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By SecureWorld News Team
Mon | May 21, 2018 | 8:11 AM PDT

They were a U.S. hacking group known as LOpht, and they were way before their time.

In 1998, when many Americans were still on their first "connected" computer and AOL dial-up was how most people accessed the internet, LOpht hacking group members were testifying before Congress about the dangers of the internet.

They warned that they could take it down, if they desired, and predicted it would become a bad neighborhood because of the opportunities that existed.

Here is the C-SPAN video from 20 years ago of their testimony on May 19, 1998: 

Also, the Washington Post published a fascinating report on the group's warnings and how they compare with where we are today. It's a really interesting read:

"The seven young men sitting before some of Capitol Hill’s most powerful lawmakers weren’t graduate students or junior analysts from some think tank. No, Space Rogue, Kingpin, Mudge and the others were hackers who had come from the mysterious environs of cyberspace to deliver a terrifying warning to the world.

Your computers, they told the panel of senators in May 1998, are not safe—not the software, not the hardware, not the networks that link them together. The companies that build these things don’t care, the hackers continued, and they have no reason to care because failure costs them nothing. And the federal government has neither the skill nor the will to do anything about it."

 
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