Titan Rain
loresecurityhacking
The US government's code name for a series of coordinated intrusions from 2003 onward into defence contractors, army installations and NASA - Lockheed Martin, Sandia, Redstone Arsenal - widely attributed in reporting to Chinese state-linked operators.
The human story is as instructive as the technical one. Sandia analyst Shawn Carpenter traced the intruders on his own initiative, shared findings with the Army and FBI, and was fired for it; he later won a jury award. The case set the pattern for two decades of industrial and defence espionage reporting, and it forced a shift in doctrine: perimeter defence assumes an attacker who leaves, while an operator who intends to stay for years requires detection, segmentation and hunting - the reasoning that eventually produced the modern security operations centre.
Also known as: 2003 intrusions, chinese apt, shawn carpenter