“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster” -Sun Tzu-
In a digital world enemies are changing and updating. Hence, it’s good to know a short history of who they are to be aware of their threat.
1969, Phone Freaking: By blowing a toy whistle into a phone receiver, John Draper illegally accessed the phone network and made free calls. “Phreaking” portmanteau of the words phone and freak affected many people such as Steve Jobs.
1985, KGB-Hack: During the cold war, German hackers infiltrated the Pentagon and other US military computers in order to sell confidential US information to the Russian secret service.
1992, Michelangelo Madness: This virus caused hysteria after media reported that it would delete data from millions of infected computers on March 6th, the birthday of the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo. Computer users connected to the Internet bought large quantities of anti-virus software but in spite of all the madness, the virus caused little damage affecting only a few thousands computers.
1999, Email Virus: By sending billions of emails the Melissa virus overloaded the Internet with data. To prevent the worm, email providers like Microsoft shut down losing approximately 80 million dollars.
2007, Hack attack in Estonia: Estonian Internet was swamped and sabotaged in a series of cyber attacks against government organizations, banks and the general public. This cyber-warfare distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), creating cyber-armies or botnets to send coordinated crash-inducing attacks to targeted Web servers.
2010, Cyber-warfare: The Stuxnet virus severely weakened the Iranian nuclear program by destroying more than a thousand uranium centrifuges. The US Government is suspect of creating and spreading the virus.
2013, Big Coup: Globally networking criminals manipulated data of credit cards and withdrew 45 millions dollars at ATMs around the world. The criminals, responsible for this cyber-robbery are still free.
Hacking is about finding security weakness in networks. Worms and viruses are widely spread nowadays and it’s better to protect your mobile devices with the best, Android Security Suite.