What was the intrusion into the French information and communication network in the 1830s?
From government agencies, hospitals, schools, to technology companies, there have been numerous incidents of attacks on the networks of organizations. The beginning of such attacks is often thought of as ``recent'', and it is often thought that it began in the late 20th century when computers with built-in programs began to be distributed at the earliest. One of the earliest known incidents of network compromise. Journalist Tom Standage explains the incident that occurred in France.
The crooked timber of humanity
In the latter half of the 18th century, France invented a system for quickly transmitting information over long distances. In this method, multiple poles called 'brackets' were hung on the roof of the tower, and information was transmitted to distant towers using the direction of the brackets as a code. The speed of information transmission is faster than that of a mail carriage, and it is said that the total length of the information network reached 14,000 km in its heyday.
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In 1834, banker brothers François Blanc and Joseph Blanc devised a method of breaking into the semaphore network. The Blanc brothers were trading government bonds at an exchange in Bordeaux, but at that time it took several days by mail carriage to receive information on market movements from Paris to Bordeaux. Realizing that traders with faster access to information could make money by anticipating market movements, the Bran brothers implemented a covert method of communicating information through semaphore communications.
At that time, the characters used by the operator of the arm communication included a code called 'backspace', which meant 'ignore the previous character'. The Bran brothers made good use of the rule that ``the operator who received the backspace does not convey the previous character to the next tower'', and the two bribed the communication operator to ``show the market movement before the backspace. Please insert the characters.'
The Bran brothers, who received the message sent in this way, succeeded in making money without anyone knowing.
by Guilhem Vellut
However, in 1836, the operator who had taken the bribe fell ill and confided everything to a friend who had singled out to replace him. I'm sorry. However, at that time there was no law prohibiting the abuse of the network, so it seems that the two were acquitted.
``The semaphore telegraph seems hopelessly insecure to the modern eye, but the key weakness is the human flaw of the user,'' said Standage. The story of the Bran brothers is a reminder that there will always be people who will use any new invention with malicious intent, and this is human nature and the future. It's something that will never change,' he said.
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