NBC has released a 2014 slide from a secret NSA Threat Operations Center (NTOC) briefing—a map that shows the locations of "every single successful computer intrusion" by Chinese state-sponsored hackers over a five-year period. More than 600 US businesses and institutions were breached during that period.

The slide was provided to NBC by an unnamed "intelligence source," who said the briefing "highlighted China's interest in Google and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, and in air traffic control systems... [and] catalogued the documents and data Chinese government hackers have exfiltrated," the network reported.

The report suggests that the NSA has been tracking Chinese cyber-attacks for years and that its own network surveillance of China gives the agency the ability to correlate those attacks with specific sources. The briefing shown to NBC listed locations for the sources of each of the "exploitations and attacks," NBC reported.

The leak, coincidentally, comes as the leadership of the NSA and Department of Defense continues to lobby for the creation of a "cyber-deterrent"—a network attack capability that could be used to launch a massive and crippling computer and network attack against any adversary who launched an attack on US networks. In a speech before the Aspen Security Forum last week, NSA Director and US Cyber Command head Admiral Mike Rogers warned, "If we do nothing, then one of the potential unintended consequences of this could be, does this send a signal to other nation states, other groups, other actors that this kind of behavior is OK and that you can do this without generating any kind of response?"

The comments are in line with the recently updated Department of Defense cyber strategy, which seeks to put DOD at the forefront of defending the US "and its interests against cyberattacks of significant consequence." The posture of deterrence was one of the points in Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter's cyber strategy document, published in April:

The United States must be able to declare or display effective response capabilities to deter an adversary from initiating an attack; develop effective defensive capabilities to deny a potential attack from succeeding; and strengthen the overall resilience of U.S. systems to withstand a potential attack if it penetrates the United States’ defenses. In addition, the United States requires strong intelligence, forensics, and indications and warning capabilities to reduce anonymity in cyberspace and increase confidence in attribution.

The question remains as to whether the DOD or NSA are pressing the White House to approve launching some sort of response to the hack of the Office of Personnel Management against China, or whether building a cyber-deterrent itself would be the response. But attacks on government aren't the only thing that US Cybercom intends to respond to—there are sixteen private sector areas that have been deemed as having a national security impact, including financial services, communications providers, transportation companies, energy companies, and agriculture and food distribution.

Rogers said in his speech at Aspen that what the DOD's new cyber strategy lays out was that “we believe that the nation is going to be turning to us to help defend it in the midst of a potential crisis and as a result we will generate capabilities that we could potentially apply, if directed, against portions of those 16 segments.” He said that DOD is "not signing up" to protect all businesses, but that NSA and DOD want to be able to create partnerships with the private sector to help defend them.

The problem, he noted, is that the law currently prohibits sharing information between the NSA and many of these companies—and for the NSA to monitor their networks to defend them. “Using NSA resources to monitor and guard U.S. networks—that's not our mission,” Rogers said. “And it's against the law. But on the other hand I do want to create a partnership where we're able to share information with each other," where NSA can tell private sector companies "this is what you're going to see, this is how you can best structure your defense to defeat it.”