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Black hat or White hat! Computer Hacking ExplainedA Brief HistoryOne might not suspect that the art, or scourge, of computer hacking was created at one of the havens for technological excellence.
True, at MIT
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology), a group of students developed
the technique and borrowed their name from the "hackers" of the late
1800s who found amusement in pranking the emerging telephone
companies.Getting their laughs and skills from hacking and cracking
into primitive computers and exploiting the Arpanet (predecessor to the
internet), they created a novelty that would become the target of
federal crackdown in years to come. To define hacking in short, we can
say that an artistic criminal offense of breaking into another remote
system without the owner's consent for the purpose of stealing
information is what is hacking.
However,
the act of hacking started out innocently, and was basically a method
of trying to figure out how computer systems worked. The 1970s saw the
rise in "phreaking," or phone hacking, headed by John Draper. This
method allowed the user of a "blue box,", when used with a Captain
Crunch whistle of 2600 hertz which accessed the AT&T long distance
system, to make free long distance calls. Hackers initiated with
accessing the free phone calls through a varied range of sources,
thereby managing to circumvent into the nation's radio system and the
phoning system resulting in a tremendous phone fraud nationwide.
After
the age of "phreaking," computers became not only the target, but also
the forum, for a growing hacker population to communicate. The creation
of bulletin board systems (BBS) allowed this communication and the
technological possibility of more serious government and credit card
hacking became possible. At this time in the early 80's, hacking groups
such as the Legion of Doom began to emerge in the United States, giving
organization, and thus more power to hackers across the country.
Once
this happened, breaking into the computers became a legitimate
activity, with its own groups and soon its own voice with the 2600
magazine, launched in 1984. The effects of computer hacking were
serious. Two years later, inevitably, Congress launched the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act that outlawed hacking. Over the years, there was a
series of noticeable occurrences as the worst consequential effect of
computer hacking on more high profile cases, such as the Morris Worm,
responsible for infecting government and university systems, and the
Mitnick case in 1995, which captured Kevin Mitnick, steeling as many as
20000 credit card numbers.
In
1999, security software became widely known by the public, and with the
release of new Windows programs, which were littered with security
weaknesses, they became successful because of necessity. This
fraudulent act of computer hacking is perhaps the major problem,
confronting the rapidly expanding population of Internet users today,
with the systems still trying to battle online hackers.
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