The Complete History of Hacking

[1980] Nintendo, Ltd. releases Donkey Kong as a coin-operated arcade game.

[1980] Usenet is born, networking UNIX machines over slow phone lines. Usenet eventually overruns ARPANET as the virtual bulletin board of choice for the emerging hacker nation.

[1980 Dec] Roscoe Gang, including Kevin Mitnick, invade computer system at US Leasing.

[1981] Kenji Urada, 37, becomes the first reported death caused by a robot. A self-propelled robotic cart crushed him as he was trying to repair it in a Japanese factory.

[1981] Commodore Business Machines starts shipping the VIC-20 home computer. It features a 6502 microprocessor, 8 colors and a 61-key keyboard. Screen columns are limited to 22 characters. The product is manufactured in West Germany and sells in the U.S. for just under $300.

[1981 Jul] Microsoft acquires complete rights to Seattle Computer Product’s DOS and names it MS-DOS.

[1981] Ian Murphy (’Captain Zap’) was the first hacker to be tried and convicted as a felon. Murphy broke into AT&T’s computers and changed the internal clocks that metered billing rates. People were getting late-night discount rates when they called at midday.

[1981 May 23] Kevin Mitnick, 17, is arrested for stealing computer manuals from Pacific Bell’s switching center in Los Angeles, California. He will be prosecuted as a juvenile and sentenced to probation.

[1981 May 28] First mention of Microsoft on Usenet.

[1982] There are an estimated 3 million computer terminals “networked” with larger “host” computers. Also, there are an estimated number of 5 million desktop computers in use within the United States. More than 100 companies make personal computers.

[1982] Sun Microsystems, Inc. is founded by four 27-year-old men; Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy.

[1982] As hacker culture begins to erode, losing some of its brightest minds to commercial PC and software start-ups, Richard Stallman starts to develop a free clone of UNIX, written in C, that he calls GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix).

[1982] Lewis De Payne (’Roscoe’) pleas guilty to conspiracy and fraud. Sentence: 150 days in jail. Accomplice gets thirty. Mitnick gets ninety day diagnostic study by juvenile justice system, plus a year probation.

[1982] Kevin Mitnick cracks Pacific Telephone system and TRW; destroys data.

[1982] William Gibson coins term “cyberspace.”

[1982] ‘414 Gang’ phreakers raided. ‘414 Private’ BBS was where the ‘414 Gang’ would exchange information while breaking into systems of Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Los Alamos military computers.

[1982 Aug] Commodore ships the Commodore 64 computer and enters more than one million homes during this first year. The C-64 was the first home computer with a standard 64K RAM. With an suggested retail price of $595, it was considered a huge value. It included a keyboard, CPU, graphics and sound chips.

[1982 Sep 19] Scott E. Fahlman typed the first on-line smiley,

[1983] The Internet is formed when ARPANET is split into military and civilian sections.

[1983] The movie WarGames is released, Matthew Broderick plays a computer whiz kid who inadvertently initiates the countdown to World War III.

[1983] Plovernet BBS (Bulletin Board System) was a powerful East Coast pirate board that operated in both New York and Florida. Owned and operated by teenage hacker ‘Quasi Moto’, Plovernet attracted five hundred eager users in 1983. Eric Corley (’Emmanuel Goldstein’) was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with ‘Lex Luthor’, who would later found the phreaker/hacker group, Legion of Doom.

[1983 Sep 22] Kevin Poulsen (’Dark Dante’) and Ron Austin are arrested for breaking into the ARPANET. At 17 Poulsen is not prosecuted and Austin receives 3 years probation.

[1983 Sep 27] Richard Stallman makes the first Usenet announcement about GNU.

[1983 Nov 12] First mention of Microsoft Windows on Usenet.

[1984] Andrew Tanenbaum writes the first version of Minix, a UNIX intended for educational purposes. Minix later gave Linus Torvalds the inspiration to start writing Linux.

[1984] The University of California at Berkeley released version 4.2BSD which included a complete implementation of the TCP/IP networking protocols. Systems based on this and later BSD releases provided a multi-vendor networking capability based on Ethernet networking.

[1984] Bill Landreth (’The Cracker’) is convicted of breaking into some of the most secure computer systems in the United States, including GTE Telemail’s electronic mail network, where he peeped at NASA Department of Defense computer correspondence. In 1987 Bill violated his probation and was back in jail finishing his sentence. Bill also authored an interesting read titled ‘Out of the Inner Circle‘.

[1984] Legion of Doom formed. Legion of Doom, a hacker group which operated in the United States in the late 1980’s. The group’s wide ranging activities included diversion of telephone networks, copying proprietary information from companies and distributing hacking tutorials. Members included: ‘Lex Luther’ (founder), Chris Goggans (’Erik Bloodaxe’), Mark Abene (’Phiber Optik’), Adam Grant (’The Urvile’), Franklin Darden (’The Leftist’), Robert Riggs (’The Prophet’), Loyd Blankenship (’The Mentor’), Todd Lawrence (’The Marauder), Scott Chasin (’Doc Holiday’), Bruce Fancher (’Death Lord’), Patrick K. Kroupa (’Lord Digital’), James Salsman (’Karl Marx’), Steven G. Steinberg (’Frank Drake’), Corey A. Lindsly (’Mark Tabas’), ‘Agrajag The Prolonged’, ‘King Blotto’, ‘Blue Archer’, ‘The Dragyn’, ‘Unknown Soldier’, ‘Sharp Razor’, ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Paul Muad’Dib’, ‘Phucked Agent 04′, ‘X-man’, ‘Randy Smith’, ‘Steve Dahl, ‘The Warlock’, ‘Terminal Man’, ‘Silver Spy’, ‘The Videosmith’, ‘Kerrang Khan’, ‘Gary Seven’, ‘Bill From RNOC’, ‘Carrier Culprit’, ‘Master of Impact’, ‘Phantom Phreaker’, ‘Doom Prophet’, ‘Thomas Covenant’, ‘Phase Jitter’, ‘Prime Suspect’, ‘Skinny Puppy’ and ‘Professor Falken’.

[1984] 2600: The Hacker Quarterly founded by Eric Corley (’Emmanuel Goldstein’).

[1984 Jun 19] The X Window System is released by Robert W. Scheifler.

[1985] Hacker ‘zine Phrack is first published by Craig Neidorf (’Knight Lightning’) and Randy Tischler (’Taran King’).

[1985 May 24] Date of incorporation under original founding name, Quantum Computer Services (America Online).

[1986] The Congress passes Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The law, however, does not cover juveniles.

[1986] The german hacker group, Chaos Computer Club, hacked information about the german Nuclear Power Program from government computers during the Chernobyl crisis.

[1986 Feb 26] The Phoenix Fortress BBS issues warrants for the arrest and confiscation of the equpment of 7 local users in Fremont, CA. The Sysop turns out to be a local law enforcement agent and the Phoenix Fortress created to catch hackers and software pirates.

[1986 Sep 1] An unknown suspect or group of suspects using the code name Pink Floyd repeatedly accessed the UNIX and Portia computer systems at Stanford University without authorization. Damage was estimated at $10,000.

[1986 Aug] In August, while following up a 75 cent accounting error in the computer logs at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, network manager Clifford Stoll uncovers evidence of hackers at work. A year-long investigation results in the arrest of the five german hackers responsible.

[1987 Sep 14] It’s disclosed publicly that young german computer hackers calling themselves the Data Travellers, managed to break into NASA network computers and other world-wide top secret computer installations.

[1987 Nov 23] Chaos Computer Club hacks NASA’s SPAN network.

[1987 Dec] Kevin Mitnick invades systems at Santa Cruz Operation. Mitnick sentenced to probabtion for stealing software from SCO, after he cooperates by telling SCO engineers how he got into their systems.

[1988 Jun] The U.S. Secret Service (USSS) secretly videotapes the SummerCon hacker convention.

[1988 Nov 2] Robert T. Morris, Jr., a graduate student at Cornell University and son of a chief scientist at a division of the National Security Agency (NSA), launches a self-replicating worm on the government’s ARPANET (precursor to the Internet) to test its effect on UNIX systems. The worm gets out of hand and spreads to some 6,000 networked computers, clogging government and university systems. Morris is dismissed from Cornell, sentenced to three years probation and fined $10,000.

[1988 Nov 3] First mention of the Morris worm on Usenet.

[1988 Dec] Legion of Doom hacker Robert Riggs (’The Prophet’) cracks BellSouth AIMSX computer network and downloads E911 document (describes how the 911 emergency phone system works). Riggs sends a copy to Phrack editor Craig Neidorf (’Knight Lightning’). Both Craig and Robert are raided by Federal authorities and later indicted. The indictment said the “computerized text file” was worth $79,449, and a BellSouth security official testified at trial it was worth $24,639. The trial began on July 23, 1990 but the proceedings unexpectedly ended when the government asked the court to dismiss all the charges when it was discovered that the public could call a toll-free number and purchase the same E911 document for less than $20.

[1988 Dec 16] 25-year-old computer hacker Kevin Mitnick is held without bail on charges that include stealing $1 million in software from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), including VMS source code, and causing that firm $4 million in damages.

[1989] 22-year-old computer hacker and ex-LOD member Corey Lindsly (’Mark Tabas’) pleaded guilty to felony charges relating to using a computer to access US West’s system illegally, which resulted in five years probation. [see also 1995 Feb. 'Phonemasters']

[1989] At the Cern laboratory for research in high-energy physics in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau develop the protocols that will become the world wide web.

[1989] Legion of Doom/H member Loyd Blankenship (’The Mentor’) is arrested. He publishes a now-famous treatise that comes to be known as the Hacker’s Manifesto.

[1989 Jan 23] Herbert Zinn (’Shadowhawk’), a high school dropout, was the first to be convicted (as a juvenile) under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. Zinn was 16 when he managed to break into AT&T and Department of Defense systems. He was convicted on January 23, 1989, of destroying $174,000 worth of files, copying programs valued at millions of dollars, and publishing passwords and instructions on how to violate computer security systems. Zinn was sentenced to nine months in prison and fined $10,000.

[1989 May] A task force in Chicago raids and arrests an alleged computer hacker known as ‘Kyrie’.

[1989 Jun] An underground group of hackers known as the NuPrometheus League distributes proprietary software illegally obtained from Apple Computer.

[1989 Jul 21] Known as the “Atlanta Three” case, 3 members of the LOD/H (Legion of Doom) where charged with hacking into Bell South’s Telephone (including 911) Networks - possessing proprietary BellSouth software and information, unauthorized intrusion, illegal possession of phone credit card numbers with intent to defraud, and conspiracy. The three hackers where: Franklin Darden (’The Leftist’), Adam Grant (’The Urvile’ and ‘Necron 99′), Robert Riggs (’The Prophet’).