Pioneers in Tech: Mary Golda Ross, Native American aerospace engineer
In 1958, the panel and host of the game show “What’s My Line?” didn’t know what to make of Mary Golda Ross. Through a series of yes or no questions, the panelists—which included the actor Jack Lemmon—deduced that Ross had...
Tech Time Warp: SCA virus infects the Commodore Amiga
The Commodore Amiga offered many firsts to computer users of the mid-1980s: 256 kilobytes of RAM, a 256-color display, and preemptive multitasking, not to mention a splashy celebrity debut (Andy Warhol used the Amiga to create a portrait of Debbie...
Tech Time Warp: Ghostball virus haunts PC users in 1989
The story of the Ghostball virus is a worthwhile tale to revisit as Cybersecurity Awareness Month draws to a close on Halloween. As some PC users found out in October 1989, malware can be difficult to exorcise from your system....
Pioneers in Tech: Agnes Meyer Driscoll, World War Codebreaker
Cybersecurity is one of the most in-demand career fields today, with nearly 465,000 open jobs in the industry as of October 2021. These positions —cybersecurity analyst, penetration and vulnerability tester, etc.— have their roots in the work of Agnes Meyer...
Tech Time Warp: Gone phishing for cybersecurity history
The theme for Week 2 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month is “Phight the Phish!” Arguably one of the most insidious forms of cybercrime, phishing relies on tricking a recipient via social engineering into handing over personal information—and sometimes installing malware in...
Tech Time Warp: A Sober-ing tale for cybersecurity awareness month
The wriggling saga of the Sober worm is a cautionary tale worthy of a revisit during Cybersecurity Awareness Month. It’s a good reminder that once malware is on the loose, it’s hard to catch—and that it often undergoes a metamorphosis...
Tech Time Warp: The cybersecurity industry begins with RSA patent
October 1 kicks off Cybersecurity Awareness Month, now in its 18th year. A joint initiative of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), the awareness month seeks to educate individuals and organizations about...
Tech Time Warp: Swen worm poses as security patch
The hits for network admins kept coming in late summer/early fall 2003. Just weeks after the Blaster-Welchia-SoBig.F triple punch, the Swen worm wriggled its way onto at least 1.5 million computers. Like so many other pieces of malware, Swen exploited...
Tech Time Warp: The first FORTRAN program runs
Although FORTRAN was not commercially released until 1957, the date September 20, 1954, is also significant in the history of the groundbreaking computer language. That’s when the first FORTRAN program successfully ran while in development at IBM. John Backus worked...
Pioneers in Tech: Luis von Ahn turns everyone into a crowdsourcer
Depending on your point of view, a CAPTCHA or a reCAPTCHA is either an annoyance (who can read those fuzzy letters, anyway?) or a boon to security, preventing fake account creation, spam commenting, fraudulent transactions, and more. But did you...