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?
Therefore Stuxnet is only the tip of the iceberg. Sanger sees Ukraine as a petri dish for Russia’s cyber armies. In fact, David introduces BlackEnergy, the Russian attack on the Ukrainian electric power grid.
Stuxnet
Similarly, Operation Olympic Games, an intelligence project begun under George Bush, was accelerated by Obama. Kim Zetter masterfully addresses this attack in her amazing book Countdown to Zero Day.
2016 Presidential Election
However, the surprise of the book is how deeply entangled Paul Manafort was in Ukraine’s politics by way of Moscow’s strong man Victor Yanukovych. Yanukovych relied upon Manfort’s connections to keep his funding afloat and coordinating with Moscow. Conversely, Yanukovych flew to Russia as his political power collapsed. Russia pulled his strings, and pulled him across Ukraine to Moscow. No surprise to see growing scrutiny of Manafort running Trump’s campaign?
Sanger certainly illustrates how two different Russian intelligence units hacked DNC email servers and they pushed them to Wikileaks. Unquestionably Sanger brings into focus as Russia working in collaboration and funding Wikileaks. Remember DCLeaks? Robert Mueller’s investigation proved the website was a Russian intelligence operation.
Hence, The Perfect Weapon concludes (maybe justly) with Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 election influenced by Russia.
Indeed, cyber is truly The Perfect Weapon.
Politics and Prose | Sanger discusses “The Perfect Weapon”
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