You can lodge yourself anywhere you want, monitor what you want, divert attempts at detection and so on. Senior Washington officials who participated in the exercise had little clue they were under widespread cyber attack. We found that within the Defense Department, we lacked the ability to integrate the picture well, and the rest of the government was not prepared at all to handle this. It was a fairly wrenching experience for us. By their nature, experts say, unauthorized electronic intrusions can be difficult to detect.
Hackers can disguise their probes.
They also can cover their tracks by bouncing through many Internet provider stations before zeroing in on their targets. Under current law, investigators need a court order to trace back beyond the most immediate Internet service provider. This helps explain why U.S. defense and law enforcement authorities had trouble in February making sense for days of the unusual pattern of suspicious intrusions that showed up on the screens here at the Air Force Computer Emergency Response Team. By the end of that first week, Pentagon officials discovered similar breaches at some Navy sites and concluded that a coordinated assault was underway. Pentagon leaders decided to mobilize in a way they never had against a cyber intrusion, setting up a special crisis cell on the Joint Staff for a search operation code-named Solar Sunrise.