The Titan Rain investigation highlights two important points. First, given political and bureaucratic limitations, it is extremely difficult to assign responsibility for cyber espionage. Conventional wisdom dictates that Internet-based technologies enable anonymity in cyberspace and that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to assign attribution to a cyber attack or espionage. This belief is based on the notion that cyber attackers and spies can effectively cloak their identity by launching their attack from a server in another country and masking their origin to the final target of the digital assault.

However, the work of Shawn Carpenter demonstrates that it is possible to trace a cyber assailant across the Internet to a point of origin. Carpenter, through his analysis, was able to track those responsible for the Titan Rain penetrations back to a router in Chinese province of Guangdong. Moreover, Carpenter was able to trace the point of origin one step further to a handful of workstations that connected to the Internet via the Guangdong router by installing a digital ?listening post? on the router. It is important to note that Carpenter was able to track the Titan Rain attackers across the Internet, through a number of bot networks in South Korea , Hong Kong , and Taiwan to what he believes is their origin. It, therefore, seems evident that anonymity in cyberspace is not assured in the face of the creative use of technology and patient analysis.