The History of the Word "Cyber"

How we all dress in the future (apparently). Via Dreamlike Art.

The word “cyber” has a weird history. I could give you the modern version starting with the use of the term cyberpunk and of course William Gibson’s usage in 1982 with the term “cyberspace” in the short story “Burning Chrome” (and later fleshed out the concept more fully in the novel “Neuromancer”), but it actually starts before then with a term based on the Greek “kubernetes”. The term was cybernetics, which dealt with control systems and communications protocols between machines and human operators and first came into use in the 1940’s right after World War II. The actual first use of the cyberspace term was in the 1960’s and had nothing to do with computers and technology, but Gibson’s use in science fiction brought it to the forefront. There might be other paths this took, but the popular use seems to have been at least solidified if not derived from this creative reuse of wordplay by William Gibson.

The Porn Industry

As many of us old school folks know, it is the porn industry that has really caused the whole online industry to flourish. The first successful large-scale adoption of online payment systems via credit cards came from the porn industry. Streaming content and scaling up to meet demand - all pioneered by porn. Before porn took off, the idea of sending your credit card information via some type of web form to some random website was not only uncomfortable, it was considered downright dangerous. Security professionals discouraged it boldly and proudly. In hacker circles, we knew knew the drill - if it was a website in the late ‘90s at the beginning of the original triple-w era with this new “world wide web” we simply broke in, and if it had porn we downloaded it without paying. But as the Internet slowly began to evolve with web forums, DMs, and chats, “cybersex” became a thing.

The chat was between two people, and typically there would be one that was a male and another that at least pretended to be a female. One might say to the other “wanna cyber?” and they’d enter a private chat room and talk dirty to each other while self-fondling until climax. No video, no pictures, they’d have to type in everything. “I’m slowly taking off my bra….” and other shit like that. Yes, young folk, this was what your parents did online back in the day. Basically, “cyber” was shorthand for “cybersex”.

So in common parlance amongst infosec and hacker professionals that now have gray hair, the term cyber by itself meant someone jerking it to a text-filled computer screen while a some other person pretended to be their substitute teacher or supermodel female boss at work or whatever, via a text screen with wondrously colorful prose.

Cyberbunker

Speaking of porn-related activity, a number of porn sites were up and running at a facility located in the Netherlands called Cyberbunker. After version 1 was busted, a few years later version 2 came online in Germany. At various points both versions had extremely questionable content being hosted/stored on their servers. A rather tame example many of you might remember involved Pirate Bay - they eventually ended up at Cyberbunker version 2. Basically Cyberbunker was dark Web 1.0. If you want to know more about Cyberbunker, search on Netflix for the excellent documentary on it.

Cyberbunker was yet another variation on the cyber word - a darker but still interesting variation. The term cybersex did predate it, if I am recalling my awareness of the cyber timeline correctly. But I digress, more importantly this whole cybersex masturbatory trajectory did not lead to just Cyberbunker, it led of course to the U.S. Military.

The Military

Next in the popular evolution of the term cyber is Uncle Sam. The Theater of War, a phrase that dates back to the 19th century, is often divided up into realms by the powers that be into Land, Sea, and Air. Even Space is included in this at this point, largely due to the space race from the 1950s and 60s into the world of spy satellites. Now in swoops the Internet - itself largely a product of the cold war as a DARPA project to allow bomb makers to electronically share plans and other communications - and they couldn’t call it cyberspace like William Gibson because that sounded too familiar to the already-designated Space realm. So it was often referred to as just the Cyber realm. “Bob transferred to a new department, he’s even on a different floor in the Pentagon now.” “Oh really, what’s he doing.” “Cyber.” “Ahh.”

Of course no one in the military consulted myself or the thousands of other online nerds about the chat room jerkoff antics of the same name, so most of us found it hilarious. Despite my past and general paranoia I did end up working for a defense contractor and even had a security clearance, and many of the projects I worked on involved DoD and this Cyber realm, so I got use to hearing the term in this new context as I’d encounter it day in and day out - often coming from someone in a uniform looking all serious, or in some important-looking government-ish document.

Again, as the whole APT thing began to come into reality, it was nearly exclusively involving the Cyber realm and at first the military, but as businesses were transitioning pretty much every department and division to be online, there was an increasingly consistent attack pattern by the APT actors against non-military targets. It wasn’t discussed much in public as it made the victims look bad, but Operation Aurora and Google going public with it brought the whole thing into the open with a bunch of terms making their way into more normal Infosec circles such as APT and cyber. There were even those that thought the entire APT thing was complete bullshit and that cyber was some type of way for the military to get more money out of an ignorant Congress. Okay that last part is at least partially true but then again that’s what the military does for everything, right?

And Now…

Which brings us to the present. Infosec has taken on the term cyber and more or less embraced it - we often talk about cybersecurity, and it has bled over into popular culture as well with cyberpunk being a modern take on William Gibson’s original concepts.

And to think, all of this surrounding the word “cyber” - a term born out of text-based online sexual encounters. Which begs the question: “What did YOU do this week on Cyber Monday?”