How Crime has Evolved in a Increasingly Digital World

The year is 1834, the telegraph is doing the impossible, transmitting data across vast distances, France's government builds a network of towers to relay messages across the country. Two brothers in Bordeaux are bond traders looking for an advantage over their local competition who are waiting on mail that takes days to arrive from Paris to update market data. The brothers, realizing the opportunity, bribed a government worker for one of the tower relays to hide stock market data in routine messages, passing them off as errors, and allowing them to get market information days before any of their fellow bond traders. Francois and Joseph Blanc committed the first technical cybercrime in history. Today, if cyber crime were a country they'd be the third largest economy, and with a total estimated cost of $9.5 Trillion USD in 2024, and is projected to reach $10.5 Trillion USD annually by 2025.

The first computer virus was a worm, a self-replicating piece of malware that spreads throughout a network without the need for a host program or someone to continuously activate it. Not all worms are harmful but not all are harmless. Worms search local networks for vulnerabilities and attempt to connect computers and operate independently as software. Bob Thomas created the first virus in 1971 called the Creeper Program as a security test to test the possibility of self-replicating programs. It wasn't designed to harm the systems it infected and would delete itself when it moved from hard drive to hard drive and displayed the message "I'M THE CREEPER. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN!". In 1974 a virus named The Rabbit was developed with malicious intent, it used it's self-replication to copy itself and degrade system performance until failure, the name was influenced by the programs speed of infection to computer crash.

Gaming on the internet brought us the first Trojan virus. In 1975 John Walker developed a popular animal guessing game where the program would attempt to guess which animal the user was thinking of in a game of 20 Questions. The game was called ANIMAL, but the program John Walker made called PERVADE installed itself along with the game, examined the infected computers directories available to the user and then installed a copy of ANIMAL into every directory available. Though ultimately not created for the express purpose of doing harm, no malicious intent, ANIMAL and PERVADE are the first examples of a Trojan Virus, a virus hiding inside another program the user wanted to download.

What began with people exploring exploits never stopped, it's only become more prevalent today. In the 1970's personal computers were brand new and expensive. They began as hobbyist kits like the Altair 8800, if you wanted anything with some computing power, you needed a mainframe which were used by large organizations like banks, educational institutions etc. By the late 1970s companies were offering fully assembled "home-computers" like the Apple II and Commodore PET, making personal computers far more accessible and launching a tidal wave over the following decades as the digital world increasingly envelopes our lives with modern smart phones, smart TVs, smart fridges, toasters with WIFI access, and anything else than can have a microcomputer put into it. Work, socializing, entertainment, education, critical services, more and more of our lives are moving to digital spaces. This makes a lot of things more accessible to the user, but it also makes sensitive, vital data, more available to criminals who will exploit any weakness in cyber security.

Cyber crime in the 1970s until now hasn't changed in it's foundation, but the methods employed in creating, destroying, ransoming, and spying on data have evolved in sophistication over the decades since the Blanc brother, Bob Thomas, and John Walker made their respective contributions to the history of cyber crime. With the adoption of AI cyber crime has become automated, AI powered phishing, deepfakes etc, along with techniques where hackers use legitimate system tools to evade detection has created an environment of daily data breaches of organizations that are trusted to keep their users data safe and secure, and individuals are flooded with spam from criminals attempting to gain access to your data to profit off of it.

Cybercrime as a service has become a thriving industry with online marketplaces where leaked data and ready to use malicious tools are easily accessible to criminals. The national security threat assessment for 2025-2026 regarding cybercrime singles out Ransomware attacks as the top cybercrime threat facing Canada and the increase in cyber attacks from foreign states who are increasingly becoming more bold in their attempts to target critical infrastructure.

The more our lives transition to a digital space, and the more devices we rely on to get through our day to day lives, the more vulnerable we become to cyber crime. If we have work, personal items, things we created on a laptop without routine backups, and become a victim of a ransomware attack by a bad actor, you can be forced into an impossible choice; lose what you had, or pay the price. Keeping your devices and data safe are vital in 2026 and into the future as we continue to build the digital world.

References:

Morgan, S. (2024, November 18). Cybercrime to cost the world $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Cybercrime Magazine. https://cybersecurityventures.com/hackerpocalypse-cybercrime-report-2016/

Canada, C. S. E. (2024, October 30). National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026. Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. https://www.cyber.gc.ca/en/guidance/national-cyber-threat-assessment-2025-2026

Arctic Wolf. (2024, April 19). History of cybercrime. https://arcticwolf.com/resources/blog/decade-of-cybercrime/