when did the need for computer tampering laws become apparent
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act The original 1984 bill was enacted in response to concern that computer-related crimes might go unpunished. The House Committee Report to the original computer crime bill characterized the 1983 techno-thriller film WarGames—in which a young Matthew Broderick breaks into a U.S. military supercomputer programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war and unwittingly almost starts World War III—as “a realistic representation of the automatic dialing and access capabilities of the personal computer.”[2]
Antivirus software Although the roots of the computer virus date back as early as 1949, when the Hungarian scientist John von Neumann published the "Theory of self-reproducing automata",[3] the first known computer virus appeared in 1971 and was dubbed the "Creeper virus".[4] This computer virus infected Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) PDP-10 mainframe computers running the TENEX operating system.[5][6]