Those times, end of the 90's, was basically wild west. Many uneducated people fresh on the internet, netbus just recently available, news users would install anything you ask them...
I would call that real hacking but kiddies at the time had a lot of fun creating problems to the new netizens.
This may be a generational thing, but most IT security even a mere 20 years ago focused heavily on the human elements. Networks were different back then and people were far easier to dupe. You usually had to be on site to gain access to anything interesting. The social engineering tricks people roll their eyes at these days were invented back then for this purpose. Hacking is a broad term with deep roots. Let’s not gatekeep it too hard.
I loved the early internet, IRC, newsgroups etc. The really old school phreakers even before that was also a different time. Back then you could do stuff like that and go on to start companies like Apple (Woz). Now, you'll end up in a solitary confined cell or have to join the FBI/NSA if you are caught.
Hacker groups aren't as tied to freedom as it used to feel.
Yeah but everything is online right now and we're moving more and more data that _must_ be secured. Back then you really only cared about a couple of platforms - nobody cared if you could hack some random dudes garage or phone.
Right. So quite a bit later than the period I'm talking about. Late 90s/2000s period is arguably when commonly-used hardware was most accessible/hackable.
Looking back on that era, the hate towards hackers feels really misplaced. Yeah, at the time it was more local and more dominated by people doing it for the lolz but we kinda owe them a debt of gratitude. If they hadn't gotten everyone to stop being lazy about security we'd be in a very different place now, surrounded by rouge states and agencies launching hyper sophisticated attacks on infrastructure and data. That was also the era that trained the current generation of cybersecurity experts.
In contrast, I think they're getting progressively more and more useful in light of an increasingly larger and more automatedly hostile world network.
I imagine in the 1970s there weren't a whole lot of hacks that began with "scan the entirety of ARPANET to find a few vulnerable machines, then apply vulnerability."
Oh, unencrypted data was an even bigger issue back then. I remember still having ethernet hubs at the time and watchin the data go to and from my buddies computer on the our network.
Makes total sense, especially recalling the zeitgeist of the era. IIRC, this was during the height of worms which propagated via vulnerabilities in code that handles network traffic.
Thanks for the nostalgia trip. We must be about the same age and I remember hitting up local corporations that had WEP encrypted networks and offering them my help in improving their security.
Felt like a real security expert then ;) I'm out of that loop now but security sure did seem a lot easier to get a grip on at that time.
Much of that was also back before viruses and trojans were an every day occurrence, before an unpatched computer on a network wasn't going to be owned within an hour or so.
It was more fun back then, and we weren't the ones who ruined it.
Torrenting and child porn, I would guess. I remember the slow transition from people using open networks to securing the shit out of them, and there was this big fear that someone could use your network to download copyright-protected and/or illegal material, and it would be tied to your IP.
As a kid I was fascinated with stories of people hacking into high security places like the pentagon. But I recently realized that, while this was surely no walk in the park even 20 years ago, it must have been easier then that it is now. Things like ssh or vpn weren't around back then, and even though I'm sure they had equivalents, they were probably proprietary and thus not as secure as today's time-tested open source solutions. What do you think?
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