Halloween opens a playful Pandora’s box on campy and intriguing spooks and scares. Like recalling tales of local cryptids, retellings of campfire stories, and reflections on infamous characters in history, let’s celebrate Halloween by looking at some of the biggest tech spooks in history.
Unexpected Worms in Early Cyberspace
In 1988, one year before the birth of the World Wide Web, the internet was a very different place, full of trust, innocence, opportunity, and a small group of users; looking back, it was only a matter of time before viruses overtook it, but in 1988 it was a shocking experience. The Morris Worm was the first Worm virus created and released onto the internet. The Morris Worm was created as an experiment by a Cornell University student, Robert Morris. Since the internet was still entirely open for exploration, Morris was curious about its limitations. Morris created the worm as a test for security across networks, and it even included passwords to test the security of accounts currently being used online. Morris hacked into the MIT network to launch his worm and get some results, and the results were more destructive than anyone likely imagined.
The Morris Worm exposed a vulnerability across the internet and shut down machines across many campuses and public research operations. The Morris Worm infected an estimated 10% of the computers on the internet within 72 hours. This attack set the standard for internet security, destroying the culture of assumptive trust that preceded it and ushering in a security and privacy-intensive standard for individuals and corporations on the internet. The design of many websites, machines, and security precautions would make it impossible to replicate. The establishment of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), the anti-worm and anti-virus industry, the development of firewalls and greater security measures, and the diversity of operating systems have made a similar attack impossible today.
Explosive Typos
The Mariner 1 was destined to be remembered as the pioneer of the American Mariner Program. In 1962, it was launched from Cape Canaveral with exciting plans to collect data on Venus, but within 293 seconds, it was ordered to self-destruct. Quickly after launch, the Mariner 1 veered dangerously off course. The ground team ran into many communications errors and could not reestablish the Mariner 1’s trajectory. The cause? A missing hyphen in the code ultimately led to the Mariner 1’s self-destruction. In 1962, this missing hyphen ran up a tab of $18.5 million, $156 million today.
Bug Invasion from the Future
The Millennium Bug or Y2K bug is one of the most infamous tech scares in history. As the world prepared to venture into a new era, namely a new millennium as the year 2000 approached, anxiety spread over whether computers could handle the switch.
The anxiety around Y2K stemmed from the way numbers were coded up to that point. As computer code was written in the 60s, programmers used two-digit codes to indicate years for dates. For example, 89 in code would correspond to 1989. People became concerned that when the date switched over to January 1st, 2000, computers would interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000. This could have led to catastrophe for governments and companies that relied on computers for their vital processes and security.
Ultimately, very few issues popped up globally on the morning of January 1st, 2000, despite total spending estimated at $200 billion in mitigation. Y2K is now often looked back on as a pop-culture hoax or conspiracy theory.
Attack of the Algorithm
On August 1st, 2012, the New York Stock Exchange opened for business, just as it did every weekday morning at 9 A.M. But within 45 minutes, an algorithm would entirely cripple one prominent investor.
Within an hour of opening, Knight Capital had executed 4 million automatic trades due to an error in an algorithm that managed automatic purchases and sales. This error cost Knight Capital $440 million, or $10 million a minute, potentially making it one of the most expensive bugs in history and causing Knight Capital to file for bankruptcy.
Computer bugs don’t have to be scary, cataclysmic, and financially destructive. Check out some of our articles on prevention, our knowledgebase full of how-to guides, or reach out to us at Hotwire Networks if you ever run into an obstacle so you can avoid crippling errors and continue your smooth ride through the internet.
