Hack, Hack, Sweet Has-Been...

I was watching a piece by a YouTuber I follow [NetworkChuck], earlier on today, about the huge data centres that sit on opposite sides of a road in Dallas, Texas. Whilst not unique, they represent a significant portion of the interchange of data that passes through the internet, nanosecond by nanosecond, carrying huge amounts of information traffic from all over the network. In the piece, much is made of the stringent physical security of the place, with multiple air-locked entry/exit traps, locked equipment cages and pass-card/fingerprint devices. All good and proper, one might imagine. But the fatal flaw in this cosy commercial scenario? But of course; in order to function in its allotted task sphere, it is perforce connected. To the internet. And hence potentially to any and every other network/server farm/computer/device also so connected, and so, vulnerable to attack by those that know how to exploit network and software vulnerabilities to whatever ends they so choose.

Hacking, as it is known, has been around for a very long time: much further back than the modern internet and the World Wide Web [does anyone actually refer to the WWW as such, any more?], and in fact just about any technology can be 'hacked' to good or bad ends. People used to 'hack' the telephone system: 'phreaking', as it was phrased back then. But the term hacking as we understand it these days emerged in the 1980s, when operating system vulnerabilities allowed at first pranksters, and then rather more shady operators, to interfere with computers via viruses and trojan horse software introduced via the rather mundane route of floppy discs and such; the majority of computers extant then lacking any form of connectivity via a network. Networks in those days were few and far between, and very high level; the stuff of governments, defence departments, banks and so forth. Most hobbyist computer nerds - myself included - could only 'network' via dial-up connections to the 'bulletin boards' that proliferated during that decade: early hackers starting to peddle their mischief back then, via software shared in those nascent online times.

But in 1991, the introduction of the World Wide Web [blog posts passim], changed the whole thing up many, many gears. OK, it took a few [very few in reality] years to get to where we effectively find ourselves now, but the fruits of today's always on, always connected networking are plain to see in the plethora of scams and hacks that are designed to separate people and organisations from their money on a routine basis. At the heart of all of these are the networks themselves, the complexities of which are beyond the ken of the vast majority of the human population that rely almost entirely on them to simply function. Your computer, laptop, phone, TV; even your house, down to the bloody doorbell, should you have gone completely down the rabbit hole of the Internet of Things, are connected for all intents and purposes to everyone and every other thing that inhabits the same network spaces, and hence they are all potentially hackable to some degree. It is possible to hack your life. Fact. To what degree this potential threat could impact on your existence is down to many, many factors, up to and including personal knowledge and diligence. However, the threat is always there: it's in the nature of the beast itself. Picture, though, a time when such threats were not only unimagined and unimaginable, but which were actually, simply, not there at all.

Obviously a pre-computer era would be de facto lacking in such threats. But imagine the very dawn of the modern era of computing: the Second World War and Bletchley Park, and the efforts to break the enciphered messages of our then enemies. I've written before of the extraordinary achievements of the men and women who worked at Bletchley: in particular of the almost unsung hero of the piece, Tommy Flowers; the Post Office engineer who designed and built the world's first actually programmable digital computer, codenamed Colossus. By the end of the war, there were ten Colossi in service and another in the pipeline. All but two were destroyed on war's end, with the remaining pair broken up in the 1960s for security reasons; the general public, historians and academics alike not being made aware of either the machine itself or its creator's existence until many decades later.

The security of the thing and its operations however, were not just assured by the machinations of government, military and security services however, but also by two simple and very salient facts. The machine itself possessed no software operating system as we would now understand it: rather, it was programmed via the hardware itself to complete its tasks, using switches; and it was not in any way networked. The fact is that it couldn't possibly have been connected to anything else, as neither computers [aside from Colossus itself] nor computer networking actually existed at that point in time. In fact, even though programmable computers with software operating systems became available in small numbers during the postwar years, it wouldn't be until the 1960s before efforts were made to connect the things together; with the first iteration of what would eventually become the internet not being realised until the ARPAnet wide area packet-switched network [itself very limited] was initiated in 1966. The thing is, that computer hacking as we know it today simply didn't exist before then, as there was simply nothing to hack...

BTW, if anyone can tell me the origin of the title of this post, then you grew up in the same era as me! No prizes, unfortunately!