Who is popular today?

A fascinating history of cybercrime, from teenage pioneers to international bot armiesOne of the most important figures in the history of cybersecurity is Matthew Broderick. In the 1983 movie WarGames he played David Lightman, a high-school computer whiz who hacks into the Norad defence system by mistake and almost sets off a thermonuclear war. The movie started a national conversation about the vulnerability of computers. President Reagan asked his security advisers: “Could something like this really happen?” Members of Congress screened clips in subcommittee hearings, leading to the first federal legislation on cybercrime. Before he was Ferris Bueller, Broderick was the fresh face of hacking.Five years later, a Cornell graduate student named Robert Morris Jr designed a self-replicating “worm” to explore the network that connected the country’s computers, but made a crucial coding error. The worm grew too fast; the network crashed. The first person a horrified Morris alerted was his father, who happened to be one of the US government’s leading experts on data security. Media reports about this real-life David Lightman and his “Morris worm” introduced Americans to an unfamiliar word: the internet. Continue reading...