9781422284858

some of the world’s brightest, most technologically adept people. As soon as that troubling signal was discovered in 2008 by an NSA mon- itor, the nation’s top cyber spy hunters got to work. They learned that the malware had been analyzed a few months earlier by a comput- er expert in Finland, who had dubbed it “Agent.btz.” The attack had infected the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, which the De- partment of Defense uses to transmit classified information. It was also inside the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, which sends super-secret material to U.S. officials wherever they are stationed throughout the world.

Soldiers often work with computers, gathering data, writing reports, and communicating with people back home or in the field. In 2008, hackers used that access to attack military computers.

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