Tech Time Warp of the Week: The ’90s TV Special That Profiled Hackers and Their Glorious Hair

Dan Farmer looks more like the keyboard player for some New Wave band than a corporate cybersecurity guru. But thanks to a little tool he created called SATAN—short for Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks—he was one of the leading security experts of the 1990s.

That’s why he was tapped for the first episode of Internet Cafe—a PBS TV show that chronicles the early rise of the internet from 1996 until 2002. The episode (see above) aims to provide the inside scoop of the internet’s emerging hacker subculture, airing not long after a high-profile defacement of the CIA and Justice Department websites. In addition to Farmer, it draws on interviews with hackers like Aleph One (aka Elias Levy), the founder of the defunct Bugtraq mailing list, and two members of the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow: White Knight and Reid Fleming.

Yes, some of it is rather quaint. For modern viewers, the most baffling moment is surely the “CyberBlast,” where viewers could actually download software using a “TV modem.” And then there’s the hair. But what’s most striking about the episode is that not much else has changed since then. The guests talk about how large corporations fail to protect the online data of their customer. They explain the importance of applying security updates. And they debate the pros and cons of disclosing software vulnerabilities. In other words, they argue about same things security researchers are still arguing about today.

Did Sony do enough to prevent the recent mega-theft of its data? Should the makers of Metasploit really be sharing the scariest security vulnerabilities—and the tools to exploit them—with the entire world? Is Anonymous a legitimate political group or, well, just a big joke?

Questions like that weren’t even new even back in 1996, when the first wave of hackers were already starting to retire. Towards the end of the show, White Knight and Fleming talk about what a thrill it was to be a hacker in the early 1980s, back when you couldn’t just download everything you needed to hack a corporate server. You had to come up with ways of breaking into systems on your own. They even argue that although hacking is still fun for the new generation coming up, it’s becoming less alluring as the number of new things you can discover on your own diminishes.

But new hackers will always replace the old. If systems are vulnerable, people will break into them, whether it’s for fun, profit, politics, or revenge. Just look at Sony. And now apply your security updates.