The Quick and Dirty History of Cybersecurity

Fill-in-the-blank flashcards covering the major milestones and concepts in the history of cybersecurity.

In the 1970s and 1980s, computer security threats were primarily from __.

malicious insiders

Marcus Hoss hacked into the ARPANET using a gateway located in __.

Berkeley

Marcus Hoss accessed approximately military computers, including the Pentagon’s mainframes.

400

Hoss’s primary intent was to acquire information to sell to the .

KGB

Astronomer __ used honeypot systems to detect the intrusion.

Clifford Stoll

The first computer worm was called __.

Creeper

The Creeper worm printed the message __.

I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.

The Morris worm was designed to infect systems.

UNIX

The Morris worm was created by a graduate student from Cornell University named __.

Robert T. Morris

The Morris worm led to the first person being charged under the Act.

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

The act led to the development of a , predecessor of US-CERT.

Computer Emergency Response Team

The Morris worm triggered the start of a new field in computer security and the growth of the industry.

antivirus

In the 1990s, the primary delivery method for viruses was malicious attachments.

email

Early antivirus solutions used signatures, which were initially based on .

hashes

Two significant problems with early antivirus solutions were high resource usage and positives.

false

By 2007, the number of malware samples had grown to at least million.

5

Endpoint protection platforms rely on the premise that malware samples are deviations from other existing samples, rather than relying solely on static .

signatures

SSL came to be in .

1995

Netscape released the SSL protocol in 1995, and it became the core for developing languages such as .

HTTPS

Anonymous first came into the limelight on 2003.

October 1

Anonymous hacked the Church of Scientology using attacks.

DDoS

Albert Gonzales created a cybercriminal ring compromising at least cards.

45.7

TJX’s breach cost the company a loss amounting to million dollars.

256

Gonzales received a sentence of years in prison.

40

The EternalBlue vulnerability allows an attacker to exploit protocols used to share files across a network.

SMB

The EternalBlue exploit was leaked by the Shadow Brokers on 2017.

April 14

The WannaCry attack targeted health institutions and caused health services to halt for almost a .

week

NotPetya attacks targeted banks, ministries, electricity, and newspapers across .

Ukraine

HIPAA became law on 1996.

August 21

GLBA, the Financial Modernization Act, was enacted in .

1999

FISMA was legislated in to provide guidance for securing information systems.

2003

FISMA compliance requires agencies to designate professionals to oversee the implementation of the security plans.

security

The E-Government Act outlines the main threats that affect information systems and the need for adopting effective security .

measures

GDPR protects data specifically belonging to members of the Union.

European

GDPR imposes fines of at least % of annual profits.

4

GDPR requires explicit consent of data owners before their confidential information.

using

The DHS strategy was rolled out in .

2018

The Federal Cybersecurity R&D framework has been active since and is updated every four years.

2012

The Federal Cybersecurity R&D framework is updated every years.

four

Yahoo attacks compromised over billion Yahoo accounts.

3

Gmail and Yahoo attacks used spear-phishing emails to trick targets into inputting credentials on dummy pages and bypassed authentication.

two-factor

Artificial intelligence is integrated into antivirus and firewall solutions to achieve smarter and response capability.

detection

The emergence of networks is set to automate critical infrastructure like transportation.

5G