From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Internet in its various forms has a long history of turbulent relations, major man-made disruptions (such as wide scale computer virus incidents, DOS and DDOS attacks that cripple services, and organized attacks that cripple major online communities), and other conflicts. This is a list of known and documented Internet, Usenet, virtual community and World Wide Web related conflicts, and of conflicts that touch on both offline and online worlds with possibly wider reaching implications.

Spawned from the original ARPANET, the modern Internet, World Wide Web and services on it such as virtual communties (bulletin boards, forums, and MMOs) have grown exponentionally. Such prolific growth of population, mirroring "offline" society, contributes to the amount of conflicts and problems online growing each year. Today, billions of people in nearly all countries can be found on various Internets. Inevitably, as in "brick and mortar" or offline society, the virtual equivalent of major turning points, conflicts, and disruptions--the online equivalents of the falling of the Berlin Wall, the creation of the United Nations, spread of disease, and events like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait will occur.

Contents 1 Pre WWW era, 1950s-1991 1.1 1960s 1.2 1970s 1.2.1 1976: 1.2.2 1978: 1.3 1980s 1.3.1 1980: 1.3.2 1981: 1.3.3 1982: 1.3.4 1983: 1.3.5 1985: 1.3.6 1986: 1.3.7 1988: 1.3.8 1990: 2 WWW era, 1991 onwards 2.1 1990s 2.1.1 1991: 2.1.2 1994: 2.1.3 1996: 2.1.4 1998: 2.1.5 1999: 2.2 2000s 2.2.1 2000: 2.2.2 2001: 2.2.3 2002: 2.2.4 2003: 2.2.5 2004: 2.2.6 2005: 2.2.7 2006: 2.3 See also 2.3.1 Major aspects and issues 2.3.2 Functions 2.3.3 Underlying infrastructure 2.3.4 Regulatory bodies 2.4 References

[edit] Pre WWW era, 1950s-1991

[edit] 1960s

• The Internet is born as the first ARPANET link was established on October 29, 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at SRI. By December, the entire 4-node network was connected^[1].

[edit] 1970s

[edit] 1976:

• A 21-year old Bill Gates writes 'An Open Letter to Hobbyists', a document in which he condemns Open-source software and software piracy. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?", he wrote, a precursor to the veritable war for market share in the 21st century between his Microsoft and Linux and Unix based computer solutions.

[edit] 1978:

• In May, the first known spam email was sent, to "several hundred" recipients.

[edit] 1980s

[edit] 1980:

• ARPANET grinds to a complete halt on October 27th because of an accidentally-propagated status-message virus.^[2], ^[3]

[edit] 1981:

• Ian Murphy, who calls himself Captain Zap, was the first hacker to be tried and convicted as a felon. Murphy broke into AT&T's computers in 1981 and changed the internal clocks that metered billing rates. People were getting late-night discount rates when they called at midday. [This has been exposed as a hoax.]^[4]

[edit] 1982:

• A program called "Elk Cloner" is credited with being the first computer virus to appear "in the wild" -- that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created. Written in 1982 by Rich Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread by floppy disk.

[edit] 1983:

• Fred Cohen develops the first PC viruses, he later proves that no known detection software can defend against all virus algorithms.

[edit] 1985:

• Kevin Mitnick, a famous former computer criminal, was arrested by the FBI on February 15. Mitnick was convicted of wire fraud and of breaking into the computer systems of Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia, and Sun Microsystems. He served five years in prison. His pursuit and subsequent arrest made him one of the most famous hackers up to that time.

[edit] 1986:

• The first PC virus was a boot sector virus called (c)Brain, is by two brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, operating out of Lahore, Pakistan. However, analysts have claimed that the Ashar virus, a variant of Brain, possibly predated it based on code within the virus.

[edit] 1988:

• A 23-year-old graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, released the internet's first worm, the Morris worm. Morris, the son of a National Security Agency (NSA) computer security expert, wrote 99 lines of code and released them as an experiment. The program began replicating and infecting machines at a much faster rate than he had anticipated, causing machines all over the world to crash.

[edit] 1990:

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is founded in July.

[edit] WWW era, 1991 onwards

[edit] 1990s

[edit] 1991:

• On August 6, 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This marks the day the WWW went live.

• Phil Zimmermann creates and releases Pretty Good Privacy, an encryption tool still in use. By 1993 he is the target of US government investigations charged with "munitions export without a license". The investigation ended in 1996 with no charges filed; this is the first known case of a government trying to stop the spread of encryption technology.

[edit] 1994:

• An international group, dubbed the "Phonemasters" by the FBI, hacked into the networks of a number of companies including MCI WorldCom, Sprint, AT&T, and Equifax credit reporters. The gang accounted for approximately $1.85 million in business losses.^[5]

• In late 1994, Vladimir Levin convinced Citibank's computers to transfer $10 million from its customers' accounts to his. Interpol arrested him at Heathrow Airport and Citibank got most of the money back. He pleaded guilty in 1995, but the method he used wasn't uncovered for another ten years and at that time was one of the largest computer crimes by dollar value.

[edit] 1996:

• Tim Lloyd plants a software time bomb at Omega Engineering, a company in New Jersey. The results of the attack are devastating: losses of USD $12 million and more than 80 employees lose their jobs. Lloyd is sentenced to 41 months in jail. ^[6]

[edit] 1998:

• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act becomes law in the United States.

• The CIH computer virus is released, written by Chen Ing Hau of Taiwan. It is considered to be one of the most harmful widely circulated viruses, overwriting critical information on infected system drives, and more importantly, in some cases corrupting the system BIOS, rendering computer systems unbootable and invalidating the previous myth that 'viruses cannot damage hardware'. It was found in the wild in September.

• Two Chinese hackers, Hao Jinglong and Hao Jingwen (twin brothers), are sentenced to death by a court in China for breaking into a bank's computer network and stealing 720'000 yuan ($87'000).^[7]

[edit] 1999:

• From the time the Morris worm struck the internet until the onset of the Melissa virus, the internet was relatively free from swift-moving, highly destructive "malware." The Melissa virus, however, was rapacious; damages have been estimated at nearly $400 million. It marked a turning point, too: Melissa was the first incident of its kind to affect the newly commercial internet.

[edit] 2000s

[edit] 2000:

• Discovering a demo of their song I Disappear on the Napster P2P file-sharing network, rock band Metallica filed legal action against Napster over it. This was the first time a major musical act publicly against allegedly illegal file sharing.
• In February 2000, some of the internet's most reliable sites were rendered nearly unreachable by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Yahoo took the first hit on February 7, 2000. In the next few days, Buy.com, eBay, CNN, Amazon.com, ZDNet.com, E*Trade, and Excite were taken down by DDoS attacks. Though damage estimates vary widely, the FBI estimates that the companies suffered $1.7 billion in lost business and other damages.^[8]
• Microsoft admits its computer network was breached and the code for several upcoming versions of Windows were stolen.

[edit] 2001:

• Dmitry Sklyarov is arrested by FBI agents while visiting the United States for having cracked encryption on Adobe Acrobat e-book software, in violation of the United States' DMCA. This occurred despite the fact that Russia, of which he is a citizen, does not honor this law as of 2001.^[9],^[10]

[edit] 2002:

• Operation Clambake, the war between Scientology and the Internet, unfolds.
• In October, a massive attack against the 13 root domain servers of the Internet is launched by unidentified hackers. The aim: to stop the domain name resolution service around the net.^[11]

[edit] 2003:

• Site Finder, the attempt by Verisign in 2003 to take control of all unregistered .com and .net domain names for their own purposes, is launched, and just as quickly scuttled after massive public outcry and official protect from groups such as ARIN and IANA.

[edit] 2004:

• In November, Marvel Comics filed a lawsuit against the developers of the City of Heroes MMO, Cryptic Studios and their publisher NCSoft alleging that the game not only allows, but actively promotes, the creation of characters whose copyrights and trademarks are owned by Marvel, and that Cryptic has intentionally failed to police these infringing characters. The suit sought unspecified damages and an injunction to force the companies to stop making use of its characters. The case is settled and rejected by United States courts in December 2005 with no changes made to the City of Heroes game.

[edit] 2005:

• In October, the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal began, where it was discovered that Sony BMG Music Entertainment surreptitiously and possibly illegally distributed copy protection software that forced itself to install on computers playing their audio CDs. As a result, many Windows based computers belonging to consumers were left vulnerable to exploit and hacking.

• In November, it was revealed that the online video game World of Warcraft, with millions of subscribers, would be hackable due to the far-reaching corruption and invasiveness of Sony's copy protection scheme.^[12]

• On December 20th, the City of Heroes game servers were nearly all hacked by an undisclosed method. According to NCSoft representative CuppaJo, "Customer data and its security was not compromised in any way during the incident that occurred," and no additional information beyond this was publicly disclosed. As of July 2006, this is the first known hack of any MMO, of which there are millions of subscribers across numerous games.^{[13][14][15][16]}

[edit] 2006:

• In January 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lodged a class action lawsuit (Hepting vs. AT&T) which alleged that AT&T had allowed agents of the National Security Agency to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants. If true, this would violate American law. In April 2006 a retired former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, lodged an affadavit supporting this allegation ^[17]. The Department of Justice has stated they will intervene in this lawsuit by means of State Secrets Privilege.^[18] The existence of this database and the NSA program that compiled it was mostly unknown to the general public until USA Today broke the story on May 10, 2006.^[19] It is estimated that the database contains over 1.9 trillion call-detail records of phone calls made after September 11, 2001. ^[20].
• On May 3rd, a massive DDOS assault on Blue Security, an anti-spam company, is redirected by Blue Security staff to their Movable Type-hosted blog. The result is that the DDOS instead knocks out all access to over 1.8 million active blogs, including all ten million plus registered LiveJournal accounts (which is owned by Movable Type's parent company). ^{[21] [22]}

• The MPAA in May was accused of hiring illegal hackers to fight torrent technology.^[23]

• In June, The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker website based in and operating from Sweden, is raided by Swedish police for allegedly violating United States, Swedish, and Europeon Union copyright law, despite the fact the listing indexes of torrent files is not actually providing illegal material. As of November 2006, the site remains online, operating from Denmark and no legal action has been filed against it or its owners.^[24]

[edit] See also

• List of Internet topics

[edit] Major aspects and issues

• History of the Internet
• Internet democracy
• Privacy on the Internet
• Net neutrality
• Timeline of hacker history

[edit] Functions

• E-mail
• File-sharing
• Instant messaging
• Internet fax
• Search engine
• Web browser

[edit] Underlying infrastructure

• Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
• Internet Service Provider (ISP)
• Usenet
• Web hosting
• World Wide Web (WWW)

[edit] Regulatory bodies

• Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
• Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

[edit] References