French hackers contributed greatly to breaching several data of infamous organizations all over the world since history. The Creepers was known as an infamous program that used to act like a virus in 1971. It was the very first known case of a viral program that doesn’t harm cyber security but rather displays a message, “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can.”
Successful hacking has been performed in history to disarm vital organizations causing terror over the world.
Hacking Napoleon’s Telegraph
Napoleon’s mechanical arms of telegraph which looked a lot like a windmill and were used to send coded signals across France was hacked in 1834 by thieves. These thieves were seeking information on stock market.
This particular methods of intercepting signals to get coded messages were later used during the American Civil war where the Union and Confederate armies tapped each other’s telegraph lines. Later Confederate newspapers published the coded Union messages in order to crowdsource code-breaking.
A French Personnel Hacked the Nazi Government
In France very first hacking was performed by Rene Carmille in the Nazi-occupied nation. It was performed to save the lives of French Jews. Mr. Carmille was the Comptroller General of the Vichy French army. Mr. Carmille had information processing machines for census forms. The census form was deployed by the Nazi government to target Jews living in France.
Mr. Carmille requested the government to compile data from the census forms onto tabular cards for analysis. But Mr. Carmille and his group intentionally mishandled the punch cards to slow down the process of searching for French Jews. He did this by the methods of making which is reprogramming the punch card machines to ensure that they would never punch information.
However, Mr. Carmille was hunted down by the Nazi government and died in the concentration camp. His methods of hacking were an act of resistance for the French people.
The German Chaos Computer Club
In the late 1980s to early 1990 a group of hackers across Western Europe, North America, and Australia were considered to be underground hackers. These were tech savvy people who broke into library computers in order to learn rather than performing illegal activities. The computation technology was completely under control of strict governance and anybody who tried to breached were being punished heavily.
According to researcher Gabriella Coleman of McGill University, the government chocked out a plan to capture these hackers by establishing a decoy organization. Instead of beating them down they have recruited a young hacker named Jean-Bernard Condat who formed a olderst European hacker’s association, the German Chaos Computer Club to track and arrest the other hackers.
However, it has been argued that the government officials might have hired these arrested hackers to work for them. The government attempted to built a fake grass root hacker organization over years in order to shape the development of French hacker community. This kind of inclusion of hackers in the government’s space enhanced capacity of French intelligence agency. The hackers community working for govenrment’s intelligence agency then helped in building national security, privacy and surveillance efforts.
The french government’s deceptive attempt of hacking the hackers went into full effect to maintain national sovereignty.
From a historical perspective hacking started as a means of obtaining information in order to fulfill a vision. Sometimes it could have been to battle the Nazi government or sometimes to learn more from the strong grips of authoritarian government.
It only states that the historical hackers were no different than today’s highly tech savvy hackers.
