مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

In 1903 at the Royal Institution in London, physicist John Ambrose Fleming was preparing the setup of a primitive projection device intended to display Morse code messages from his colleague Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless telegraphy. Supposedly, this method of transmitting information was secure. Yet before the demonstration had even started, the audience was surprised, baffled, and amused to hear a series of messages being tapped out. The first messages were simply the word ‘‘rats’’ being tapped, but what followed was more complex and insulting to Marconi. A limerick began, ‘‘There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily. . . ’’ The damage had been done; wireless telegraphy was clearly nowhere near as secure as Marconi had claimed. A few days later, the magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne claimed responsibility for this first recorded instance of the hacking of an information system (IS) (Marks, 2011).

Whether for mischief or for malice, no system has ever been completely immune from hacking or compromise since Maskelyne’s trick. In the 1960s, John Draper (aka Captain Crunch) used a toy whistle from a Cap’n Crunch cereal box to trick AT&T’s telephone system into allowing him to place free long distance calls. In 1965, the Compatible Time-Sharing System on IBM’s 7094 machine was hacked for the first time.

Mainframe systems were targeted from then on, and the first PC virus, Brain, was accidentally created by Pakistani programmers Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi in 1986. Keeping systems, networks, and individual devices secure became a critical part of the IS professional’s role. These cybersecurity issues have escalated at an exponential rate as massive data breaches at firms such as Target and Sony grabbed headlines, identity theft became a nightmare for thousands of individuals, and the security of smartphones also came under threat. Even technologies traditionally regarded as ‘not IT’ showed their vulnerability: distraught parents found their baby monitoring devices were exposed, and hackers brought a Jeep Cherokee to a standstill on a highway by remotely compromising its control systems. Now the most personal information technologies of all are under threat; we have entered the age of the wearable computer