The First Hacks
Play the 2,600 Hz tone that opened the American telephone network. Release the Morris worm and watch a tenth of the internet fall. Five true origin stories, two of which you operate yourself.
Every rule you follow
is a scar.
Five true stories about the people whose curiosity, mistakes and bad luck built an entire profession — one incident at a time. Two of them you can operate yourself.
A toy whistle from a cereal box produced one tone — and that tone could give the largest machine ever built its orders.
2,600 HzPlays a steady 2,600 Hz tone. Turn your volume down first.
The exact frequency AT&T used to signal ‘this line is free’.
In 1971 the American telephone network used a 2,600 Hz tone on the same channel as the conversation to signal that a line was free. Reproduce the tone and the switch believed you had hung up while the line stayed open.
An astronomer refused to round off an accounting glitch. The trail ran to the KGB.
A 75-cent discrepancy in machine-time billing at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory led to an unauthorised account, and from there through Tymnet and Datex-P to Hannover — and an intruder selling what he found to the KGB.
A graduate student wanted to count the internet. One line of code turned the census into a siege.
0 / 60,000hosts on the internet · 1988
Watch a tenth of the internet fall in real time.
The Morris worm reached roughly 6,000 of the approximately 60,000 hosts then connected — about a tenth of the internet. Nothing was stolen; the damage was pure load.
Stuxnet crossed an air gap on a USB stick and spun uranium centrifuges to destruction — while the operators' screens read ‘normal’.
The first weapon written entirely in software.
Stuxnet crossed an air gap and destroyed physical centrifuges while reporting normal operation to the control room. It marked the beginning of operational technology security as a discipline.
WannaCry tore through unpatched systems worldwide. The flaw was known. The patch already existed.
Ooops, your files have been encrypted!
0
computers, 150+ countries
0
NHS appointments disrupted
Somewhere in that outage was a person whose care was delayed. That is the ‘somebody’ in somebody was hurt first.
WannaCry reached roughly 200,000 computers across more than 150 countries and disrupted around 19,000 NHS appointments. A patch had been available for weeks.
Every control is a scar.
Learn the wound, and the rule makes sense.
The whistle. The seventy-five cents. The experiment. The centrifuge.
The ward.
Somebody was hurt first — so that you would not have to be.
Every control you follow at work exists because somebody was hurt first. In-band signalling was replaced because of the whistle. Accounting reconciliation became a security control because of seventy-five cents. Rate limiting, patch management and network segmentation each have a name and a date behind them.
Learn the wound, and the rule makes sense.
The books behind it.
Four volumes of incident history. Two more this year.
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