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It was in the 1960s when organisations first started to become more protective of computers and personal information stored on them. During this time there was no internet or network to worry about, so security was more physical. Fernando Corbato was the inventor of passwords to protect user accounts and information. As supported by  (Computer password inventor dies aged 93, no date) he introduced this basic security method whilst developing methods to allow multiple people to use a computer at the same time.

Computer password inventor dies aged 93 (no date) BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48988091 (Accessed: 3 October 2020).

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When a computer virus can self-replicate over a network, it is called a worm, the first computer worm in the world was created by the BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman) engineer Robert H Thomas. BBN is a high-tech company based in Cambridge. This worm wasn't a real virus, not just due to the fact the notion "computer virus" didn't exist in 1970s, but also it was an experimental self-replicating program, never intended to cause any damage, but instead to demonstrate a mobile app. This worm was written in PDP-10 assembly (“The Digital Equipment Corporaton PDP-10,” n.d.) ran on Tenex operating system (The OS which saw the first email programs). This worm would start to print a file, stop, find another system, open a connection, drag itself over to another machine, and then start running on the new machine. It'd cause the machines to display the message "I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN".

(The First Computer Virus of Bob Thomas (Complete History) n.d.)

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The very first Denial of Service attack, this worm virus was developed by a man named Robert Tappan Morris, a grad student who understood how quickly a worm could spread. This worm was found to have infected at least 10 percent of the internet, the worm caused major damage and widespread outages. The worm was initially designed to evaluate and understand the size of the internet and wasn't created to cause any damage. It worked by exploiting any known vulnerabilities in Unix Sendmail (“How do I use Sendmail?” n.d.), finger, and rsh/rexec, as well as weak passwords. The reason for it becoming more damaging was due to the unintended outgrowth of the code which resulted in it being more damaging, meaning a machine could become infected any number of times with every infection decreasing the machines performance speed until it got to a state of being unusable. The worm would decide whether to attack a new machine by studying whether or not there was a copy of the worm running previously, but administrators could just run a process that would answer "yes" when asked if there was a previous copy, hence meaning the worm would stay away. Morris allowed the worm to copy itself, even if the answer was "yes", this duplication allowed the worm to spread quickly, affecting machines numerous times. Around 6,000 major UNIX machines were infected and when the network was surveyed it was found that two thousand computers were infected in fifteen ours, removing the virus took a couple days with the estimated damage around 100 thousand to 10 million dollars.

(‘What Is the Morris Worm? | How Do They Infect PC and Devices?’ 2018)

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The CMA (Computer Misuse Act) is a piece of legalisation that punishes any acts of accessing or modifying any data stored on computer systems without appropriate consent or permission. There are three different levels of penalisation if you are prosecuted under the CMA, these are applied based on the crime and severity of said crime. The lowest form of penalisation is applied if you're found guilty of accessing a computer without permission, this penalisation is up to two years in prison and a £5,000 fine. Gaining access to a computer without correct permissions so you can steal data or take part in another crime, like committing fraud will get you a sentence of up to 10 years in prison with a fine of unlimited amounts. Modifying content of a computer system or distributing malware with the intent to destroy or damage the contents of a computer can get you a sentence of up to ten years with also an unlimited fine. This act has been reshaped over the past 20 years to respond to the variety of threats and avenues in which you can harm. The ownership of any hacking tools or exploit kits can be considered illegal under the act, even if they're used by legitimate white hat hackers.

(What Is the Computer Misuse Act? n.d.)

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Anti virus products saw a sharp increase of use, these products were used to scan computers for the presence of malicious software such as viruses and worms. during this period malware was slowly increasing in size and becoming more popular as a choice for malicious users. Therefore IT security professionals found a new technique in identifying malware families to see how they were related. As supported by (Mutune, 2019)  "Only a few thousands of malware samples existed in the 1990s, the number had grown to at least 5 million by the year 2007.

Mutune, G. (2019) ‘The Quick and Dirty History of Cybersecurity’, Cyber Experts, 21 July. Available at: https://cyberexperts.com/history-of-cybersecurity/ (Accessed: 2 October 2020).

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Secure Socket Layers (SSL) came around in 1995, the SSL internet protocol enabled users to access the web securely. Netscape developed SSL shortly after the release of the first internet browser. This became the core for developing languages such as HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).

(What Is SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)? | DigiCert.Com n.d.)

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Late March 1999, David Lee Smith, a named programmer hijacked an AOL account, this account was used to post a file on an internet newsgroup named "alt.sex." These posts promised plenty of free passwords to web sites containing adult content, once users had downloaded this file with the "free passwords" a virus would be unleashed on their system. Later that year it began spreading faster, it used a macro to hijack Microsoft Outlook email's, sending messages to the first 50 addresses, these messages tempted the recipients to open attachments loaded with viruses by giving them names which would entice the recipients, this was done via the help of social engineering. This virus didn’t intent to steal any money or info, its wreaked havoc without it. Email servers at more than 300 corporations became overloaded, and some had to shut down, including at Microsoft. Around one million email accounts were disrupted, with internet traffic in different locations slowed drastically. The damage was enormous with an estimated $80 million for cleaning up and repairing affected systems. Smith was arrested and sentenced to 20 months in federal prison with a fine of $5000.

(The Melissa Virus n.d.)

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Very soon after the issue was settled for the Melissa virus, the ILOVEYOU virus was released. It attacked millions of Windows PC's starting on the 5th of May, this virus was a worm virus. It was triggered as an email message with the subject of the message being "ILOVEYOU" including a txt.vbs attachment called a "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU". The .vbs extension was often mistook for a normal text file, however it is a VBScript program (Thomas 2019) which hackers tend to utilise to create a worm. There were a reported 50 million cases infections reported, with the cost of damages hitting around 7 Billion dollars, with it being reported to ultimately hit around 10 billion dollars. Six days on from the ILOVEYOU virus, variants of the virus were circulating around and popping up in different languages. The Pentagon, CIA and UK parliament had to close their email services.

(What Is ILOVEYOU Virus? | How to Prevent ILOVEYOU Virus Download? n.d.)

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As supported by (Mutune, 2019) "One of the most memorable attacks during this period includes the first reported case of serial data breaches targeting credit cards." These attacks were most popular between 2005 -2007 when Albert Gonzales created a cybercriminal ring for compromising credit card systems. It is reported that the group executed attacks that succesfully stole confidential information from at least 45.7 million cards. These cards supposedly belonged to regular customers of TJX retailers, or as known in the UK TK MAXX. The total loss amounted to £256 million and gonzales once caught was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment. Many organizations saw this as warning to protect themselves with better cybersecurity programs.

Mutune, G. (2019) ‘The Quick and Dirty History of Cybersecurity’, Cyber Experts, 21 July. Available at: https://cyberexperts.com/history-of-cybersecurity/ (Accessed: 2 October 2020).

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George Bush created the department of homeland security which took all responsibilities for IT infrastructures and after some time a cyber security division was created to deal with all cyber threats and system insecurities.

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2003 - Present - Hacktivists - Anonymous Group

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2003 - Present - Hacktivists - Anonymous Group

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Anonymous is a group composed of an international network of hacktivists (A group of criminals who work together to carry out cyber-attacks to support political causes). This group originally formed from a website known as 4chan, the name of the group was originally inspired by the anonymity which users on 4chan can post. The two symbols of the group are a Guy Fawkes mask and the "man without the head" image. Anonymous' first attempt to make the headlines was in 2008 with a project called "Project Chanology." When the Church of Scientology removed a video of Tom Cruise speaking of the religion from the internet for portraying the church in a negative way, Anonymous decided the best move was to post a video on YouTube tagged "Message to Scientology." The groups motive was to uncover how dangerous organisations like this were, as well as how the removal of Tom Cruise video violated free speech. Anonymous managed to establish plenty of power and firmness in their first endeavour. The group Anonymous has been involved in many more similar situations since then and have developed quite a good reputation, which has earnt them praise for their work, their mission to combat cyber jihadists. A well-known newspaper in the UK wrote that the group are "the digilantes " (a digilante is someone who seeks and deals justice without legal authority) due to their retaliation against the terrorist attacks on French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Anonymous' most well-known attack was in 2011 where they attacked the Sony PlayStation and the PlayStation Network websites. Anonymous were unhappy with the lawsuit between Sony and George Hotz as they saw it as an attack on free speech and that Sony was abusing customer rights through their legal attacks on PS3 jailbreakers. Both Sony.com and Playstation.com were down for several hours in the U.S. and Europe whilst the group released a threatening video on YouTube instructing the company why it was targeted. Around 77 million PlayStation users had their personal data stolen, however Anonymous denied the attack and blamed Sony's incompetence, insisting they had been framed by online thieves, after this attack Sony incorporated an identity protection programme, which included a $1m identity theft insurance policy for every user.

(How Did Anonymous Start? The History Of The Mysterious ‘Hacktivist’ Group Began Quite Some Time Ago n.d.)

(‘Hacker Group Anonymous Denies Sony Attack’ 2011)

(Berton and Pawlak 2015)

(Charlie Hebdo Attack: Three Days of Terror - BBC News n.d.)

(An Incomplete List of Every Person, Place, and Institution Upon Which Anonymous Has ‘Declared War’ 2016)

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Wikileaks was a site created in 2006 by an Australian programmer and activist Julian Assange, the website functioned as a clearing for classified information. They received their first lot of sensitive documents from an encryption network which allows users to transmit data anonymously, the WikiLeaks volunteer mined the data from this encrypted network and eventually collected more than a million documents, providing the site with its first article, this being a message from a Somali rebel leader whom encouraged the use of hired gunman to assassinate government officials, this was posted in December 2006. In 2007 the site was shut down due to legal action in the US for posting the standard operating procedures for the U.S, military's detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In 2009 the site made news again with the release of a load of internal e-mails from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit. 2010 was where WikiLeaks posted a bunch of documents, around half a million in total, these relating to U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Barack Obama (President at the time) put the leaks down as a threat to the United States national security. Wikileaks made public an edited video which was filmed in 2007 from a gun camera of a U.S attack helicopter, which showed the killings of a dozen people. That same year the website was dealt many setbacks, which forced it off-line again, WikiLeaks again was only available on mirror sites or by directly going to the IP address. Assange was arrested by the British police force on count of an outstanding Swedish warrant for alleged sex crimes. The organisation faced a bigger hit later when PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard all suspended online payments as donations to WikiLeaks. 2013 saw Assange launch the WikiLeaks Party as well as announcing his candidacy for a seat in the Australian Senate. This was an attempt to promote a platform of "transparency, accountability and justice" the party managed to get a total of seven candidates. An interparty feud broke the number of candidates to only six, WikiLeaks Party only won less than 1 percent of the national vote. Assange stated his party would continue. November 2014 saw Sony Pictures Entertainment become target of a huge data breach; a group named Guardians of Peace eventually began with the releasing of sensitive company information. That following April, WikiLeaks published over 200,000 of its stolen documents in a database. The most notable moment for WikiLeaks was in March 2016 where an archive of around 30,000 email messages and attachments were unveiled, they were all retrieved from a private server held by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state. In July, WikiLeaks released and published more over 60,000 DNC (Democratic National Committee) e-mail messages and documents. It was revealed that top DNC officials preferred Clinton over rival, Bernie Sanders. Probe by U.S intelligence services and FBI later concluded that people with ties to the Russian government had infiltrated the DNC in a way to obtain information that would pad support for Republican candidate Donald trump. On October, a video recording came up which was quite damaging to Trump where he boasted that his fame allowed him to grope women without consequence. An hour later, WikiLeaks published a group of e-mail messages from Clintons campaign chair John Podesta's personal account. It was determined that the account had been obtained via a spear-phishing (e-mails sent to select employees in an org, such as company or government agency, that's the target, clicking on these links let hostile programs enter the org computers) attack performed by Russian hackers. Wikileaks supporters began to criticize the org for its lack of co-ordination.

(WikiLeaks | Founding, History, & Controversies n.d.)

(Phishing | Computing n.d.)

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As supported by (‘2011 PlayStation Network outage’, 2020) At the time of the outage, with a count of 77 million registered PlayStation Network accounts, it was one of the largest data security breaches in history. It surpassed the 2007 TJX hack which affected 45 million customers. This attack occured between April 17 and April 19, 2011 and forced Sony to turn off the network on April 20th. The outage lasted 23 days with sony reporting that personal information from all 77 million accounts had been exposed. As a result sony released an update (firmware version 3.61) on may 14th this was a patch that focused on security. This also required users to change their accounts password upon signing in.

‘2011 PlayStation Network outage’ (2020) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2011_PlayStation_Network_outage&oldid=978362330 (Accessed: 3 October 2020).

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In may of 2014, global auction site Ebay reported that a malicious attack exposed its entire account list of 145 million users. This information included names, addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords, As supported by (Swinhoe, 2020). It was reported that the hackers used three corporate employees to access its network and that they had complete access for 229 days. Luckily no financial information was compromised, so as a result of this attack Ebay only had to ask its customers to change their passwords.

Swinhoe, D. (2020) The 15 biggest data breaches of the 21st century, CSO Online. Available at: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html (Accessed: 3 October 2020).

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June 2010 came with the discovery of Stuxnet, it was a 500KB computer worm infecting the software of 14 industrial sites in Iran, including but not limited to a uranium-enrichment plant. Even though computer viruses rely on an oblivious victim installing them, worms spread on their own, often via a computer network. The worm was a malicious piece of code which attacked in 3 different phases. Firstly, it would target a Microsoft Windows machine and network, consistently replicating itself. Then it hunted for Siemens Step7 software which is Windows-based software used to program industrial control systems. It would finally compromise the logic controllers. This would allow the author to spy on industrial systems and cause equipment to destroy themselves, this would go unrecognised to the human operators. Stuxnet would be allowed to spread between computers that are running Windows, not just those that are connected to the Internet, merely putting a USB drive into an infected machine would infect the USB, then once this USB had been placed into a non-infected machine it would infect it. The authors of Stuxnet haven't been identified, but the size and sophistication of the worm allowed experts to believe it could have been created with help from a nation-state, leaks revealed that it was potentially the US and Israel who were responsible.

(GMT n.d.)

(STEP 7 (PLC Classic Software) n.d.)

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This attack was a group of counter-espionage cyber-attacks carried out by Chinese government against several companies, those including Google, Microsoft and Adobe. These attacks were first identified by Google, the attacks were named "Operation Aurora" by Dmitri Alperovitch Vice President of Threat Research at McAfee, a cyber security company. These cyber-attacks were intended for counterintelligence, the attackers were attempting to infiltrate the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates. A few years later Dave Aucsmith, who was a senior director of Microsoft's Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments, advised that the attackers were inquiring whether the US government had uncovered the identities of secret Chinese agents whom were operating in the US. Some suggested the attack was a part of a well thought campaign executed by "government operatives, public security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government." The attackers wanted to obtain control of computer systems, but for complete control they wanted "elevated access" to the system. These attackers capitalized on a newly discovered software vulnerability in the Internet Explorer using a malware to obtain this elevated access. Using multiple layers of encryption on network traffic to carry the hack out. Many governments including Germany, France and Australia advised citizens to move from versions of Internet Explorer to any other browser, days later Microsoft announced that it had fixed this vulnerability , this exploit was later released into the public and into a penetration testing tool.

(Yedakula n.d.)

(What Is Penetration Testing? 11 Hacking Tools the Pros Use | CSO Online n.d.)

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In April 2015 the agency that managed the government’s civilian workforce, identified that it's personnel files were hacked. Throughout the sensitive data there were millions of SF-86 forms, containing very personal information that's been gathered in numerous background checks for those seeking security clearances, as well as records of millions of fingerprints. This OPM breach soon led to an investigation and resignation of the highest OPM executives. The OPM breach was bigger and more dangerous than first thought. In the end the hack stole 21.5 million records for US government workers, these hacks signalled the rise of China as a threat on a global stage, before this, Chinese hackers were seen as unskilled.

(US Office of Personnel Management 2016)

(Fruhlinger 2020)

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These three ransomware outbreaks were developed by government-backed hackers, however for different reasons. WannaCry was created by North Korean hackers wanting to infect companies and extort ransom payments in order to raise funds. This ransomware was a type of crypto-ransomware, WannaCry takes data hostage, only returning it if the ransom set is paid. This ransomware targets computers that are operating Windows as an OS, encrypting data and expecting a payment of a ransom in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin (How Does Bitcoin Work? - Bitcoin n.d.). The damage could have been avoided if only people were not using outdated computer systems and instead educated themselves around the need to update software. Microsoft released a security patch which defended the user’s systems from the exploit two months prior to the ransomware attack starting. Due to lack of updates from certain individuals they were left exposed to this attack. The attackers insisted on $300 worth of Bitcoin however later increased that ransom to $600. Victims who refused to pay the ransom within three days were informed their files would be permanently deleted. The coding used in the attack was poor and when victims would pay the ransom, they would not get access to their files again, purely based on the fact the attackers had no way of associating a certain computer to certain victim. WannaCry hit around 230,000 computers around the world, first company affected was the Spanish mobile company, Telefónica, thousands of NHS hospitals and surgeries across the UK were affected. A third of NHS trusts were affected. One of the worst parts was ambulances were rerouted, leaving those in need of care.  The estimated cost to the NHS was £92 million after 19,000 appointments were cancelled due to this attack. As it spread further than Europe, computer systems in 150 countries were left down and out of operation. WannaCry had an estimated $4billion in losses across the globe.

(What Is WannaCry Ransomware? 2019)

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It has been reported that a group hackers attempted to break into the World Health Organisation very recently. The report stated that the identity and motive of this group of hackers was unclear. However They believe this attack to be targeted due to the recent outbreak of coronavirus and any information regarding Coronavirus during this tough time would be very valuable to th e public.

Bing, R. S., Jack Stubbs, Christopher (no date) Exclusive: Elite hackers target WHO as coronavirus cyberattacks spike, U.S. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-hack-exclusive-idUSKBN21A3BN (Accessed: 3 October 2020).