History of the Internet

birth of the internet

1836

Telegraph

Cooke and Wheatstone patent it.

Why is this relevant?

  • Revolutionised human (tele)communications.
  • Morse Code a series of dots and dashes used to communicate between humans. This is not a million miles away from how computers communicate via (binary 0/1) data today. Although it is much slower!!

1858 - 1866

Allowed direct instantaneous communication across the atlantic.

Why is this relevant?

  • Today, cables connect all continents and are still a main hub of telecommunications.

1876

Alexander Graham Bell Exhibits.

Why is this relevant?

  • Telephones exchanges provide the backbone of Internet connections today.
  • Modems provide Digital to Audio conversions to allow computers to connect over the telephone network.

1957

First artificial earth satellite.

Why is this relevant?

  • The start of global telecommunications. Satellites play an important role in transmitting all sorts of data today.
  • In response, US forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military.

1962 - 1968

Why is this relevant?

  • As we will see later the Internet relies on packets to transfer data.
  • The origin is military : for utmost security in transferring information of networks (no single outage point).
  • Data is split into tiny packets that may take different routes to a destination.
  • Hard to eavesdrop on messages.
  • More than one route available — if one route goes down another may be followed.
  • Networks can withstand large scale destruction (Nuclear attack – This was the time of the Cold War).

1969

ARPANET commissioned by DoD for research into networking

Why is this relevant?

  • First node at UCLA (Los Angeles) closely followed by nodes at Stanford Research Institute, UCSB (Santa Barbara) and U of Utah (4 Nodes).

1971

  • 15 nodes (23 hosts) on ARPANET.
  • E-mail invented — a program to send messages across a distributed network.

    Why is this relevant?

    • E-mail is still the main way of inter-person communication on the Internet today.
    • We will study how to use and send E-mail shortly in this course.
    • You will make extensive use of E-mail for the rest of your life.

1972

  • First public demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines.
  • Internetworking Working Group (INWG) created to address need for establishing agreed upon protocols.

    Why is this relevant?

    • Telnet specification
    • Telnet is still a relevant means of inter-machine connection today.

1973

  • First international connections to the ARPANET: University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway)
  • Ethernet outlined — this how local networks are basically connected today.
  • Internet ideas started.
  • Gateway architecture sketched on back of envelope in hotel lobby in San Francisco. Gateways define how large networks (maybe of different architecture) can be connected together.
  • File Transfer protocol specified — how computers send and receive data.

1992 - 1992

  • World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN; Tim Berners-Lee developer.

    Why is relevant?

    • Originally developed to provide a distributed hypermedia system.
    • Easy access to any form of information anywhere in the world.
    • Initially non-graphic (this came later, MOSAIC, 1993).
    • Revolutionised modern communications and even our, way of life (?).
  • NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736 Mbps). NSFNET traffic passes 1 trillion bytes/month and 10 billion packets/month
  • Start of JANET IP Service (JIPS) using TCP/IP within the UK academic network.
Multimedia changes the face of the Internet

  • Number of hosts breaks 1 Million. News groups 4,000
  • Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered.
  • First MBONE audio multicast (March) and video multicast (November).
  • The term “Surfing the Internet” is coined by Jean Armour Polly.

1993

  • Number of Hosts 2 Million. 600 WWW sites.
  • InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services
    • directory and database services
    • registration services
    • information services
  • Business and Media really take notice of the Internet.
  • US White House and United Nations (UN) comes on-line.
  • Mosaic takes the Internet by storm.

    Why is this relevant?

    • User Friendly Graphical Front End to the World Wide Web.
    • Develops into Netscape — most popular WWW browser to date.
    • WWW proliferates at a 341,634

1994

  • Number of Hosts 3 Million. 10,000 WWW sites. 10,000 News groups.
  • ARPANET/Internet celebrates 25th anniversary
  • Local communities begin to be wired up directly to the Internet (Lexington and Cambridge, Mass., USA)
  • US Senate and House provide information servers
  • Shopping malls, banks arrive on the Internet
    • A new way of life
    • You can now order pizza from the Hut online in the US.
    • First Virtual, the first cyberbank, open up for business
  • NSFNET traffic passes 10 trillion bytes/month
  • WWW edges out telnet to become 2nd most popular service on the Net (behind ftp-data) based on % of packets and bytes traffic distribution on NSFNET
  • UK’s HM Treasury on-line (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/)

1995

  • 6.5 Million Hosts, 100,000 WWW Sites.
  • NSFNET reverts back to a research network. Main US backbone traffic now routed through interconnected network providers
  • WWW surpasses ftp-data in March as the service with greatest traffic on NSFNet based on packet count, and in April based on byte count
  • Traditional online dial-up systems (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access
  • A number of Net related companies go public, with Netscape leading the pack.
  • Registration of domain names is no longer free.
  • Technologies of the Year: WWW, Search engines (WAIS development).
  • New WWW technologies Emerge Technologies
    • Mobile code (JAVA, JAVAscript, ActiveX),
    • Virtual environments (VRML),
    • Collaborative tools (CU-SeeMe)

1996

  • 12.8 Million Hosts, 0.5 Million WWW Sites.
  • 50 Million Regular Internet Users
  • 1% World Population Online, 7% English Speaking World
  • Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for years)
  • The WWW browser war begins , fought primarily between Netscape and Microsoft, has rushed in a new age in software development, whereby new releases are made quarterly with the help of Internet users eager to test upcoming (beta) versions.

2000

  • 90 Million Hosts, 68 Million WWW sites
  • 391 Million Regular Internet Users
  • 7% World Population Online, 34% English Speaking World
  • New Top Level Domians (TLD). Some TLDs Begining to run out? .com for example?
    • In November 2000, after extensive discussions throughout the global Internet community, the ICANN Board selected seven TLD proposals to be included in the first addition of a global TLD to the Internet since the 1980s. The selected TLDs are: .aero (for the air-transport industry), .biz (for businesses), .coop (for cooperatives), .info (for all uses), .museum (for museums), .name (for individuals), and .pro (for professions).

the biggest hacks ever

Stuxnet (2010)

Carried out by at least one Nation State, Stuxnet was, at the time, the most sophisticated hack to have hit the world stage. Able to determine its exact location and environment, it destroyed a sizeable number of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. Had it gone wrong, it could have indiscriminately destroyed centrifuges around the world.

The LinkedIn hack (2012)

The notability of this hack is that more than 160 million records of personal information was stolen in a hack that began in 2012. It was not discovered for four years. If this is not the nail in the coffin of the antivirus paradigm, then please, tell me what that nail would be.

Visit Tom’s Blog to read all of my blogs and articles covering cybersecurity.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. hack (2014)

This hack of the largest bank in America took the personal financial information of more than 75 million customers of the bank. What puzzled investigators was that the hackers had breached an access level that would have allowed them to have stolen billions if they had chosen, yet they did not. To me, this is no mystery at all. Combining this hack with just one or two others (The Panama Papers hack, and the OPM hack, for example) might certainly prove many times more valuable in influence through blackmail and other avenues. We must learn to think in bigger terms when we assess the damage of a given hack.

The Home Depot hack (2014)

This hack achieved the largest retail credit card breach in human history. Once they breached the first Home Depot store, the hackers worked their way throughout the continent. They monitored the payment transactions on over 7,000 of The Home Depot self-serve checkout registers and skimmed credit card numbers as customers paid for their purchases. This hack is noteworthy because it gained access, within less than a day, to over 50 million credit cards.

U.S. Office of Personnel Management hack (2015)

Certainly the largest espionage coup of all time, unknown actors walked off with detailed records of every employee and consultant of the U.S. government for the past 50 years, including all top-secret cleared employees. The OPM hack had been in progress for two years before it was discovered.

FBI hack by a 15-year-old boy (2016)

A 15-year-old, in November of 2016, hacked the FBI and released detailed information about every undercover FBI officer in America. The data was released on the Dark Web. The notable and relevant point about this hack was the lack of sophistication and training on the part of the hacker. The (allegedly) most secure system within the U.S. government being vulnerable to a rank amateur hacker certainly ranks this among the great hacks.

The Conficker worm (2008)

The Conficker hack, first perpetrated in 2008, has not done the damage that more recent hacks have achieved, but it is notable in that it refuses to die. It is still replicating itself from one machine to another, turning each one into a zombie bot or into a keylogger that steals credit card information. The continued existence of this worm should be absolute proof to all that our existing antivirus paradigm (which I created) is no longer functional at any level.