Nicholas Schmidle reports:
One day in the summer of 2003, Shawn Carpenter, a security analyst in New Mexico, went to Florida on a secret mission. Carpenter, then thirty-five, worked at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, on a cybersecurity team. At the time, Sandia was managed by the defense contractor Lockheed Martin. When hundreds of computers at Lockheed Martin’s office in Orlando suddenly started crashing, Carpenter and his team got on the next flight.
The team discovered that Lockheed Martin had been hacked, most likely by actors affiliated with the Chinese government.
And thus begins a story that is the stuff movies are made from. Leave yourself time to read it all, as this is not a short piece, but if you’re interested in hack-back, you’ll want to read it on The New Yorker.