Today In Infosec

2007: The xkcd comic "Exploits of a Mom" was published. You might know it as the "Little Bobby Tables" comic. Ah, Mrs. Roberts - we admire your SQLi long game! xkcd.com/327/

2005: The Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) was launched by TippingPoint.

2004: The Mydoom-O worm flooded search engines with automated searches, preventing millions of people from performing Google searches for 3 hours. The horror! Forced to switch to AOL, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Excite, MSN, and Lycos for up to 3 hours!

1939: Polish mathematicians led by Marian Rejewski fully cracked the Enigma machine and created decoder machines they called "Enigma doubles". The Polish Cypher Bureau modified the commercial Enigma rotors, reflector, and internal wiring to match the military Enigma's.

1933: William F. Friedman filed a patent for a "cryptographic system". The patent (U.S. Patent 6,097,812) was finally issued 24,479 days later (year 2000) - one of the longest known suppressed patent applications. He died 31 years before it was issued.

2008: Spammer Eddie Davidson (aka "Spam King"), his wife, and daughter were found dead in a murder-suicide, 4 days after he escaped a federal prison camp. A teenager was also shot in the neck and an infant was found unharmed.

1985: Chase Manhattan Bank discovered a message in one of its computer systems from Lord Flathead. It said that unless he was given free use of the computer, he would destroy records in the system. Who was Lord Flathead? He was Tom Anderson, who founded Myspace 18 years later!

1989: Known as the Atlanta Three case, 3 members of Legion of Doom were charged with hacking into BellSouth’s Telephone networks – possessing proprietary software and info, unauthorized intrusion, illegal possession of phone credit card #s with intent to defraud, and conspiracy.

2012: 21-year-old Trevor Harwell of Fullerton, California was sentenced to a year in jail after installing spyware on victims' laptops to record videos of nude women. His tactics caused women to take their laptops into their bathrooms while they showered.

1984: The college comedy movie "Revenge of the Nerds" was released. With a budget of $8 million, it grossed $40 million at the box office in the US. There are some aspects of the movie that are cringeworthy by 2024 standards, but the movie has nerds, technology, and computers.

2004: Researchers at Sophos reported the first ever virus to infect the Microsoft Pocket PC operating system. The Duts virus (W32/Duts-A) required users to click a button in a dialog box before it would add code to executable files on their device.

2007: The Spanish-language computer virus hoax "Antichrist" (aka "Anticristo") was first detected by Symantec.

2017: When 1 bitcoin was valued at roughly $2,100, John McAfee stated that 1 bitcoin would be worth $500,000 within 3 years. He was so confident, he boasted that he'd...uh...eat...[just look at the image]. Its high over that 3 year period was December 16, 2017 - $19,716.

2001: The Sircam worm was discovered. It affected Windows computers and primarily spread via email, sending randomly chosen documents from the host computer (after infecting them) to email addresses in the host's address book.

1999: DilDog of Cult of the Dead Cow confirmed official Back Orifice 2000 CD-ROMs distributed during DEF CON four days prior were infected with the destructive CIH virus. Initially cDc blamed pirated copies as the source, later discovering a duplicating machine had been infected.

1991: The United Kingdom's Court of Appeal used a 126-year-old precedent concerning a steam engine to uphold a conviction against a 21-year-old computer hacker. You have to admire the argument made by the defendant and his lawyer (see screenshot).

2010: Brian Krebs' blog post on Stuxnet was the first coverage to get wide attention, after discovery and disclosure by AV firm VirusBlokAda.

1998: Ethereal was first released publicly as version 0.2.0. Its creator, Gerald Combs, thought it was cool that Bob Metcalfe named Ethernet after luminiferous ether so he picked a name beginning with ether. In 2006 the network protocol analyzer was renamed Wireshark.

2001: The first version of the Code Red worm was released. It exploited a trivial-to-exploit buffer overflow vulnerability within the theidq.dll ISAPI extension to IIS. Microsoft had made a patch available a month earlier via MS01-033.

1988: The boot sector virus for the Atari ST, Screen, was discovered by Carsten Frischkorn (aka virentod). Also, the Atari ST was a model of personal computer sold between 1985 and 1993, not a gaming console like the more famous Atari 2600.

1963: While serving as US National Security Advisor to President Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy issued National Security Action Memorandum No. 252, which called for the establishment of the US National Communications System (NCS). The driver for NCS was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.