History Of Internet Security

By Author: johan peter
Total Articles: 45
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Computers have become ubiquitous and indispensable today. The traditional system of documenting things on paper is being rapidly replaced by computers. The growing dependency on computers, especially since the advent of the Internet, has also made the integrity, confidentiality and availability of information and resources vulnerable. The Internet came into existence with the view to bring the world closer. It is a very dynamic environment where there is no boundary of place and time for any user. Initially, Internet was conceptualized for a limited number of users and hence it was designed without taking any security aspect into consideration. The increased popularity of Internet made it an open ground for hackers, viruses, bugs; which compromised the basic motives for which the computers and Internet came into existence.

Birth of the Internet and Concerns:
Though information sharing started taking place via computers in the '60s called the ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network) and the e-mail system was conceived in 1969, when it was termed as the electronic post office, the term 'Internet' was first ...
... used in 1982. The world was made familiar with the term 'computer virus' for the first time in 1983 by Fred Cohen. Robert Schifreen and Steve Gold were arrested for compromising with Prince Philip's Prestel mailbox. The first PC virus called 'Brain' was created in Pakistan in 1985. By 1987, with the growing number of Internet hosts and the personal computer industry; number of people got access to Internet, which was a unique experience. With such a wide and open platform to use, the Internet was no longer safe. Privacy and security concerns started mushrooming and the terms 'hacker', 'cracker' and 'electronic break-in' were coined, when Robert Morris launched the Internet worm that spread across 1/10th (6000) of the Internet hosts. He was then sentenced to three years probation, 400 hours of community service and $10,000 fine.
Firewall:
November 2, 1988 changed the Internet user experience forever. Peter Yee at the NASA Ames Research Center reported an incident in the TCP/IP Internet mailing list that Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames were attacked by Internet virus. This is when, those who built and contributed to the Internet and its users felt unsafe of their web presence. Other viruses followed suit and started attacking systems. This prompted the making of a Firewall. This term literally means that it is a wall or barrier between the house and the garage or between apartments that will control the time of a raging fire from entering another premise, or a precautionary distance between an automobile engine and its driver. This concept was executed in the virtual world in the form of the first network firewalls in late 1980s, which were routers that were used to separate networks into smaller LANs. This avoided various networks from being affected at the same time. However, the first security routers were used in the early 1990s which worked on the filtering rules that could detect harmful pages or sites and could block them from the system.
Antivirus:
Most viruses in the '80s were relatively less harmful to the systems, as they were limited to self-reproduction and had no specific damage routine written in the code. However, this scene changed when more programmers became aware of virus programming and started building viruses that manipulated and destroyed data on infected computers. This aroused the need for something like an anti-virus, which would render safety to the systems and networks. Though it is a topic of debate over who was the first to invent the anti-virus code or software, early records from the 1980s credit Bernd Fix of having first publicly performed the removal of computer viruses in 1987, also there were two anti-virus applications that were developed for the Atari ST platform in the same year. Installing an anti-virus software on individual computers, using tools like firewalls, cloud anti-virus, on-line scanners, etc are being increasingly used for security purposes. These tools come with their ownshare of benefits and disadvantages like an expensive renewal, for example.

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