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" The New York Times got hacked. It got hacked for months by a sophisticated system allegedly stemming from the Chinese military\u2014after the newspaper&amp;#039;s investigation into the nation&amp;#039;s prime minister&amp;#039;s shady business dealings\u2014and outsourced to hackers abroad as well as routed through American universities&amp;#039; computers. All of its employees&amp;#039; passwords were stolen\u2014not just those of reporters and editors. Some personal computers were overcome. In some sections, the report reads like a great spy novel: [The hackers] set up at least three back doors into users&amp;#039; machines that they used as a digital base camp. From there they snooped around The Times&amp;#039;s systems for at least two weeks before they identified the domain controller that contains user names and hashed, or scrambled, passwords for every Times employee. And so it fell on the Times&amp;#039; hired cybersecurity experts and deployed its IT team \u2014 the under-appreciated, self-acknowledged nerds of every office \u2014 to track and counter the barrage. Their efforts included allowing &amp;quot;hackers to spin a digital web for fourth months to identify every digital back door the hackers used.&amp;quot; All the while, of course, like any IT team, being castigated from within. &amp;quot;I would like to apologize to the NYT computer support folks I snapped at after they reset my password without warning,&amp;quot; tweeted reporter John Schwartz after the newspaper published its story. But it appears that the Times&amp;#039; IT team (again, with hired help) largely succeeded. (Though these things linger; ask the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which found out its printers and thermostats were still communicating with Chinese computers months after its besiegement.) And so the moral of the story is one that has become and will continue to be a common refrain: Nerds are today&amp;#039;s and our future&amp;#039;s security heroes. It&amp;#039;s a tough job! One that not only the Times but also the Pentagon needs more help with. This Sunday the Washington Post wrote that the U.S. Cyber Command is looking to hire 4,000 more people to its squad. But even that&amp;#039;s not enough, say cyber-security experts, and, most crucially, there&amp;#039;s a dearth of talent who can act as &amp;quot;hunters&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;tool builders,&amp;quot; operators who fend off attacks and rebuild defenses several times a day. In short, the Pentagon, too, needs more high-brainpowered nerds. It says it&amp;#039;s recruiting. But it&amp;#039;s also competing with banks, defense contractors, and power companies. Though, in the end, to us, it seems like these past few weeks our nation&amp;#039;s better tech minds have been busy devoting their smarts to haphazard Red-Bull-and-vodka-fueled hook-up-facilitating sites, naked-selfie (and naked-selfie stealing) tools, and porn-commandeered glorified-gif machines. Sure, if we have our way, the next Saving Private Ryan about America&amp;#039;s war heroes will be boring as all hell. But, hey\u2014it seems like the celibacy threat is getting neutralized in the meantime. First things first. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a17316/cyberwar-nerd-defenders-15043873/?click=news>