"Grain of Sands" : A New Chinese Methodology

The "Grain of Sands" is a methodology used to derive intelligence from disparate pieces of data no matter how seemingly trivial, as each data point might just be the final little piece that completes the puzzle. That involves parsing through often low-level information to find a few nuggets.

According to a story by the Financial Times on Friday, U.S. officials have confirmed that the White House e-mail archives were attacked several times in recent months. The report says the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, a new unit established in 2007 to tackle cyber security, detected the attacks on the White House, and also traced the attacks back to servers based in China.

It was revealed this week that the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain were hacked over the summer. Now, a report has surfaced that the White House has suffered multiple attacks in recent months as well.