They Came to Rob Star Wars

How Russian hackers used nine seconds of computing time to steal information about the Strategic Defense Initiative … in 1986

In computer-science time, the year 1986 seems like an almost impossibly distant past. The World Wide Web did not yet exist, computer users paid handsomely for clunky boxes whose RAM measured in a handful of megabytes and cellular phones used first-generation wireless networking.

But in terms of computer security, we haven’t come as far from 1986 as we would like to think.