A brief history of hacking and how to protect yourself today

Hacking has been used as a tool for good and evil since machines existed. At its simplest, it refers to using something in a way that wasn’t intended, but it’s generally (and unfairly) regarded by the mainstream public as something perpetually nefarious. So, let’s take a look at the modern history of hacking and see how it’s led to the protections we need today.

The hacks, the myths, the legends

The movies illustrate good-guy ‘white hat’ hackers, bad-guy ‘black hat’ hackers and in-between, ‘grey hat’ hackers, as well. There’s Matthew Broderick in War Games cheekily hacking into his school’s computer system to change his girlfriend’s grades, and Mark Zuckerberg’s pre-Facebook ‘Face Mash’ exploits in The Social Network, as memorable examples. But, it’s another real-life character that bridges cheeky shenanigans and a criminal mindset.

In the 1970s, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak joined the ‘phreaker’ community which figured-out how to get free, long-distance phone calls by playing the right tones to a payphone. His Blue Box made this simple and Steve Jobs says that without it, there’d be no Apple.

Other notable hacking communities grew from video games: speedrunners use tweaks and exploits to complete games in record times, and early PC gamers overclocked CPUs and graphics cards for upgraded performance. In 2009, a University of Toronto research team hacked graphics cards, using its processors to train a neural network for the first time.

Things are getting serious

Other hackers make a nuisance of themselves for laughs and Wozniak is, worth mentioning. At a time where it was common to manipulate ‘bunny ears’ TV antennae to achieve a clear picture, he’d use a secret TV broadcaster box to produce static that would only vanish when someone held the antennae in increasingly absurd positions. Fast-forward to 2011 and LulzSec hacked into notable Fortune 500 companies and governments. They didn’t steal money but left taunting messages that made global headlines. It was their actions that motivated many big businesses to finally take cybersecurity seriously.

Before that, nuisance virus outbreaks like 2001’s Nimda would quickly infect computers and networks. It didn’t steal anything, just stopped them functioning. This led to an increased adoption of antivirus software such as Norton AntiVirus, which had seen its popularity grow rapidly ever since it was first launched way back in the early 1990s, as concerned users took steps to help block threats.