The Hacker Chronicles - Volume 1: Origins: Ten Cases That Made Cybersecurity Necessary, 1971-1998

Between 1971 and 1998, the networks the modern world was being built on had no defences worth the name. This is the story of ten cases that changed that.

In 1971, a blind eight-year-old in Boston discovered he could whistle into a telephone and place free long-distance calls. In 1986, an astronomer at Berkeley traced a 75-cent accounting discrepancy to a West German intelligence operation. In 1988, a Cornell graduate student released a program that took down ten per cent of the internet by accident. In 1995, a Russian mathematician with no internet connection at home moved ten million dollars out of Citibank. In 1998, the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense told a Senate committee that the most coordinated attack on Pentagon networks ever recorded had been conducted by two teenagers in California.

The Hacker Chronicles is a narrative history of cybercrime, drawn from court records, contemporary press accounts, published memoirs, and the established historical literature. The ten cases that follow — Captain Crunch, the 414s, the Cuckoo's Egg, the Morris Worm, the Citibank heist, Solar Sunrise, and four others — are the cases that made cybersecurity necessary as a discipline.

The series continues in Volume Two: Going Pro (1999-2010), Volume Three: Going Geopolitical (2010-2020), and Volume Four: Going Strategic (2020-2025).