Las primeras contraseñas
Un poco de historia nunca viene mal. En The World’s First Computer Password? It Was Useless Too hablan de los primeros ordenadores de tiempo compartido (ejecutaban los programas de varios usuarios, en lugar de un usuario cada vez, cuando le tocaba) y de la ‘necesidad’ de las primeras contraseñas:
It probably arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid-1960s, when researchers at the university built a massive time-sharing computer called CTSS. The punchline is that even then, passwords didn’t protect users as well as they could have. Technology changes. But, then again, it doesn’t.
Aunque en realidad en aquella época la seguridad no era una gran preocupación:
The irony is that the MIT researchers who pioneered the passwords didn’t really care much about security.
El primer robo de contraseñas documentado:
In the spring of 1962, Scherr was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He had been allotted four hours per week, but it wasn’t nearly enough time to run the detailed performance simulations he’d designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all of the passwords stored on the system.
“There was a way to request files to be printed offline by submitting a punched card,” he remembered in a pamphlet written last year to commemorate the invention of the CTSS. “Late one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing.”