The Perfect Weapon
war, sabotage, and fear in the cyber age
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Publisher Description
From Russia’s tampering with the US election to the WannaCry hack that temporarily crippled Britain’s NHS, cyber has become the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists.
Cheap to acquire, easily deniable, and used for a variety of malicious purposes — from crippling infrastructure to sowing discord and doubt — cyberweapons are re-writing the rules of warfare. In less than a decade, they have displaced terrorism and nuclear missiles as the biggest immediate threat to international security and to democracy.
Here, New York Times correspondent David E. Sanger takes us from the White House Situation Room to the dens of Chinese government hackers and the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, piecing together a remarkable picture of a world now coming face-to-face with the most sophisticated — and arguably most dangerous — weapon ever invented.
The Perfect Weapon is the dramatic story of a new era of constant sabotage, misinformation, and fear, in which everyone is a target.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Computer and cyber warfare is a burgeoning mode of conflict that poses serious threats to the United States, Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondent Sanger (Confront and Conceal) argues in this perhaps overly worried investigation. Sanger rehashes the notorious Russian hacks during the 2016 American election along with lesser-known digital assaults on the United States, including the installation of Russian malware on systems that control and could shut down U. S. power and communications grids; Russian hacks of White House, Pentagon, and NSA networks, the last putting secret American hacking tools in the hands of miscreants; and Iranian and Chinese hacks of banks, corporations, and government databases. America, he notes, is hardly innocent, having engineered the Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear centrifuges and a possible sabotage of North Korean missiles. He further warns that federal responses to these attacks have been feckless and shrouded in a secrecy that makes prevention harder. Sanger gives a lucid account of national programs for digital espionage and warfare, but it's not always clear that the various technologies described hold much danger; for example, he doesn't make a strong case that Russian spoofing of social media accounts really undermines American democracy. Readers could use a more thorough exploration of the limitations of supposedly perfect digital weapons.
