Word: networks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...proper perspective, according to MIT network manager Jeffrey I. Schiller, is "to view computers and computer information as property. Breaking into computers is just as wrong as breaking into a house...
...least publicized achievements of the computer revolution: a huge, arching communications network connecting 60,000 computers by high-speed data links and ordinary telephone lines. Developed by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s, Arpanet, as the information grid is called, has carried everything from unclassified military data to electronic love notes sent from one lonely researcher to another. But last week it became the conduit for something much more dramatic: one of the most sophisticated and infectious computer viruses the world has yet seen...
...trouble surfaced in computer centers at two institutions that serve as major network links: M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley. Last Wednesday night computers at both centers started furiously generating unwanted electronic files, clogging up their storage systems and slowing operations to a crawl. Almost immediately, similar problems began turning up at other centers throughout the network, from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington to New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. Within hours, operators shut down thousands of machines across the country to quarantine them, severing their connections to other computers and rendering productive work all but impossible...
...itself by taking control of a computer's internal machinery. Unlike more malicious versions, the new virus did not destroy data stored in computers, but it did disrupt the work of tens of thousands of researchers hooked into Arpanet. It also penetrated unclassified branches of a second, more secure network called Milnet, which is used by military researchers. Said a Government computer expert: "The kid simply put us out of action...
Other computer centers had better luck. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., alerted to the problem by colleagues at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., immediately "guillotined" their computers from the network to keep from getting hit. As a preventive measure, Maryland's Goddard Space Flight Center shut off its system on Thursday. Eventually, the Defense Department brought down both Arpanet and Milnet and began efforts to tighten the security of the networks...