60 Fun Facts About Cybersecurity

What is the fraud of sending messages posing as a trusted sender to trick people into revealing passwords called?

Phishing takes its 'ph' spelling from phreaking, the older hobby of hacking phone systems; the word was first recorded in AOHell, a 1995 AOL cracking toolkit.

Malware that encrypts a victim's files and demands payment for the key is called what?

Ransomware dates to the 1989 AIDS Trojan, which scrambled file names on victims' PCs and demanded $189 be mailed to a post-office box in Panama; its weak symmetric cipher was soon reversed.

The 'CIA triad' at the heart of information security stands for confidentiality, integrity and what?

Availability, the third leg of the CIA triad, means legitimate users can reach their data when they need it; the acronym has nothing to do with the US intelligence agency.

A software flaw exploited by attackers before the vendor even knows it exists is called what?

Zero-day counts the days the vendor has had to fix it, which at the moment of discovery is none.

In cybersecurity, a decoy system set up to attract attackers and study them is known as what?

A honeypot makes suspicion automatic: no legitimate user has a reason to touch it, so anything that does is an attacker.

Multi-factor authentication requires how many distinct types of evidence before granting access?

Multi-factor authentication demands two or more distinct factor types: something you know (a password), something you have (a phone or key) and something you are (a fingerprint).

Malware that disguises itself as a normal program to mislead users is named after what?

Trojan-horse malware is named after the hollow wooden horse of Greek myth that smuggled Greek soldiers inside the walls of Troy; the computing sense dates from the early 1970s.

Manipulating people psychologically into divulging information or taking unsafe actions is called what?

Social engineering attacks the person rather than the machine; its sub-genres include pretexting (an invented scenario), baiting (a tempting USB stick) and tailgating through a secure door.

Which networking term, borrowed from building construction, names a system that filters traffic between networks?

Firewall originally meant a wall that confines a fire within a row of buildings; the word jumped to networking in the 1980s.

A computer that is physically isolated from the internet and other unsecured networks is said to be what?

An air-gapped computer has no network connection at all, so data must move by hand on removable media; an infected USB stick is how Stuxnet crossed the gap into Iran's enrichment plant.

An analyst at which research firm named the 'never trust, always verify' model 'Zero Trust' in 2010?

Forrester analyst John Kindervag coined 'Zero Trust' in a 2010 report; the model gained ground as cloud and mobile use dissolved the old network perimeter.

What is generally considered the first computer worm, a 1971 program on ARPANET?

It printed 'I'M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN', and a program called Reaper was written to hunt it down, making Reaper the first antivirus.

The Morris worm of 2 November 1988 was written by a graduate student at which university?

Robert Tappan Morris was a Cornell graduate student who launched the worm from MIT to disguise its origin; his was the first felony conviction under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

What sentence did Robert Tappan Morris receive for releasing the 1988 internet worm?

Morris received three years' probation, 400 hours of community service and a $10,050 fine; the appeals court put the clean-up cost per site at anywhere from $200 to over $53,000.

The ILOVEYOU worm of May 2000 was written by a college dropout from which country?

Onel de Guzman, a computer-college dropout from Manila in the Philippines, had all charges dropped because the Philippines had no law against hacking at the time.

Which 1999 virus spread via infected Word documents emailed to a victim's first 50 contacts?

Melissa, released by David L. Smith on 26 March 1999, arrived as a Word attachment innocuously named list.doc and mailed itself to the first 50 addresses in each victim's Outlook address book.

Elk Cloner, an early 'in the wild' virus written by a 15-year-old around 1982, targeted which computer?

Rich Skrenta wrote Elk Cloner for the Apple II as a prank and spread it on game floppies; every 50th boot it displayed a short poem.

Brain, considered the first virus for the IBM PC, was written in 1986 by two brothers in which city?

Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi ran a computer shop in Lahore, Pakistan, and embedded their names, address and phone numbers in Brain's code; they were reportedly swamped with calls.

Stuxnet, uncovered in 2010, is believed to have destroyed nuclear centrifuges at which Iranian facility?

Stuxnet hijacked the Siemens controllers running Natanz's enrichment centrifuges and reportedly wrecked almost a fifth of Iran's centrifuges by spinning them outside their safe range.

The joint US-Israeli effort that reportedly built Stuxnet is known by what code name?

Operation Olympic Games was revealed by New York Times reporter David Sanger in 2012 as a programme begun under George W. Bush and expanded under Barack Obama.

The May 2017 WannaCry attack spread using EternalBlue, an exploit originally developed by which agency?

EternalBlue was built by the NSA and leaked by the Shadow Brokers in April 2017, a month before WannaCry; the US and Britain later blamed North Korea for the attack itself.

WannaCry was halted within hours when researcher Marcus Hutchins did what?

The malware checked whether an unregistered web address existed before running; once he bought it, new infections stopped.

Heartbleed, disclosed in April 2014, was a bug in which widely used cryptography library?

Heartbleed was a missing bounds check in OpenSSL's TLS heartbeat extension (CVE-2014-0160) that let anyone read up to 64 KB of a server's memory per request; it arrived with its own logo.

The 2017 Equifax breach exposed private records of roughly how many Americans?

An unpatched Apache Struts flaw let attackers in, and the US later indicted members of China's People's Liberation Army.

The 2020 supply-chain attack on US government agencies came through which SolarWinds product?

The attackers slipped a backdoor into updates of SolarWinds' Orion network-monitoring platform; fewer than 18,000 of its 33,000 customers installed the tainted build, and the SVR-linked group Cozy Bear was blamed.

Which group was identified by the FBI as responsible for the May 2021 Colonial Pipeline extortion attack?

The FBI named the DarkSide ransomware gang on 10 May 2021; Colonial paid 75 bitcoin, about $4.4 million, within hours, and panic buying then emptied filling stations across the Southeast.

The 2013 Yahoo breach, not disclosed until 2016, affected how many user accounts?

Yahoo revised the 2013 breach in October 2017 to all 3 billion accounts, three times the 1 billion first admitted; a separate 2014 intrusion hit 500 million, and Verizon cut its purchase price by $350 million.

The 'Guardians of Peace' hackers leaked Sony Pictures data in 2014 demanding it pull which film?

The Interview, a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco as a TV host and producer recruited to assassinate Kim Jong Un, was pulled from wide release before a limited Christmas Day opening in 2014.

Log4Shell, the critical December 2021 flaw, hit Log4j, a logging library for which language?

Log4j is the Apache logging library for Java; the flaw had lurked since a 2013 JNDI lookup feature, was reported by Alibaba Cloud's Chen Zhaojun, and got its 'Log4Shell' name from the LunaSec team.

NSO Group, developer of the Pegasus phone spyware, is based in which country?

NSO Group is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, and every foreign sale of Pegasus needs an export licence from the Israeli defence ministry; the US Commerce Department blacklisted the firm in November 2021.

The 2016 Mirai malware that took down Twitter and Netflix via DNS provider Dyn infected what?

Mirai scanned for internet-of-things devices such as IP cameras and DVRs left on factory-default passwords; its creators first used it to hit Minecraft servers and run a protection racket.

In February 2009 Microsoft offered what reward for information on Conficker's author?

Microsoft posted a $250,000 bounty on 12 February 2009 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Conficker's creators; the worm had already infected millions of Windows PCs via the MS08-067 flaw.

Kevin Mitnick, once the FBI's most-wanted hacker, was arrested in February 1995 in which city?

The FBI arrested Mitnick in his Raleigh, North Carolina apartment on 15 February 1995 after Tsutomu Shimomura helped track him down; Shimomura co-wrote Takedown about the chase, and Mitnick spent five years in prison.

John Draper's toy cereal-box whistle, source of his 'Captain Crunch' nickname, produced which tone?

The Cap'n Crunch whistle blew 2600 Hz, the tone AT&T's long-distance network used to signal an idle trunk line, so the whistle could seize a line and unlock free calls.

Which British agency had secretly developed an RSA equivalent four years before its 1977 publication?

At GCHQ, Clifford Cocks wrote down the RSA scheme in 1973, building on James Ellis's 'non-secret encryption'; it stayed classified until 1997, so Rivest, Shamir and Adleman got the credit and the name.

The Advanced Encryption Standard adopted by NIST in 2001 was originally called what?

Rijndael, a blend of its designers' names, was submitted by Belgian cryptographers Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen and beat Serpent and Twofish in the NIST competition; AES uses 128, 192 or 256-bit keys.

Which 1976 paper introduced public and private key pairs, letting strangers agree a secret over an open channel?

Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman's 'New Directions in Cryptography' (1976) introduced public-key cryptography; Ralph Merkle conceived the idea independently, and GCHQ's Malcolm Williamson had found the exchange in secret in 1974.

Which substitution cipher shifts each letter a fixed number of places down the alphabet?

The Caesar cipher is named for Julius Caesar, who shifted letters by three in private correspondence, as Suetonius recorded; its 13-place variant ROT13 is its best-known descendant.

Who first broke the German Enigma machine's message keys, in December 1932?

Marian Rejewski used permutation theory and French-supplied documents to reconstruct Enigma in December 1932; in July 1939 the Poles handed replicas and methods to British and French intelligence, weeks before the war began.

What was the first programmable electronic digital computer, used to break Lorenz ciphers at Bletchley Park?

Colossus, designed by Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers at Dollis Hill and run at Bletchley Park from February 1944, used about 1,600 valves to break the German Lorenz 'Tunny' teleprinter cipher.

CTSS, the first computer system to require a login password, debuted in 1961 at which institution?

CTSS was built at MIT's Computation Center under Fernando Corbató; its LOGIN command asked for a password, and in 1962 a PhD student simply printed the password file to steal extra machine time.

Who coined the term 'computer virus', which his student Fred Cohen then used in a 1984 paper?

Leonard Adleman, Cohen's doctoral adviser at USC, suggested the name 'virus' for Cohen's 1983 self-replicating experiment; Adleman is also the 'A' in RSA encryption.

In the 1970s the Soviets planted keyloggers in the US Embassy in Moscow, hidden inside what?

The Selectric bug hid inside the typewriter's frame and used magnetometers to sense the print ball's movement, radioing every keystroke; NSA's Project GUNMAN found the bugged IBM Selectric typewriters in 1984.

Which company coined 'bug bounty' in 1995 with a programme for its Navigator 2.0 beta?

Netscape's 'Bugs Bounty', announced in October 1995 for the Navigator 2.0 beta, paid cash and merchandise for reported flaws; the US government's first, 'Hack the Pentagon', came in 2016.

In which city was the first DEF CON hacker convention held in 1993?

Jeff Moss, then 18, organised the first DEF CON at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in 1993, originally planned as a farewell party for a hacker friend.

The hacktivist collective Anonymous, known for Guy Fawkes masks, originated in 2003 on which website?

Anonymous grew out of 4chan's /b/ board, where posts without a name default to 'Anonymous'; its best-known early campaign, 2008's Project Chanology, targeted the Church of Scientology.

What does the acronym CAPTCHA stand for?

CAPTCHA expands to Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart; Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon coined it in 2003, and von Ahn later founded reCAPTCHA and Duolingo.

GDPR fines for the worst breaches can reach €20 million or what share of a company's worldwide annual turnover, whichever is greater?

4% is the top tier; even failing to appoint an EU representative can cost €10 million or 2%.

CISA, the US cyber-infrastructure agency, sits within which federal department?

CISA is part of the Department of Homeland Security; it grew out of DHS's National Protection and Programs Directorate and was renamed by an act signed in November 2018.

In which month is Cybersecurity Awareness Month observed in the United States?

October has been Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the US since 2004, launched by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Cyber Security Alliance; Europe and Australia use the same month.

Who created the breach-checking site Have I Been Pwned in December 2013?

Troy Hunt, an Australian security researcher, launched Have I Been Pwned on 4 December 2013; the main catalyst was the Adobe breach of 153 million accounts two months earlier.

The Wi-Fi Alliance introduced WPA in 2003 to replace which badly broken wireless security standard?

WEP, whose name promised 'Wired Equivalent Privacy', ran RC4 with 24-bit initialisation vectors that repeated, and the 2001 Fluhrer–Mantin–Shamir attack recovered its keys; WPA's TKIP was the stopgap fix.

The Tor network's core technique, developed at the US Naval Research Lab, is called what?

Onion routing, invented at the US Naval Research Laboratory in the mid-1990s by Paul Syverson, Michael Reed and David Goldschlag, wraps traffic in nested encryption that each relay peels off one layer at a time.

SQL injection is sometimes nicknamed 'Bobby Tables' after a strip from which webcomic?

xkcd strip 327, 'Exploits of a Mom', has a mother naming her son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- and hoping the school has sanitised its database inputs.

In WarGames (1983), a teenager dials into a NORAD supercomputer known by which acronym?

WOPR, the War Operation Plan Response computer, is pronounced 'whopper'; it also answers to Joshua, and it learns futility by playing tic-tac-toe against itself.

Who created Mr. Robot, the USA Network series starring Rami Malek as hacker Elliot Alderson?

Sam Esmail's show was praised by security professionals for using real tools and realistic attacks rather than Hollywood typing.

In the 1995 film Hackers, Jonny Lee Miller's Dade Murphy was banned from computers at 11 under what handle?

Zero Cool had crashed 1,507 systems and caused a seven-point drop in the stock exchange; Angelina Jolie played his rival.

The 2018 Facebook data scandal that shut down Cambridge Analytica concerned harvesting user profiles for what kind of work?

Political consulting was the British firm's business; formerly SCL USA, it lost CEO Alexander Nix and closed the same year.

A network of compromised computers controlled remotely to send spam or launch attacks is called what?

A botnet ('robot network') is herded from a command-and-control server; Conficker enslaved millions of Windows PCs in 2008–09, and Mirai's infected cameras and routers peaked at about 600,000 in 2016.

Which December 2013 retail breach exposed data on up to 110 million customers?

Target's point-of-sale systems were seeded with card-skimming malware via a heating contractor's stolen credentials; 40 million card numbers and 70 million customer records were taken, and CEO Gregg Steinhafel resigned in May 2014.