From 1996 through 1998, attackers conducted a sustained intrusion campaign against NASA, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, military contractors, civilian academic institutions, and other U.S. government agencies. Investigators said the operation involved tens of thousands of files, potentially including naval codes, missile-guidance information, military maps, troop configurations, hardware designs, encryption techniques, and Pentagon war-planning data. They estimated that a printout of the stolen material would have reached three times the 555-foot height of the Washington Monument, though that figure was an investigative estimate rather than a measured inventory.
The attackers exploited unpatched vulnerabilities and routed connections through compromised universities, libraries, and other institutions to obscure their origin. U.S. officials initially blamed Russia, but the source notes that early evidence was limited largely to a Russian IP address, making national attribution contested. By the end of 1999, a 40-person law-enforcement, military, and government task force was investigating the breach. Years later, researchers including Kaspersky’s Guerrero-Saade and Costin Raiu and King’s College London researchers Thomas Rid and Danny Moore linked code recovered from a 1998 proxy server to techniques later associated with Turla. That retrospective connection remains an attribution claim, while the breach itself is well established.
