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short space of time. Mularski was a close confidant to several of his targets.

Now, because of the carelessness of a colleague who had left a file with a trace of the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance letterhead on a computer, he was threatened with exposure and the collapse of an immensely intricate operation.

This was also the FBI’s first major foray into cybercrime. Until now the US Postal Inspection Service, but above all the US Secret Service, had dominated cyber investigations. By 2004 it was clear that cyber- crime was one of the fastest growing sectors of organised criminal activity worldwide. More and more organisations, institutions and individuals were being hacked into. Credit cards were the biggest problem, because of the sheer volume being misused or stolen. But large companies were now victims of industrial espionage in which their commercial secrets were being stolen and sold on to competitors by some of the very hackers who were involved in credit-card fraud. Cisco Systems had allowed a Chinese competitor to steal and copy the plans for one of its most advanced servers – so not even supposedly computer-savvy corporations were immune.

The haphazard approach to network security, both in government and in private industry, was beginning to spook the White House, Congress and the Pentagon. Most government agencies and ministries were either unaware of their vulnerability or so overwhelmed by the number of attacks launched against them that they buried their heads in the sand, in the hope that the problem might just disappear.

However, that was not an option for the Pentagon. It was swamped trying to manage the fallout from Titan Rain, a series of sustained attacks on the Defense Department’s computer systems, originating in China and designed to gouge out all the classified secrets sitting in unwisely exposed files.

The big banks were still reeling from the so-called pvv (pin verifica- tion value) vulnerability that had cost Citibank and the Bank of America tens of millions in stolen cash during the Shadowcrew period, and although they had solved that problem, hundreds of other banks were still spewing out cash from their ATMs to carders.

In a word: chaos.

The implications were not hard to fathom. Before long, large amounts of taxpayers’ dollars would be diverted into the related