The history of hackers from the dawn of humanity to the present day.

• Hackers ≠ villains
  “Hacker” simply means someone who pushes a system beyond its intended use; ethics split them into white hats(defenders) and black hats (attackers).

• Flaws are human, not machine
  Bugs stem from programming mistakes; early example: 1950s “bugs” were literal moths in tube computers. Hackers exploit such flaws just as lock-pickers exploit bad locks.

• First big hack (1834)
  The Blanc brothers bribed operators on France’s optical-telegraph network to slip stock tips through the error-correction mechanism, beating the market by days.

• Phone-phreak era (1950s-1970s)
  Captain Crunch’s 2600 Hz whistle fooled switches into granting free calls; Jobs & Wozniak sold “blue boxes” doing the same.

• Internet dawn & celebrity hackers
  Kevin Poulsen rerouted radio contests; Robert Morris’s worm crashed 10 % of the fledgling Internet; Kevin Mitnick mixed technical hacks with social engineering, landing on the FBI’s “Most Wanted.”

• Hacker collectivism

  • Cypherpunks (1992): privacy, decentralization, crypto manifesto (free access, distrust authority).

  • Anonymous: leaderless “digital flock” coordinating online protests.

  • Chaos Computer Club (Berlin): white-hat research and public audits (e.g., Germany’s COVID app).

• Four modern tribes

  1. White hats / researchers – find and disclose bugs, defend privacy.

  2. Criminal crews – profit-driven ransomware, card theft, etc.

  3. Mercenaries – vendors of spyware like Pegasus, sold to states.

  4. Nation-states – build cyber-armies; Stuxnet showed state-grade sabotage.

• Why the bad reputation?
  Cyber-crime now out-earns all other transnational crime combined; 83 % of SMEs still lack basic defenses. As stakes rise—from personal data to national security—every hacker action feels existential.

Bottom line: Hackers can be guardians or predators; their tools are neutral, but in a hyper-connected world the consequences—and the fear—have never been bigger.

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