1 Hacker originally meant “one who makes
furniture with an ax.” Perhaps because of the blunt
nature of that approach, the word came to mean
someone who takes pleasure in an unconventional
solution to a technical obstacle.
2 Computer hacking was born in the late 1950s,
when members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club,
obsessed with electric switching, began preparing
punch cards to control an IBM 704 mainframe .
3 One of the club’s early programs: code that
illuminated lights on the mainframe’s console,
making it look like a ball was zipping from left to
right, then right to left with the flip of a switch.
Voilà: computer Ping-Pong!
4 By the early 1970s, hacker “Cap’n
Crunch” (a.k.a. John Draper) had used a toy whistle
to match the 2,600-hertz tone used by AT&T’s long-
distance switching system. This gave him access to
call routing (and brief access to jail).
5 Before they struck it rich, Apple founders Steve
Wozniak and Steve Jobs made and sold “blue boxes,”
electronic versions of Draper’s whistle.
6 Using a blue box, Wozniak crank-called the
Pope’s residence in Vatican City and pretended to be
Henry Kissinger.
7 Hacking went Hollywood in the 1983 movie
WarGames, about a whiz kid who breaks into a
Defense Department computer and, at one point, hi
jacks a pay phone by hot-wiring it with a soda can
pull-ring.
8 That same year, six Milwaukee teens hacked into
Los Alamos National Lab , which develops nuclear
weapons.
9 In 1988 Robert T. Morris created a worm, or self-
replicating program, purportedly to evaluate
Internet security.
10 The worm reproduced too well, however. The
multimillion-dollar havoc that ensued led to
Morris’s felony conviction, one of the first under
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (PDF).
11 They all come home eventually. Morris now
researches computer science at...MIT.
12 British hacker Gary McKinnon broke into 97
U.S. Navy, Army, Pentagon, and NASA computers in
2001 and 2002.
13 McKinnon’s defense: He wasn’t hunting military
secrets; he was only seeking suppressed government
files about space aliens.
14 According to rumor, agents of China’s People’s
Liberation Army attempted to hack the U.S. power
grid, triggering the great North American blackout of
2003.
15 It took IBM researcher Scott Lunsford just one
day to penetrate the network of a nuclear power
station: “I thought, ‘Gosh, this is a big problem.’”
16 Unclear on the concept: When West Point holds
its annual cyberwar games , the troops wear full
fatigues while fighting an enemy online.
17 Think your Mac is hackproof? At this year’s
CanSecWest conference , security researcher Charlie
Miller used a flaw in Safari to break into a MacBook
in under 10 seconds.
18 Cyborgs beware: Tadayoshi Kohno at the
University of Washington recently hacked into a
wireless defibrillator, causing it to deliver fatal-
strength jolts of electricity.
19 This does not bode well for patients receiving
wireless deep-brain stimulators.
20 The greatest kludge of all? Roger Angel of the
University of Arizona has proposed building a giant
sunscreen in space to hack the planet’s climate.
