HACKER HISTORY

MIT students hack the PDP-1 minicomputer and create Spacewar!, widely considered the first interactive video game. The word "hacker" is born at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club — meaning someone who creates elegant solutions.

John Draper discovers that a toy whistle from Cap'n Crunch cereal produces a perfect 2600Hz tone, granting free long-distance calls by exploiting AT&T's signaling system. Phone phreaking becomes a subculture.

16-year-old Kevin Mitnick socially engineers his way into Digital Equipment Corporation's network. He copies their software but doesn't sell it — he just wanted to see if he could. It won't be his last hack.

A group of teenage hackers from Milwaukee, known as "The 414s," break into 60 computer systems including Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The FBI investigates teenagers for the first time.

2600: The Hacker Quarterly begins publication, named after the 2600Hz phreaking frequency. The same year, Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) is founded in a slaughterhouse in Lubbock, Texas. Hacker culture gets its literature.

"The Mentor" (Loyd Blankenship) publishes "The Conscience of a Hacker" in Phrack after his arrest. "My crime is that of curiosity... I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto." It becomes the philosophical foundation of hacker culture.

Cliff Stoll publishes "The Cuckoo's Egg," documenting how he tracked a 75-cent accounting discrepancy to a KGB-sponsored hacker named Markus Hess. It becomes the original cyber-espionage thriller — and it's all true.

Jeff Moss (Dark Tangent) organizes the first DEF CON in Las Vegas. It was supposed to be a one-time goodbye party for BBS culture. Instead, it becomes the world's largest and most infamous hacker convention, still running today.

Kevin Mitnick is finally arrested with help from security researcher Tsutomu Shimomura. Meanwhile, 15-year-old Jon Lech Johansen ("DVD Jon") reverse-engineers CSS encryption on DVDs, sparking a landmark fight over digital rights and reverse engineering.

Cult of the Dead Cow releases Back Orifice at DEF CON 6 — a remote administration tool (or trojan, depending on who you ask) for Windows. It exposes Microsoft's terrible security and becomes one of the most notorious hacking tools of the era.

A love letter from the Philippines infects 45 million computers worldwide. The ILOVEYOU worm spreads via email with the subject "I Love You" and an attachment called LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs. It causes an estimated $10 billion in damage.

Anonymous coalesces from the chaos of 4chan's /b/ board. What starts as trolling and pranks evolves into a decentralized hacktivist collective. "We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget."

Estonia suffers the first-ever coordinated cyber attack against an entire nation. DDoS attacks cripple banks, media, and government websites for weeks. It's widely attributed to Russia, though never officially proven. NATO takes notice.

LulzSec, a splinter group from Anonymous, goes on a 50-day hacking spree. Sony, PBS, the CIA, the US Senate, FBI affiliates — all breached "for the lulz." They release data, deface websites, and mock their targets publicly before disbanding.

North Korea's Lazarus Group breaches Sony Pictures in retaliation for "The Interview." They leak unreleased films, executive emails, salary data, and Social Security numbers. It's the most destructive corporate hack ever — a nation-state attacking a movie studio.

WannaCry ransomware exploits an NSA-developed exploit (EternalBlue) leaked by the Shadow Brokers. It hits 200,000+ computers across 150 countries. Hospitals, factories, and government systems are paralyzed. A 22-year-old named Marcus Hutchins accidentally finds the kill switch.

Russian intelligence compromises SolarWinds' Orion software update, gaining access to 18,000 organizations including the US Treasury, Department of Homeland Security, and Microsoft. The attack goes undetected for 9 months. Supply chain security will never be the same.

A critical vulnerability in Apache Log4j, a ubiquitous Java logging library, allows remote code execution with a single crafted string. Hundreds of millions of devices are vulnerable. Security teams worldwide spend Christmas patching. It's called "the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade."

A sophisticated supply chain attack is discovered in XZ Utils, a compression library used by nearly every Linux distribution. A maintainer named "Jia Tan" spent two years gaining trust before inserting a backdoor targeting SSH authentication. Caught by a Microsoft engineer who noticed a 500ms delay.