Part 1: It Begins Preface With the newspapers full of large-scale data breaches, where each one was larger than the last, no-one ever thought it would be Tom McKinnon, the Chief Security Architect at the Ministry of Computing, that would go down as the person who would create the most devastating breach of all. Hack-a-day The security operations centre within the Ministry of Computing contained many screens showing traffic flows and security alerts. Its coloured coded traces had been designed for the human operators to detect major intrusions, and where green showed that all was good; amber defined a change; and where red identified the colour of danger. The analysts had perfectly tuned their eyes to the scrolling charts and text feeds, and could instantly see the seeds of attacks. They were the experts in finding not only a needle in a haystack, but also a pin-prick on the Moon. The place ran on normality - using signatures of well-known intrusions - and on abnormality