They wear hoodies, hunch over laptops and stare into screens that look like the Matrix. You know who I’m talking about: hackers.

NSSPlus is a cybersecurity firm protecting a roster of government and military agencies from real-life adversaries. As NSSPlus planned a push into the corporate world, they needed accessible, compelling ways to explain what they did and why it mattered.

We learned that if you’re serious about defending your network, you hire people to try to hack it. As we listened to client experts calmly explain how to break into some of the most secure networks on the planet, we started to think we had a story. Hence this whitepaper, explaining why thinking like an attacker is indispensable to modern cybersecurity.