Technical Adversary

For anyone who has a security clearance and doesn't believe the U.S. faces a cyber-espionage crisis, Colonel Steven Shirley has 102 stories to share with you.

That's the number of cases in which Shirley's team of Pentagon researchers discovered cyberspies breaching the networks of government agencies, defense contractors and other organizations with ties to the U.S. Department of Defense, gaining administrator-level access with the aim of stealing military secrets.

The Pentagon's forensics-focused Cyber Crime Center, where Shirley is executive director, found that between August 2007 and August 2009, 71 government agencies, contractors, universities and think tanks with connections to the U.S. military had been penetrated by foreign hackers, in some cases multiple times. In total, Shirley told Forbes, the center performed 116 investigations following spying breaches and found that in all but 14 of those cases the intruders had gained complete administrator-level access to the victim's network.

Foreign APTs running wild seems to be the norm.

The over-use of the term APT in the last few months is testimony to their success in the number of incidents of data theft that has been openly disclosed from sensitive agencies.