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Within the U.S. military, Titan Rain is raising alarms. A November 2003 government alert obtained by TIME details what a source close to the investigation says was an early indication of Titan Rain's ability to cause widespread havoc. Hundreds of Defense Department computer systems had been penetrated by an insidious program known as a "trojan," the alert warned. "These compromises ... allow an unknown adversary not only control over the DOD hosts, but also the capability to use the DOD hosts in malicious activity. The potential also exists for the perpetrator to potentially shut down each host." The attacks were...
Even if official Washington is not certain, Carpenter and other network-security analysts believe that the attacks are Chinese government spying. "It's a hard thing to prove," says a network-intrusion-detection analyst at a major U.S. defense contractor who has been studying Titan Rain since 2003, "but this has been going on so long and it's so well organized that the whole thing is state sponsored, I think." When it comes to advancing their military by stealing data, "the Chinese are more aggressive" than anyone else, David Szady, head of the FBI's counterintelligence unit, told TIME...
...Titan Rain presents a severe test for the patchwork of agencies digging into the problem. Both the cybercrime and counterintelligence divisions of the FBI are investigating, the law-enforcement source tells TIME. But while the FBI has a solid track record cajoling foreign governments into cooperating in catching garden-variety hackers, the source says that China is not cooperating with the U.S. on Titan Rain. The FBI would need high-level diplomatic and Department of Justice authorization to do what Carpenter did in sneaking into foreign computers. The military would have more flexibility in hacking back against the Chinese, says...
...gathering cyberinfo, some agencies have in the past turned a blind eye to free-lancers--or even encouraged them--to do the job. After he hooked up with the FBI, Carpenter was assured by the agents assigned to him that he had done important and justified work in tracking Titan Rain attackers. Within a couple of weeks, FBI agents asked him to stop sleuthing while they got more authorization, but they still showered him with praise over the next four months as he fed them technical analyses of what he had found earlier. "This could very well impact national security...
...initially, by the FBI. Although the U.S. Attorney declined to pursue charges against him, Carpenter feels betrayed. "It's just ridiculous. I was tracking real bad guys," he says. "But they are so afraid of taking risks that they wasted all this time investigating me instead of going after Titan Rain." Worse, he adds, they never asked for the passwords and other tools that could enable them to pick up the investigative trail at the Guangdong router...