60 Fun Facts About Cybersecurity

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

The spelling nods to 'phreaking', the older hobby of hacking phone systems; the word first appeared in a 1995 AOL cracking toolkit.

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

The first documented example, the 1989 AIDS Trojan, was so badly designed that victims never actually needed to pay.

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

It has nothing to do with the US intelligence agency; the third leg means legitimate users can actually get at their data.

A vulnerability that is exploited before the software vendor knows it exists is called what?

The name counts the days the vendor has had to fix it, which at the moment of discovery is none.

A decoy system set up to attract and study attackers is known as what?

Anything that touches it is suspicious by definition, since no legitimate user has a reason to be there.

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

The classic factors are something you know, something you have and something you are, and a physical key to a lock counts as a possession factor centuries old.

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

The story of the hollow gift that let soldiers into Troy fit so well that the name has stuck for decades.

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

Sub-genres include pretexting (an invented scenario), baiting (a tempting USB stick) and tailgating through a secure door.

Which term borrowed from building construction describes a system that filters traffic between networks?

The original meaning was a wall that confines a fire within a row of buildings; it jumped to networking in the 1980s.

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

Data still has to move by hand on removable media, and an infected USB stick is exactly how Stuxnet crossed the gap.

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

John Kindervag's idea 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?

His father was an NSA cryptographer, and the case produced 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?

He also got 400 hours of community service, and the court of appeals put the clean-up cost per site at anywhere from $200 to $53,000.

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

Prosecutors dropped all charges against Onel de Guzman because the country had no law against hacking at the time.

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

David L. Smith released it on 26 March 1999; the infected attachment was innocuously named list.doc.

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

Rich Skrenta hid it on a game disk as a joke; 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?

The Alvi brothers embedded their names, address and phone numbers in the code, and were reportedly swamped with calls.

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

It targeted Siemens programmable logic controllers and reportedly wrecked almost a fifth of Iran's centrifuges by spinning them apart.

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

Neither government has ever officially admitted responsibility.

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

The Shadow Brokers leaked it a month before the attack, and Britain and the US later blamed North Korea for WannaCry 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?

A missing bounds check in the TLS heartbeat extension gave the bug its name, and it came 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?

Fewer than 18,000 of 33,000 customers installed the tainted update, 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 company paid 75 bitcoin, about $4.4 million, within hours; panic buying then emptied filling stations across the Southeast.

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

A separate 2014 intrusion hit another 500 million, and the disclosures knocked hundreds of millions off Verizon's purchase price.

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

The comedy starred Seth Rogen and James Franco as journalists recruited to assassinate Kim Jong Un.

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

It had gone unnoticed since 2013 and was first reported by a researcher at Alibaba Cloud; the name came from the LunaSec team.

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

Every foreign sale needs approval from the Israeli defence ministry, yet governments have used it against journalists and activists.

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

Its creators originally used it to attack Minecraft servers and run a protection racket; many infected cameras still had default passwords.

The Conficker worm, detected in November 2008, infected Windows machines in how many countries?

It combined a Windows flaw with dictionary attacks on admin passwords and was the biggest worm outbreak since SQL Slammer in 2003.

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

Tsutomu Shimomura helped track him down and co-wrote the book Takedown about the chase; Mitnick spent five years in prison.

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

That was the tone AT&T used to signal a free trunk line, so blowing the whistle could unlock free long-distance calls.

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

Clifford Cocks's 1973 work 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?

Two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, designed it; 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?

Ralph Merkle conceived the protocol independently, and GCHQ's Malcolm Williamson had it earlier in secret.

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

Its Roman namesake used a shift of three in private letters; today it survives mainly as ROT13.

Which Polish mathematician first broke the German Enigma machine's message keys around December 1932?

The Poles handed their techniques and 'Enigma doubles' to British and French intelligence in July 1939, weeks before the war began.

What was the world's first programmable digital electronic computer, built at Bletchley Park, called?

About 75% of the Bletchley staff were women; the site was also infiltrated by Soviet mole John Cairncross.

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

Its LOGIN command asked for a password, and a plain-text password file remains the classic thing an attacker hopes to find.

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

He is also the 'A' in RSA, making him responsible for one of the field's best-known defences and its most famous piece of vocabulary.

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

The 'selectric bug' detected the print head's rotation magnetically and transmitted every keystroke.

Which company launched the first bug bounty programme in 1995, for the beta of its Navigator 2.0 browser?

The US government did not follow until 'Hack the Pentagon' in 2016.

The DEF CON hacker convention has been held annually since 1993 in which city?

Founder Jeff Moss was 18 and organised the first one as a farewell party for a friend; contests now include lockpicking and Capture the Flag.

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

Its best-known early campaign, Project Chanology, targeted the Church of Scientology.

What does the acronym CAPTCHA stand for?

The term was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon; von Ahn later founded reCAPTCHA and Duolingo.

GDPR fines can reach €20 million or what share of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is greater?

Failing even to appoint an EU representative can cost €10 million or 2%.

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

It grew out of the National Protection and Programs Directorate and gained its current name in 2018.

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

Australia marks it in the same month, and it is the traditional time for corporate password-hygiene campaigns.

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

He says 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?

Its name promised 'Wired Equivalent Privacy', which turned out to be wildly optimistic.

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

Each relay peels off one layer of encryption, hence the vegetable metaphor and the .onion addresses.

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

The joke has a mother naming her son Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- and hoping the school has sanitised its inputs.

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

Pronounced 'whopper', it also answers to Joshua, and it learns futility by playing tic-tac-toe against itself.

In Mr. Robot, Rami Malek plays cybersecurity engineer and hacker Elliot Alderson. Who created the series?

The show was praised by security professionals for using real tools and realistic attacks rather than Hollywood typing.

In Hackers (1995), Jonny Lee Miller's character was banned from computers at 11 under what handle?

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

The Facebook data scandal that shut down Cambridge Analytica in 2018 concerned harvesting profiles for what?

The British firm, formerly SCL USA, lost its CEO Alexander Nix and closed the same year.

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

Mirai and Conficker each enslaved millions of machines this way.

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

Card numbers were skimmed from point-of-sale systems, and the company's security overhaul afterwards became a case study for retailers everywhere.