Slideshow


Titan Rain

Hacks
against the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies stretching back to 2003
were codenamed Titan Rain by investigators. The attacks, which breached
hundreds of networks, including Departments of State, Energy and Homeland
Security, were coordinated from Chinese computers, investigators found.

Joint Strike Fighter hack

The
Department of Defense’s costliest weapons program ever was allegedly no match
for hackers as spies broke into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike
Fighter (JSF) project in 2007. Details continue to be scarce to this day but
former U.S. officials claim the attacks can be traced back to China, a claim
China’s Foreign Ministry immediately refuted.

Unisys/DHS Hack

A
congressional investigation was launched after hackers compromised a number of
Homeland Security computers and transferred sensitive data to several Chinese
language Web sites. The investigation deemed that Unisys, a government
contractor that had been hired to secure the department’s systems, was
responsible for the intrusions.


Moonlight Maze

Starting in 1998,
U.S. government officials began noticing a pattern of probes into various
government networks, including the Pentagon, NASA, universities, research
institutions and the Department of Energy. Evidently, hackers – believed to be
located in Russia – had compromised these networks and left backdoors through
which they could secretly slip at a later time. The targets of these intrusions
were mostly unclassified but sensitive information such as military hardware
design plans, maps of military bases, and troop arrangements.

Gary McKinnon

For more than a year between February
of 2001 and March of 2002, a British national, Gary McKinnon, was allegedly able
to hack into nearly 100 United States military and NASA computers.

Morris worm

Even before
the Internet was “the Internet,” it was a breeding ground for worms that could
spread between loosely protected and networked machines. One of the first of
its kind, the now famous Morris worm, spread across the world over ARPANET, a
progenitor to the modern Internet designed by what was then the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) for the Department of Defense.