Windows 95 -- Microsoft comes of age

Prior to Windows 95, things were fairly quiet, but this big release put the company on the map and on the radar of hackers. The company’s huge embrace of the Internet using pre-Web technologies exposed Microsoft programs like Internet Explorer and ActiveX to security risk. In 1998, a product manager for Microsoft Windows NT's security team acknowledged the security pains. "Essentially, Windows 95 and 98 were designed to provide security features tailored to the consumer marketplace," said Microsoft's Karan Khanna. "But at the design point, they were not designed to be resistant to all forms and intensities of attack." Khanna was responding to a program dubbed "Back Orifice" (a pun on Microsoft's BackOffice server-side application suite) that gave an attacker the ability to remotely control a computer. The Cult of the Dead Cow hacker group said it was trying to pressure Microsoft into improving the security of its operating system.