Last month Heckman, a researcher for the non-profit IT research corporation MITRE, gave a talk with fellow MITRE researcher Frank Stech at Purdue’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security and described a cyber war game scenario MITRE played out internally in which she and Stech tried an unorthodox defensive strategy: Instead of trying to purge a Red Team of hackers from a Blue Team’s network they were defending, Heckman and Stech let the attackers linger inside, watched them, and fed them confusing misinformation. Although both Heckman or Stech declined to talk to me about their lecture, the presentation (video here) suggests an alternative approach to what the cybersecurity industry calls “advanced persistent threat” (APT) hackers–state-sponsored, sophisticated intruders who have penetrated hundreds of corporations and government agencies in recent years and siphoned vast amounts of information.