History of Hacking Timeline

The hacker magazine 2600 began regular publication just as TAP was putting out its final issue. Its editor, 'Emmanuel Goldstein' (real name Eric Corley), took his handle from the leader of the resistance in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Today, copies are sold at most large retail bookstores.

Image source: 2600: The Hacker Quarterly

Sirius launched MONDO 2000, a major '90s tech-lifestyle magazine, in Berkeley, California, blending cyberculture, hacking, and counterculture themes.

Image source: Mondo 2000

An international coalition of hackers — including Cult of the Dead Cow, 2600's staff, Phrack's staff, L0pht, and the Chaos Computer Club — issued a joint statement (CRD 990107 - Hackers on planet earth against infowar) condemning the Legion of the Underground's declaration of war.

In July, Cult of the Dead Cow released Back Orifice 2000, a remote administration tool, at DEF CON, sparking debate over dual-use hacking tools.

Image source: Back Orifice 2000

Bulgarian virus writer Dark Avenger wrote 1260, the first known use of polymorphic code, designed to circumvent the pattern recognition used by antivirus software and nowadays also intrusion detection systems.

The US General Accounting Office reported that hackers attempted to break into Defense Department computer files some 250,000 times in 1995 alone, with a success rate of about 65% and doubling annually.

Image source: United States Government Accountability Office

In the wake of Microsoft's Windows 98 release, 1999 became a banner year for security and hacking, as software security went mainstream amid widespread vulnerabilities and exploits.

Hackers defaced the US Embassy in China's website and placed racist, anti-government slogans on the embassy site in retaliation for the 1998 US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Image source: Embassy of the United States, Beijing

Nimda.H, a variant of the worm discovered in November 2001, became the biggest malware outbreak in terms of machines infected, though it caused little monetary damage.

The 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist attempted to steal US$951 million from Bangladesh Bank using fraudulent SWIFT transfers, succeeding in getting $101 million — although some of this was later recovered.

Image source: Bangladesh Bank robbery

WikiLeaks published documents from the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak, with the leaks ongoing until April 2017. The breach had involved hackers compromising servers and passing leaked information onward.

Image source: 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak

Hackers stole international personal user data from Uber, including phone numbers, email addresses, and names of 57 million people, plus 600,000 driver's license numbers. The company concealed the breach rather than disclosing it promptly.

Image source: Joe Sullivan (Internet security expert)

The 2016 Dyn cyberattack used a botnet of IoT devices infected with Mirai, conducted by hacktivist groups SpainSquad, Anonymous, and New World Hackers, reportedly in retaliation for Ecuador rescinding Internet access to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at their London embassy.

Image source: DDoS attacks on Dyn

Yahoo! reported massive data breaches affecting more than 1 billion users, among the largest breaches ever disclosed at the time.

Image source: Yahoo data breaches

From May to July 2017, attackers exploited a vulnerability in Equifax's systems, ultimately exposing sensitive personal and financial data of roughly 147 million people.

The June 2017 Petya cyberattack spread rapidly worldwide, encrypting hard drives and disrupting corporations, ports, and government systems, particularly in Ukraine.

Image source: Petya (malware family)

In September 2017, consulting giant Deloitte suffered a breach in which attackers accessed its global email server, exposing confidential client and internal information.

Image source: Deloitte

A hack was conducted to support the 2019 Hong Kong protests during the Hong Kong police's siege of Polytechnic University, targeting government-linked systems.

Image source: 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests

In July 2020, attackers used social engineering against Twitter employees to take over high-profile accounts, including Barack Obama and Elon Musk, promoting a bitcoin doubling scam that netted over $100,000.

Image source: 2020 Twitter account hijacking

The website of Belarusian company 'BrestTorgTeknika' was defaced by a hacker using the pseudonym 'Queen Elsa', in support of the 2020–21 Belarusian protests. The site read 'Get Iced Iced already' and 'Free Belarus, revolution of our times', alluding to a slogan from the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

Image source: 2020–2021 Belarusian protests

State security officials and American corporate security officers feared attacks were a prelude to hacking of election infrastructure during the 2020 elections, similar to incidents during the 2016 US elections and other Russian cyberattacks; no evidence emerged that election infrastructure was targeted in 2020.

Image source: Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections

A computer technician in Yangon determined that a series of hacks were denial-of-service attacks, and that the group's motive was to protest the 2021 Myanmar coup.

Image source: 2021 Myanmar coup d'état

Personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users was posted online. Facebook claimed the information was from a 2019 breach and had already taken mitigation measures, but declined to say whether it had notified affected users.

Image source: Facebook

The Ivanti Pulse Connect Secure data breach involved unauthorized access to networks of high-value targets since at least June 2020 via CVE-2021-22893, across US defense, government, and financial organizations.

Image source: Ivanti

In September and October 2021, the Epik data breach exposed more than 180 gigabytes of internal data from the domain registrar known for hosting far-right websites, released by the collective Anonymous.

Image source: 2021 Epik data breach

An anonymous 4chan user reportedly hacked and leaked the source code of Twitch, as well as information on how much the streaming service had paid to nearly 2.4 million streamers since August 2019.

Image source: Twitch (service)

As of May 2026, the Bybit exchange hack remains the largest breach in the cryptocurrency sector by dollar value, with stolen funds attributed to state-sponsored actors.