A history of Internet security
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
How could you make it better? I'd suggest adding:
* This is inside baseball, but Lopatic's NCSA httpd exploit in '95, which inspired 8lgm's Sendmail 8.6.12 exploit, which in turn kicked off the modern era of software security.
* The Mitnick/Shimomura Saga in summer '95, which surfaced TCP sequencing and provoked the eventual adoption of SSH.
* The first major distributed denial of service attack (probably around '99).
* The Summer Of Worms (Slammer/Blaster/Welchia in '03), which pivoted Microsoft from security-oblivious desktop software vendor to the middle of the enterprise security industry.
* The release of Metasploit at Black Hat in '03.
* Roughly the same time period: Tor.
* The AT&T "Room 101" NSA monitoring fiasco.
* Something like TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative, or some other appropriate example of an early vulnerability market, in '06-'07.
* You think, maybe, just maybe, Snowden is meaningful to Internet security?
http://windowsitpro.com/security/complete-text-bill-gates-tr...
* Spoofing (before decent intermediate router policies, and with predictable TCP sequence numbers in early TCP stacks)
* TCP-half open portscanning (Assange's 'strobe' tool)
* Major developments in covert OS detection
* All major OS default daemon/config remote bugs
* Host-based and network-based IDS (Snort, etc.)
* SATAN
* Era of people mass-migrating from Windows to Mac and Linux
* Microsoft finally releasing a malware removal tool
* First consumer firewalls
* UPnP deployment for home routers
* Major cable breaks
* Major routing glitches
* The many blows to trust in SSL certificate infrastructure
* The devops era (immutable infrastructure and the beginnings of 'security as a process' popularization)
It was a little goofy and it has a lot of human interest stuff in it to make it more of a story, but I liked it.
I can't remember life before everyone was on dialup Internet, so it was very informative to me.
pg shows up as a student in a tiny aside at the very end!
Story summarized here:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg
ACM article covering the story's events (May 1988):
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=42412&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=...