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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