Remember the NotPetya attack? It wiped 80 percent of Ukraine’s computers clean. We are now witnessing new weapons of war, and Ukraine was just the testing ground. The scary question is how are these weapons going to be used in the future? Interestingly, what saved Ukraine is what makes the United States the must vulnerable nation on earth – Ukraine was not fully automated.
Many people and institutions did not want the story to be told, but the author knew “that the only way to contain the spread of the world’s most secretive, invisible market was to shine a big fat light on it.” The author presents some scary information about just what is going on. Even the NSA was back-channeling with international agencies that set cryptographic standards, advocated for a flawed formula for generating the random numbers in encryption schemes that NSA computers could easily crack, paying off companies, infiltrating factories at leading encryption chip makers to insert backdoors, hacking into companies’ internal servers, and more. The Stuxnet incident brought a new highly sophisticated software into play. Now industrialized industries are a target.
We learn about companies that acted as advanced cyber threat alert systems for the big banks and government agencies. Bounties were paid for bugs and especially zero-day bugs in software. Eventually, a growing number of defense contracts, intelligence analysts, and cybercriminals began offering even greater rewards to hackers, and get this, made them promise to keep their bug discoveries secret! The author was able to talk to one of the market’s first brokers, and his stories read like a spy novel. There were cloak-and-dagger meetings, bags of cash, and murky middlemen, and this was not some TV show. This was reality. Some sensed an increasing potential for an all-out cyberwar. In time more governments started their own cyber offense programs and the cost of exploits exploded as did the number of contractors eager to traffic in them. Eventually, the author was able to talk to someone viewed as the father of American cyberwar who became the world’s most skilled exploiter in the digital realm. In time, American intelligence agencies were siphoning data from hundreds of strategically placed implants throughout the world, and so were other countries.
Some of the stuff the author reveals is almost unbelievable. For instance, the NSA had a program code-named Genie that eventually became implanted in “nearly every major make and model of internet router, switch, firewall, encryption device, and computer on the market.” Yikes!! And all sides were doing this. As American officials accused China of embedding trapdoors in Huawei’s products, the NSA had pried its way into Huawei’s headquarters. This is disturbing. As one official said, “In the race to exploit everything and anything we could, we painted ourselves into a dead end where there is no way out. It’s going to be a disaster for the rest of the country.” Stuxnet was a Rubicon in offensive warfare it seems. The scary thing now is where the biggest number of targets are found: Europe, Japan, and the United States. Remember 1945? “Somebody just used a new weapon, and this weapon will not be put back in the box.” Another scary point made was the number of NSA hackers that left the agency for various reasons. Some moved overseas to the Gulf, the story being to help American allies. The reality was grimmer and more sordid.
There’s more. Some companies in the business, such as Hacking Team sold exploits to various government agencies around the globe, “some with human rights records that were not just questionable but grotesque,” according to the author. And I am sure they were not the only ones. In the news as I write, is the Israeli company NSO, basically a gun for hire, and they were not the only one. Then there were the nation states. In an operation dubbed Aurora, Chinese hackers got into high-tech companies, defense contractors, and others. They were able to attack source code repositories. “With that access, they could surreptitiously change the code that made its way into commercial products and attack any customers who used the software.” Again, scary stuff. There is so much information here, I can only scratch the surface – the book clocks in at almost five hundred pages! Ergo, you need to read this book. Continuing, we see how the United States was falling behind. In the 2019 International Collegiate Programming Contest, the winners were Russian, Polish, Chinese, South Korean and Taiwanese. “A team from Iran beat Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton, which didn’t even break into the top twenty.” In 2012, two weeks after Iran hit Saudi Aramco, a major congressional effort was made to lock down U.S. critical infrastructure – note that this was 2012. It seemed promising until the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbyists started yelling overregulation and big government. Well, the standards became watered down and became voluntary. Fast forward to today when we see a major pipeline hacked. What is frightening is that a “carefully orchestrated cyberattack on the American grid could unleash outages for at least months, if not years.” Scores of new nation-states have moved into the invisible battlespace.
The author wants this book to be a wake-up call. Many are unaware of and even fewer truly understand the scope of what is going on. The author wonders if we will have the awareness to solve “what may be the most complex puzzle of our digital era. Let’s hope we are not on the precipice of a cyber catastrophe!”
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Customer reviews
Useful for cybersec nonprofessionals —scarce data, some salient facts and lots of opinions
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2021
This is an interesting effort — Ms. Perlroth is a skilled writer dealing with a complex set of topics. She spends considerable amount of time dealing with the drama of cybersecurity and cyber warfare. The author does provide some useful interviews with some cyber specialists, government figures and mercenary elements involved in intrusion of information systems. Unfortunately she omits several well less known cyber attacks and the various roles of non-state actors in our present cybersecurity environment. This is a useful read for nonprofessional cybersecurity readers. It's unfortunate that she sometimes renders some sensationalist opinions that are not backed by appropriate facts. In sum, I would recommend this book however, I urge some caution because some of her facts have scant attribution. I respect your opinions however in cybersecurity we have to make a clear differentiation between facts and opinions. I enjoy her skilled writing and varied perspectives.
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2021
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Full of hyperbole and bad information. Stay away
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Usefully repetative
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Interesting, but lots of mistakes, and should have been a quarter the length
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And you thought a war was carried out with explosives ?
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