how did cyber security start

Question

Could somebody please tell me the history of cybersecurity?

Answer 1

History of Cybersecurity is associated with the history of the Internet i.e. ARPANET. In the ’70s a researcher named Bob Thomas realized that a computer program could move across a network and could leave a trail wherever it went. That sparked an interest in him and he created a program and named it CREEPER. Which would go across the network and leave a message which read, “I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.”

This program caught the attention of the inventor of e-mail, Ray Tomlinson who tweaked CREEPER and made it self-replicating and in effect, he created the world’s 1st worm. 

Fortunately, he made an antidote to this program which was creating a mess around in the network and named it REAPER, the world’s 1st antivirus software whose job was to catch these CREEPER’s and delete them. 

Before these incidents in the ’60s, the form of security was only the passwords which were formulated to safeguard the computer from an unauthorized person who had a good knowledge of computers and physical security was put up to prevent such incidents from happening. Even they had real fire-safety measures in place to protect the computer from fire incidents.

After the ’70s there was a continuous rise in computer activities and with the advancement in technology, various types of bugs were created which hanged the systems and was used to retrieve information from the computer and network systems.

One of the most notable and famous cyber-attack of the ’80s was performed by German Computer Hacker Marcus Hess who hacked an internet gateway in Berkeley, which he used to hack some 400 military computers including the mainframe of The Pentagon, with the intent of selling these secrets to Russian military and security intelligence. 

And luckily because of an astronomer Clifford Stoll who detected this intrusion and deployed a honeypot technique to catch this criminal in possession of unauthorized data. Such cases repeated in the history of cybersecurity to this day. 

Modern cybersecurity threats are phishing/spoofing, Denial-of-Service, Ransomware, etc. and many new types of cyber threats are on their way towards these cybersecurity professionals. 

If you are inspired by the history of cybersecurity and have an inclination towards this domain, do check out our cyber security courses by Intellipaat!