History of the Internet
The Internet started as an idea to build a redundant, self healing network using the only existing network we had in the 1950-60s, long distance lines. The idea was to mesh these lines to build a communications network that could withstand a nuclear bomb detonated on the lower continental United States and still allow communications from key strategic locations. The Internet is self healing, blow one part of it up and it will find a path around the damage to still allow communications. This network was called ARPANET.
ARPANET grows up to become the Internet
In the 1980’s was when ARPANET grew up and turned into the Internet, TCP/IP protocols were the default routing protocols, DNS was established, and in 1987 Cisco shipped its first router.
In the 1990’s we saw our first onramps to the Internet, Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL’s “You’ve got mail”. The 90’s also gave us Google, Netflix (just DVDs) and Match.com and the Internet browsers war between Netscape and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
In 2000 we called the Internet the “Information Highway” because it was mostly a lot of information on static web pages. Between 2000 and 2008 we saw the largest Internet software development period, literally transitioning from static pages to an interactive and dynamic experience almost overnight. This was dubbed Web 2.0. This is also the birth period of Napster, Facebook, WordPress, YouTube and Reddit.
This period we also where we saw the first cracks in web security, Google even released a White paper titled “Web 2.0: The New Face of the Web…and why your protection may need a face-lift”. The race to get software to the market such as Internet Browsers, Adobe flash, Adobe Reader, and Java to enhance your Internet experience led to gaping holes in security. With so many vulnerabilities hacker started writing exploits kits to take advantage of them all. See my exploits kits blog for more information and learn how exploit kits are used on the Internet.