Hack history

As some vulnerabilities get fixed , others pop up requiring attention from product and service providers. The newest one has a name that will not mean anything to most people. But the new 0-day attack is so significant that some people see it as the worst internet hack in history. Malicious individuals are already exploiting the Log4Shell attack, which allows them to get into computer systems and servers without a password.

Security experts have seen Log4Shell in action in Minecraft, the popular game that Microsoft owns. A few lines of text passed around in a chat might be enough to penetrate the defenses of a target computer. The same ease of access would allow hackers to go after any computer out there using the Log4J open-sourced java-based logging utility.

The reports on Log4Shell indicate that the hack is a major threat to many Internet companies. This is because hackers might take advantage of it to execute code inside their systems. Patching the vulnerability is possible, and companies have started deploying fixes. But each separate internet entity will have to handle the matter on its own servers and systems. This means not everyone will deploy fixes simultaneously, risking prolonged exposure to the attacks.

January 3, January 1, December 29, December 27, December 25, Pages Categories. Get this podcast on your phone! In, IBM announced "personal computers. It was stand alone machine, fully loaded with a CPU, software, memory, utilities, storage, etc. You could go anywhere and do anything on these computers.

In , a movie called War Games came out. This was the first movie to show the inner workings of hackers. For audiences nationwide this movie served as a warning. The territory was changing. More people were moving into the online world.

Then the cops shut them down. This rivalry was called "The Great Hacker War". A man who called himself Lex Luthor founded the Legion of Doom. Another contender for the most significant hack is the Office of Personnel Management data breach around This was thought to have been performed by China, in order to acquire the sensitive data used for FS86 forms for the government.

No one knows exactly how much information was accessed, because the government has been kind of cagey about it. But millions of these forms and the data they contained were lost. The reason this is critical is that those forms are what individuals fill out to be hired by the FBI or the Secret Service, and contain very private, potentially damaging information, which foreign agents or any other person could potentially leverage to their benefit. It just destroyed computer systems. It was installed in the backdoor of tax software that was widely used in Ukraine.

Any company or entity that does business in Ukraine would have had to use this software for business purposes, so when the code was executed all those systems that were connecting back to this tax software were affected, and it caused millions of dollars in losses. Lots and lots of equipment had to be replaced. For two weeks, parts of Ukraine had effectively no internet.

It impacted shipping and all sorts of physical infrastructure. Video: Exclusive-U. The answer here invariably depends on your perspective—and probably also your security clearance.

But if pressed, I do have a favorite that I think helps set the course of history as well as represent some of the biggest challenges in cyber conflicts. Not only was the hack possibly one of the most significant attacks on critical infrastructure, but it also was an information warfare attack, a psychological operation. It therefore shows the duality of cyber conflict better than anything else.