Hacking: An Early History 

DO SHOW ON ORGIN OF 420.

No offense mate, but from what I can tell, Iolo is bloatware. There are many other better antivirus tools, even for free. Along with that, registry cleaners and other things like that are unnecessary, and can even damage performance and if severe enough, can trash your entire operating system install. I'd be careful with them.

You got hackers posing as you using your pics

Yes origin of shit comes from London cause they live London

This reminds me of the movie "Hackers." The characters were involved in both phreaking and computer hacking. Yes, I realize the movie is unrealistic, but if you suspend disbelief it's a fun movie. One of my favorites. 😀

@@lydiarose5212 I think it's Angelie Jolie's first movie. I watched that cast go on to other good movie's as well.

Such a huge story on it's own, and such a gaping hole in this (hi)story. Definitions change over time but I wouldn't consider spreading viruses as "hacking". Back in the day, "hacking" often required a soldering iron.

@@Istandby666 not at all. Cyborg 2 my dude

I, too, expected to hear about phone phreakers in this.

Shall we play a game?

Was about to say this.

@@navret1707 “The only winning move is not to play.”

How about a nice game of chess?

How about a game of Global Thermo Nuclear War.....😁

I was going to recommend that as well! Like this video it’s a great guide to computer security for the general public, that explains things simply and accurately.

Another book recommendation - "Shockwave Rider" by James Brunner (1975). The book that defined the use of "worm" for this. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider

That’s the way I’ve always heard explained as well.

Great book.

+1 for him to read this, maybe he’ll get a clue about the topic.

Cliff came to my office a couple times in 1993 for meetings and he was so excited at one point that he stepped up onto the CEO's desk and walked back and forth a couple steps as he was speaking. Everybody in a suit just looked at him and gave a weird contented look as if to say, "We don't care. Let him do whatever he wants."

If you haven't had a chance to read the book ( The Cuckoo's Egg), you really should. My dad gave me a copy when I first started getting into computers in the early 90's. Was an amazing tale of not only the hunt, but of the interesting life in and around Berkeley at the time.

You as well be safe!

Good morning from Boulder, Colorado. I remember when you called into the mainframe at 300 baud from a dumb terminal because there were no floppy disks or home computers yet. Long live the LSI ADM-3A.

@@Peter_S_ I used to live in Brighton CO.

@@RetiredSailor60 Cheers from the land of (temporary) ice and snow. I was in Thornton yesterday.

And! Don't forget the joy of twenty minutes of squealing cassette tape ! Just as you got your hopes up. The tape slipped and , you started all over again, and again and again.

In fact, I remember SA discussing worm contests where the winner was the worm with the most copies of itself in memory after a given number of clock cycles. The article discussed techniques for writing better worms.

@@jackiemowery5243 I do believe I remember that now. It was just a few years ago so bit of a reach back in the cobwebs....🤣

I’m happy to see you brought up this book. It is not only a great read but a fascinating look at how law enforcement knows so little about the internet crime curve.

@@kevindown1592 I always liked the "if you didn't right it down, it didn't happen".

@@kevindown1592 Very much not true any more.

Mine was a Tandy 1000 and I would laugh at all my friends with my 16 color integrated graphics while they had 4 color RGBs.😂 I still regale my grandkids with the days of dip switches and typing every line of code. Windows 95 made everyone lazy!😋

You knew you had a bad ass Tandy system when your doubled your RAM by soldering a second IC piggyback on the motherboard RAM chip.

​​@@lapurta22 now we're in here talking about the grand old days, lol. Real hardware hacking, and DOS programs a mile long on a TRASH-80 to turn a light off. Or the first time I sat down in front of the Tandy 1000 my mother brought home. Thank God she was an early adopter of tech. She wasn't as happy when she saw what it looked like on the inside, but she did enjoy the extra RAM set... There were other adventures, too, but that's enough for here. Suffice it to say, the old modem I scrounged from high school because no one knew what to do with it was nice to have around... I'm almost sad those days are gone. But in retrospect, seeing how far everything's come, and how far it could still go is certainly entertaining. It's like daydreaming in elementary school, without being scolded, and scared out of the futuristic thoughts of what's to come, and the what has been of the past. Thanks to everyone in this thread for the memory jog. Its still amazing to me, when I stop and really think about it. I'm currently tapping this out on a mobile phone, from North Carolina, sat at my daughter's swim meet. Dick Tracy's phone watch doesnt have anything on us now!

You will know that Robert TAP IN Morris was spoken a lot at his trial.

Who

The feds were scared that Mitnick could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a telephone.

Kevin Mitnick was more a case of hubris than of hacking/cracking, IMO. There was no shortage of clever hackers during Mitnick's heyday. Mitnick's problem was that he thought he was smarter than everyone else, so used the same exploits repeatedly and never made more than cursory attempts to cover his tracks, even after he got caught again and again and again. And, naturally, each time authorities caught him, they exposed what he had done. This made him appear to be a brilliant hacker - although I don't know how many of his exploits he actually found or devised himself - but also a criminal with no horse sense.

Captain Crunch showed Steve Wozniak how to build a “blue box” to make long distance phone calls for free. A pioneer hacker.

and in the computer accessing world there is a preference to split between those exploring and those doing harm. usually a preference is those exploring(not taking or damaging data) are hackers and those doing the accessing for malicious intent as crackers. Or maybe that was just a long time ago.

I would disagree, because during WW2, the German Enigma had to be “Hacked” in order to de-code messages.

@@JesusisJesus But was the term "Hacked" used THEN - or is it being used NOW to describe what was done then? .

@@BobSmith-dk8nw Yes

While in it's latter days some phreakers used modems and computers to generate tones, the original phreaks made custom circuits and circuit boards to generate the tones used to bypass the phone system's long distance security.

This. It always irks me when hacking is defined solely as maliciously breaking into computers and their networks.

1976, Indiana University. Some of us would often break into the computer lab during the night and try to get into other systems in the country solely for the personal props. It never even occurred to us to try something malicious.

In the 70's and 80's, when I first experimented in electronics, the hackers and phone phreakers often referred to ourselves as "white hat", "black hat and "grey hats", mixing our cowboy hats (seeing ourselves on a new frontier) mixed with the colors of wizard predisposition from role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. A "white hat" used their skills to benefit rather than harm, a "black hat" didn't care about the harm they caused and the "grey hat" had mixed ethics about the effects they caused.

@@Bear-cm1vl All true. But I believe the MIT version of the word predated the 70s. Certainly, the Hackers conference goes back to the mid-70s. Of course, there were phone hackers busy at the time.

There might still be competitions to see who can write the code that performs the job with the least code.

@@20chocsaday yes, all the time.

My first computer was a commodore vic-20 with tape drive memory

My first machine was an Apple ][ in 1978 and disk drives for them didn't exist yet. Tape was all we had.

As a Radio Shack employee, I sold the first TRS-80 computer West of the Mississippi. To my boss.

I started in 1984 with an Atari 800XL. I paid around $350 for the 64k computer, a disk drive and small printer. My Navy shipmate who inspired me had paid over $1,000 for a similar system the year before, but only 48k. The gear got better and prices dropped quickly. Got my Commodore C64 a couple years later.

How was that done? More than sticky tape over a sensor I expect.?

@@20chocsaday No, they litterally hacked it. They reprogrammed it. Scott Manley has a video about it.

No.

Infamous? No.

Remember when terminals were called "glass teletypes"? Long live the ADM-3A.

@@Peter_S_ Hadn't heard of glass teletypes before and I worked in commo centers with teletypes. Does make sense. Thanks.

@@Peter_S_ Yep, I sure do. Wasn't very long that that term was in use tho.

@@Peter_S_ I remember the large hard drives they had for storage at the local community college. By large I mean a physically large contraption about the size of a water heater. Each unit had 120megabytes of space. They had four of them. It was nice to see the newer equipment showing up. Before we had to use computer cards for batch programming.

Phreaking ☎️ 🙂

The media gets it so bad, that Wargames was still the most realistic depiction of network security for decades. That finally changed with the release of Mr. Robot -- which gained great fandom among the network security community for its realistic depictions of what systems intrusion actually entails. It's all sped up for drama -- looking at a terminal for hours would be boring -- but the tools and techniques are very real. The irony is that AI technology is only, in current year, able to replicate the core conceit of Wargames -- an independent AI that can be reasoned with.

@@NozomuYume There's a very realistic hacking scene in, of all places, The Matrix Reloaded. There's a scene where Trinity, inside The Matrix, uses a real attack program to exploit a real system vulnerability. The only thing that's fake is the invalid IPv4 address she targets.

@@snapdragon6601 He had to be a phreaker too, When his GF in the movie wargames makes a comment about the phone calls being expensive he drops a quick line about there being ways around that. Looking back knowing what I know of history now, he clearly knew how to mess with the phones, aka a phreaker. Ive heard rumors War Games is where the term wardriving came from for looking for open WiFi, A modern version of his randomly dialing around looking for open modems setup to answer.

@@evensgrey That is very likely deliberate. Movies are known to use deliberately invalid IPv4 or use local addresses (ie 192.168.x.x) for the same reason that telephones in films are 555-xxxx.

Believe me, everything they write is fully calculated and executed with precision to influence public opinion. They are propagandists- there is nothing hack about it.

Amen. 😔

I think they use an app now

Heck, there are hack writer AIs now. How far we've come... :(

Robot Journalism sucks

I read somewhere yesterday that for the first time, streaming has taken over traditional TV in usage. The younger generation prefers to watch RU-vid than regular television

@"The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered", This is an incredible story and will surprise you if you haven't heard it already. "A Cuckoo's Egg" is a good read also

Very few knew and ever fewer remembered that Applelink Personal Edition got an infusion from G.E. Investment Capital to create AOL. Those were the days.... I met the infamous Cap'n Crunch at a party and hung out a bit at his place before I started to wonder if he had a thing for young boys, which is turns out he did.

You probably know the story about a woman in a locked room who got a General's private data simply by demanding it. "The General needs it now!". It is always a human who doesn't follow rules that lets something slip past.

@@20chocsaday social engineering, Your firewall may be strong but your meat wall is weak. Even physical layer access is possible with good social engineering, I mean we have even had training videos about it where I work and that is a supermarket. As naturally there are likely people who have bad intents who would want access to our communications room which has the phone lines, VOIP boxes, and of course the switches and routers that drive the store network including the POS terminals. Now yes CCs and Debit are encrypted at the pin pad so odds are a MITM upstairs is useless but with computer security if you give the bad guys a bit they will take a whole byte.

" a generation lost in space "

Thank you!

That's not even all that new a usage. That usage of the term 'hacking' goes back over 50 years, and directly connects to the 'phone phreaking' subculture of the 1970's. There's a certain sort of person who, before and above anything else, wants to get into the guts of the system and understand how it works and how to control it, and then uses that knowledge to make things do things they weren't intended to. A classic trick was how you could make a certain model of early hard disk unit literally walk across the floor by using the right combination of seeks. If you were clever and the machine was originally installed in the right place in the machine room, there were instances of people actually blocking the door to the room shut. In at least once instance, they ended up cutting through the concrete block wall to get into the machine room because nobody could make the damn thing move away from the door again. (As to why the walls were built so sturdily, these were typically 14 in steel platters spinning at 10 000 RPM. If a head crashed and nobody was there to manually shut down the drive, it might develop a wobble. At 10 0000 RPM and 14 inches in diameter. There was at least one instance of such a platter embedding itself half it's diameter into a concrete block wall. While machine rooms were built secure to keep the contents from being stolen, they were mainly built that way to make sure the contents stayed inside if there was a mechanical failure.)

That is pretty much the original use. Hacker/hacking used to, and sometimes still refers to, people who explore systems, finding undocumented behavior, coming up with novel approaches to accomplish something, etc. Part of that was finding ways around security measures, not really out of malicious intent, but simply as a challenge and to get to know how things work. It is the media in the 80s and 90s that caused the general public to take hacker/hacking to mean malicious attacks on computer systems and networks.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8ZIzaQwglv0.html

Thank you!

Yes, but he was was starting early computer/network security against the first serious Soviet hackers.

Great book! Stolll stumbled into detecting the farming scheme, but did a bang up job of setting up the honey pot.

This was a fascinating read and I recommend it.

Except that practice was known as phreaking, not hacking. But very often if a person was a member of the one community they were also a member of the other.

Hello Dave,Can I ask you a question?

By the way, Lance they’re actively doing everything they can to block my communications illegally. I can’t post anything new to RU-vid even. They suspended Facebook suspended Instagram, suspended Twitter for me telling the world that they have abused me. I hope none of you want a military because I am out here putting comments into RU-vid videos related to join the military.

Yes, as a Hacquenee, was an old French term for a Horse for Hire, used for travelling. Also a high actioned horse! Of the type favoured to draw horse drawn cabs. PS if you don't know it the London Bourough of Hackney--- dosen't have the highest of reputations.

ha.

The net had been invented years before. The web hadn't.

I owned a Laser 128, which was a clone of the Apple//e. It came with 128K of memory and ran programs written for the //e. However, it had its own BIOS, not a copy of the Apple BIOS. I felt that its built in disassembler was superior to the one built into the //e. Each time a program loaded into the //e from floppy disk, all the code was loaded from scratch. There was no way for a virus to reside in memory and pass from one program to another. Apple made the operating system available to software companies to be freely copied onto their disks, so most software loaded a fresh copy each time. IBM PCs typically had the DOS loaded into memory first, and it would read the commercial disks. The Apple //e commercial software disks usually came with copy protection. Unlike the IBM PC, reading the disk was heavily done in software. The IBM PC had hardware to read sectors, where for the Apple //e that task was done in software. The software writers had to rely on a piece of hard coded software in BIOS to read track 0, sector 0 into memory. Then code in track 0 sector 0 executed. Usually, the code read in a few more sectors, with help form the BIOS, until enough code was loaded to take over. There were several flavors of copy protection. One was to have the disk formatted the standard Apple way and have a nonstandard data pattern somewhere on the disk. A subroutine would read the nonstandard pattern and decide if the disk was genuine. It could return a 1 for yes or 0 for no. If you tried to copy the disk with normal Apple copy software, the nonstandard pattern would not copy and the subroutine would reject the copied disk. Programs like Locksmith attempted to copy disks bit by bit. There was a "war" between software developers and disk copy developers. It was legal to make backup copies of software that you had purchased, so Locksmith had a legitimate use. A much better way was to find the subroutine in the machine code and patch it to bypass the disk read and return "success". There was a disk editor program which could be used to patch the code on a copy of the commercial disk. Patched disks used standard format and could be copied with Apple copy software. A second copy protection method was to use a nonstandard method of writing the program on the commercial disk. One hack was to modify their loader to read the entire program into the computer memory and then jump to code written by the hacker. This code would pull the program from memory and write it back in standard format to a blank disk equipped with a standard loader. Now, the computer could boot from the standard disk and jump to the memory address where the program normally commenced execution. The hacker's disk could be copied with standard programs. There was one popular program where the copy protection prevented it from running on the Apple IIGS. The software development company refused to fix the problem. So, a hacker's copy made its way into the hands of IIGS owners and ran on IIGS machines, something that the original disks did not do. The hacked copies also found a legitimate home in schools. Many times the standard disk drives didn't read the nonstandard data patterns well. Furthermore, students often damaged disks and replacement meant buying new copies of the software. The schools could store the original copies of the software in a safe place and let the students use copies which could be readily duplicated. In many cases, the copies worked better than the original disks.

There were lots of holes and there are probably more now. I remember trying to find the prices for about 6 materials I was using to keep the price down. Access Denied. But I could print off, and did, print everything about every item in the entire factory.

Actually, a lot of early machines had a substantial degree of physical security, to the extent system security was generally considered pointless. If you were able to physically access the thing, it was assumed you were allowed to use it and knew what you were doing.

Hacking and piracy are two totally exclusive things.

No x86 architecture processor after the 486 came without a working math core anyway. Technically, the 486sx DID have a math core, but those were the dies where the math core didn't work. The so-called 487 'math co-processor' was actually a full-fledged 486 with working math core that fit a different socket, and disabled the 486sx entirely when installed.