Summarized by the Alliance for Fort Eisenhower
Published May 9, 2025
The story of U.S. Cyber Command doesn’t start in 2009 when it was formally established as a sub–unified command in 2009. The story really starts in the late 1980s when the first documented cases of cyber-espionage occurred during the early days of the internet.
In 1986, a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory named Clifford Stoll uncovered a Soviet-backed hacking campaign targeting U.S military and research networks — a case he famously documented in The Cuckoo’s Egg. Two years later, the Morris Worm swept through the internet, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the Defense Department began to reckon with the strategic implications of the emerging threat environment.