Download The Perfect Weapon War Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age David E Sanger 9780451497895 Books

Product details Hardcover 384 pages Publisher Crown (June 19, 2018) Language English ISBN-10 9780451497895 ISBN-13 978-0451497895 ASIN 0451497899

The Perfect Weapon War Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age David E Sanger 9780451497895 Books Reviews

• I came to this book the long way around. Knowing that I had just published a military thriller in which North Korea crashes the electrical grid for the greater DC area, my brother-in-law sent me a link to David Sanger’s recent interview on NPR. Listening to Mr. Sanger confirmed some of the scariest parts of my own research. I discovered that my fictional scheme for robbing the U.S. government of electrical power is uncomfortably similar to an actual cyber attack that flat-lined large segments of the Ukrainian grid in 2015. Far from being worst-case imaginary scenarios, some of the concepts I’ve written about have already played out in the real world, usually in countries distant from the United States and under circumstances that either don’t make the news or don’t create an impression on the public consciousness.
  I burned through this book in less than a day. The Perfect Weapon has the page-flipping intensity of the best techno-thriller novels, with the gravitas of meticulously-sourced nonfiction. If I had to sum up this book in one word, it would be “terrifying.”
  With true stories from the cyber sabotage of the Democratic Campaign Committee to the penetration of the White House computer networks, this book is a wake-up call for our technology-dependent civilization. I just hope we don’t hit the ‘snooze’ button and go back to sleep.
• Russia and China have penetrated so deeply into the electronic systems that sustain the American economy that either country might be able to set us back two or three decades using cyber weapons. North Korea and Iran appear to be not far behind. What seems to be stopping them all is the equal or greater ability of the United States to do the same or worse to them—not to mention the chance we might reduce their countries to cinders with nuclear weapons. That's the message at the heart of David E. Sanger's chilling new book, The Perfect Weapon. "Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus on US national security," he writes. And that competition is increasingly playing out online.
  
  The US government has been slow on the uptake to acknowledge this threat. In 2007, the intelligence community's annual worldwide threat assessment delivered to Congress did not even include cyber weapons on the list. At that point, both Russia and China had been building their cyber capabilities for years. Now, of course, attitudes have changed. The United States Cyber Command, created in 2009, was upgraded only in 2018 into a Unified Combatant Command, one of ten in the US armed forces. Cyber Command is headquartered at Fort Meade, along with the National Security Agency, and is commanded by the agency's director. Together, NSA and Cyber Command house both our country's offensive and defensive cyber operations. Sanger explains that the two organizations work together uneasily. Their priorities are sometimes at cross-purposes.
  
  Excessive caution about the threat of cyber weapons
  
  David Sanger is extraordinarily well-connected in Washington. He has been writing on foreign policy, globalization, nuclear proliferation, and the presidency for more than thirty years for the New York Times. He has been the paper's Chief Washington Correspondent since 2006. Throughout The Perfect Weapon, he cites one-on-one conversations with nearly all the major players in the drama he describes. And drama it is. This book details the bureaucratic turf wars, foot-dragging, incompetence, and excessive caution that has so often characterized America's inadequate response to the threat posed by cyber weapons.
  
  The dilemma Sanger describes is worrisome. "America's offensive cyber prowess has so outpaced our defense that officials hesitate to strike back," he writes. Although American companies and government are penetrated online thousands of times every day, the government has rarely spoken out to denounce those responsible. Partly, this is because it may take days, weeks, or even months to assemble definitive proof about who launched a given attack. But it's also because officials in the CIA, NSA, Pentagon, and White House are unwilling for our adversaries to gain any insight into how we obtained the information. Even when we know perfectly well who's responsible, they decline to speak out. Simply citing specific evidence could reveal the existence of American or Allied "implants" in their computer systems. Like many of the top former officials he interviewed, Sanger regards that reluctance to show our cards as an error.
  
  "The US has only rarely activated cyber weapons"
  
  Unless the government can accuse an adversary in public, it's hampered from retaliating. The upshot is that the US has only rarely activated cyber weapons, so far as we know. (The most notable exceptions were the Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear production facilities in 2010, carried out jointly with Israel, and the attack on North Korea's launch systems that caused its missiles to explode or fall into the sea.) However, Russia has not hesitated to attack weaker nations, chiefly Ukraine and Estonia, as well as both the United States and Western Europe.
  
  As Sanger points out, there are ways, however inadequate, that the United States might combat a nuclear attack. There is always a warning, even if it's measured only in minutes. With cyber weapons, however, there is no warning. And "In almost every classified Pentagon scenario for how a future confrontation with Russia and China, even Iran and North Korea, might play out, the adversary's first strike against the United States would include a cyber barrage aimed at civilians." And the threat isn't limited to those four hostile countries. "A decade ago," Sanger notes, "there were three or four nations with effective cyber forces; now there are more than thirty." Now we face the proliferation of cyber weapons, not just nuclear devices.
  
  About the author
  
  David E. Sanger has written two books on American foreign policy as well as The Perfect Weapon, his most recent work. He is the Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times.
• Clear concise narrative. One hears of attacks against the U.S. and companies all the time. The details about how the attacks were carried out are fascinating. The information about the west’s capabilities make you feel better.
  
  However it is clear that the general public does not realize the seriousness of the threat. And many in government—federal, state and local don’t understand either.
  
  It is obvious that we are at war. We need a program like Y2K to harden our networks. We need a 9/11 type commission to find out what happened in the 2016 election and we need to protect the upcoming midterms and beyond.
  
  The Russians were able to change voting totals in the Ukraine and shut down their electric grid.
  
  We need paper ballots. How hard would it be to build a touch screen machine that prints your ballot in human readable form with your selections clearly marked. You check it and feed it into the ocr scanner. Paper trail and you check it just like your atm or gasoline receipt.
  
  It would be hard for anyone to hack the voting machines.
• This was the first book I have read by Mr. Sanger, and I regret to say, it will be my last. One naturally has high expectations from someone of his caliber, but, after reading the book, I'm frankly wondering what all the fuss is about. Much of the book is written as if it were intended for high school-level comprehension. So much of it is hashing over "old" news that anyone who regularly reads a newspaper would already know. He is also a real name dropper in the book - being sure to mention all the people he knows and interviewed for the book - almost as if he were trying to establish the credibility a first time author might seek, which seems totally unnecessary. He is of course a newspaper reporter, which is how the book is written, but the subject really screams out for hard hitting analysis, which is sorely lacking here. Mostly, it is a newspaper reporter reporting on the news. There is very little that is new here. There are other, recent books out on the subject which are far broader in scope and analysis, such as "Virtual Terror", which I found to be a far better and more valuable read. A shame Sanger didn't put his intellectual capacity into this book. Instead, it seems to be just another over-hyped, mass marketed, mass produced, ordinary book. A shame.