Kevin Mitnick popularized social engineering in the 90s and properly documented it starting 2001. 30 years back, you could have broken into so many systems this

Kevin Mitnick popularized social engineering in the 90s and properly documented it starting 2001. 30 years back, you could have broken into so many systems this way. Just call someone, claim to be their boss, ask for the password. Https was only really widespread about a decade ago. It's trivial to encrypt literally every minor chat message today, but I also wonder at what era it would have been too computationally expensive. It's possible logins weren't even encrypted. Symmetric key encryption was well known into the 70s, but how widespread was the use? I remember in the 90s, they'd tell us to use PGP for everything and the US gov allegedly demanded a back door for it. You could probably find an unprotected hard drive somewhere and figure out file contents from the plaintext. As for cyber warfare, they probably don't have a clue what our systems run on. 2013 had plenty of exploits. Most have been handled by 2024 and it's done by layers upon layers of security. You don't just hack into systems nowadays. Social engineering and spearphishing is the easiest vector, and even that has layers of protection. Cold war era scientists might have been more thorough though. They did creative stuff like The Great Seal bug, but the thing is we know about every idea that has ever been thought of in the 70s by now. But it reminds me of the X-Com games, where a team defeats a group with superior technology attacks one with inferior tech. They beat the invaders, they reverse engineer the technology, and they use it to make even better ones. I'd say the fundamentals don't matter much, but they were just immersed in being creative with all their restrictions.