Operation Aurora
loresecurityhacking
The 2009 espionage campaign against Google and dozens of companies that dragged nation-state hacking into the open.
Disclosed by Google in a January 2010 blog post that stunned the industry, Aurora used an Internet Explorer zero-day to penetrate Google, Adobe, and reportedly more than twenty other firms, seeking source code and the accounts of human-rights activists. Google's response, threatening to leave the Chinese market, made a breach a matter of foreign policy for the first time. Corporate transparency about state-level intrusion dates from this moment.