of a national strategy, the foreign spy agencies then use a massive database analysis to combine information in hacks as diverse as the office of personnel management to the cheating website ashley madison. taken together, they really ratchet up the level of harm. the opm breach has people who applied for security clearances and the ashley madison breach, the affairs they may be having about the relationship. together it provides a lot of leverage that could be used to blackmail and influence personnel. both countries use private contractors including hackers to infiltrate u.s. systems to help hide the true source of the attacks. governments carry out their own attacks. they ve been on a gradual upswing since the mid-2000s, due to their success, a u.s.