History

  1. Advanced Network Reconnaissance with Nmap

    Video This video is a presentation by Gordoon Lyon aka Fydor, the creator of the nmap network scanner, from ShmooCon 2006. From...

  2. After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past

    Book The introduction to this book provides access to the debate on the "archeology of the contemporary" or, in other terms, the archeology of...

  3. An Evening with Berferd: In Which a Cracker is Lured, Endured, and Studied

    Article This article is written by Bell Labs researcher Bill Cheswick about Unix security. Cheswick studied a hacker in the wild using an early...

  4. A Prehistory of Social Media

    Article This article provides an introduction to the birth of social media by providing a "prehistory" of the internet itself. The article focuses...

  5. Back Orifice

    Digital Artifact This article details the digital artifact Back Orifice (a play on Windows Back Office) created by the hacking group Cult of the...

  6. BBS The Documentary: Episode 1 of 8: BAUD (The Beginning)

    Video This video is episode 1 of 8 of a documentary mini-series by Jason Scott about the bulletin board systems (BBS). From...

  7. Book Launch: The Hacker and the State

    Video This video is the book launch of Dr. Ben Buchanan's book The Hacker and the State. From the video description, "Packed with...

  8. Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

    Book This book describes the details of the history and technological development of the Stuxnet Worm. Kim Zetter is a top cybersecurity journalist...

  9. Cult of the Dead Cow

    Book Chapter This book chapter from the recent book on the hacking group the Cult of the Dead Cow is about the Back Orifice...

  10. DEF CON 19 - Jason Scott - Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack

    Video This video depicts a presentation by Jason Scott at the hacker conference, DEFCON '19 about the preservation of digital artifacts on...

  11. DEFCON - The Full Documentary

    Video This video is a documentary of the DefCon hacker conference and hacking convention. From the video description, "A film about the world's...

  12. Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources

    Academic Paper This article from the University of Glasgow is a handy guide for historical preservation in the 1990s that makes use of...

  13. Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11

    Digital Artifact This article details the history and technical developments of the PDP-11, a series of 16-bit microcomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation...

  14. Exploding the Phone

    Book This book provides an in-depth historical perspective and study of phone phreaking and hackers of the telecommunication industry known as phone...

  15. Freedom Downtime

    Video This video is the documentary from 2001 that is sympathetic to convicted computer hacker, Kevin Mitnick. It is produced by 2600...

  16. From Internet Farming to Weapons of the Geek

    Article This article details the history of political hacking by Gabriella Coleman in which she provides an introduction and inventory of the...

  17. Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

    Book Chapter This book details the spirit of the times with the criminalization (and eventual crackdown) of the so-called "hacker underground." This particular...

  18. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

    Book Steven Levy's book is is a classic text on the history of computing. It is used throughout the course to highlight the hacker...

  19. Hackers Testimony at the United States Senate

    Video This video depicts the testimony of the hacker group, L0pht Heavy Industries, in front of the United States Senate in 1998. The...

  20. How the Apple-1 Works

    Video This video provides a technical overview of the Apple-1 Computer. The technical aspects of the computer are described and shown as...

  21. Masters of Crowds: The Rise of Mass Social Engineering

    Article This article provides a deep history of mass manipulation from the 1920s through the mid-1970s. This article is adapted from the...

  22. Operation Sundevil

    Video The video provides a brief overview of Operation Sundevil from the 1990s. The operation was apart of a large hacker crackdown...

  23. Phone Phreaking: A Call From Joybubbles

    Video This video depicts a phone phreaking call made by the hacker Joybubbles aka Josef Engressia, Jr. This original sound byte comes...

  24. Phrack Magazine - Issue 31

    Article This article is an introduction to Issue 31 of the popular underground hacking publication of Phrack Magazine. This particular article details...

  25. Red Box (Phreaking)

    Article This article provides a technical description and history of the red box phone phreaking device. This device was created and utilized...

  26. Reflections on Trusting Trust

    Article This article is a written version of an Alan Turing Award Lecture from Ken Thomson in 1984. This article is a...

  27. Remote OS detection via TCP/IP Stack FingerPrinting

    Article This article is from issuse 54 of Phrack Magazine in 1998 written by Gordon Lyon aka Fydor, the creator of the...

  28. Rene Carmille

    Article This article details the life of Rene Carmille who is known to be one of the first hackers. This article gives a...

  29. Representing Hacker Culture: Reading Phrack

    Book Chapter This book chapter from Douglas Thomas' book Hacker Culture details an outsider's guide to reading the hacker zine Phrack. This chapter discusses...

  30. Resistance to the current: the dialectics of hacking

    Book Chapter This book chapter is titled "Internet Relay Chat: A Time Machine That Stood the Test of Time" and details the history...

  31. Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit

    Article This article is from issue 49 of Phrack Magazine written by Elias Levy who also goes by the handle Aleph One in...

  32. Spacewar!

    Digital Artifact This game is a digital artifact of a Javascript version of the popular Spacewar! video game that is one of the...

  33. Stalking the Wily Hacker

    Article This article tells the story of a hacker who penetrated Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the 1980s. It provides an anecdotal perspective...

  34. Storage Media

    Article This article provides the technical developments of various data storage methods and mediums throughout history. These digital artifacts provide an understanding...

  35. The Art of Deception

    Book This book is a digital artifact used in the course to represent the area of social engineering. The book details several...

  36. The Art of Port Scanning

    Article This article from issue 51 of Phrack Magazine is written by Gordon Lyon aka Fydor about the nmap network scanner. This article introduced...

  37. The First Hacker

    Video This video gives an overview of Rene Carmille's contribution as the first hacker. From the video description: "Based on the extraordinary...

  38. The Government's Fight to Make Encryption Illegal

    Video This video is the third-part of a four part documentary by ReasonTV titled "Cypherpunks Write Code". From the video description: In 1977,...

  39. The Hacker Conference: A Ritual Condensation and Celebration of a Lifeworld

    Academic Paper This paper written by Gabriella Coleman, anthropologist and expert on all things computer hacking, provides a new scholarly perspective on hacker conferences....

  40. The Secret History of Hacking

    Video This video depicts some of the secret side of the history of hacking from black hat hackers to white hat hackers....

  41. Unauthorized Access

    Video This video is a documentary about hackers by Annalisa Savage from 1994. From the video description, "This is a nostalgic hacker documentary...

  42. War Dialer

    Digital Artifact This article provides historical context and the technical developments in wardialing and war dialers. War dialing is a technique developed by hackers...

  43. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy

    Book This book is written by Martin Paul Eve, a Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing, about the Warez Scene and community. This...

  44. Watch Me Demo My New IRC Client on an 80s Retro Computer

    Video This video is a video of a demo of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) on an 80s retro computer. The IRC is highly...