The story of the first hacker could be a 21st-century tale. It includes a zero-day exploit, patent trolling, a live demo, egos, and industrial espionage. New Scientist has identified its candidate for the world’s first hacker. The hacker found a security hole in Marconi’s wireless telegraph technology and used it to publicly show the inventor up.
The first hacker
New Scientist’s first hacker was, Nevil Maskelyne. Nevil Maskelyne was a stage magician who disrupted a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph in 1903. He disrupted the demo by wirelessly sending insults in Morse code through Marconi confidential channels. Visitors to the Bach Seat should be sophisticated enough to know the risks of running a live demo, but 110+ years ago, they didn’t.
According to the author, the first hack occurred at the Royal Institution in London. As Marconi associate, John A. Fleming (inventor of the vacuum tube) was preparing the Marconi equipment for a public demo of the long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi when something unplanned happened.
Scientific hooliganism
Before the demonstration was scheduled to begin, the demo gear began to receive a message. The unplanned message included a poem that accused Marconi of “diddling the public.” Then it started in with some Shakespeare.
Arthur Blok, Fleming’s assistant, figured that someone else was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theater. The new signal was strong enough to interfere with Marconi’s equipment. Unfortunately for Marconi and Fleming, Nevil Maskelyne figured out the hack first. Mr. Maskelyne’s hack proved that Marconi’s gear was insecure. It also proved it was likely that they could eavesdrop on supposedly private messages too.
In response, Fleming fired posted a complaint in The Times. In the paper he dubbed the hack “scientific hooliganism.” He asked the newspaper’s readers to help him find the hacker.
However, Maskelyne, whose family had made a fortune making “spend-a-penny” locks in pay toilets outed himself four days later. He justified his actions on the grounds that he revealed the security holes for the public good. (Sound familiar?)
Maskelyne who taught himself wireless technology had a great deal of experience with wireless. According to the article, he would use Morse code in “mind-reading” magic tricks to secretly communicate with a partner. And in 1900, Maskelyn sent wireless messages between a ground station and a balloon 10 miles away. But, his ambitions were frustrated by Marconi’s broad patents. The overly broad patent left him embittered towards the Italian. Maskelyne would soon find a way to get back at Marconi. It turned out that the Eastern Telegraph Company, worried that Marconi’s wireless would kill their global wired communications business hired Maskelyne as a spy.
Revealed security holes for the public good
Maskelyne built a 50-meter radio mast near the Marconi Wireless offices. From these offices Marconi was beaming wireless messages to vessels as part of its highly successful “secure” ship-to-shore messaging business. From there, Maskelyne could easily eavesdrop on the “confidential channel” Marconi wireless messages.
Maskelyne gleefully revealed the lack of security by writing in the journal The Electrician in November 1902,
I received Marconi messages with a 25-foot collecting circuit [aerial] raised on a scaffold pole. When eventually the mast was erected the problem was not interception but how to deal with the enormous excess of energy.
To further publicize his results and perhaps extract some revenge on Marconi, Maskelyne staged his Royal Institution poetry broadcast.
The New Scientist concludes that Maskelyne’s name had been forgotten but now he is in the history books as the world’s patron saint of hackers.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.