Moonlight Maze is the name of an FBI inquiry into a cyber attack on United States government networks that began in 1998.
On September 20, 1999, Newsweek printed a story on Moonlight Maze that was written by Gregory Vistica. It was titled "'We're in the middle of a cyberwar'," based on a quote from then-Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre. Bodmer, Kilger, Carpenter and Jones cite that the duration of the attack was well over two years and the adversary was likely able to collect a vast amount of critical information which was previously safeguarded and characterized the attack as an Advanced Persistent Threat. They explained that the ability to retain access, probe these systems and collect sensitive data demonstrated a level of expertise rarely seen at that time.
Federal Computer Week's Dan Verton described the Hamre quote earlier that year as pertaining to "Serbia's attacks against NATO's public World Wide Web pages".