Hacking events from 1903 to 2023 by

1903

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:07:39 UTC

Magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne distrupts John Amdrose Fleming's public demonstration Guglielmo Marconi's supposedly safe and secure wireless telegraphy technology.

He then proceeded to send insults in morse code.

1932

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:09:32 UTC

The enigma machine of the Germans is broken down, and the punch card encryption is cracked by 2 polish scientists, Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski

1939

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:12:26 UTC

A machine based on 1932 discovery and crack of the enigma machine code and subsequent creation of the Bomba machine, which was designed to crack enigma codes, is made this time being able to crack the codes even faster and takes advantage of the small keyspace of the the enigma machine, which made it vulnerable to brute force attacks

1949

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:16:35 UTC

Von Neumann was a pioneer of computer fundamentals and what allowed computers to exist the way they do today, in his "Theory and organization of complicated automata", he outlined the structure that will most efficiently allow computers to function, while also speculating that computer programs could reproduce themselves if built to do so. And therefore the first idea of a virus was born

1955

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:18:29 UTC

At MIT the word "hack" was first born, it waqs stated by some students that "Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.", and it was then decided that anyone messing with electronics is hacking with them.

1957

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:22:04 UTC

A blind seven year old with perfect pitch, discovered that a whistled fourth E above middle C would interfere with AT&T automated phone systems, and allow calls to be made free, this being the moment phreacking was opened.

1963

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:24:45 UTC

First ever reference to malicious hacking is made in MIT's student newspaper, where telephone hacking allowed massive phone bills for those who never made the calls and war dialling

1967

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:30:43 UTC

The first known penetration hack, took place when IBM granted a high school with dial up access terminals, the students being fascinated by this, learned the language and the base uses, but curiosity drove them to the wider scope of the network resulting in a few penetrations of the system which in turn made IBM upgrade their security, and show their gratitude in the documentation some of their system releases by saying ("we also thank") "a number of high school students for their compulsion to bomb the system".

1980

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:40:30 UTC

The FBI investigates a branch of security at NCSS, this being covered by the NY times and saying "technical experts, skilled, often young, computer programmers who almost whimsically probe the defenses of a computer system, searching out the limits and the possibilities of the machine. Despite their seemingly subversive role, hackers are a recognized asset in the computer industry, often highly prized." the newspapaer also first introduced white hat hackers, as doing evil with good outcomes, an example was a NCSS employee having made a password cracker and getting reprimanded for not reporting on the breach.

1987

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:45:29 UTC

The christmas tree EXEC "worm" causes major disruption to the VNET, BITNET and EARN networks.

1993

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:46:58 UTC

The first DEF CON hacking conference takes place in Las Vegas. The conference is meant to be a one-time party to say good-bye to BBSs (now replaced by the Web), but the gathering was so popular it became an annual event.
AOL gives its users access to Usenet, precipitating Eternal September.

2002

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:47:23 UTC

January: Bill Gates decrees that Microsoft will secure its products and services, and kicks off a massive internal training and quality control campaign.
March: Gary McKinnon is arrested following unauthorized access to US military and NASA computers.
May: Klez.H, a variant of the worm discovered in November 2001, becomes the biggest malware outbreak in terms of machines infected, but causes little monetary damage.
June: The Bush administration files a bill to create the Department of Homeland Security, which, among other things, will be responsible for protecting the nation's critical IT infrastructure.
August: Researcher Chris Paget publishes a paper describing "shatter attacks", detailing how Windows' unauthenticated messaging system can be used to take over a machine. The paper raises questions about how securable Windows could ever be. It is however largely derided as irrelevant as the vulnerabilities it described are caused by vulnerable applications (placing windows on the desktop with inappropriate privileges) rather than an inherent flaw within the Operating System.
October: The International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium—(ISC)²—confers its 10,000th CISSP certification.

2008

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:47:48 UTC

January 17: Project Chanology; Anonymous attacks Scientology website servers around the world. Private documents are stolen from Scientology computers and distributed over the Internet.
March 7: Around 20 Chinese hackers claim to have gained access to the world's most sensitive sites, including the Pentagon. They operated from an apartment on a Chinese Island.^[65]
March 14: Trend Micro website successfully hacked by Turkish hacker Janizary (aka Utku).

2012

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:48:11 UTC

A hacker published over 400,000 credit cards online, and threatened Israel to release 1 million credit cards in the future. In response to that incident, an Israeli hacker published over 200 Albanian' credit cards online.

2022

30204126 — 2024-09-03 14:48:42 UTC

February: The German Chaos Computer Club has reported more than fifty data leaks. Government institutions and companies from various business sectors were affected. In total, the researchers had access to over 6.4 million personal data records as well as terabytes of log data and source code.