Freaks Of The Wireless: The Story Of The First Wireless Hack

uh so thank you for coming to my presentation on the first Wireless hack uh we're going to go cover the Rivalry between a great magician Neville masculin and a famous inventor gomo Marone these events took place between 1900 and 1903 at the Advent of radio communication radio technology is still with us today Wi-Fi Bluetooth satellite mobile phones and the wireless technology developed during this time set the team for the modern world Marcone was an Italian Irish inventor who became known as the father of radio he grew up in Italy where he was educated as a child he was an introvert with few friends but there was something commanding about his personality at the age of 20 Marone read

an obit of Hinrich Herz who proved the existence of radio waves Marone saw the potential for this communication technology and started developing his own system [Music] he developed the technology in the family home in Italy and he tested it in the kitchen and in the garden and in 1896 he came to England and uh to demonstrate the technology and filed patents to protect the technology within a year he had been granted the patents and Marone founded his his private company with investment that was arranged by his cousin Henry Jameson Davis of the Jameson Whiskey Empire as he's building up his company he's starting to set up signal stations and hire technicians and engineers and building up the infrastructure um that

would ultimately make him successful in 1899 became a key year for Marone he demonstrated the technology publicly at the America's Cup yacht race and this would be where he'd be providing updates of the race in real time to the news crews back on Shore and this qualifies as the first sporting broadcast and having built the key elements of his private company Marone was no longer seen as the introverted young boy and he was then Mr Marone the Wireless Systems at this time were built from a few main elements a transmitter a receiver a Mory and a printer at this point the systems weren't tuned so they broadcast in a wide range of frequencies which was a

functional problem unless she happened to be the only Wireless operator Marone have had rival and that rival was Neville masculine who is best known as a magician in 1900 Neville was 38 12 years older than Marone he was in the family business of magic uh where his father his wife his brother sister Sons and Daughters would all work Neville was a reserve man he spoke of himself infrequently yet he was personal and had a lot of friends and acquaintances the Egyptian Hall in Picadilly which was England's home of mystery was where the family business was operated and this is where Neville performed the wireless hack of 1903 at the Royal Institution this is also where his

Workshop was where he developed the Illusions and created inventions with his father and developed his Wireless technology Neville was a prominent magician and some of the Illusions he created are still used to this day levitation seems to have really taken off he was also the president of the magic circle which is an organization his father founded did he wrote books about magic and many of the principles of manipulation he describes are very similar to Robert chini's principles of influence which become the basis of model modern social engineering the most famous invention was one his father created which was the paid toilet locks and this is where the phrase spend the penny comes from you might say Neville was born to take the

Pierce but Neville spoke of the mon monotony of an magician's life and this drove him to other Pursuits and his ventions and in 1900 he went on an expedition with John Mackenzie bacon and using a camera he invented filmed an eclipse and this is the oldest known film of an astronomical event that exists we continue his experiments of bacon in hot air bloing and one of these experiments was a demonstration of a wireless device he created this was a demonstration of surface to a transmissions and very likely the first of its kind this was observed by many notable people of the day and there was a clear military application for this technology Neville pained his system and his device was did

not infringe on marone's invention and he had a unique system and this led him to start experimenting with Colonel josier who was the Secretary of Lloyds Lloyd's owned the signal stations around the world that did the ship to shore Communications using flag semore there was a clear application for wireless technology the experiments were moderately successful and they both appro approached Marone to sell an exclusive license for for the signal stations and Neville's technology but Marcone was only interested in the license and Neville was cut out of the deal josier proceeded with Marone without Neville or his technology and this contract in conjunction with the Marone company infrastructure and paintings position Marone is the deao provider of Wireless

telegraphy shortly after the Lloyd steel Marcone would return to the America's Cup and this time he had a rival lead the forest who is another wireless Pioneer in the US their systems were untuned meaning that they would interfere with each other so they agreed a solution they would each have a 5 minute slot and they would alternate whose turn it was this went about as well as You' expect they ended up jamming each other to the point where no one could transmit anything this frustrated the forest to the point where he threw his radio out off the side of the boat but it highlighted the the lack of tuning and the problem of mutual interference was a real one that needed

to be solved shortly after the race Marcone goes up to Canada to perform some more experiments before returning to England these experiments were only known to Marone and his engineers at the time these experiments were the first transatlantic Wireless Transmissions they were heralded as a success in the Press but they weren't universally applauded cable telegraphy companies doubted that this had even occurred and they even started deriding Marone publicly marone's error is that there was no independent observation of the event and this was a lesson that Marcy learned from Marcy had two issues that he needed to address with his technology the problem of mutual interference and the problem of secrecy and Marone had an answer to both and that answer was

sintony sintony essentially meant tuning a transmitter and the receiver to the same frequency Marone claimed that this solved both the problem of mutual interference and the problem of secrecy is with hindsight that we can see this never going to be the case but so sure was Marone that he issued a

challenge Marone put a challenge to named individuals to insep messages the conditions were stringent and prohibitive but there was a clear challenge in place the challenge was to bypass a security mechanism for which a fee would be paid the fee would be £100 which might get you a point in London but inflation adjusted that's about £10,000 today but these are the basic elements of a bug bounty in 1901 1902 Marone set out to test this ciny system during a cruise to Russia and then onto the Mediterranean Marcone's childhood friend Luigi salari had secured the use of the Italian roow yacht the Carlo Alberto to perform these experiments the yacht was equipped with the receiving apparatus so

messages could be received Transmissions would be sent from Marcone's Flagship station in puw in Cornwall Maroney stations were often referred to as Thunder factories due to the high amount of power that was required to send messages over distance learning the lessons from the transatlantic transmission Mar only started involving prominent figures in his experiments he traveled to kronstad near St Petersburg testing the syonic system on the way when he arrived he gave a demonstration to Zar Nicholas II and King Emanuel III salari reported the success of sintony and testing in a comprehensive report that he publicly published Marcone and Solari then returned to England before embarking on the second leg of the cruise to the Mediterranean but the second leg would

have an unexpected Observer Neville traveled to to PO kerno to test his wireless system with the Eastern Telegraph company and this was just 18 M away from Marone station in POI but as soon as Neville turned on his system he started receiving messages and poy which were meant to be secure Marcone traveled to the Mediterranean and arranged to send King Edward iith and King Emanuel III telegrams malcone was not aware that there was someon Eve dropping on the messages the telegrams were sent and Marone achieved the Des ired outcome and salari published his report and it very quickly received a response Neville responded and published messages that have been sent from puu that salari had not mentioned in his

report he also gave evidence of a counter measure paulu had deployed without marone's knowledge a second transmission was sent to stop people in the local vicinity from receiving the messages that were sent from poit but never was able to decode them Marcone being unaware assumed that the operator in POI didn't know mors code and smashed up his equipment in the fit of rage Solari stops him they rebuilt the receiver but Neville's evidence was dismissed out of hand and Marcone rep Marcone's Representatives called him a and a forger and this led to an interesting exchange now it might be a little bit of slight hand to call this the first hacker pseudonym but this is probably

the first hacker that used a pseudonym for trolling so malcone again returns to Canada to demonstrate transatlantic transmission this time the message is from President Roosevelt to King

Edwards Marcone while being interviewed about the presidential telegram mentions a Carlo Alberto incident in Pro in passing he states that messages were intercepted and wheels back the claims of secrecy made by salari this frustrates Neville who demands an apology Marcone remains silent so masculine pens the satire of marone's challenge or bug Bounty under the name vindex which translates to Avenger it parades the time frames the unreasonable conditions but it goes further and implies that the Atlantic transmission didn't happen he is implying that Marone is a l and a forger there's outrage about the challenge and many prominent figures calling it absurd and ridiculous but the whole thing was fairly humorous and this All Leads up to the

incident of the Royal Institution the famous hack John Ambrose Fleming gave a lecture where there was a demonstration of marone's system Marone continues to reassert the claim that tuning or synony means that messages cannot be incepted or interfered with and the events will play out like this Marone would transmit messages and poy these would be relayed by chelsford to the Royal Institution in London John Ambrose Fleming will read out the messages Marone sent during the lecture nille knew about this lecture and saw it as the only opportunity he had to test marone's claims so he sets out information gathering he sent people to inspect the site and determine what was happening and when it was happening

to test Marcone's claim he used an untune transmitter that should not interfere with the demonstration if the claims of syntony and security are correct we also knew that he had to get Fleming to disclose the attack so the messages he sent had to be calibrated to get his attention and evoke a response he also arranged for monitoring between uh POI and the Royal Institution um from the poth kerno site he previously used and he also arranged for people to be there in site but this planning made it a social engineering attack as much as as a technical attack and if we Define social engineering as any act that influences a person to take an act

that may or may not be in their best interests then the criteria certainly met so it's worth noting when Neville performed his attack he was just 300 meters down the road from the Royal Institution so he would have seen the comings and goings and the setup of this but on the day Marone sends messages from POI to the Royal Institution there is a response and replies which Fleming is due to read out and those messages are monitored by por Kono on Neville's request so Fleming starts the lecture reads out the messages from Marone and 5 minutes before it's due to close Neville sends his transmission and interferes with the lecture and he sends a message

which over and over is rats which is deliberately designed to aoke a response from Fleming Fleming doesn't notice but his assistant and subsequently Neville sends passages from Henry V and The Merchant of Venice from Shakespeare which are coded messages for Fleming but don't have time to quite go into that but in one incident he's able to refute both maron's claims about security the messages could not be tapped and the messages could not be interfered with with devices that were not similarly attuned every Claim about the efficacy of sintony was now challenged so Fleming is told about this after the fact and he complains to Marone about the interference he talks about a darly attempt to jam them and

how as a Ruff inly act and he suspects Neville but he can't prove it so after a few days of deliberation they go public seeking confirmation of the attack they would know who it was in short node order Neville claimed responsibility immediately after so F Fleming complains in the Press of the monkeyish pranks the scientific hooliganism makes intimations of violence towards Neville a fire exchange of letters is publicized across several newspapers a Neville outclasses Fleming he dissects his arguments highlights his inconsistencies and Savages his reputation and in a Victorian mic drop moment he concludes the exchange by saying I must decline sir to prolong a discussion where I'm confronted with such a hopeless tangle of

self-contradiction Fleming's reputations in tatters and he's sacked by Marcone because he's no longer a credible scientific figure so if nille was the proof of concept the exploitation in the world and possibly the first denial of service attack occurred at the 1903 Americas Cup this is the first confir the final confirmation that the Marcone syonic system was flawed and this is a replay of the 1901 America's Cup and we have le De Forest and Marone again demonstrating their systems but this time they were both tuned so according to Marone they should have been secure but n third party starts transmitting abuse persistently for days on end this stops both Marcone and DeForest from sending updates about the

race this is another failure for both of them on a side note Marone had started patent infringement proceedings against the forest earlier in the year following this race the forest comes to England he buys Neville's patents and uses this to get around marone's pattern claims he also hires Neville as a consultant who he'd work with with the forest for years to come so what went wrong Marcone and Fleming only tested that the system worked they didn't seek any independent verification that their system could be interfered with and they only tested it on Marone systems and not other systems that are around at the time they could have looked at the events that happened and derived some

lessons learned and the number of days that they had between the incident and their response means they had no response plan in place but ultimately all of this why was Marone successful well Marcone had the clarity of vision to drive his engineers and his organization forward to his ultimate Vision he used The credibility and reputation of others in a very Macky aelan sense and discarded people who are no longer useful once he burnt their reputation he created a business model that adapted to adversity so every time something went wrong he would be able to respond to that and that's kind of a antifragile in a very nen Talib kind of way he aggressively protected his patent

technology in the secrecy of his inventions and he secured strategic contracts early on which made him the deao standard moving forward that concludes the story of the first Wireless [Applause] hack any question questions Service as well uh first wiress I'm aware of yeah I haven't been able to find an earlier

example you mention in the talk that um it was sort of taken up by Kings of two kings up on there King of England king of Italy yeah yeah and do you think that the technology would have advanced move forward if it hadn't had the military capabilities uh well the military was certainly first interested in that technology but there were commercial um implications to it as well in terms of having a more flexible response for merchant ships and things like that so cable telegraphy were also interested in that technology because they would have ships laying cables for cable telegraphy as well and that's where Neville goes to test down at forth kerno specifically for that um and an interesting little side

note as well the Eastern Telegraph company and the Marone company L later combine and form cable and

wireless any other

questions no that's it then thank you