The Perfect Weapon
Russian hackers broke into the Democratic National Committee's computer systems in 2015, and the subsequent leaks of the emails they stole may have altered the course of American democracy. But viewing the DNC hacks solely through the lens of Trump misses the bigger, more important storey: within the same year, the Russians had not only broken into networks at the White House, State Department, and Joint Chiefs of Staff, but also implanted themselves in American electrical and nuclear plants, giving them the ability to turn off vast swaths of the country. This was the climax of a decade of rising digital sabotage among the world's powers, with Americans becoming collateral damage as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia battled in cyberspace to undermine one another in daily near-war struggle.
The Perfect Weapon tells the inside story of how cyberweapons have changed geopolitics like nothing else since the creation of the atomic bomb. Cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists because it is cheap to acquire, simple to deny, and can be used for a range of destructive purposes—from damaging infrastructure to spreading dissension and mistrust. With Operation Olympic Games, which used malicious code to blow up Iran's nuclear centrifuges, two presidents—Bush and Obama—drew first blood, but America was remarkably unprepared when its own weapons were stolen from its arsenal and, during President Trump's first year, turned against the US and its allies. Because America was so susceptible to debilitating assaults on its own networks of banks, utilities, and government institutions, the administration was frequently immobilized, unable to threaten the deployment of cyberweapons.
From the White House Situation Room to the dens of Chinese government hackers to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger—who previously broke the story of the Olympic Games in his previous book—reveals a world facing the perils of technological revolution. The Perfect Weapon is the gripping narrative of how big and little powers alike fell victim to a new era of relentless sabotage, misinformation, and terror, in which everyone is a target.
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