主题：【文摘】“完整的”INTERNET 历史 3) -- 仙八

1990s

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[1990] Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) ceases to exist. Arpanet was the Internet predecessor, started in 1969.

[1990] Archie (ARCHIvE), created by Alan Emtage and Bill Heelan, Archie is one of the first attempts at organizing information on the net, designed to index FTP sites.

[1990] Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is formed by Mitch Kapor and John Barlow in part to defend the rights of those investigated for alleged computer hacking.

[1990] Kevin Poulsen pulls off the now-infamous incident involving KIIS-FM in Los Angeles, California. The station ran the "Win a Porsche by Friday" contest, with a $50,000 Porsche given to the 102nd caller. Kevin and his associates, stationed at their computers, seized control of the station's 25 telephone lines, blocking out all calls but their own. Then he dialed the 102nd call -- and later collected his Porsche 944. The story of Poulsen's life in front of the monitor will be told in the book, The Watchman.

[1990 May 7] May 7 through May 9, the United States Secret Service and the Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau implement Operation Sundevil computer hacker raids in Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose and San Francisco.

[1991] Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the University of Minnesota. Gopher is a distributed document search and retrieval network protocol.

[1991] Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption program is released by Philip Zimmerman. This made Zimmermann the target of a three-year criminal investigation because the government said it violated U.S. export restrictions for cryptographic software. PGP nonetheless became the most widely used email encryption software in the world. Later the government would drop its case against Zimmerman in early 1996. When used properly, PGP is capable of very high security; informed observers believe that even government agencies such as the NSA are incapable of directly breaking properly produced PGP-protected messages. Bruce Schneier, a highly respected cryptographer, characterized PGP as being "the closest you're likely to get to military-grade encryption".

[1991] The Internet, having been established to link the military and educational institutions but banned access to businesses. That ban is lifted this year.

[1991] Rumors circulate about the Michelangelo virus, a program expected to crash computers on March 6, 1992, the artist's 517th birthday. Doomsday passes without much incident.

[1991 Feb] Solaris 1.0 is released by Sun Microsystems. Early versions, based on BSD UNIX, were called SunOS. Solaris uses a monolithic kernel.

[1991 Feb] DOS version of AOL released.

[1991 Feb] Python programming language by Guido van Rossum is released to Usenet. Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme or Java and is an open source high-level programming language.

[1991 May] Apple introduces Macintosh System 7.0.

[1991 Jul] Justin Petersen (Agent Steal, Eric Heinz) arrested for breaking into TRW and stealing credit cards.

[1991 Aug 6] Tim Berners-Lee's Usenet announcement of the World Wide Web (WWW) project.

[1991 Sep 17] Linus Torvalds publicly releases Linux version 0.01, the source is all of 64KB. While a computer science student at the University of Helsinki Linus created the Linux operating system. Linus originally named his operating system Freax. Today Linux is a module loading monolithic kernel which means it can load executable modules at runtime, allowing easy extension of the kernel's capabilities as required, while helping to keep the amount of code running in kernelspace to a minimum. The monolithic approach defines a high-level virtual interface over the hardware, with a set of primitives or system calls to implement operating system services.

[1991 Oct 5] Linus Torvalds decides to announce on Usenet the availability of a free minix-like kernel called Linux.

[1992] The term "surfing the Internet" is coined by librarian Jean Armour Polly.

[1992] Masters of Deception (MOD) phone phreakers are arrested from evidence obtained via wiretaps.

[1992] 386BSD 0.0/0.1 released by co-creator William "Bill" Jolitz.

[1992 Jan 29] Minix creator, Andy Tanenbaum, posts the infamous LINUX is obsolete newsgroup posting on comp.os.minix. Later, Linux creator Linus Torvalds quickly responds to the posting.

[1992 Mar 31] The newsgroup comp.os.linux is created.

[1993] The FVWM (F Virtual Window Manager) project is started. FVWM was designed to minimize memory consumption, provide a 3-D look and provide a simple virtual desktop.

[1993 Apr 20] NetBSD 0.8 is released. NetBSD took its roots from the original UCB 4.3BSD via the Networking/2 release and 386BSD. NetBSD formed to focus on multi-platform support.

[1993 Apr 21] Mosaic web browser 1.0 is released. Written at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The leaders of the team that developed Mosaic are Marc Andreesen, one of the founders of Netscape and Jim Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics.

[1993 Apr 30] CERN announced that the World Wide Web (WWW) would be free to anyone, with no fees due.

[1993 Jun] 130 web sites exist online. Netcraft survey will later count 55 million web sites online in October 2004.

[1993 Jul 9] The first Def Con hacking conference takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference is meant to be a one-time party to say good-bye to Bulletin Board Systems (now replaced by the Web), but the gathering is so popular it becomes an annual event.

[1993 Jul 17] Slackware, by Patrick Volkerding becomes the first commercial standalone distribution of Linux. Volkerding quote regarding using Slackware instead of Microsoft Windows, "Besides, I think Slackware sounds better than Microsoft, don't you?"

[1993 Mar 1] Microsoft releases Windows NT (New Technology) 3.1. From an architectural standpoint, Windows NT is designed to be a modified microkernel.

[1993 Oct 28] Randal Schwartz (Perl language guru) uses the program called Crack at Intel to crack password files, he is later found guilty under an Oregon computer crime law and sentenced.

[1993 Dec] FreeBSD version 1.0 is released. Frustration at getting patches integrated and releases of 386BSD led to FreeBSD, which concentrated mainly on the i386 platform.

[1994] Red Hat is founded and becomes one of the most popular Linux distributions. Red Hat is founded by Marc Ewing, which was named after his grandfather's favorite old red Cornell lacrosse team cap. Ewing used to wear the cap between classes while a student in Carnegie Mellon's computer science program.

[1994] Opera web browser first released.

[1994 Jan 12] Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) starts his one year sentence. As a founding member of the Masters of Deception, Mark inspired thousands of teenagers around the country to "study" the internal workings of the United State's phone systems. A federal judge attempted to "send a message" to other hackers by sentencing Mark to a year in federal prison, but the message got garbled: Hundreds of well-wishers attended a welcome-home party in Mark's honor at a Manhattan Club. Soon after, New York Magazine dubbed him one of the city's 100 smartest people. Other MOD members: Elias Ladopoulos (Acid Phreak), Paul Stira (Scorpion), John Lee (Corrupt), Allen Wilson (Wing), 'The Seeker', 'HAC', 'Red Knight', 'Lord Micro' and Julio Fernandez (Outlaw).

[1994 Feb] David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, start their guide, which would later be called Yahoo.com, in a campus trailer as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. The web site was originally called, Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web, but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."

[1994 Mar 14] Linux kernel 1.0 is released.

[1994 Mar 23] 16-year-old music student Richard Pryce (Datastream Cowboy) is arrested and charged with breaking into hundreds of computers including those at the Griffiths Air Force Base, NASA and the Korean Atomic Research Institute. The Times of London reported that knowing he was about to be arrested, Richard "curled up on the floor and cried." Pryce later pled guilty to 12 hacking offenses and fined $1,800. Later, Matthew Bevan (Kuji), mentor to Pryce was finally tracked down and arrested. The charges against Bevan were later dropped and now he works as a computer security consultant.

[1994 Apr 12] One of the first spam messages is posted to newsgoups. Two lawyers from Phoenix, Arizona named Canter and Siegel posted a message advertising their fairly useless services in an upcoming U.S. "green card" lottery. Quickly people called it a "spam" and the word caught on.

[1994 Jun 13] Vladimir Levin, a 23-year-old, led a Russian hacker group in the first publicly revealed international bank robbery over a network. Stealing around 10 million dollars from Citibank, which claims to have recovered all but $400,000 of the money. Levin was later caught and sentenced to 3 years in prison.

[1994 Oct] The first version of Netscape web browser is released.

[1994 Dec] The first alpha version of Ruby is released by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto.

[1994 Dec 25] Kevin Mitnick (supposedly) hacks into computer security specialist Tsutomu Shimomura's computers. Mitnick was first suspected of hacking into Tsutomu's computers but an unknown Israeli hacker (friend to Mitnick) was later suspected. The Israeli hacker was thought to be looking for the Oki cell phone disassembler written by Shimomura and wanted by Mitnick. This security breach will urge Tsutomu, along with authorties, to track down and capture Mitnick. Which Shimomura will later write about in the book, Takedown. Later, Mitnick will be charged with obtaining unauthorized access to computers belonging to numerous computer software and computer operating systems manufacturers, cellular telephone manufacturers, internet service providers, and educational institutions; and stealing, copying, and misappropriating proprietary computer software from Motorola, Fujitsu, Nokia, Sun, Novell, and NEC. Mitnick was also in possession of 20,000 credit card numbers at the time of his arrest.

[1995 Feb] Ex-LOD member, Corey Lindsly (Mark Tabas) was the major ringleader in a computer hacker organization, known as the Phonemasters, whose ultimate goal was to own the telecommunications infrastructure from coast-to-coast. The group penetrated the systems of AT&T, British Telecom., GTE, MCI WorldCom, Sprint, Southwestern Bell and systems owned by state and federal governmental agencies, to include the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer system. They broke into credit reporting databases belonging to Equifax Inc. and TRW Inc. They entered Nexis/Lexis databases and systems of Dun & Bradstreet. They had access to portions of the national power grid, air-traffic-control systems and had hacked their way into a digital cache of unpublished phone numbers at the White House. A federal court granted the FBI permission to use the first ever "data tap" to monitor the hacker's activities. These hackers organized their assaults on the computers through teleconferencing and utilized the encryption program PGP to hide the data which they traded with each other. On Sep. 16 1999 Corey Lindsly, age 32, of Portland, Oregon, was sentenced to forty-one months imprisonment and ordered to pay $10,000 to the victim corporations. Other Phonemasters members: John Bosanac (Gatsby) from San Diego, Calvin Cantrell (Zibby) and Brian Jaynes both located in Dallas, Rudy Lombardi (Bro) in Canada and Thomas Gurtler in Ohio. Calvin Cantrell, age 30, of Grand Prairie, Texas, was sentenced to two years imprisonment and ordered to pay $10,000 to the victim corporations. John Bosanac was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

[1995 Mar 18] SATAN (Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks) security tool released to the Internet by Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema. The release stirs huge debate about security auditing tools being given to the public. A debate that still continues to this day.

[1995 Apr] Apache web server 0.6.2 released. Brian Behlendorf was the primary developer of the Apache Web server. As of Aug 2004 Apache ran 67% of the web sites. Apache HTTP Server is an open source HTTP web server for Unix platforms (BSD, Linux, and UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows, and other platforms.

[1995 May 5] Chris Lamprecht (Minor Threat) becomes first person banned from the Internet. Chris was sentenced for a number of crimes to which he pled guilty. The crimes involved the theft and sale of Southwestern Bell circuit boards. In the early 1990s Chris wrote a program called ToneLoc (Tone Locator), a phone dialing program modeled on the program Matthew Broderick used in the movie WarGames to find open modem lines in telephone exchanges.

[1995 May 23] Sun launches Java. Java programming language is created by James Gosling.

[1995 Jul] The first online bookstore, Amazon.com, is launched in Seattle by Jeffrey P. Bezos.

[1995 Jul 12] Tatu Ylonen announces the release of the first Secure Shell (SSH) login program. SSH is a protocol for secure remote logins and other secure network services over an insecure network. The shell is a program that presents an interface to various operating system functions and services. The shell is so called because it is an outer layer of interface between the user and the kernel of the operating system.

[1995 Aug] Internet Explorer 1.0 is released.

[1995 Aug] Microsoft releases Windows 95 and sells more than 1 Million copies within 4 days.

[1995 Aug 16] French student Damien Doligez cracks 40-bit RC4 encryption. The challenge presented the encrypted data of a Netscape session, using the default exportable mode, 40-bit RC4 encryption. Doligez broke the code in eight days using 112 workstations.

[1995 Sep] eBay is founded by Pierre Omidyar.

[1995 Sep 17] Ian Goldberg and David Wagner broke the pseudorandom number generator of Netscape Navigator 1.1. They get the session key in a few hours on a single workstation.

[1996] KDE (K Desktop Environment) project is started by Matthias Ettrich.

[1996] New Deal releases New Deal Office 2.5, which was formerly PC-GEOS.

[1996] IBM Releases OS/2 Warp 4 with a significant facelift for the Workplace Shell.

[1996] The internet now has over 16 million hosts and is growing rapidly.

[1996] An Internet startup located in Tel Aviv, Israel, launched a service to bring computer users together called ICQ, or I Seek You.

[1996] Icanet, a company that designed Internet sites for public schools, was threatened by an extortionist in Germany. The deal: If Icanet agreed to buy his computer security program for $30,000, the hacker would not devastate the company's computers. In April, Andy Hendrata, a 27-year-old Indonesian computer science student in Germany, was convicted of computer sabotage and attempted extortion. He received a one-year suspended sentence and was fined $1,500.

[1996] The U.S. General Accounting Office reports that hackers attempted to break into Defense Department computer systems some 250,000 times in 1995 alone. About 65 percent of the attempts were successful, according to the report.

[1996 Jan] Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, which later becomes Google.

[1996 Mar 6] United Press International (UPI) reveals that a hacker called 'u4ea' and also known as 'el8ite', 'eliteone', 'el8' and 'b1ff' online has been threatening to crash systems at the Boston Herald newspaper and several Internet Service Providers in the Boston, Massachusetts area. Reports indicate that the hacker may have covertly entered up to 100 Internet sites and desytroyed files on many of them. An investigation is initiated by the NYPD Computer Crimes section.

[1996 May] Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) is published. POP3 is an application layer Internet standard protocol used to retrieve email from a remote server to a local client over a TCP/IP connection. Nearly all individual Internet service provider email accounts are accessed via POP3.

[1996 Jun 9] Linux kernel 2.0 is released.

[1996 Jul 31] Tim Lloyd plants a software time bomb at Omega Engineering in New Jersey; First federal computer sabotage case. The software time bomb destroyed the company's computer network and the global manufacturer's ability to manufacture in the summer of 1996. The attack caused the company $12 million in losses and cost 80 employees their jobs. Lloyd received 41 months in jail. He also was ordered to pay more than $2 million in restitution.

[1996 Aug] Microsoft releases Windows NT (New Technology) 4.0.

[1996 Sep] Johan Helsingius closes penet.fi. Penet.fi, the world's most popular anonymous remailer was raided by the Finnish police in 1995 after the Church of Scientology complained that a penet.fi customer was posting the church's secrets on the Net. Helsingius closed the remailer after a Finnish court ruled he must reveal the customer's real email address.

[1996 Oct] Internet2 project started. The purpose is to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies such as IPv6, and to ensure that new applications and technologies are deployed to the existing Internet.

[1996 Oct 18] OpenBSD 2.0, the initial release, is announced. OpenBSD is an Ultra-Secure Operating System and forks off of NetBSD 1.1 code after Theo de Raadt has a disagreement over the future of the NetBSD code. OpenBSD development began by focusing on producing an incredibly secure OS (Operating System). Today OpenBSD is considered the most secure operating system in the world, out of the box and on a default install. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Microsoft.

[1997] The GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) project is started by Miguel de Icaza and will later progress by the free software company he founded with Nat Friedman in early 2000.

[1997] DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) format released and DVD players/movies hit consumer market.

[1997] 101,803 Name Servers are registered in the whois database.

[1997 Jan 28] Ian Goldberg, a University of California-Berkeley graduate student, took on RSA Data Security's challenge and cracked the 40-bit code by linking together 250 idle workstations that allowed him to test 100 billion possible "keys" per hour. In three and a half hours Goldberg had decoded the message, which read, "This is why you should use a longer key."

[1997 June] The original version of the standard IEEE 802.11 released and sometimes called "802.11legacy" specifies two data rates of 1 and 2 Megabits per second (Mbit/s) to be transmitted via infrared (IR) signals or in the ISM band at 2.4 GHz.

[1997 Jul] Mac OS 8 is released. Selling 1.25 million copies in less than 2 weeks.

[1997 Oct 31] Eugene Kashpureff arrested for redirecting the NSI web page to his Alternic web site. Kashpureff designed a corruption of the software system that allows Internet-linked computers to communicate with each other. By exploiting a weakness in that software, Kashpureff hijacked Internet users attempting to reach the web site for InterNIC, his chief commercial competitor, to his AlterNIC web site, impeding those users' ability to register web site domain names or to review InterNIC's popular "electronic directory" for existing domain names.

[1997 Dec] Julio Ardita (El Griton) a 21-year-old Argentinean was sentenced to a three-year probation for hacking into computer systems belonging to Harvard, NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center.

[1997 Dec 8] Yahoo.com web site is defaced.

[1998] DVD-Recordable systems/equipment hits market.

[1998] Two hackers, Hao Jinglong and Hao Jingwen (twin brothers) are sentenced to death by a court in China for breaking into a bank computer network and stealing 720,000 yuan ($87,000). The Yangzhou Intermediate People?s Court in the eastern Jiangsu province of China rejected an appeal of Hao Jingwen and upholding a death sentence against him. Jingwen and his brother, Hao Jinglong, hacked into the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China computers and shifted 720,000 yuan ($87,000) into accounts they had set up under phoney names. In September of 1998, they withdrew 260,000 yuan ($31,400) of those funds. Hao Jinglong?s original sentence to death was suspended in return for his testimony.

[1998 Feb 27] The 56-bit DES-II-1 challenge by RSA Data Security was completed by a massively distributed array of computers coordinating their brute force attacks via the distributed.net "organization." The cleartext message read, "Many hands make light work." The participants collectively examined 6.3 x 10^16 keys?fully 90 percent of the entire keyspace?in about 40 days.

[1998 Mar 18] Ehud Tenebaum (The Analyzer), an Israeli teen-ager is arrested in Israel. During heightened tensions in the Persian Gulf, hackers touch off a string of break-ins to unclassified Pentagon computers and steal software programs. Officials suspect him of working in concert with American teens to break into Pentagon computers. Then-U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre calls it "the most organized and systematic attack" on U.S. military systems to date. An investigation points to two American teens. A 19-year-old Israeli hacker who calls himself 'The Analyzer' (Ehud Tenebaum) is eventually identified as their ringleader and arrested. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls Tenebaum "damn good ... and very dangerous." The attacks exploited a well-known vulnerability in the Solaris operating system for which a patch had been available for months. Today Tenebaum is chief technology officer of a computer consulting firm.

[1998 Apr 26] CIH virus released by Chen Ing-Hou, the creator of the CIH virus, that takes his initials. This was the first known virus to target the flash BIOS (Basic Input Output System).

[1998 May] Members from the Boston, Massachusetts hacker group L0pht (@stake) testify before the U.S. Senate about Internet vulnerabilities.

[1998 Jun 28] Microsoft releases Windows 98.

[1998 Jul 31] During Def Con 6 the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) release Back Orifice (BO), a tool for analyzing and compromising Windows security.

[1998 Sep 13] The New York Times web site is defaced by hackers, renaming the site HFG (Hacking For Girlies). The hackers express anger at the arrest and imprisonment of Kevin Mitnick, the subject of the book Takedown co-authored by Times reporter John Markoff. In early November, two members of HFG told Forbes magazine that they initiated the attack because they were bored and couldn't agree on a video to watch.

[1998 Sep 17] Aaron Blosser a contract programmer and self-described "math geek" harnessed over 2,500 US West computers by installing a program that would utilize their idle time to find very large prime numbers. Their combined computational power in theory surpassed that of most supercomputers. Blosser enlisted 2,585 computers to work at various times during the day and night and quickly ran up 10.63 years of computer processing time in his search for a new prime number. "I've worked on this (math) problem for a long time," said Blosser. "When I started working at US West, all that computational power was just too tempting for me."

[1999] Apple introduces Mac OS 9.

[1999 Jan 25] Linux kernel 2.2 is released.

[1999 Mar] Apple releases Mac OS X Server with their Macintosh GUI, a UNIX based OS that Apple names Darwin. Darwin is itself based on the FreeBSD code with a custom Mac kernel in place of the standard BSD kernel.

[1999 Mar 26] Melissa virus affects 100,000 email users and caused $80 million in damages; written by David Smith a 29-year-old New Jersey computer programmer. The virus known as Melissa, was named after a Florida stripper.

[1999 May] The Napster peer-to-peer MP3 file-sharing system, used mainly to copy and swap unencrypted files of songs for free, begins to gain popularity, primarily on college campuses where students have easy access to high-speed Internet connections. It was created by Northeastern University students Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, age 19 and 20, respectively. Before being shut down on July 2, 2001, Napster, had attracted 85 million registered users downloading as many as 3 billion songs a month.

[1999 May 11] Whitehouse.gov is defaced.

[1999 Jun] RISCOS Ltd releases RISC OS 4 for RiscPC, A7000 or A7000+ machines.

[1999 Jul 10] Back Orifice 2000 released at Def Con 7.

[1999 Aug 30] Microsoft Corporation shuts down its Hotmail operation for approximately two hours. The shut down comes after receiving confirmed reports that hackers breached some of their servers by entering Hotmail accounts through third-party Internet providers without using passwords.

[1999 Aug 19] ABC news web site is defaced.

[1999 Sep 5] C-Span web site is defaced.

[1999 Sep 13] Drudge Report web site is defaced.

[1999 Sep 23] Nasdaq and American Stock Exchange web sites are defaced.

[1999 Nov] 15-year-old Norwegian, Jon Johansen (DVD Jon), one of the three founding members of MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering), the trio of programmers who created a huge stir in the DVD marketplace by releasing DeCSS, a program used to crack the Content Scrambling System (CSS) encryption used to protect every DVD movie on the market. On Jan. 24, 2000 authorities in Norway raid Johansen's house and take computer equipment. Later, Johansen goes to court charged with violating DVD piracy laws and is found not guilty. The Norwegian Economic Crime Unit confirmed that it will not appeal the upholding of his acquittal on copyright charges to the Norway's Supreme Court. Norwegian appeals court upheld Johansen's earlier acquittal on all counts of alleged copyright violations, much to the irritation of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

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2000s

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[2000 Jan 5] Apple announces Aqua, the new look for their upcoming MacOS X client

[2000 Jan 15] 19-year-old Raphael Gray (Curador) steals over 23,000 credit card numbers from 8 small companies. Raphael styled himself as a "saint of e-commerce", as he hacked into U.S., British and Canadian companies during a "crusade" to expose holes in Internet security and who used computer billionaire Bill Gates' credit card details to send him Viagra.

[2000 Feb 7] 16-year-old Canadian hacker nicknamed Mafiaboy, carried out his distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) spree using attack tools available on the Internet that let him launch a remotely coordinated blitz of 1-gigabits-per-second flood of IP packet requests from "zombie" servers which knocked Yahoo off-line for over 3 hours. Two days later the DDoS attacks continued, this time hitting eBay, Amazon, Buy.com, ZDNet, CNN, E*Trade and MSN. After pleding guilty 'Mafiaboy' was sentenced on Sep. 12 2001 to eight months in a youth detention center.

[2000 May 3] Apache.org is defaced by {} and Hardbeat. A Powered by Microsoft Back Office logo is placed at the bottom of the site. A member of the Apache Software Foundation later said, "It would have been nice if they hadn't put the damned Microsoft logo up, but I guess they had to do something to get attention."

[2000 May 15] Love Bug virus sent from the Philippines; AMA computer college. Michael Buen & Onel de Guzman are suspected of writing the virus. The global cost of the virus is estimated to be nearly seven-billion dollars.

[2000 Jun 1] Qualcomm computer systems in San Diego, California are hacked by University of Wisconsin-Madison student Jerome Heckenkamp. When school police asked for the password for his personal computer, court records say Heckenkamp chuckled when he gave it up. "Hackme", he told them. One time Los Alamos National Laboratory employee, Heckenkamp, 24, pleads guilty to causing at least $70,000 in losses in a 1999 hacking spree while a graduate student. In addition to hacking Qualcomm -- the latter performed under the handle MagicFX -- Heckenkamp admitted to penetrating the systems of Exodus Communications, Juniper Networks, eBay, Lycos, and Cygnus Solutions.

[2000 Aug 17] United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan in New York bars Eric Corley (Emmanuel Goldstein), publisher of 2600 magazine, from republishing software hacks that circumvent DVD industry encryptions. The code would enable movies to be more readily copied and exchanged as data files on the Internet.

[2000 Sep 6] Patrick W. Gregory (MostHateD), age 20, pled guilty for his role as a founding member of a hacking ring called GlobalHell and is sentenced to 26 months imprisonment, three years supervised release and was ordered to pay $154,529.86 in restitution. GlobalHell is said to have caused at least $1.5 million in damages to various U.S. corporations and government entities, including the White House and the U.S. Army. Gregory, a high school dropout who has said he wants to start his own computer security business, admits in a plea agreement to stealing telephone conferencing services from AT&T, MCI, and Latitude Communications and holding conference calls with other hackers around the country.

[2000 Oct] Microsoft admits that its corporate network has been hacked and source code for future Windows products has been seen. The hacker is later suspected to be from St. Petersburg, Russia.

[2000 Oct 10] FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) lure two Russian hackers to their arrest in Seattle, Washington, after it was determined that Alexei V. Ivanov, 20, and Vasiliy Gorshkov, 25, spent two years victimizing American businesses. The FBI established a bogus computer security firm that they named, fittingly enough, Invita. They leased office space in downtown Seattle and immediately called Ivanov in Russia about possible employment as a hacker. The FBI communicated with Gorshkov and Ivanov, by email and telephone during the summer and fall of 2000. The men agreed to a face to face meeting and on Nov. 10, Gorshkov and Ivanov flew to Seattle and went directly to a two hour "job interview" with undercover FBI agents who were posing as Invita staff. The Russians were asked to further demonstrate their hacking skills on an IBM Thinkpad provided by the agents. The hackers happily complied and communicated with their home server back in Chelyabinsk, unaware that the laptop they were using was running a "sniffer" program that recorded their every keystroke. The FBI agents' descriptions of the meeting portray Ivanov and Gorshkov as not only blissfully ignorant of their impending arrest, but also somewhat cocky about their hacking skills. At one point in the meeting, as Gorshkov glibly detailed how he and Ivanov extorted money from a U.S. Internet service provider after hacking into its servers, he told the room of undercover agents that "the FBI could not get them in Russia."

[2000 Oct 28] After 9 million hack attempts, security web site AntiOnline is defaced by Australian hacker ron1n (n1nor). AntiOnline was deemed "unhackable" by the sites owner, John Vranesevich but a poorly coded cgi script(s) written by Vranesevich led to the hack.

[2000 Nov 7] A 19-year-old Dutch hacker named 'Dimitri' broke into Microsoft?s internal web servers with intentions to show the company its vulnerability due to not installing their own patches.

[2000 Dec 13] More than 55,000 credit card numbers were stolen from Creditcards.com, which processes credit transactions for online companies. About 25,000 of them were posted online when an extortion payment was not made.

[2001 Jan 4] Linux kernel 2.4 is released.

[2001 Feb 1] Hackers invade the World Economic Forum. The compromised data included credit card numbers, personal cell phone numbers and information concerning passports and travel arrangements for a number of government and business leaders. Among the notable victims whose personal information was pilfered were Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright and former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

[2001 Feb 12] Anna Kournikova virus released by 20-year-old Dutchman Jan de Wit (OnTheFly) who was later arrested and sentenced to 150 hours of community service.

[2001 Mar 7] Jesus Oquendo (Sil), age 27, of Queens, New York was convicted and sentenced to 27 months in Manhattan federal court on charges of computer hacking and electronic eavesdropping of victim company Five Partners Asset Management LLC (Five Partners), a venture capital company based in Manhattan. Oquendo left the victim a taunting message on its network: "Hello, I have just hacked into your system. Have a nice day."

[2001 May 1] Chinese and U.S. hackers attack each other because of the U.S. spy plane that had to make an emergency landing in China after the U.S. plane collides with and kills Chinese fighter pilot Wang Wei.

[2001 Jul 17] Code Red worm is released. The worm exploits vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Internet Information Server IIS. The worm got its name from Code Red Mountain Dew which was used to stay awake by the computer security researchers that disassembled the exploit.

[2001 Jul 16] 27-year-old Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov arrested at Def Con 9 for creating a program to copy Adobe electronic books. He was charged with violating the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Demitry was later released, as part of the agreement, Sklyarov will testify for the government in the case that remains against ElcomSoft, the company that sells the copying software.

[2001 Sep 18] Nimda worm (admin backwards) starts to spread, infecting Microsoft IIS servers that are open to known software vulnerabilities.

[2001 Oct 23] Apple introduces the iPod portable music player.

[2001 Oct 25] Microsoft releases Windows XP.

[2002 Feb 25] A 17-year-old female hacker, from Belgium, calling herself Gigabyte takes credit for writing the first-ever virus, called Sharpei, written in Microsoft's newest programming language C# (C sharp).

[2002 Jul 30] Copies of OpenSSH are trojaned. OpenSSH is a popular, free version of the Secure Shell (SSH) communications suite and is used as a secure replacement for protocols such as telnet, rlogin, rsh, and ftp. The main OpenBSD (ftp.openbsd.org) mirror was compromised, realized only after developers noticed that the checksum of the package had changed.

[2002 Aug 17] Federal law enforcement authorities searched the computers of a San Diego, California security firm that used the Internet to access government and military computers without authorization over the summer. Investigators from the FBI, the U.S. Army and NASA visited the offices of ForensicTec Solutions Inc. seeking details about how the company gained access to computers at Fort Hood in Texas and at the Energy Department, NASA and other government facilities. The searches began hours after it was reported that ForensicTec consultants used free software to identify vulnerable computers and then downloaded hundreds of confidential files containing military procedures, email, Social Security Numbers and financial data, according to records maintained by the company. While ForensicTec officials said they wanted to help the government and "get some positive exposure for themselves," authorities are pursuing the matter as a criminal case.

[2002 Aug 28] The Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) web site is defaced and copyrighted mp3s are uploaded to the server. The RIAA along with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), has won many critics online in its quest to shut down popular file-trading networks such as Napster.

[2002 Sep] There are an estimated 605 million people on-line.

[2002 Sep 20] Samir Rana (Torner) a 21-year-old London, England hacker is arrested following a year-long investigation into the creation of the Linux rootkit program called Tornkit and on suspicion of being a member of the infamous hacker group Fluffy Bunny. It was later reporter that Rana owned the pink stuffed toy depicted in website defacements by Fluffy Bunny.

[2002 Oct 8] Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) advisory is released detailing the discovery of a back door (trojan horse) found in the source code files of Sendmail 8.12.6.

[2002 Oct 16] Microsoft admits to being hacked. The security breach took place on a server that hosts Microsoft's Windows beta community, which allows more than 20,000 Windows users a chance to test software that is still in development.

[2002 Oct 21] A distributed denial-of-service (Dee-Dos) attack, lasting one hour, sent a barrage of data at the 13 domain name service root servers. The attack was in the form of an ICMP flood, which was blocked by many of the root servers, preventing any real loss of network performance.

[2002 Nov 22] Lisa Chen, a 52-year-old Taiwanese woman who pleaded no contest in one of the largest software piracy cases in the U.S. was sentenced to nine years in prison, one of the longest sentences ever for a case involving software piracy. Chen was arrested along with three associates in November 2001 after local sheriffs seized hundreds of thousands of copies of pirated software worth more than $75 million, software that Chen smuggled from Taiwan.

[2002 Dec 17] A jury acquitted ElcomSoft, a Russian software company, of criminal copyright charges related to selling a program that can crack antipiracy protections on electronic books. The case against ElcomSoft is considered a crucial test of the criminal provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a controversial law designed to extend copyright protections into the digital age.

[2003 Jan 21] Simon Vallor, 22, a British web designer was sentenced to two years in prison for writing one of the world's most destructive viruses which wiped out computers worldwide. Vallor was the author of 3 viruses -- "Gokar," "Redesi," and "Admirer" -- "Gokar" spread the most widely and was at one point ranked as the third most prevalent virus of all time.

[2003 Feb 7] Two hackers who broke into Riverside County, California court computers and electronically dismissed a variety of pending cases plead guilty to the crime. Both William Grace, 22, and Brandon Wilson, 28, were sentenced to nine years in jail after pleading guilty to 72 counts of illegally entering a computer system and editing data, along with seven counts of conspiracy to commit extortion

[2003 Apr 10] Sony sells the first Blu-Ray DVD (Blue-Laser DVD) recorder, which has a storage capacity of nearly 23 gigabytes of data. This level of storage density is achieved through the use of blue lasers, which have a narrower wavelength of light compared to conventional red laser DVDs, which top out at 4.7 gigabytes per layer per side.

[2003 Apr 24] Microsoft releases Windows Server 2003 (AKA Windows NT 5.2 and for a time called "Windows.NET server").

[2003 Apr 29] New Scotland Yard arrest 24-year-old Lynn Htun at a London, England convention center, the site of InfoSecurity Europe 2003. Law enforcement and Internet security professionals said they believe Htun is the mastermind of the Fluffi Bunni hacking exploits, hacking into sites ranging from those of McDonalds Corp to Internet security specialists SANS Institute, Symantec Corp and SecurityFocus.

[2003 Jul 16] DragonFly BSD project is announced. DragonFly BSD is a fork from FreeBSD 4.8

[2003 Sep 8] The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sues 261 individuals for allegedly distributing copyright music files over peer-to-peer networks.

[2003 Nov 6] Microsoft creates a $5-million (U.S.) fund to track down malicious hackers that target the software giant's popular Windows operating systems. The fund includes a $500,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest of the two hackers who unleashed the Blaster and Sobig viruses that attacked millions of computers.

[2003 Dec 18] Linux kernel 2.6 is released.

[2003 Dec 24] WBG Links (this site) gets Slashdotted.

[2003 Dec 31] The CEO of VoteHere, a developer of secure electronic voting technology confirmed that a hacker broke into its corporate network in October and accessed internal documents.

[2004 Mar 24] GNOME server is compromised, delaying the release of GNOME 2.6.

[2004 Apr 30] Sasser worm starts to spread. Internet traffic suggested that the worm and its variants have compromised about 500,000 computers in three days, but estimates range from 200,000 to 1 million systems. Two weeks later 18-year-old Sven Jaschan is arrested in northern Germany, in connection with writing and distributing the Sasser worm. He later confessed to police that he was both the author of Sasser and the original author of the NetSky worm.

[2004 May 25] Microsoft admitted that a portion of their UK website was compromised by hackers and defaced.

[2004 Nov 4] IBM's Blue Gene/L became the top contender to the supercomputing throne, the machine can perform 70.7 trillion calculations per second (70.7 teraflops).

[2004 Nov 5] Internet speed record broken. Researchers successfully sent data using a 10Gigabit Ethernet link between the University of Tokyo and the CERN research center in Geneva, Switzerland. The T110 delivered sustained 7.57 Gbps throughput running standard 1500-byte Ethernet packets over a single TCP connection across an 11,490 mile (18,500 km) link using a uni-processor AMD Opteron system on each end of the connection. That's enough speed to transfer a full-length DVD anywhere in the world in less than five seconds.

[2004 Nov 6] There are over 44 million gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains: .com .edu .mil .net .org .gov) registered.

[2004 Nov 8] Pioneer announce they have developed a technique which will allow optical drives to store 500GB of data, using ultraviolet lasers, which emit shorter wavelength rays than blue lasers.

[2004 Nov 9] Firefox 1.0 web browser is released. Blake Ross created Firefox and Ben Goodger is the development lead.

[2004 Nov 28] SCO website is defaced twice within a few hours by a hacker named 'realloc()' who left a sarcastic message to SCO, concerning the SCO lawsuit against IBM. [1st defacement] [2nd defacement]

[2004 Nov 30] Optical network speed record broken. At a sustained rate of 101 gigabits--the equivalent of three DVD movies--per second between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, the so-called High Energy Physics team shattered a record for data transfer.