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Was This the First Denial of Service Attack?

Posted by timothy on from the read-the-disclaimer-about-calling-first dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Way back in 1974, Dave Dennis, then aged 13, decided to try out the -ext- TUTOR command on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois, and see if he could cause all the terminals of other users to go offline. It worked. And he never got caught. Of course, the powers that be eventually caught on and fixed the -ext- command so terminals by default didn't automatically receive -ext-'s sent from other locations."

1 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Seems fitting by sys.stdout.write · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I think we should stop and give thanks to the author of the article for couching the story with "this is likely not the first DoS attack, but here's a neat story anyway."

    It's so refreshing to see Internet writers not making outlandish, unverifiable claims about things like this.

    So, props.