Tech Time Warp is a weekly feature that looks back at interesting moments and milestones in tech history.
Tag: Tech Time Warp
Tech Time Warp: First CAN-SPAM conviction snares a phisher
Most of us have experienced that horrible, sinking feeling that comes with being tricked or nearly tricked by a phishing email. According to the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, one of the organizations behind the 20th annual Cybersecurity Awareness Month,...
Tech Time Warp: Is MFA the brainchild of a digital pirate?
In conjunction with the 20th anniversary of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, organizers have introduced a new evergreen theme: “Secure Our World.” Designed for year-round use, the theme encourages adoption of now-widely available security measures such as multi-factor authentication (MFA). Let’s get into this...
Tech Time Warp: Spilling the tea about HotJava
In the mid-1990s, when early internet users were first exposed to the online world via AOL CD-ROMs, websites were static places. You could find text, graphics, and some choppy audio and video. But that was about to change with the...
Tech Time Warp: History of the first case of ransomware
In this week’s Tech Time Warp, we look at the recent cybersecurity news out of Las Vegas sounds like something from Ocean’s 11, no matter whether your taste runs to Frank Sinatra or George Clooney: two of the world’s largest...
Tech Time Warp: Nimda worm slows traffic with multiple propagation methods
In this week’s Tech Time Warp, we look back to September 2001. While the world was reeling from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, hackers unleashed a new threat: a worm that could modify existing websites to trick users into downloading malware....
Tech Time Warp: Woz dabbles in music festivals
In this week’s Tech Time Warp we discuss how we all know Steve Wozniak as the co-founder of Apple—but did you know Woz also dabbled in rock festivals? Forty-one years ago, while on hiatus from Apple after a plane crash,...
Tech Time Warp: Why the Panix attack was a wake-up call
In this week’s Tech Time Warp, we take a look at how a work emergency is never good news—and when notice of it comes late on a Friday afternoon, it’s even worse. Especially when the news is that your internet...
Tech Time Warp: Worm named Code Red wakes users up to security risks
In this week’s tech time warp we look at how, following a month of DDoS attacks and security bulletins—including an attack on whitehouse.gov—computer users were on high alert Aug. 1, 2001, as they waited to see whether the Code Red...
Tech Time Warp: How human error leads to July 1997 email outage
This week’s Tech Time Warp looks at how, in a world that’s so utterly reliant on the internet, service outages are hardly uncommon anymore, whether they’re the result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, like that which caused Microsoft...