The current era: social engineering teenage crews beating billion-dollar defenses, extortion without encryption, a single company’s collapse freezing America’s pharmacies — and the closest the internet has ever come to a supply-chain catastrophe.
The era attackers learned to poison the supply chain itself: a backdoor inside the software updates of 18,000 organizations, and ransomware crews bold enough to shut down a country’s fuel pipeline and its meat supply.
The most destructive years in internet history: nation-state ransomware, the $10B NotPetya wipeout and the IoT botnet that broke the US internet.
The era the hypothetical became real: the first cyber weapon that destroyed physical machinery, the first state attack on a corporation over a movie, the collapse of the web’s trust system, and the biggest espionage haul in US history.
The decade the Internet became the world’s infrastructure — and its crime economy. Email worms, the first APTs, the first nation-state DDoS war, and the biggest credit-card heists the world had ever seen.
Before the web, before firewalls, before cybersecurity was a word — the two incidents that created the industry: the Morris Worm and the world’s most wanted hacker.
From the worm that broke 10% of the early Internet to the ransomware attack that froze America’s pharmacy system — the 33 incidents that defined modern cybersecurity, in one complete list.