XScanners IWC

The Past – mid 80’s - 1999

A brief history of the online battles and how they have advanced over the Past 10 years and tools we have developed to fight against them. Hacking, worms and viruses, and how the two have melded into the new face of internet and Cyber-Warfare/Terrorism. The current Status of the new online battles and the many different worms and viruses, and the rapid development of new exploit development code also the rapid development of transport mechanism’s to help spread or infect systems or more of a global or larger scale based on the intended targets or the desired affects that the individuals are going after. The primary categories of computer criminals are Crackers/Hackers, Criminals or vandals.

Our primary focus will be that of the Computer criminal such, that these are the individuals that are most likely and interested in creating, causing or benefiting from disruption of internet or network traffic. Thru this time we saw the emergence of the internet as more of a public tool, whereas prior to this time very few people actually used the internet directly. Most connections were either from universities, large companies or government it was mainly for research and development as well, with some large online communities like TheWell, on the west coast, and a few others. During this time we also saw a rise in the types of viruses and other network based threats. It was not considered as major of a problem back then, it was primarily a more of an annoyance more than anything else, and most of the users just wrote it off as people playing or testing what could be done, turning a blind eye so to speak.

The problem was that by allowing most of this initial activity and hacking to go unchecked, we helped to determine the path of the future of these types of attacks, we also by not initially make security a higher priority helped to shape the level and scale at which some of these attacks would grow to or evolve into. Let’s look at some of the first and majors issues from the start. The first of the major outages or disturbances on the internet was the Morris Worm ; this was designed to expose the security defects in operating systems, with out attaching itself like a virus does, In Nov 98, when he released the worm it immediately went out of control due to what he claims was a programming error that caused the worm to start a catastrophic rate of replication and reinfection. It did have a large impact on the infrastructure, and caused widespread degradation and outages on the backbone at the time. This was and can be considered the start of the mass mail worm, and was only a sign of things to come and in light of recent events it will be come apparent why I say this. This was just the beginning of the new wave of internet based attacks and cyber-battles that would cause us to redefine the way we conduct ourselves and business on the internet. This also led to a document called the Hacker Manifesto or Mentor’s last words In the late 80’s and starting in the early 90’s we started to see an increase in the amount of information trafficking as well as an increase in the knowledge and skills being used in breaking into systems and networks.

Individuals started using know flaws and vulnerabilities which till then, had never been tested or truly exploited for personal gain or notoriety, one such instance was that in which a group of German based hackers where using university computers to scan and break into government and military networks in the United States, these tracked and found by a University Researcher working in the Data Processing Center for a university found accounting errors, which lead him to this discovery, his name was Clifford Stohl .

Another well known case is that of convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick , breaking into several computer systems to steal information and source for operating systems and other tools used by network security and telecommunication engineer’s as well as so called making threats against the Engr. The result of this was his incarceration as well as the subsequent conviction of multiple counts of Computer Fraud and Theft. The basic cause of these events can be summed up into the fact, that no matter how people try to organize or form groups like the hacker groups, that ego’s, differing thoughts or motivators will eventually drive them to seek other goals, hence we have the problems we have today.

This is in the truest form, nothing more than teenagers and now older generation of earlier hackers are trying to one up each other. Thus they battle online or even now sell their services to others for fame, fortune or both. The other reason why it continues today is that these individuals have realized that by selling the secrets or information or in many times performing the services themselves that they can make lots of money hence getting respect from their peer’s. These are all problems that will be around for a long time, based on the current trends in technology and politics.

The true hackers are those have come up with most of the technological advances and technologies that we enjoy in our everyday lives, but the script kiddies and modern day virus and worm writers have and will continue to cause major problems for the internet of today and the future as long as we continue to ignore the importance of security first and build in security from the very start of projects and applications.