The first cyber criminals

'Cyber crime' sounds like a very new type of crime. In fact, it has been around since the 1970s - before the personal computer was invented, when computers far less powerful than today's games consoles filled entire rooms and were monitored by technicians.
The first cyber crimes were carried out across telephone lines, by a group of electronic enthusiasts known as 'phone phreakers'. Having studied the US telephone system, they realised that it used a series of musical tones to connect calls. They found they could imitate those tones, and steal free phone calls, by creating small musical devices called 'blue boxes'. One famous 'phreaker', John Draper, even discovered that using a whistle given away inside a cereal box could do the same job as a blue box.

Cyber crime centred on the telephone for many years, until the first computer-to-computer cyber crime took place in the 1980s. 'Hacking', as it has since been referred to, gained new public visibility after the popular 1984 film Wargames, in which a hacker breaks into a US military computer and saves the world. Many hackers later said this was their inspiration.

It was the arrival of the Internet that was eventually to make cyber crime a big issue. When millions of home and business computer users began to visit the Internet in the early to mid 1990s, banks became the target for hackers. With the rise of the Internet, credit cards became the tools of cyber criminals. This prompted credit card companies to consider ways they could make cards more secure.