An unnamed woman’s identity was weaponized to strip classified data from Ohio’s air defenses, a vulnerability hidden within a wider campaign of state-sponsored espionage.
The vulnerability of the nation's power and communication grids was laid bare by a series of intrusions that the military's highest leaders were told they could neither detect nor attribute.
Invisible incursions into private and state systems defined the new battlefield in a 2000 briefing that remained unclassified as the Global Information Grid expanded.
National security gaps left critical systems vulnerable to computer intrusions while agencies struggled to share data across different mandates and levels of secrecy.
National sovereignty was at risk as the Department of Defense debated whether proactive counter-intrusions during peacetime constituted an illegal escalation of force.