offline and online worlds with possibly wider reaching implications. Spawned from the original ARPANET, the modern Internet, World Wide Web and other services on it, such as virtual communities (bulletin boards, forums, and Massively multiplayer online games) have grown exponentially. Such prolific growth of population, mirroring "offline" society, contributes to the number of conflicts and problems online growing each year. Today, billions of people in nearly all countries use various parts of the Internet. Inevitably, as in "brick and mortar" or offline society, the virtual equivalent of major turning points, conflicts, and disruptions—the online equivalents of the falling of the Berlin Wall, the creation of the United Nations, spread of disease, and events like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait will occur.
Pre World Wide Web era
1980s
1980 ARPANET grinds to a complete halt on October 27 because of an accidentally-propagated status-message virus.
1982 The 414s compromise dozens of high-profile computer systems, including those at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Security Pacific National Bank, between 1982 and 1983.
1985 Kevin Mitnick was arrested by the FBI on February 15. Mitnick was convicted of wire fraud and of breaking into the computer systems of Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia, and Sun Microsystems. He served five years in prison. His pursuit and subsequent arrest made him one of the most famous hackers up to that time.
1988 A 23-year-old graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, released the Internet's first worm, the Morris worm. Morris, the son of a National Security Agency (NSA) computer security expert, wrote 99 lines of code and released them as an experiment. The program began replicating and infecting machines at a much faster rate than he had anticipated, causing machines all over the world to crash.
1990 In response to the US Secret Service's Operation Sundevil, Mitch Kapor establishes the Electronic Frontier Foundation to provide legal representation in cases involving the civil rights of computer users.
World Wide Web era
1990s
1991 Phil Zimmermann creates and releases Pretty Good Privacy, an encryption tool still in use. By 1993, he was the target of U.S. government investigations, charged with "munitions export without a license". The investigation ended in 1996 with no charges filed.
1994 An international group, dubbed the "Phonemasters" by the FBI, hacked into the networks of a number of companies including MCI WorldCom, Sprint, AT&T, and Equifax credit reporters. The gang accounted for approximately $1.85 million in business losses. In late 1995, Vladimir Levin persuaded Citibank's computers to transfer $10 million from its customers' accounts to his. Interpol arrested him at Heathrow Airport, and Citibank got most of the money back. He pleaded guilty in 1995, but the method he used wasn't uncovered for another ten years, and at that time was one of the largest computer crimes by dollar value. Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel post the first large commercial newsgroup spam, setting off an arms race between spammers and network operators.
1995 Scientology and the Internet: After documents copyrighted by the Church of Scientology are posted to Usenet group alt.religion.scientology, church lawyers send threats of legal action to several users and attempt to shut down the group. Lawsuits are brought against users Dennis Erlich, Grady Ward, Arnaldo Lerma and Karin Spaink, but these fail to stem distribution of the documents.
1996 Tim Lloyd plants a software time bomb at Omega Engineering, a company in New Jersey. The results of the attack are devastating: losses of US$12 million and more than 80 employees lose their jobs. Lloyd is sentenced to 41 months in jail. US President Bill Clinton signs the Communications Decency Act into US federal law as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Web site operators turn their pages black in protest. The decency provisions are overturned the following year in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union.
1998 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) becomes law in the United States. The CIH computer virus is released, written by Chen Ing Hau of Taiwan. It is considered to be one of the most harmful widely circulated viruses, overwriting critical information on infected system drives, and more importantly, in some cases corrupting the system BIOS, rendering computer systems unbootable. It was found in the wild in September. Two Chinese hackers, Hao Jinglong and Hao Jingwen (twin brothers), are sentenced to death by a court in China for breaking into a bank's computer network and stealing 720,000 yuan ($87,000). The US government allows the export of 56-bit encryption software, and stronger encryption software for highly sensitive data. The Electronic Disturbance Theater launches the Floodnet tool for civil disobedience, a tool to create a denial-of-service attack (DOS). The first DoS attacks were launched against the Pentagon, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the Mexican government.
1999 From the time the Morris worm struck the Internet until the onset of the Melissa virus, the Internet was relatively free from swift-moving, highly destructive "malware". The Melissa virus, however, was rapacious; damages have been estimated at nearly $400 million. It marked a turning point, being the first incident of its kind to affect the newly commercial Internet.
2000s
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