JOE takes a look back at the history of hacking

With Ubisoft’s Watch_Dogs currently in shops, JOE has decided to take a look back at history of hacking, from the first recorded hack to how and why hacking became so popular in the first place…

Hacking has grown into much, much more than just something for the average online user to be constantly paranoid about. Hacking, and the idea of breaking into an unsecured online network for good or for bad, has grown into an entire subculture with movies, books and now videogames being devoted to the subject. People within the hacking community can even be separated into three distinct groups: While Hat Hackers; the security guys who try to find weaknesses in computer systems so that the bad guys don’t get their hands on sensitive information. The Black Hat Hackers; the bad guys who want to break into a computer system for fraudulent purposes. Finally, there are the Grey Hat Hackers (think Aiden Pearce); they guys whose reasons for hacking aren’t always clear. The Grey Hat guys are usually the ones who take down a corporate website in order to highlight their poor working conditions etc. So while their actions are usually fairly destructive, their intentions are (usually) good. However, hacking, has been around a lot longer than most people think and it all started off a long time before computers were even invented… Back in 1903 John Ambrose Fleming, a renowned English electrical engineer and physicist, was giving a public demonstration of his boss Guglielmo Marconi's purportedly secure wireless telegraphy technology when the signal was disrupted (hacked) by a music-hall magician named Nevil Maskelyne (pictured below). Maskelyne, who had an interest in telegraphy technology, wanted to show the public that Marconi's idea of a truly secure network was farfetched, so he disrupted the Marconi's signal with one of his own. That was the first recorded example of a ‘computer hacker’ at work. You can find out more about the incident in question over here. Over the following few decades, various notable hacks, or system breaches, took place, including the cracking of the Enigma machine code back in 1932, but hacking as we know it today didn’t really kick off until the early 1970s, when a far-left youth-orientated political group in the US known as the Youth International Party, or Yippies (not to be confused with Yuppies), started publishing a newsletter called the Technological Assistance Program (TAP). The TAP taught people how to gain unauthorised access to the phone networks, which was an activity known as ‘phreaking’. ‘Phreakers’ could then use this information to make free phone calls to anywhere in the world. So hacking, as we know it today, basically started out as a way to make free calls to your buddy in Australia… Phreaking was done by reverse engineering the system of tones used to route long distance phone calls. After a while an electronic tone generator, known as a ‘blue box’ (pictured below), was created to recreate these tones without the user having to do much manual work – the tones were often recreated using toy whistles that came as prizes in cereal boxes. Interestingly, the example below was created by Apple Inc. co-founder, Steve Wozniak. Unfortunately for phreakers all around the world, it didn’t take long before the phone companies realised that their systems could be easily breached by cheapskates wanting cheap calls and techy teens with nothing better to do, so they updated their networks to more advanced computerised systems. However, even though the phone companies changed their working ways, the phreakers didn’t and hacking into the new computerised systems became more of a personal challenge to some of the hackers rather than just being an easy way of getting free calls. Hacking, as we know it today, well and truly kicked off in the 80s as computers became more commonplace and media coverage of hacking, along with the 1983 movie War Games, gave the wider public (and wannabe hackers) the idea that hackers were genius, all-powerful tech gurus who could bring the world to a standstill with just one click… That is an idea that still lives on to this day, and while it may not be true for 99 per cent of online hackers, it certainly is true for Watch Dogs’ Aiden Pearce.