Great chronology. It is interesting how you can pick certain incidents out of the multiple streams of hacking events to build a contiguous story. I would include several other events.

January 2003 SQL Slammer takes down the Internet. Luckily it is over a weekend and carriers quickly recover by filtering traffic.

July 2003. MSBlaster

2003 first versions of Cool Web Search and the rise of adware

2004 Shawn Carpenter discovers Chinese hacking attacks against Lockheed Martin, Army Research Labs, World Bank, Nasa, and Sandia. Titan Rain

2003 series of DDoS attacks and extortion against online gambling sites. The rise of criminal DDoS.

April 27 2007 Russia encourages crowd sourced DDoS against Estonia.

August 8, 2008 Russia launches DDoS against Georgia while invading South Ossetia. The first cyber war.

June 2008, Twitter used to spread DDoS instructions against Iranian web sites.

July 4, 2009 DDoS against US Federal web sites and South Korean websites.

August 2009. Russian attacks against a blogger leads to outage of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook.

This should b named history of cracking and piracy. Plz dont corrupt the memories of true hackers like steive wozeniac and richard stallman by associating there names with these criminals.

Wow, that is truly amazing dude. I LOVED War Games, Fav movie of ALL time

RT
www.real-privacy.net.tc

The entry for 1994 is not completely true.

"Kuji" was in fact found and arrested in 1996. His real name is Mathew Bevan (21 years old in 1994). Also, I could be wrong, but I believe the base is called "Griffiss Air Force Base" not "Griffith..."

Incidentally, the case wasn't pursued by the prosecution and thus resulted in an aquital.

Other unforgivable oversights by the bot that compiled this list:

June 1984 - Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc ....oooM) was formed at the Farm Pac slaughterhouse by Grandmaster Ratte' (aka Swamp Ratte'), Franken Gibe, and Sid Vicious, three BBS SysOps.

December 1990 - cDc member Drunkfux gave birth to the modern hacker con. HoHoCon, usually held in Houston, Texas, was the first hacker conference which invited the participation of both journalists and law enforcement. In all, dFx hosted five annual HoHoCons.

This is a history of computer crime.

A true history of hacking would be boring.

"19xx: Codemasters develops Game Genie for NES."

"19xx: Linus Torvalds started work on a free UNIX clone...."

There's more to hacking than breaking the law with a computer.

I believe events like defcon (i.e. the first one) deserve mention; defcon is a huge aspect of black/grey/white-hat culture.

This is crap. This is nothing more than a list of people breaking the law. The media would have us believe "their" definition of the word "hacking", and shove it down our throats as a scare tactic. True hacking has nothing to do with crime. It has to do with true code skills to make a computer do what you want.

Leave this propaganda where it belongs, on the cutting room floor.

umm yea don't forget the one movie where the wolverine hacks millions of lost money to the CIA guy Gabriel Shear too bad storm gets killed..
Who the hell wrote this article a 10 year old kid that googled everything?????
focus try hiring real journalists.

You are talking about CRACKING, hacking is a different concept. You are ruining the good name of hackers!!!!!!

How can you include some douche email bomber along with the likes of Cap'n Crunch?

Hacking should be punishable by the death penalty.

Ahh, the good old days. To think, I owe my entire profession to being obsessed with an old Apple II and getting "codez". Many moons ago.

Oh Yeah That's Cool Who Did That Windows Xp Pirated
Version??Is That A Girl?Damn!

I think you are forgetting the guy who stole some cents from every visa/mastercard account, earning millions.

I would say this is a chronology about crackers, not hackers...

This is great. There are def. some folks left out though. How about LoD and MoD. They had a pretty significant chunk of the history. Also there are a lot of modern attacks that are noteworthy as well. I think the problem is that they are so common now they are hardly groundbreaking or barely even news worthy.

I want to buy some decorations, went to their family to be also good!
tiffany jewelry

tiffany

Do you remember "I love you" and "SASSER"?

Agree the list is incorrectly titled.

Where is L0pht? Telling congress you can bring the internet down in 30 mins doesn't make the list?

Thanks for the suggestions and information's.

You for got about the legion of doom and the masters of deception, ATT and the FBI and wired magazine all spin together to make one of the most interesting hacker stories of all time...

interesting list but have more information not added

John Draper is nicknamed "Cap'n Crunch" after he learns that a toy whistle(...)

That, plus he looks like a black haired Cap'n Crunch with glasses.

John Draper is nicknamed "Cap'n Crunch" after he learns that a toy whistle(...)

That, plus he looks like a black haired Cap'n Crunch with glasses.

i've heard a lot of bullshit explaining the word 'hack' but this is the first time i've seen this bullshit about the model trains

Want to help us build America. Only buy shares that have paying dividends and only for food you buy in a grocery store each month. when stocks go up and down, its not these shares, because we only buy what we eat in shares. also when you get your taxes for each quarter for your paying dividends. pay an extra $100 from what you receive so you'll get more back at the end of each year. companies have many food shares so buy the shares, like campbell foods or c+ h sugar, etc. might be under other companies, like Kraft Foods. your choice to help us AMERICANS build AMERICA back up.

You kids can whine all you want about hackers vs crackers, it's a distinction only you care about.

They're. all. hackers.

Would you like to play a game of TIC TAC TOE?

Enough is enough.

We are starting a new worldwide mowement, this is it!. We the people takes control. enough is enough. Please, wait until 1. dec, we will rock the hole world.

@Trod:

"You kids can whine all you want about hackers vs crackers, it's a distinction only you care about.

They're. all. hackers."

you are ignorant, narrow-minded and surely dumb. you do not know the very definition of hacking. we're not whining. we're defending OUR right to express ourselves.

if we all noticed that this article is purely some non-sense propaganda and started complaining about the inaccuracy of its title, then there's a good chance that we've DONE SO FOR A REASON. Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about and clearly you are yet another propaganda enthusiast. so is the guy who suggested hackers should face the death penalty.

1998 - Hackers and geeks across the world learn that WinAmp can save the highly unstable version of windows (98) avaiable at the time even going so far as to sometimes overrule the dreaded blue screen of death if it happens to be playing a MP3 at the time of the crash. Microsofts reputation is forever trashed as the encoding and sharing of illegal copies becomes the 'coolest' way to make the windows operating system stable eventually leading to the creation of Napster.

2000 - Unknown hackers encode a tracking worm into several jpg files containing illegal and unsavoury pictures of minors. Left to run rampant for over a year on the irc channels as well illegal websites the information gathered from the worm is handed over to law enforcent authorities in both the US and UK resulting in the arrest of over a thousand peadophiles.

@Trod

Seriously... I think more than one person thinks that the terminology is wrong.... and mostly it's probably not "kids" arguing about the terms but the people who grew up as computers were developing and who were and or are actually involved in the community... whereas you have revealed your ignorance for the world to see.

The term hacker and cracker have become almost synonymous in popular culture (because of popular Hollywood movies) and it is an oversight that I feel does both groups wrong. They are specific groups with very different goals and mindsets and, while there is some overlap in the groups... they are NOT even close to the same.

Hackers - "people who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary." Hackers "hack together" code, contribute to projects, streamline and customize their computers (and or electronics) to perfectly suite their purposes. You can only become a hacker through the acknowledgement of your peers due to your contributions in code or insight.

Crackers - Computer savvy people who "crack" into protected software etc. in order to allow unauthorised access/use of such projects. You become a cracker by successfully "Cracking" programs.

The skillsets are similar but the goals are completely... COMPLETELY different.

Clearly this is more correctly a History of Crackers.

and @duderino
That sounds to me like a horrible idea... not even just because Hacking isn't what everyone seems to think it is... but you think that cracking into software should be punishable by death?

Should people who copied video tapes or made mix tapes have been subject to the death penalty too?

i want to be a hacker someone teach me ..

The story in 2000 about multiple hackers bring down CNN eBay Amazon Buy and Yahoo is inaccurate.

It was one person, mafiaboy.
Micheal Calce, he was 16 at the time I believe.

He also took out Dell and E*TRADE

He has a book out about it. It's good. Check it out.
It's titled mafiaboy.

This is a history of poor code and unpatched vulnerabilities. AT&T was imposing a 2600 Hz signal on the wire ... did they think that no one would ever notice?

How many times do the laws have to get tougher before the Pentagon stops getting cracked?

Why is an asset such as the electric distribution system left vulnerable -- for HOW LONG?

What these people are good at is engineering. They spot the chinks in the armor that those who write the code have left there. The law runs against these perfectly good engineers and protects the perfectly bad ones who left the holes to begin with.

Send these guys to jail?? They ought to get good money for spotting the problems. As it is now, they can't even 'do the right thing' and report the problems to the owners of the porous code.

I started using personal computers at the 'home built XT' stage, when 'the internet' did not exist as a public utility and it could take 3 days, or more, for an email to pass from BBS to BBS. The distinction between hacker and cracker is not small one. Hackers have dinner with their families, crackers have dinner with the warden.

email marketing at this days crate a lot of website heckling to get the website email list dont forget that

and they crate the email that hack you email to get more emails
you can read more on http://www.activetrail.com

CRACKING! Hacking is COMPLETELY different!

IT'S REALLY NICE TO HACK SOMEONES THING WITHOUT HIS PERMISSION.IT SHARPS UR MIND I WANNA BE HACKER.