1 Hacker originally meant “one who makes furniture with an
ax.” Perhaps because of the blunt nature of that approach,
the word came to mean someone who takes pleasure in an
unconventional solution to a technical obstacle.
2 Computer hacking was born in the late 1950s, when members
of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, obsessed with electric
switching, began preparing punch cards to control an IBM 704
mainframe.
3 One of the club’s early programs: code that illuminated
lights on the mainframe’s console, making it look like a ball was
zipping from left to right, then right to left with the flip of a
switch. Voilà: computer Ping-Pong!
4 By the early 1970s, hacker “Cap’n Crunch” (a.k.a. John
Draper) had used a toy whistle to match the 2,600-hertz tone
used by AT&T’s long-distance switching system. This gave him
access to call routing (and brief access to jail).
5 Before they struck it rich, Apple founders Steve Wozniak
and Steve jobs made and sold “blue boxes,” electronic versions
of Draper’s whistle.
6 Using a blue box, Wozniak crank- called the Pope’s residence
in Vatican City and pretended to be Thierry Henry Kissinger.
7 Hacking went Hollywood in the 1983 movie WarGames, about a
whiz kid who breaks into a Defense Department computer and,
at one point, hi¬jacks a pay phone by hot- wiring it with a
soda can pull-ring.
8 That same year, six Milwaukee teens hacked into Los Alamos
National Lab, which develops nuclear weapons.
9 In 1988 Robert T. Morris created a worm, or self-replicating
program, purportedly to evaluate Internet security.
10 The worm reproduced too well, however. The multi¬million-d
ollar havoc that ensued led to Morris’s felony conviction, one of
the first under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (PDF).
11 They all come home eventually. Morris now researches
computer science at...MIT.
12 British hacker Gary McKinnon broke into 97 U.S. Navy,
Army, Pentagon, and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002.
13 McKinnon’s defense: He wasn’t hunting military secrets; he
was only seeking suppressed government files about space
aliens.
14 According to rumor, agents of China’s People’s Liberation
Army attempted to hack the U.S. power grid, triggering the
great North American blackout of 2003.
15 It took IBM researcher Scott
Lunsford just one day to penetrate the
network of a nuclear power station: “I
thought, ‘Gosh, this is a big problem.’”
16 Unclear on the concept: When West Point holds its annual
cyberwar games, the troops wear full fatigues while fighting
an enemy online.
17 Think your Mac is hackproof? At this year’s CanSecWest
conference, security researcher Charlie Miller used a flaw in
Safari to break into a MacBook in under 10 seconds.
18 Cyborgs beware: Tadayoshi Kohno at the University of
Washington recently hacked into a wireless
defibrillator, causing it to deliver fatal-strength jolts of
electricity.
19 This does not bode well for patients receiving wireless deep-
brain simulators.
20 The greatest kludge of all? Roger
Angel of the University of Arizona has
proposed building a giant sunscreen in
space to hack the planet’s climate :)
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