WHO INVENTED IT AND WHY?
The modern con game began with a Spanish prisoner. As far back as the 1870s, American businessmen began receiving letters from Cuba, Spain, and South America claiming to be from European military officers or aristocrats wrongly imprisoned in Spain. These men claimed to have heard of the American man from a mutual acquaintance, who will also have recommended an agent to mediate the transaction between the “prisoner” and the mark.
The prisoner has, sadly, a beautiful young daughter—his heir and only offspring—as well as a large sum of money that is inaccessible to the daughter, the agent, and the prisoner. The prisoner’s only wish is that some honest man will undertake to retrieve the money and bring the daughter and her fortune to the United States. In exchange, the man performing this service will receive one-third of the fortune and management of the rest in the name of the beautiful, young, and now rich, daughter (who, it is implied, will soon require a husband). The prisoner beseeches the victim to contact the agent, who will only need a small sum of money in order to claim the fortune and secure passage for it and the daughter to the United States.
So successful has this con been that it has been run with little variation for more than a century. E-mail has just made it easier. Every other scam on the Internet has its roots, more or less, in the tradition of the Spanish Prisoner and other less well-known cons.
Phishing, like any good con, relies on the essentially trusting nature of most people. Its roots lie in the earliest days of the Internet as we now know it, when America Online was still a thing that people used instead of just a footnote in the Wikipedia entry for “Good Ideas Poorly Executed.” Originally, phishing took the form of an instant message sent over the AOL network that appeared to be from an official source. Passwords or payment details would be requested, and the result was usually a hacked account or some minor credit card fraud. Inside the relatively closed architecture of AOL, phishing on the scale it is practiced now wasn’t really possible. It wasn’t until the populace at large began to migrate online that phishing really took off.
The concept of computer viruses and other self-replicating software was originated by the mathematician John von Neumann. Von Neumann will be familiar to science fiction nerds as the guy who first realized the human race would eventually be wiped out by self-replicating killer robots. He theorized that any sufficiently automated system could easily make a copy of itself in much the same way an organic virus does.
The first true computer virus appeared in 1971 on the military network known as ARPANET. Creeper, written by researcher Bob Thomas, was created only as an experiment, and was destroyed as quickly as it was built. ARPANET, along with its vulnerable architecture, would eventually become the Internet we all know and love.
The original infection vector for malicious software was by floppy disk. Which means, you know, you were kind of a software whore if you got a virus back in those days. You shouldn’t be inserting other people’s floppies into your drive slot unless you have protection. It wasn’t until the World Wide Web exploded that malware became big business. With the increase in connection speeds and web traffic and e-mail, the distribution and management of illicit software became simple.