History
The CCC was founded in Berlin on September 12, 1981 at a table which had previously belonged to the Kommune I in the rooms of the newspaper Die Tageszeitung by Wau Holland and others in anticipation of the prominent role that information technology would play in the way people live and communicate.
The CCC became world famous when they drew public attention to the security flaws of the German Bildschirmtext computer network by causing it to debit DM 134,000 in a Hamburg bank in favor of the club. The money was returned the next day in front of the press. Prior to the incident, the system provider had failed to react to proof of the security flaw provided by the CCC, claiming to the public that their system was safe. Bildschirmtext was the biggest commercially available online system targeted at the general public in its region at that time, run and heavily advertised by the German telecommunications agency (Deutsche Bundespost) which also strove to keep up-to-date alternatives out of the market.
In 1989, the CCC was peripherally involved in the first cyberespionage case to make international headlines. A group of German hackers led by Karl Koch, who was loosely affiliated with the CCC, was arrested for breaking into US government and corporate computers and selling operating-system source code to the Soviet KGB.
Several of the CCC's early exploits are documented in a paper, written by Digital Equipment Corporation's lead European Investigator of the CCC's activities in the 1980s and 1990s. These include the CCC protests against French nuclear tests and members of the CCC involved with the German Green Party.
The CCC is more widely known for its public demonstrations of security risks. In 1996, CCC members demonstrated an attack against Microsoft's ActiveX technology, changing personal data in a Quicken database. In April 1998, the CCC successfully demonstrated the cloning of a GSM customer card, breaking the COMP128 encryption algorithm used at that time by many GSM SIMs.
In 2001, the CCC celebrated its twentieth birthday with an interactive light installation dubbed Project Blinkenlights that turned the building Haus des Lehrers in Berlin into a giant computer screen. A follow up installation (dubbed "Arcade") at the Bibliothèque nationale de France was the world's biggest light installation ever.
In March 2008, the CCC acquired and published the fingerprints of German Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble. The magazine also included the fingerprint on a film that readers could use to fool fingerprint readers. This was done to protest the use of biometric data in German identity devices such as e-passports.
Later in October 2008, CCC's Project Blinkenlights went to Toronto, Canada with project Stereoscope.
Read more about this topic: Chaos Computer Club
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