In the beginning there were the spies...
Most people think of security and cryptography as something used by the military during wars to communicate without the enemy knowing or by governments to keep their secrets.
During the second world war the Germans used their Enigma machines to send messages. They
thoughtthose messages were unbreakable since Enigma applied a different code to each
letter of a message. However a group of high-IQed British people managed to crack Enigma
codes with the world's most advanced computers then, and managed to read Hitler's mail,
which helped the Allies winning the war in Europe and Africa. At this same war, on the
other side of the globe the United States was braking the codes of Japan with their
crypthoanalysis team in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese didn't believe their codes could be
broken, till the end of the war. The Japanese system was representing each word by a
randomly assigned set of five digits. For example, 78934 might stand for
"Tokyo", and 78935 for "Suicide". Every time they changed their codes
it might be months before the US could read them again. The United States managed to crack
about 25% of the Japanese messages, and it was enough.
Julius Caesar, two thousand years earlier, when sending messages used a system of cryptography on his messages to his troops. He used to rotate each letter of the messages by a number of letters, for example, the word ATTACK would become CVVCEM (Rotating each letter 2 letters ahead). Back at those days this system was enough against the semi-literate barbarian spies of the enemy.
Today, any 10 year old kid could crack Julius Caesar's messages,
after all there are only 26 possibilities to
check...
To the
top
Let's go back to the present:
A senate
subcommittee, after finding Pentagon computers are hit with 250,000 break-ins a year, will
focus next on the State Department. Investigators say State, often called "Foggy
Bottom", has only a foggy notion of how many outsiders regularly invade it's
Internet-connected computers. The Justice Department has slowed computerization programs
because of hacker attacks.
Only one in 500 break-ins is detected and reported to the Pentagon,
which has the government's most advanced hacker-awareness program. Two hackers used the
Internet to gain access to an Air Force computer in Rome, N.Y. The hackers then used that
connection to invade a computer system at NATO headquarters in Europe. Another one of
their victims is NASA, which apparently was tapped for coded passwords that the hackers
sent to an unknown location in Latvia. (Source: Dow Jones News Services, The Wall Street
Journal, May 31, 1996. Copyright 1996 The Wall Street Journal)
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency web site was being broken into by some
cyber graffiti artist who have made his/her mark on the home page of the CIA
(http://www.odci.gov/cia) by changing it to read the Central Stupidity Agency. Another
part of the message also tell the spy agency to "Stop Lying". This happened on
Wednesday night September 18, 1996 and by the next day the web site was closed for repair.
This is the before shot.
This
is the after shot.
Today, security is one of the hottest subjects.
The internet is entering our lives fast, and a lot of sensitive information is passed
through it. Anyone who is connected to the internet should know about security. Using the
internet without some sort of protection is like leaving your door open, when you're not
at home. Security leaks are present everywhere : from E-mail messages to Web pages that
can harm your computer. Watch out !
To find out where I retreaved this information from just follow this link WWW Security : Introduction.