Here’s How the First Cyber Attack Went Down

One hundred years before the first computer

It’s widely acknowledged that the internet is a marvelous, wondrous place with hardly any downsides to speak of.

Yet every day this veritable digital paradise is hit with cyber attacks. These range from malicious email attachments to coordinated assaults on the data infrastructure of entire nation states.

It’s hard to believe something as beloved and universally beneficial as the world wide web could be harboring such insidiousness.

But cyber attacks predate our modern internet. They predate the term cyber attack.

In fact, the first cyber attack happened 100 years before computers even existed.

Telecommunications, in their most rudimentary form, have been around since humans started rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. Smoke signals are a handy way to transmit information over long distances at essentially the speed of light — or in the time it took someone to notice the smoke in the sky.

Some time after that, we had homing pigeons with notes tied to their legs and polished shields to reflect flashes of sunlight and signal over long distances. But all of these methods were often haphazard or used infrequently during times of war or under…