Back in May 2004, Shawn Carpenter, a computer intrusion expert at Sandia National Laboratories – which work on the USA's nuclear weapons programme – began investigating a cyber security breach.
He had seen similar attacks on defence giant Lockheed Martin, which controls Sandia. Whoever was behind them was good – grabbing what they wanted in moments and always leaving a backdoor open so they could return.
Carpenter used a technique called 'back-hacking' to pursue the attackers online, all the way through Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea where they stashed their stolen files to their source – Guangdong in southern China.
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