Word: hacker
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Federal authorities have warned that hackers can penetrate the Internet's sophisticated security barriers to steal information from companies and universities. But CIA officials believe their own computer system and the new Intelink are practically invulnerable to invasion by outsiders. There will always be the threat of government officials with security clearance who decide to betray their country and download intelligence files. Yet terminals inside Langley are routinely audited for suspicious activity, such as an unusual number of log-ins after hours or repeated failures to have a password accepted, usually symptomatic of a hacker testing out a host...
Intelink operates over the Pentagon's Defense Systems Network, which has its own lines or leases special lines from phone companies to send encrypted messages. To penetrate that system, a hacker would first have to wiretap a dsnet line, then break the sophisticated encryption of its messages, as well as steal another user's password to get past the main menu...
Cyber bandits keep probing nonetheless. TIME has learned that CIA security officers have caught at least half a dozen agency employees and contractors who on a lark have tried to hack parts of the agency's computer system that are closed off to them. A hacker from Canada almost daily tries to break past the CIA's Internet link to get to the agency's secret files. He once used the password "Clinton," thinking that would give him access to any secret. It didn't. "We know who he is," a CIA official said with a smile. "But there...
...Steven Levy chronicled in his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, there were three generations of youthful computer programmers who deliberately led the rest of civilization away from centralized mainframe computers and their predominant sponsor, IBM. ``The Hacker Ethic,'' articulated by Levy, offered a distinctly countercultural set of tenets. Among them...
...third generation of revolutionaries, the software hackers of the early '80s, created the application, education and entertainment programs for personal computers. Typical was Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental-meditation teacher, who gave us the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM's Apple-imitating PC. Like most computer pioneers, Kapor is still active. His Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co- founded with a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, lobbies successfully in Washington for civil rights in cyberspace. In the years since Levy's book, a fourth generation of revolutionaries has come to power. Still abiding...