It comes as no surprise that the history of cybersecurity can be traced back to the appearance of the internet. Ever since the worldwide web began to percolate into mainstream society, cybercriminals have been coming up with innovative ways to take advantage of this.
One of the first incidents of hacking took place in the early 1980s when a group of computer hackers known as the 414s (named after their Milwaukee area code) was arrested for breaking into more than 60 computer networks. These include the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
As hacking became increasingly challenging during this period, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was created to punish those who were caught victimizing computer systems. By the late 1980s, a unit called the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was formed under the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to investigate the growing volume of hacking on computer networks.
Towards the end of the 1980s, Robert Morris released the historic Internet worm, which caused 10% of the internet to shut down (at the time). It was also possibly the first denial-of-service (DOS) attack ever to appear on the Internet.
Though hacking from the 1980s was, for the most part, carried out by amateurs and hacking students, cybercrime took a more serious turn as the 1990s rolled by. By this time, cybercrime has not only increased in sophistication but notoriety. Hackers started to target government agencies and substantial corporate databases, such as Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon.
From the late 1990s to the beginning of the millennium, viruses, such as the Melissa and ILOVEYOU, started making the headlines for infecting more than 10 million personal computers and causing the failure of email systems around the world. These threats inevitably led to the development of antivirus technology and the importance of security for computer users.
Learn more from original source: What Is Security Awareness Training?
