Peer to Peer Magazine

www.iltanet.org 64 Peer to Peer Trojans and Malware and Worms — Oh My! 1960's 1968 Frank Abagnale socially engineers a successful con that he is a Harvard- trained lawyer and gains employment in the office of the attorney general for the state of Louisiana. He previously impersonated a PanAm pilot and a pediatrician. _____________________________________ 1970's 1971 Experimental "Creeper" self- replicating program transmits over ArpaNET and displays "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" on affected DEC computer running the Tennex OS. _____________________________________ 1979 Sixteen-year old überhacker Kevin Mitnick kicks off his hacking-spree career by breaking into DEC using a modem. _____________________________________ 1980's Early 1980's Advance Fee scams (aka Nigerian 419 Scams) target victims with missives through U.S. mail. In subsequent years, the perpetrators will use fax, then e-mail. _____________________________________ 1981 The Elk Cloner boot sector virus loads itself into Apple II memory, overwrites boot sectors of other floppy discs, and is considered the first large- scale outbreak in history. _____________________________________ 1982 The Internet is created, giving hackers an attack vector that is much easier to exploit than floppy disks or phone lines. _____________________________________ 1983 Adoption of the terms "virus," "computer virus" and "infection" to describe programs that are able to self- replicate, modify other programs and/ or evolve. _____________________________________ 1983 The film "War Games" acquaints the general public with hacking (and inspires a bit of paranoia). _____________________________________ 1984 William Gibson coins the terms "cyberspace," "the matrix," "simstim" and "ICE" in the science fiction novel "Neuromancer" about Case, a futuristic computer hacker. _____________________________________ 1987, December Christmas Tree Exec is the first widely-disruptive network computer worm. It infects mainframe networks worldwide. _____________________________________ 1988 First National Bank of Chicago is the victim of a $70,000,000 computer theft. _____________________________________ 1988 The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) is created by DARPA to address network security. _____________________________________ 1990's 1995 "Concept" MS Word macro virus hits the wild. _____________________________________ 1998 Security goes mainstream following the release of Win98. Hundreds of advisories and patches are released in response to newfound (and widely-

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