Researchers Are Liberating Thousands of Pages of Forgotten Hacking History From the US Government

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/vb9bjj/researchers-are-liberating-thousands-of-pages-of-forgotten-hacking-history-from-the-us-government

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Vice.com
11 May 2019

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

In 1989, just a few months after the web became a reality, a computer worm 
infected thousands of computers across the world, including those of NASA. The 
worm showed a message on the screens of the infected computers: “Your System 
Has Been Officially WANKed.”

Late last month—30 years after the "WANK worm" struck NASA—the agency released 
an internal report that the agency wrote at the time, thanks to a journalist 
and a security researcher who have embarked on a project to use the Freedom of 
Information Act to get documents on historical hacking incidents.

The project is called “Hacking History,” and the people behind it are freelance 
journalists Emma Best, and security researcher (and former NSA hacker) Emily 
Crose. The two are crowdfunding to raise money to cover the costs of the FOIA 
requests via the document requesting platform MuckRock.

In the last few years, hackers and the cybersecurity industry have gone 
mainstream, earning headlines in major newspapers, becoming key plotlines in 
Hollywood movies, and even getting a hit TV show. But it hasn't always been 
this way. For decades, infosec and hacking was a niche industry that got very 
little news coverage and very little public attention.

[...]

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