According to McAfee, the primary goal of the attack was to gain access to and potentially modify source code repositories at these high tech, security and defense contractor companies. "[The SCMs] were wide open," says Alperovitch. "No one ever thought about securing them, yet these were the crown jewels of most of these companies in many ways—much more valuable than any financial or personally identifiable data that they may have and spend so much time and effort protecting."[13]