cyber war Archives - Don Kasprzak

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan. Fred is an American author and journalist currently writing at Slate and previously at The Boston Globe and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Scientific American.

He received a 1982 Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to the Boston Globe Magazine’s “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age” regarding he Soviet arms race. He holds both a Master of Science and Ph.D. in political science from MIT. His weekly “War Stories” column for Slate magazine covers international relations and U.S. foreign policy.

Fred shares that in June 1983, then President Reagan watched the movie War Games. A kid (actor Matthew Broderick) unknowingly playing with his home computer dialed into the Pentagon and controlled military computers. Reagan, a former actor requested from his military Joint Chiefs if this could actually happened. The generals confirmed it was indeed possible. And this may have started the first White House action to protect Hilary computers.

Yet it would be President George H.W. Bush who first leveraged American cyber attacks during the 1991 Gulf War invasion to shut down all military communications used by Saddam Hussein. This is the foundation Fred establishes for all future cyber wars fought by America.

In 2020 HBO released the documentary The Perfect Weapon based upon the best-selling book by David Sanger a New York Times national security correspondent. The book was a fantastic review of cyber attacks conducted by Russia, China and other countries deemed hostile to the US and the West. Accordingly, this documentary reveals how cyber war began. This is certainly the primary strategy today for nation state attacks. This documentary is also available on Amazon Prime.

Stuxnet, known as the cyber attack “Olympic Games” was an original US/Israel joint cyber attack. The concern was understanding the risk to a nuclear war in the Middle East in supporting Israel’s defense. The Bush Administration chose to invoke a new type of warfare.