Personal Computers PCs
We’ll go with the American version of this story as it was reported that the first personal computer was advertised in 1971 in Scientific American called the KENBAK-1 and was priced at $750 before my favourite company Apple introduced the Apple II which had a keyboard and a CRT Display and priced at $1,298. IBM introduced its own version of PCs later on in the ‘80s and that brought PCs into mainstream due to IBM’s reputation at the time which had open architecture (Fun Fact: Its OS was designed by Bill Gates and his buddy Paul Allen).
There were still few security concerns at this point as these devices were standalone, under the control of an individual were not connected to the outside world. The abuse started crawling in gradually when people grasped the User Interface as this was complex to understand.
The First Network
The first network was created in late 1969 by Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) sponsored by the Department of Defense in an effort to link four schools (University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Utah and Stanford Research Institute) to increase resource sharing and productivity. This network consisted of four nodes connected at each location to large scale computers and there was no security issues because these mainframes were physically protected.
This simple network at the time created the concept which the Internet would be built on later on and also the World Wide Web (WWW) and this opened a can of worms more like a can of vulnerabilities for potential security exploitation.
Local Area Network (LAN)
Grasping the concept of LANs in my computer class in high school was a bit of challenge for me (I admit I was never the brightest in my class) as I couldn’t put it into perspective. The concept of LAN started evolving as more powerful computers were being built and they needed to share resources. These computers (called workstations) were connected with ethernet cables directly to a more powerful computer designated as the file server. Some architectures also enabled the use of MODEMs (Modulator/Demodulator) connected to telephone lines and allowed users log on from a remote location with a matching modem.
The workstations contained a special Operating System called the Network Operating System (NOS) that provided the workstations with a User ID and Password as a means of authentication and also provided users with authority access to files. The LAN admin was responsible to keep an access control list of users so protecting the password of the LAN Admin was of great importance as it can jeopardize the entire network if compromised. Threats to LAN networks involved tampering, sabotaging and theft at the time of emergence before programming experts started writing malicious codes.
Wide Area Networks (WANs)
As LANs grew in popularity, it was only normal for us as humans to start finding ways to connect them together so the concept of Interconnection and Wide Area Networks emerged. LANs in offices and buildings were being connected to other LANs in different buildings.
Internet
Remember the project to link those four schools together we discussed earlier by ARPANET, They introduced the concept of email for easier communication and file exchange and was restricted to the U.S government before (according to U.S version of the story) Sir. Tim Berner Lee widely regarded as the father of modern day internet introduced the World Wide Web and the Web Browsers in 1989 and the U.S government had to reluctantly give up control. This even caused further explosive growth when the . COM (dot COM) domain was introduced to the public in 1993.
Internet brought about unrestricted access and was virtually available to any computer that could adopt the TCP/IP protocol (more about this later). This was the game changer as it changed everything businesses and individuals.
Conclusion
You’ll notice that the issue of security wasn’t put into much consideration at the dawn of computing as administrative forms of control such as background checks on employees was put in place to avoid exploitation. There was no connection to the outside world and the only form of security that was really necessary at the time was Physical Security as these computers were very expensive so it had to be guarded closely. This is about to change though as interconnectivity took to the reins at the later stage of the post and eventually the introduction of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and this led to the perpetrators taking advantage as more people could now interact and understand the inner workings of the computer.
In upcoming posts, we’ll take a look at this crimes and the story of Albert the Saboteur and how our security grandfathers tackled this issue which in turn laid foundation for us today.
