How China’s Patriotic ‘Honkers’ Became the Nation’s Elite Cyberspies
In the summer of 2005, Tan Dailin was a 20-year-old grad student at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering when he came to the attention of the People’s Liberation Army of China. Tan was part of a burgeoning hacker community known as the Honkers—teens and twentysomethings in late-’90s and early-’00s China who formed groups like the Green Army and Evil Octal and launched patriotic cyberattacks against Western targets they deemed disrespectful to China. The attacks were low-sophistication—