The French semaphore system hack of 200 years ago

Many say that the world’s first cyber attack happened in 1988, when Robert Morris, a 20-something graduate student at Cornell, inadvertently set loose a computer worm that quickly clogged up large sections of the internet. The semaphore network was reserved for government use, but in 1834, two brothers, François and Joseph Blanc, devised a way to hack into the system for their personal gain. The brothers bribed a telegraph operator in the city of Tours, to whom news about the stock market was delivered by an accomplice in Paris.

Source: www.amusingplanet.com