O’Reilly Network: Network Forensics: Tapping the Internet

“During the Gulf War, computer hackers in Europe broke into a
UNIX computer aboard a warship in the Persian Gulf. The hackers
thought they were being tremendously clever — and they were — but
they were also being watched.

“Just before penetrating the PACFLEETCOM computer and reading
the Navy’s email, the hackers hopped through a computer at Los
Alamos Laboratory. And unknown to the attackers, every packet in or
out of Los Alamos over the Laboratory’s Internet connection was
recorded and preserved for later analysis on magnetic tape.

“The incident in the Persian Gulf became a cause celebre in the
years that followed. Tsutomu Shimomura bragged about the incident
in his book Takedown. Many experts in the field of computer
security used the story as proof, of sorts, that the U.S. military
was asleep at the switch when it came to computer security…”

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