Timeline of Internet conflicts

ARPANET logical map, March 1977. In function, this was a map of the entire internet in 1977.

Graphic representation of a very small part of the WWW, representing some of the hyperlinks, as it exists in the modern era.

The Internet in its various forms has a long history of turbulent relations, major man-made disruptions (such as wide scale computer virus incidents, DOS and DDOS attacks that cripple services, and organized attacks that cripple major online communities), and other conflicts. This is a list of known and documented Internet, Usenet, virtual community and World Wide Web related conflicts, and of conflicts that touch on both offline and online worlds with possibly wider reaching implications.

Spawned from the original ARPANET, the modern Internet, World Wide Web and services on it such as virtual communties (bulletin boards, forums, and MMOs) have grown exponentionally. Such prolific growth of population, mirroring "offline" society, contributes to the amount of conflicts and problems online growing each year. Today, billions of people in nearly all countries can be found on various Internets. Invariabley, as in "brick and mortar" or offline society, the virtual equivalent of major turning points, conflicts, and disruptions--the online equivalents of the falling of the Berlin Wall, the creation of the United Nations, spead of disease, and events like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait will occur.

1970s

1978

• In May, the first known spam email was sent, to "several hundred" recipients.

1980s

1980

• ARPANET grinds to a complete halt on October 27th because of an accidentally-propagated status-message virus.,

1981

• Ian Murphy, known to his friends as Captain Zap, was the first cracker to be tried and convicted as a felon. Murphy broke into AT&T's computers in 1981 and changed the internal clocks that metered billing rates. People were getting late-night discount rates when they called at midday.

1988

• A 23-year-old graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, released the internet's first worm, the Morris worm. Morris, the son of a National Security Agency (NSA) computer security expert, wrote 99 lines of code and released them into the internet as an experiment. Quickly, Morris discovered that the program was replicating and infecting machines at a much faster rate than he had anticipated. Invisible tasks were overloading machines around the country and preventing users from using the machines effectively, if at all. Computers were crashing or becoming unresponsive to commands. To curtail the spread of the infection, many system administrators were forced to cut off their machines from the internet entirely.

1990s

1991

• Phil Zimmermann creates and releases Pretty Good Privacy, an encryption tool still in use. By 1993 he is the target of US government investigations charged with "munitions export without a license". The investigation ended in 1996 with no charges filed; this is the first known case of a government trying to stop the spread of encryption technology.

1994

• An international group, dubbed the "Phonemasters" by the FBI, hacked into the networks of a number of companies including MCI WorldCom, Sprint, AT&T, and Equifax credit reporters. The FBI estimates that the gang accounted for approximately $1.85 million in business losses.

1999

• From the time the Morris worm struck the internet until the onset of the Melissa virus, the internet was relatively free from swift-moving, highly destructive "malware." The Melissa virus, however, was rapacious; damages have been estimated at nearly $400 million. It marked a turning point, too: Melissa was the first incident of its kind to affect the newly commercial internet.

2000s

2000

• Discovering a demo of their song I Disappear on the Napster P2P file-sharing network, rock band Metallica filed legal action against Napster over it. This was the first time a major musical act publically against allegedly illegal file sharing.
• In February 2000, some of the internet's most reliable sites were rendered nearly unreachable by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Yahoo took the first hit on February 7, 2000. In the next few days, Buy.com, eBay, CNN, Amazon.com, ZDNet.com, E*Trade, and Excite were taken down by DDoS attacks. Though damage estimates vary widely, the FBI estimates that the companies suffered $1.7 billion in lost business and other damages.

2001

• Dmitry Sklyarov is arrested by FBI agents while visiting the United States for having cracked encryption on Adobe Acrobat e-book software, in violation of the United States' DMCA. This occured despite the fact that Russia, of which he is a citizen, does not honor this law as of 2001.

2002

• Operation Clambake, the war between Scientology and the Internet, unfolds.

2003

• Site Finder, the attempt by Verisign in 2003 to take control of all unregistered .com and .net domain names for their own purposes, is launched, and just as quickly scuttled after massive public outcry and official protect from groups such as ARIN and IANA.

2004

• In November, Marvel Comics sues the MMO City of Heroes and their parent companies, for allegedly allowing copyright infringement of their characters to occur. The case is settled and rejected by United States courts in December 2005 with no changes made to the City of Heroes game.

2005

• In October, the 2005 Sony CD copy protection scandal erupted, where it was discovered that Sony BMG Music Entertainment surreptitiously and possibly illegally distributed copy protection software that forced itself to install on computers playing their audio CDs. As a result, many Windows based computers belonging to consumers were left vulnerable to exploit and hacking.
• In November, it was revealed that the online video game World of Warcraft, with millions of subscribers, would be hackable due to the far-reaching corruption and invasiveness of Sony's copy protection scheme.
• On December 20th, the City of Heroes MMO's servers were nearly all hacked, by an undisclosed method. According to NCSoft representative CuppaJo, "Customer data and its security was not compromised in any way during the incident that occurred." However, this is not verifiable. Further such hacking events occurred in the days following, and again several months later, but these were never publically addressed or acknowledged by the either Cryptic Studios or NCSoft.,,,,

2006

• On May 3rd, a massive DDOS assault on Blue Security, an anti-spam company, is redirected by Blue Security staff to their Movable Type-hosted blog. The result is that the DDOS instead knocks out all access to over 1.8 million active blogs, including all ten million plus registered Livejournal accounts (which is owned by Movable Type's parent company). ,

• The MPAA in May was accused of hiring illegal hackers to fight torrent technology.

• In June, The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker website based in and operating from Sweden, is raided by Swedish police and SWAT teams, for allegedly violating United States, Swedish, and Europeon Union copyright law, despite the fact the listing indexes of torrent files is not actually providing illegal material. As of July 2006, the site remains online, operating from Denmark and no legal action has been filed against it or it's owners.

See also

• List of Internet topics

Major aspects and issues

• Internet democracy
• History of the Internet
• Net neutrality
• Privacy on the Internet

Functions

• E-mail
• File-sharing
• Instant messaging
• Internet fax
• Search engine
• Web browser

Underlying infrastructure

• Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
• Internet Service Provider (ISP)
• Web hosting
• World Wide Web (WWW)

Regulatory bodies

• Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
• Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)