The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger is an amazing read. To be frank this book is very quite unnerving, yet should be certainly mandatory reading. We have been at war for a couple of years on an electronic battlefield. This seems to be acting as a deterrent to actual war on a global scale.
Above all, we live today in a more complex world now regarding COVID-19. Recent cyber attacks and the flattening of attack tools is unquestionably changing the world right in-front of our eyes.
Sanger’s book will help you see it even more clearly: today a perfect storm is forming across the internet.
Therefore, The Perfect Weapon reveals so much in the opening chapters regarding successful Russian attacks upon US military and government networks.
On the contrary, the previous generation was driven by nuclear mutually assured destruction. In contrast, cyberwar or ‘cyber conflict’ is very different.
Russia’s penetration of the Pentagon’s secret network in 2008 in fact, is very upsetting reading. Sanger recalls how NSA’s Debora Plunkett discovered rogue USB sticks, left scattered across a US military base parking lot in the Middle East provided Moscow’s entry into the Pentagon networks.
WannaCry ransomware
North Korea is the boldest example of this book’s theme: A backwards third world country hacking Sony? Yes. In addition, North Korea launched the devastating WannaCry ransomware attack. On the other hand, their ransomware was unleashed across global hospitals and schools. Can you imagine WannaCry 3.0 locking down hospitals in the mist of stopping coronavirus?
