Many of today's cybersecurity luminaries—including former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos—have roots in a firm called @stake. The following excerpt, from Joseph Menn's upcoming Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World, traces the company's lasting influence.

Two years before 9/11, an intelligence contractor I will call Rodriguez was in Beijing when NATO forces in the disintegrating state of Yugoslavia dropped five US bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three. Washington rapidly apologized for what it said had been a mistake in targeting, but the Chinese were furious. In a nationally televised address, then Chinese vice president Hu Jintao condemned the bombing as “barbaric” and criminal. Tens of thousands of protestors flowed into the streets, throwing rocks and pressing up against the gates of the American embassy in Beijing and consulates in other cities.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. Buy on Amazon. Excerpted from PublicAffairs

The US needed to know what the angry crowds would do next, but the embassy staffers were trapped inside their buildings. Rodriguez, working in China as a private citizen, could still move around. He checked with a friend on the China desk of the CIA and asked how he could help. The analyst told Rodriguez to go find out what was happening and then get to an internet café to see if he could file a report from there. Once inside an internet café, Rodriguez called again for advice on transmitting something without it getting caught in China’s dragnet on international communications. The analyst asked for the street address of the café. When Rodriguez told him exactly where he was, the analyst laughed. “No problem, you don’t have to send anything,” he explained. “Back Orifice is on all of those machines.” To signal where he wanted Rodriguez to sit, he remotely ejected the CD tray from one machine. Then he read everything Rodriguez wrote as he typed out the best on-the-ground reporting from Beijing. Rodriguez erased what he had typed and walked out, leaving no record of the writing.

Some hackers felt great fulfillment in government service. Serving the government in the wake of the terror attacks gave them a chance to fit in when they hadn’t before, united by a common cause. But for too many of this cohort, what started with moral clarity ended in the realization that morality can fall apart when governments battle governments. That was the case with a cDc Ninja Strike Force member I will call Stevens. As Al-Qaeda gained notoriety and recruits from the destruction, the US Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, stepped up the hiring of American hackers like Stevens. Some operatives installed keyloggers in internet cafés in Iraq, allowing supervisors to see when a target signed in to monitored email accounts. Then the squad would track the target physically as he left and kill him.

After 9/11, the military flew Stevens to another country and assigned him to do everything geek, from setting up servers to breaking into the phones of captured terrorism suspects. Though he was a tech specialist, the small teams were close, and members would substitute for each other when needed. Sometimes things went wrong, and decisions made on the ground called for him to do things he had not been trained in or prepared for mentally. “We did bad things to people,” he said years later, still dealing with the trauma.

As the American government ramped up its spying efforts after 9/11, it needed to discover new vulnerabilities that would enable digital break-ins. In the trade, these were often called “zero-days,” because the software maker and its customers had zero days of warning that they needed to fix the flaw. A ten-day flaw is less dangerous because companies have more time to develop and distribute a patch, and customers are more likely to apply it. The increased demand for zero-days drove up prices.