Free demo · Information Security · Lesson 8 · Phase 3 · History

Sixty years of hacking in one timeline

From whistles that fooled telephone exchanges to gangs that stop car factories: hacking's history is the history of our dependence on computers.

  1. 1961 · MIT: the word “hack”Members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club call a clever technical trick a “hack”. Curiosity, not crime.
  2. 1971 · Phone phreakingJohn “Captain Crunch” Draper uses a toy whistle's 2,600 Hz tone to unlock free long-distance calls. Two future Apple founders sold “blue boxes”.
  3. 1983–1988 · Laws and wormsThe “414s” teenagers break into US labs; WarGames scares Washington; the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (1986); the Morris worm (1988) infects a tenth of the internet.
  4. 1995–2000 · Mitnick and MafiaboyKevin Mitnick, the most wanted hacker, is arrested in 1995 (he later became a security consultant). In 2000 a 15-year-old's DDoS takes Yahoo, Amazon and eBay offline.
  1. 2010 · StuxnetA state-built worm, carried in on USB sticks, makes Iranian uranium centrifuges tear themselves apart. Code can now break physical machines.
  2. 2013–2017 · Mega-breachesTarget (40 m cards), Sony Pictures (2014), the Mirai botnet of hacked cameras (2016), Equifax (147 m people) and WannaCry (2017). In India, Cosmos Bank loses ₹94 crore (2018).
  3. 2020–2024 · Supply chains and hospitalsSolarWinds supply-chain attack (2020); Colonial Pipeline ransomware causes fuel panic (2021); AIIMS Delhi ransomware (2022); MOVEit mass exploitation (2023); Change Healthcare (2024).
  4. 2025–2026 · TodayJaguar Land Rover halts production for ~5 weeks (~£1.9 bn, 2025); Marks & Spencer's 46-day outage after help-desk social engineering; Canvas/Instructure student data (May 2026); SBI records found on the dark web (Oct 2026).
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Tip: press → or Space to step through, ← to go back, R to replay.

About this lesson

The history of hacking runs from curiosity to organised crime. In the 1960s MIT students used “hack” for an ingenious technical trick; in the 1970s phone phreaks such as John Draper exploited the telephone network with a 2,600 Hz tone. The 1980s brought the first laws and the Morris worm, the 1990s Kevin Mitnick's arrest, and 2000 the Mafiaboy denial-of-service attacks. Stuxnet (2010) proved code can destroy physical equipment, and the 2010s saw mega-breaches at Target, Sony, Equifax and the WannaCry outbreak, plus the Cosmos Bank heist in India. The 2020s are defined by supply-chain attacks (SolarWinds), ransomware against infrastructure and hospitals (Colonial Pipeline, AIIMS Delhi, MOVEit, Change Healthcare) and, in 2025–2026, the Jaguar Land Rover and Marks & Spencer attacks and data leaks at Canvas, Bank of Baroda and the State Bank of India. The full Phase 3 deck gives each era its own slide with sources.

Key points

  • From MIT hacks and phone phreaking to the first laws
  • Mitnick, Mafiaboy, Stuxnet and the mega-breaches
  • 2020–2026: supply chains, hospitals, JLR, Canvas and SBI