Where did it all begin?
“The first recorded cyber crime took place in the year 1820! That is not surprising considering the fact that the abacus, which is thought to be the earliest form of a computer, has been around since 3500 B.C. in India, Japan and China. The era of modern computers, however, began with the analytical engine of Charles Babbage."
" In 1820, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a textile manufacturer in France, produced the loom. This device allowed the repetition of a series of steps in the weaving of special fabrics. This resulted in a fear amongst Jacquard's employees that their traditional employment and livelihood were being threatened. They committed acts of sabotage to discourage Jacquard from further use of the new technology. This is the first recorded cyber crime!”
In actuality the first modern Cybercrime recorded was a SPAM e-mail (definition www.wikipedia.org)sent in 1978 over the ARPAnet, which was the Defense Department network that was precursor to what we now know as the Internet, by a Digital Equipment Corp. marketing executive named Gary Thuerk to advertise a new computer. Although spamming was not illegal at the time the reaction from recipients on ARPAnet were negative. The sender received many responses of annoyance and was reminded of the proper use of ARPAnet which did not include advertising. Currently Spamming can be illegal, for example in 2005 the first spammer convicted for felony spamming Jeremy Jaynes was sentenced to 9 years in jail.
During the late 1970’s/ early 80’s “hackers” started developing Rootkits to hide traces of intruders on networked computers. Then there was the creation and release of various computer viruses. One of the first viruses documented was the Elk Cloner virus written for the Apple 2 computers by a high school student by the name of Rich Skrenta. It spread when users used an infected disk to boot up their system. It had a poem that appeared every 50 boot attempts. This was vandalism, but there were many more malicious viruses’ that soon followed.
The next progression was Breaking and entering: The first Major intrusion occurred in 1982 when a hacker group known as the 414’s broke into systems at several institutions including Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Those intrusions provoked the US government to pass several laws regarding computer security.
The first Computer Worm was created in 1988 a graduate student at Cornell University created software that would automatically reproduce itself on computers connected to the government's ARPAnet. His name is Robert T Moris Jr. and he is now a professor at MIT. He claimed he was attempting to measure the size of the Internet. The worm he created quite possibly infected thousands of government computers and caused anywhere from $10-$100 million in damage, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office. He was convicted of violating the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and was sentenced to three years' probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050.
The Trojan-horse. In 1989, a diskette proclaiming to be a database of AIDS information was mailed to thousands of AIDS researchers and subscribers to a U.K. computer magazine. The disk contained Trojan software that rendered the computers useless and demanded that a payment of $378 be sent to PC Cyborg Corporation at a post office box in Panama. Here we see a progression from malicious attacks to the pursuit of money
The Man In the Middle Attack. First recognized as an attack in 1998 by the National Security Agency, the most well-known attacks occurred in October 2005 and July 2006, when large European and U.S. banks with one time password (OTP) scratch cards and tokens were targeted with man-in-the-middle attacks. Subsequently, Amazon.com was also attacked, according to a report by security vendor Tricipher. Security experts believe that criminal software developers now have created the equivalent of Microsoft Office for man-in-the-middle exploits: a software package for sale on the Internet that even non-experienced computer users commonly referred to as “Script Kiddies” can set up to carry out attacks.
Denial of service
February, 2000. In the first documented and one of the biggest Denial Of Service attacks recorded, a Canadian hacker named MafiaBoy launched a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack that took down several high-profile Web sites, including Amazon, CNN and Yahoo!. DDoS attacks are commonly used for extortion, in which a criminal will threaten an attack unless a website owner pays him. It is common for the site owners to pay because the ransom is usually a fraction of a percentage of what they would lose for their site being down for a few hours.
It is estimated that today one million PCs are under the control of hackers worldwide, according to Trend Micro. In early 2005, German security analysts at Aachen University reported that they identified more than 100 Botnets in a three-month period. The Botnets comprised of a few hundred compromised PCs to 50,000 machines. A Botnet is a networked group of compromised computers—or “zombies”—that are controlled by people known as "Botherders". Using an assortment of Internet communications methods, most popularly Internet Relay Chat, hackers can "wake up" tens of thousands of compromised computers (zombies) and direct them to deliver crimeware, phishing attacks and sometimes spam.
The various attacks listed above showcase the historical progression of the tools used to commit cybercrimes. There some more exotic types of attacks and variations of those listed. In modern times these tools are combined to attack companies and even government networks to either steal information to sell or block information to extort. Sometimes the motivation is perceived to be politically motivated. In the most recent years we have seen an increase in politically driven attacks. Where governments have hired or even trained teams of hackers to attack foreign government infrastructure.
Koch, Christopher. (2007, June). A Brief History of Malware and Cybercrime. CIO.Com. Retrieved on April 9, 2010 from http://www.cio.com/article/116250/A_Brief_History_of_Malware_and_Cybercrime_?page=1&taxonomyId=3089
http://www.wikipedia.org
Quote: "the first CyberCrime"
http://cybercrime.planetindia.net/intro.htmChance, Mathew (2009, June) Cybercrime in Russia. CNN.com. Retrieved on April 9, 2010
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/crime/2009/06/24/chance.russia.cyber.crimes.cnn
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