Code War

Somewhere right now, a machine you depend on is being probed by a stranger you will never meet. It might be a bank, a hospital, a power grid, or the phone in your pocket. This is the ordinary condition of the connected world — a quiet, ceaseless war fought in code — and almost none of us know how it began or how it works.

In Code War, E.B Cohen tells the whole sweeping story in one gripping volume. It starts not with the internet but with a toy whistle from a cereal box that could seize the telephone network, and with the wartime codebreakers who cracked Enigma and, in doing so, invented the computer. From there it races through the first self-replicating worms and the laws written to stop them; the outlaw age of Kevin Mitnick and the astronomer who caught a KGB spy over a seventy-five-cent accounting error; the mega-breaches and the rise of ransomware; and the moment nation-states turned code into a weapon that could spin a nuclear centrifuge to pieces or switch off a country's lights.

Beneath the drama runs the machinery that makes it all possible: the mathematics of secrecy, the anatomy of an exploit, the botnet, the phishing email, and the Bitcoin that quietly turned extortion into a global industry. And running alongside the attackers is the story of the defenders — the firewalls and the zero-trust revolution, the ethical hackers and the bug hunters, and the new arms race in which artificial intelligence fights on both sides. Even-handed, vivid, and startlingly clear, this is the story of how we learned to attack and defend the digital world — and what it will take to survive the wars to come.