The earliest published attack on military research establishments was detected as far back as the late 1980s when West German hackers penetrated networked computers in California to steal secrets relating to the “Star Wars” program.
A fascinating account of this particular set of attacks is related in the 1989 book The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, by Clifford Stoll, a computer manager at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who stumbled across the activity when investigating a minor accounting discrepancy in the computer usage accounts.
Stoll discovered that the intrusion was coming from a university in West Germany across a satellite link. He set up a trap with enticing details of a fictional Star Wars contract, enabling the West German authorities to locate the hacker, a student called Markus Hess, who had been selling the stolen information to the Soviet KGB. Hess was tried and found guilty of espionage in 1990 and sent to prison.
The incident helped raised awareness across the intelligence and security communities of the potential for offensive attacks as well as the vulnerability of networked computers to compromise. It was a portent for future attacks that would materialize in years to come.