Moonlight Maze was a 1999 US government investigation into a massive data breach of classified information. It started in 1996 and affected NASA, the Pentagon, military contractors, civilian academics, the DOE, and numerous other American government agencies. By the end of 1999, the Moonlight Maze task force was composed of forty specialists from law enforcement, military, and government. The investigators claimed that if all the information stolen was printed out and stacked, it would be three times the height of the Washington Monument, which is tall. The Russian government was blamed for the attacks, although there was initially little hard evidence to back up the US accusations besides a Russian IP address that was traced to the hack. Moonlight Maze represents one of the first widely known cyber espionage campaigns in world history. It was even classified as an Advanced Persistent Threat (a very serious designation for stealthy computer network threat actors, typically a nation state or state-sponsored group) after two years of constant assault. Although Moonlight Maze was regarded as an isolated attack for many years, unrelated investigations revealed that the threat actor involved in the attack continued to be active and employ similar methods until as recently as 2016. Methods of attack The hack began with the hackers building "back doors" through which they could re-enter the infiltrated systems at will and steal further data; they also left behind tools that reroute specific network traffic through Russia. Everything they exploited during the attacks came from publicly available resources, not their own creation. In most cases, the exploits were discovered by system administrators with the intention of informing others of the vulnerabilities present in their own systems, but were instead manipulated for malicious purposes. The hackers found success since software manufacturers and maintainers were not vigilant about making sure there were no flaws in their systems. They would leave known vulnerabilities unpatched for long periods of time, sometimes as long as six months to a year, neglecting any security patch cycles. This was because prior to Moonlight Maze, no-one was aware of the damage that could be done through cyber attacks since the internet was still relatively new. As a result, they were extremely vulnerable and not very difficult to infiltrate, resulting in one of the largest data breaches of classified information in history. In order to conceal their location and throw off investigators, the hackers relayed their connection