In the modern world the technology is the most flourishing thing. Everyday people around the world use different technological equipments to get their job done and of all these computers, laptops, smartphones are heavily used. With the addiction of people to these devices, the concern for the intrusion from other person into their life or files is growing day by day. As world calls ‘hacking’ to get into to someone else’s device without their knowledge or permission, this has caused hacking to be synonymous with ‘Cybercrime’.
The Beginning
In 1970s hacker known by ‘Captain Crunch’ found a way to call free of charge using telephone. And in early 1980s group named “414s” were raided for first time by FBI for intrusion in 60 computers. Yet the term hacking or hackers were not dominantly known by people and weren’t concerned about it at all. But then in the same decade the groups like “Legions of Doom” and “Chaos Computer Club” came into existence. It was dawn of the era for the “hackers” that we know of today. These two with the “2600: The Hacker Quarterly” are the oldest and the most respected groups in the hacking world. The biggest media publicizing the hacking was the arrest of Kevin Mitnick and his trials in the 1990s. After the decade and the huge revolutionizing technology of personal computer and the internet gave similar hackers the way to exploit the devices and the network system.
Cyber Attacks
Let’s look at the major cyber attacks as we have found out; as hacking has been a problem since the era of huge and old computers they were majorly excluded from daily news context as it did not really attract any people’s attention back then. One of the major attack was as early as 1995 as a Russian engineer ‘Vladimir Levin’ hacked into Citibank’s New York IT system: wiring about $10 million however he was jailed for 3 years. Back then the world wide web was just being introduced to the network around the world. With this incident the term ‘hacking’ got the negative reputation.
In 2000, Melissa Virus ran rampant as it would affect the email of people and would send 50 other people the same virus if opened.
In 2003, the currently operating international hacktivist group called “Anonymous” were formed. They are know for DDoS attacks on government, government agencies and corporation as well as Church of Scientology. In 2012, Times magazines called Anonymous as one of ‘100 most influential people in the world’. However even after being called ‘Cyber terrorists’ they continuously have shown their support against terrorism, racism, corruption and anti-humanitarian works. The members of this group are called ‘Anons’. And their members can be seen sometimes wearing Guy Fawkes Mask as portrayed in “V for Vendetta” novel.
In 2004, a German teenager Sven Jaschan, infected American airline company ‘Delta’ to force shut down their services and flights and caused $500 million damage in total. He also caused tens of millions of computer to be affected by his virus worldwide.
Also, in 2004 Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook at the time aged 19 hacked into two Harvard Crimson reporters emails.
In 2005, a man named Alberto Gonzalez and his gang stole 140 million credit and debit card numbers from retailers and caused $250 million in damaged but was eventually caught and jailed for 20 years.
The Conficker virus is one of the most famous and strange pieces of malware of all time. Discovered in 2008, no one is quite sure where it came from, who programmed it or how long it had been in existence. It also proved to be incredibly difficult to eliminate, and was still infecting systems worldwide many years later. What made Conficker so clever was the fact that, as it spread, it tied infected systems together to form an ever growing botnet, which at its peak probably contained some 9 million devices worldwide. Botnets are usually used by hackers to launch DDoS attacks, steal data and give remote access to individual nodes. But what made Conficker so mysterious was, despite creating a sleeping giant capable of wreaking untold havoc on the internet, it was never used to do anything other than keep spreading itself. Perhaps in the end it was just a demonstration of what was possible.
In 2011, the biggest e-mail marketing firm ‘Epsilon’ was attacked through spear phishing as the company with 2000 brands for their marketing was affected with its 5 million email and data stolen causing about $250 million to $4 billion of damage.
In 2013, Spamhaus was the biggest anti-spam service provider but when they added Cyberbunker to their spam list the Cyberbunker retaliated with huge DDoS attack causing Spamhaus to stop services and also slowing internet across Europe as well.
And again in 2013, Global Bank was attacked through spear phishing as the people operating from Russia were able to steal $1 billion by impersonating as the bank staff.
In 2016, Bangladesh Bank heist was planned as hackers were able to take control of SWIFT global monetary transfer system, though their cover blew up they were able to take $81 million instead of planned $950 million.
In 2017, WannaCry virus was spread to attack older Windows OS version exploiting its vulnerability and multiple banks and offices around the world were affected as the hackers demanded $300 per computer to be unlocked.
In 2018, the biggest social media platform Facebook was the center of the cyber attack as 50 million accounts were in danger and it took Facebook about a month to find out about the hack and the bugs planted.
So, these little examples shows that hacking has been a nuisance for people around the world using different kind of internet services for multiple reasons. These types of talented-yet wasted people are the hackers who have become problematic for people, technology and the law.
The Bright Side
But that doesn’t mean the hackers that we normally see or are exposed in the media are the only type of it as not everyone is eager to enter into others computers to steal their data and destroy the systems, but there are those of hackers who are responsible for major advancement in computer technology. Their ability to exploit and expose the loopholes and problems in computers and network has caused a lot of vulnerabilities to be controlled by the developers. The stereotypical types of hackers shown in fiction are not what exactly all there are, though there has been huge problems with the ones who are there to exploit the technology. There are good deal of ways these can help in the computer and technology as they are the ones to have most knowledge about these things than any other people.
