… When computers didn’t all have permanent internet connections, which limited the damage it was possible to do by having a persistent executable running on someone’s computer.
There was little to no spyware or malware risk because this was a time when stealing CPU cycles couldn’t make you money, machines couldn’t be used to anonymously generate internet traffic, and exfiltrating captured data was essentially impossible.
As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.
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.
Maybe the lack of easy communication and scams made it easier? You could still install bonsai buddy and stuff, but there wasn't a chance to get ransomware...
Also people didn't depend that much on computers. How much would you really destroy at the time by wiping everything? How much damage would that do on a family computer these days?
There just was little to no security back then. The entire system was a permanent zero day.
Computers were mostly not networked so the threat surface was small, and like I said most hackers in the sense I described were pranksters. Big money and power was just not in it unless you were going after serious specialized targets, and there were less of those and they were pretty much all air gapped.
Air gap was the only real security back then. Just don’t connect it and guard it physically.
When computers went from speciality devices to a necessary home appliance. People were not updating or turning off automatic updates. Leading to huge bot and malware networks.
I fondly remember that period indeed. But reading your comment i realized it's been a while since i could tell whether my computer having network activity was suspicious or not, and i'm guessing a lot of younger people don't even realize that could be a thing.
> Malware wasn't nearly as well hidden back then, so uncovering it wasn't all that hard.
Yeah catpicture.jpg.exe was definitely easier to identify than modern viruses are.
At the time, spyware was not yet a mainstream business model so there was no outrage because respectable, established companies didn't yet become spyware operators. There was still mutual trust back in the day.
I remember a time when you had to be careful to not reveal your IP address to untrusted peers (e.g. on IRC) because a single specially malformed packet called the "Ping of Death" would reliably crash any internet-connected Windows PC.
That was a wild time. Nobody talked about security back then. The idea that everything in our lives would eventually run over the internet just wasn't on people's minds.
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.
Security was literally nonexistent. If you were at the console, you had control of the machine. Pwning one over the network was probably not difficult, though it wasn't the kind of thing people spent much time on back then.
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.
Of course, back then everyone using a computer was doing so in the course of their employment and abuse of the system could result in being fired. Systems have become more closed partly because the anti-abuse function benefits strongly from centralisation so you don't have to duplicate effort whacking the same abusers.
> Sometimes I'd wish our internet would be more like the network the computers in Star Trek use.
Everything was unencrypted until late 90s (and in many cases until late 00s). Email (both smtp and pop3/imap), irc, web, gopher, telnet, ftp, local disks, removable storage, network storage (smb/nfs etc), everything. Computing and the internet was much nicer place, there wasn't such an adversial attitude where everything would be broken just because its out there like today.
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.
There was little to no spyware or malware risk because this was a time when stealing CPU cycles couldn’t make you money, machines couldn’t be used to anonymously generate internet traffic, and exfiltrating captured data was essentially impossible.
As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.
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