How we got here
The need for a technologically advanced set of computer security tools in the world today is not something that just popped up overnight. There weren’t a couple of college students who decided to hone their coding skills out of boredom between classes. No – the idea of security for computing technology is a concept that evolved in parallel with the technologies themselves.
If you wanted to, you could probably find some historical parchment with ancient hieroglyphics or other language painted on it telling stories of the abacus. It might detail how someone, somewhere, managed to trick the ancient Mesopotamians by some art of visual misdirection toward the accountants and then move a bead or two on the abacus. We’ll let the historians determine and tell those stories. We are going to focus on the security of modern computing.
During the 1960s and 1970s, computer security was mostly security in the traditional sense of physical protection –...
