The first cyberattack took place in France ... two centuries ago!

France created a rudimentary national telegraph system in the 1790s , thanks to the work of engineer Claude Chappe.In 1834, a pair of corrupt bankers named Francois and Joseph Blanc launched the history's first cyberattack, corrupting the data that traversed this primitive visual telecommunications system to gain an advantage in the bond market.

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This Telegraph system consisted of a chain of towers, each of which had a system of movable wooden arms at the top. The different configurations of these arms corresponded to letters, numbers and other signs.each tower adjusted the arms to coincide with the configuration of an adjacent tower, observed through a telescope, which made the sequences of signs replicate throughout the network.Thanks to this ingenious mechanism, the menus sajes could cross the French geography much faster.The network was reserved for government use, but in 1834 two bankers, Francois and Joseph Blanc, devised a way to use it for their own purposes.

the first cyberattack to gain an advantage in the bond market

The Blanc brothers exchanged government bonds in the city of Bordeaux, where information on market movements was delayed several days from Paris.Investors could obtain the information more quickly, using messengers on horseback and pigeons, but The Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line to obtain a greater benefit than their competitors, starring in the first cyberattack in history.

To do this, they bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors in government messages that were sent through the network.The telegraph coding system included a "backspace" symbol that indicated the Transcriber that ignores the previous character. The addition of a spurious character that indicated the direction of the market movement of the previous day, followed by a backward movement, meant that the text of the message was not taken into account for delivery at the end of the line. But this additional sign could be seen by another complication: a telegraph operator who watched the tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then transmitted the information to the Blanc.

Code of letters and symbols created by Claude Chappe for his telegraph system visual.

The scam was discovered in 1836, when this sick operator and revealed the secret to a friend, to replace him. The Blanc brothers were brought before the judge, although they could not be convicted because there was no law against the misuse of data networks. Therefore, this action of the Blanc brothers in the French network is described as the first cyberattack in history.

social networks from 2000 years ago

This anecdote has been rescued in The Economist by writer and journalist Tom Standage, who has extensive experience in this type of story; his 1998 book The Victorian Internet raised a sharp look at the parallels between the telegraph bubble and the internet bubble in the late 1990s; his 2006 essay portrait of the predecessors of the moral panic about videogames (as happened before with the waltz and the novel); He has also written about the great conversation on the Facebook of the seventeenth century (the cafes); and his 2013 book, The Writing on the Wall, places the beginning of social networks 2000 years ago (“of the papyrus letters that Roman statesmen exchanged throughout the Empire until the emergence of printed treaties of the Reformation and pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions) ".

According to Standage, these comparisons, perhaps too daring, "offer us teachings that we can apply to the digital world of our days .The first is that we must avoid complacency. Cyber ​​attacks, as happened with Yahoo, they often go unnoticed for many years and it is possible that many (if not most) are never detected.Malwares like WannaCry make headlines because their effects are very visible, but it gives an inaccurate picture of the scale of the cyber security problem. Most attackers do not announce their presence ».

the human link is the weakest

«Secondly, regardless of technology, security is something like a chain and humans are always the weakest link.The French telegraph system looks hopelessly insecure to modern eyes, with its telegraph towers in sight, but its key weakness was human error, something that remains true today. Focus on security as a purely technological challenge neglects an important part of the problem: it also depends on establishing the appropriate social and economic incentives, ”he adds.

«Finally-concludes-, the attacks on the network are not only prior to modern electronic networks: they are as old as the networks themselves. The history of the Blanc brothers is a reminder that , with any new invention, people will always find a way to make malicious use of it. This is a timeless aspect of human nature, and it is not something that technology can or should hope to solve.”

Source: "The crooked timber of humanity"