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Hacks, Phreaks, Worms, Tigers
and Bears--Oh My

The top eight events that changed the history of internet security (and two that didn’t)

By Dave Gradijan

her at BBN Technologies. The upshot: the phreaker gets free phone calls and various other opportunities for mischief.

Why significant: Widely cited as the seminal precursor to computer hacking. Draper went on to build blue boxes, which are capable of reproducing other tones used by the phone company and allow their users to make free long distance calls. Draper was exposed in a 1971 Esquire article, which sparked the interest of a certain duo named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who also began building blue boxes themselves. Of course, they later founded Apple.

1988: Morris Worm
Robert Tappan Morris, a 23-year-old Cornell University student, wrote some code as part of a research project aimed at determining the size of the Internet. The worm was meant to infect computers, but only to see how many connections to the Internet existed. Because of a flaw in the code, however, it ended up exploiting vulnerabilities in Unix and spread quickly, infecting multiple machines multiple times and rendering them unusable. 

Why significant: Considered the first computer worm distributed on the Internet, and thus to some extent the beginning of the age of malware. Morris’ worm also was the first to gain significant attention from the mainstream media--and the judicial system. In 1990, Morris was sentenced in U.S district court to three year’s probation, 400 hours of community service and a $10,050 fine.



1994: Citibank Heist
Russian hacker Vladimir Levin broke into Citibank’s cash management system and siphoned $10 million into his own accounts. The stolen accounts were unencrypted. All but $400,000 of the stolen cash was recovered, and Levin was arrested in 1995 and extradited to the U.S. in 1997.  In 1998, he pled guilty to conspiracy to commit wire, bank and computer fraud. A federal court judge sentenced Levin to three years in prison, and a fine of $240,000 to be paid to Citibank.

Why significant: Considered by many as the first major bank robbery carried out with computers, and one that also underscored the global nature of cybercrime. According to Steve Katz, who was recruited after the hack to become part of a Citibank security task force, that breach was also the catalyst that helped give rise to the modern chief security officer. “It really elevated information security within the corporation and made a case for its importance,” he says. “It helped change the direction of infosec.”

1995: The Celebrity of Kevin Mitnick
This was the year that Mitnick began a five-year prison term after

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