Shawn Carpenter Case Study

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Shawn Carpenter, an employee of Sandia National Laboratories has identified and located the initiator of the Titan Rain attack. He has discovered very sensitive materials, such as detailed descriptions of NASA propulsion systems, software for the management of combat helicopters and many others. Within a fortnight, Carpenter has recorded 23,000 malicious activities on the network. Their behaviour has been described as highly organized. According to Bodmer et al., (2012), the malware code has been created for several years and number of tools were used, from simple one to highly sophisticated.

Reveron, (2012) states, that after the attack, other countries like New Zealand, France, or Germany admitted that they were attacked by China, too. However, China denied all charges and argued that they are victim of Titan Rain attack as well.

Lockheed Martin and Sandia National Laboratories

The Sandia National Laboratories is controlled by the parent company, Lockeed Martin from 1993 (Lockheed Martin, 2016). These two Department of Energy research and development laboratories are leaders in U. S. Sandia claims to be an expert in nuclear weapon systems, defence & assessments systems, energy & climate systems and …show more content…

At Sandia, Carpenter’s job position was the network security analyst. His daily tasks involved retrieving lost passwords, files and other sensitive information in case of security breach against his employee. In 2003, he investigated security breach at Lockheed Martin, and just few months later he was investigating almost the same attack at Sandia. He was surprised that attacks were just alike breaches at Redstone Martin and NASA as well. The fact, that the attacks were following the same pattern caught his eye and he knew that behind those breaches must be a single group. Attacks were precise, accurate, insatiable and completed within one