It seems that every few years, we are presented with another highly publicized example of wide-spread intrusion by a seemingly unstructured group of hackers. This story, reminiscent of both the Solar Sunrise and Moonlight Maze attacks, provides for good newspaper copy, but the actual facts leave little cause for concern beyond what we already know regarding the state of Internet security. Given that it is co-authored by an individual who notoriously made famed hacker Kevin Mitnick front-page material (securing book and film deals) lends even less credibility to the hype surrounding these events.

The reality is that there are thousands of systems on the Internet that have been compromised by unknown, and in many cases undiscovered, attackers. What we are seeing with the Stakkato case is simply one manifestation of compromised systems that has attracted additional attention due to the theft of proprietary material at Cisco and based on the fact that government and military systems were knowingly compromised.