1995
Dan Farmer demonstrates SATAN (Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks) security tool for the first time. The software officially releases on April 5, 1995 [1]
1996
Guillermo Gaede pleads guilty in Federal Court on charges of mail fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property. Formerly a software engineer at Intel’s Chandler, Arizona plant, Gaede stole proprietary 486 and Pentium specifications and transferred the data to video tape. He then offered the data to AMD who turned the data and Gaede in to authorities.
Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) announces a new processor family, the TMS320 Digital Signal Processing (DSP), which doubles recording time in digital telephone answering devices and adds full-duplex speakerphone capabilities.
1998
Ehud Tenebaum, a nineteen year old Israeli, also known as The Analyzer, is arrested in Israel. During heightened tensions in the Persian Gulf, hackers touched off a string of break-ins to unclassified Pentagon computers in order to steal software. Officials suspect Tenebaum of working in concert with American teens to break into Pentagon computers. US Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre calls it the most organized and systematic attack on US military systems to date. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls Tenebaum damn good … and very dangerous. The attacks exploited a well-known vulnerability in the Solaris operating system for which a patch had been available for months.
Sony releases the black and white diamond pattered Dual Shock controller for the PlayStation in Japan.
1999
Federal prosecutors publish a report stating that Kevin Mitnick has agreed to a plea bargain in the matter of the twenty-five count indictment leveled against him. The indictment includes fouteen counts of wire fraud and eight counts of illegal possession of computer files. Mitnick, a thirty-five year old Los Angeles resident has been in custody since his 1995 arrest in North Carolina. His agreement with prosecutors includes the term that he will be barred from using computers for three years following his release and he may not profit from his story. Mitnick is the first person ever to be convicted under a law against gaining access to an interstate computer for criminal purposes. Read more about Mitnick at ThinkQuest.
Jay Satiro, an eighteen year old high school dropout is charged with computer tampering after hacking into the internal computers of America Online and altering some programs. Jay pleads guilty and will be sentenced to one year in jail and five years without a home PC.
Mattel Inc. announces that it plans to acquire Purple Moon, a maker of CD-ROM computer games for pre-teen girls.
Bill Gates, states that the second edition of Windows 98 will be released during the fall of 1999.
2002
Registration begins for .aero domains, which will begin resolving on September 2.
2003
Apple Computer removes the original CRT-based iMac from its main online store, effectively discontinuing the product.
2004
Adobe releases Photoshop Album 2.0.1.
2008
peer to peer site LimeWire opens a legal Music store offering pay-per-track pricing
Microsoft puts out Vista SP1 early for people to download.
2009
The U.K. Government puts together a proposal to monitor and hold all social network traffic called the Interception Modernisation Programme. This would include all IM conversations.
Charlie Miller shows an exploit in Safari in where he got into a Macbook Air within seconds at the CanSecWest security conference.