- 16th Oct, 2024
- By Riya
We all have read about the times where the only way to connect with someone was bird messengers or hand delivered letters. E-mails and smartphones have emerged over the time from things like postcards, and wired telephones.
With time, we have made communications and connections over the world easier, but with that, we have also endangered the safety of personal information of the ones using these means, which, in this age and time, seems to be everyone, including a school going child to a retired old man. Let us have a glance at the history of cyber security and how it has emerged and grown over time.
- The first digital computer ever was built in the year 1943. Cybercrime did not really start for a while then, since people had barely begun to get accustomed to digital computers. Virus started attacking the computers by 1949 but that cannot be counted as cybercrime then.
- By the end of the 1950's, people started to take a particular interest in how phones function, then began to tamper with the protocols that permitted telecom experts to operate on the network remotely to place free calls and avoid paying long-distance charges. This was probably where computer hacking originated.
- In the 1960's it could be said that “hacking” officially started. It wasn't exactly caused by using computers, but rather by some individuals breaking into high-tech train sets owned by the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club. The goal is believed to be just getting access to systems. However, there were no opportunities for political or economic gain. This type of hacking was primarily about making a mess in the systems just to see if it was possible or not.
- A while after this, people started to study computers and information and knowledge was gained to know more about the “weaknesses” of the systems.
- In the 1970’s people saw the need for cybersecurity finally. The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the initial endeavor in this.
- In the 1980’s, the world saw the emergence of cybersecurity by the introduction of “Antivirus”. This decade is when you can say the history of computer crime took flight.
- In the 1990's we saw the world going online. With the introduction of WWW in the year 1989, more and more people started using computers and going on the web in the next decade and still do to this date in the past 20 years.
With more usage of the digital world, viruses and threats increased. And with that, the scope of cyber safety increased too.
At this point, everything seems to be online. We largely rely on this world to just get through our daily lives itself. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are two technologies that could see a rise in use in cybersecurity. With time, we can only hope for a better and safer world.
