Topic 2, Team 11, Post
1
From Hacking to
Hacktivism
Introduction
Hacking has been
around since the early 1900's. In its earliest form the term “hack”
was a way to describe pranks. As time went on and computers were
developed, “hacking” was no longer a way to describe a practical
joke but was a term coined by savvy computer geeks describing
breaking into a computerized system just to see if they could.
Hacking developed further into more malicious events designed to
create problems for the owner of the system they entered.
In the late 1980's
a new kind of hacking was born: hacktivism. Hacktivism is a form of
protest that occurs in cyberspace, combining grassroots political
protests with computer hacking (Jordan). A person who participates in
these activities is known as a hacktivist.
This article
begins with several defining events in hacking history, giving incite
to its evolution. It wraps up with the birth of a new era:
hacktivism.
Phone Phreaking and the Blue Box,
1960 - 1970s
Following World
War II, Bell Telephone Laboratories, nicknamed “Ma Bell,” updated
their long-distance switching system using twelve different tones
(Stryker). When a call was placed, the caller would hear a series of
tones created by the telephone computers passing information back and
forth to set up the call. The system generated “ a combination of
two fixed single-frequency tones played simultaneously” (Stryker).
The tones were mentioned in passing by and engineer of Ma Bell in a
journal (Rosenbaum).
Joe Engressia, a
blind child from Richmond, VA, was able to whistle in the perfect
pitch to mimic the telephone systems computer, which he discovered by
accident while messing around with a phone call in the mid 50's and
started whistling, disconnecting his call (Stryker). Engressia found
out from the phone company that they used a tone system and he taught
himself how it worked.
In the late 60's,
Engressia and another blind boy, Denny, got in touch with John Draper
through a pirate radio station he created and explained phone
Phreaking to him (Draper). The idea was to get Draper to build a
system for them to hack the phone system in a more sophisticated
manner. Up to this point the boys had been recording the tones and
playing them into the receiver, however, they knew a more automated
approach could be taken. Denny informed Draper of a whistle that was
currently the prize in a box of Captain Crunch cereal that created
the 2600mhz tone needed to phreak the phone system. Draper started
off using this whistle and to this day known as Captain Crunch or The
Captain.
In 1971, Draper
met Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple, at UC Berkley.
Wozniak had recently built a digital blue box with Steve Jobs, the
co-founder of Apple, based on an article they read in Esquire,
“Secrets
of the Little Blue Box,” and the journal that had published the
Bell frequencies (Draper).
Draper taught them how to use the box they had created, which was not
the first blue box created, but was much more fancy than any that had
been developed up to this point. Shortly after Wozniak used the box
to call the Pope, who was unable to come to the phone because he was
asleep (Draper).
The 414s and War Games, Early 80's
A hacking group
formed in Milwaukee, WI, the 414s, around the same time that the
movie “War Games” was released. War Games, released in August
1983, was a movie about a teenager that found a way into a military
central computer and plays a game with the computer, almost starting
World War III. The release of this movie was a motivating factor for
the members of the 414s in upping the ante on their hacking
adventures.
The 414s were
caught and charged with hacking into the computer systems at the Los
Alamos National Laboratories, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center, and many of their area schools (Kirchner). The sole purpose
of hacking into these systems for the 414s was to figure out how to
get into a system and stay there as long as possible, undetected. The
group did not do anything malicious or steal any information; they
were just highly intelligent and curious.
The
movie release, War Games, paired with the 414s hacks, were events
that put the government on alert, realizing their vulnerability
against potential threats that they did not know much about. Several
pieces of legislation began to arise to help protect against hackers
and their potential damage. The first one to be passed into law is
the Counterfeit
Access Device and Abuse Act, in 1984, and was amended to the
Counterfeit
Access Device and Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act in 1986. In its first version it prohibited
individuals from accessing government information protected for
national defense, financial institution information, or accessing any
information on a government computer (18
USC § 1030).
Chaos Computer Club (CCC)
Chaos
Computer Club, CCC, was a German hacker group and was one of the
earlier groups that paved the way from hacker to hacktivist. They
directly addressed the popular hacker motto 'All information wants to
be free' (Jordan). They joined, informally, in 1981 as a group of
I.T. professionals that discussed the changing technologies and the
impact they would have or had on society (Blanc). In 1984, CCC joined
formally and created a publication called Die
Datenschleuder (The Data Extractor) and the Chaos
Communication Congress.
The CCC
became known worldwide in 1984 when they hacked into the German
Bildschirmtext, an interactive videotex system for
the West German Postal Service. The hack caused a debit to occur from
the Hamburg bank to the CCC in the amount of DM 134,000. The idea was
not to steal the money and keep it, but to teach the government a
lesson. The CCC promptly returned it to the bank with a statement
intended to make them address the security flaws in their system
(Blanc).
Worms Against Nuclear Killers 1989
The “WANK”
worm attack in 1989 on NASA marks the beginning of hacktivism. Up
until this point, hacking episodes were more about achieving a thrill
from breaking into a secure computer system or the hunger for
knowledge of how a system works. The WANK worm was a definite push
further, with intentions to cause problems for a NASA and protest the
launch of the Galileo Space Probe, which was plutonium-powered. Many
anti-nuclear groups were in protest of this launch, fearing if
something went wrong, like with The Challenger, the plutonium spill
would result in death for residents of Florida. Instead of picketing
outside of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, hackers sent messages
through a worm they sent through the NASA computer system. (Hacker)
On October 16, 1989, two days before
the Galileo was scheduled to launch, NASA computers began seeing
strange messages on their screens illustrated below:
W O R M S A G A I N S T N U C L E A R K I L L E R S
_______________________________________________________________
\__ ____________ _____ ________ ____ ____ __ _____/
\ \ \ /\ / / / /\ \ | \ \ | | | | / / /
\ \ \ / \ / / / /__\ \ | |\ \ | | | |/ / /
\ \ \/ /\ \/ / / ______ \ | | \ \| | | |\ \ /
\_\ /__\ /____/ /______\ \____| |__\ | |____| |_\ \_/
\___________________________________________________/
\ /
\ Your System Has Been Officially WANKed /
\_____________________________________________/
You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.
A worm does not latch onto files or
programs; it is uncontrollable, and has a set of internal
instructions to
carry out within the system (Hacker).
The worm traveled throughout NASA's network of computers and crawled through holes in the
security system (Hacker). Once it made it through NASA's system, it found its way to the US Department
of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's system as
well and many other systems associated
with nuclear energy (Hacker).
Conclusion
The events outlined in this article
described the beginning of the hacking culture, giving a brief
description of some of the most famous hacking events from 1960-1989.
The timeline covered shows just how much technology and intelligence
has evolved in a seemingly short period of time. Particularly in the
80's where having a computer in your home was not all that common,
that type of technology was reserved for large organizations or
government agencies. Given the lack of accessibility, it is amazing
that so many were able to take to the technology so quickly and
create a culture of hacking and hacktivism in cyberspace.
In the next post, hacking and
hacktivism in the 90's will be discussed.
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