The perfect weapon

by David E. Sanger

Kindle Edition, 354 pages

ISBN:: 978-0-451-49791-8

(8 reviews)

From the premiere New York Times Washington correspondent, a stunning and incisive look into how cyberwarfare is influencing elections, threatening national security, and bringing us to the brink of global war.

Behind the Russian cyberattacks that may have thrown the 2016 election; behind the Sony hack; behind mysterious power outages around the world and the disappearance of thousands of personnel records from poorly guarded government servers are the traces of a new and powerful weapon, one that has the potential to remake global conflict like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. THE PERFECT WEAPON is the riveting story of how, in less than a decade, cyberwarfare displaced terrorism and nuclear attacks as the greatest threat to American national security.

Cheap to acquire, difficult to defend against, and designed to shield their user's identities so as to complicate retaliation, these weapons are capable of an unprecedented range of offensive …

Cheap to acquire, difficult to defend against, and designed to shield their user's identities so as to complicate retaliation, these weapons are capable of an unprecedented range of offensive tactics; they can take us just short of war, allowing for everything from disruption to theft to the cause of widespread damage of essential infrastructure systems. And the vulnerability of those systems has created a related but equally urgent conflict: American companies like Apple and Cisco must claim allegiance to no government in the name of selling secure products around the globe yet the US intelligence agencies want the help of such companies in defending against future cyberattacks.

Reported and written with unprecedented access by New York Times chief Washington correspondent and bestselling author David Sanger, THE PERFECT WEAPON takes readers inside war rooms and boardrooms, into the secret cyberdens of American and Chinese military, to give the deep-background story of the increasingly pitched battle between nations, their governments, their cyberwarriors, and their corporations.

3 editions

ogd5XOt reviewed The Perfect Weapon by David E. Sanger

An Amateur Effor from Someone Who Should Know Better

2 stars

This book is a mess. I can't tell if Sanger simply doesn't understand technical minutia or if his writing is so sloppy his explanations are useless - probably a bit of both.

The author repeatedly latches on to the most scandalous explanation of certain events, occasionally even acknowledging more mundane explanations are plausible and then proceeding to spend dozens of pages building up the more outlandish story. He extrapolates on scant details and builds complex theories on nothing other than pure speculation.

Further, many of his predictions on the future of cyberwar have simply proven incorrect in places like Ukraine. I can't necessarily fault Sanger for that - pretty much everyone in the information security community made the same forecasts - but nonetheless, they're wrong.

Go read Kim Zetter or Andy Greenberg.

woollypigs reviewed The Perfect Weapon by David E. Sanger

Review of 'The Perfect Weapon' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Very good read, but I had read/heard most of what is in it before in news articles, interviews, podcasts.

schmudde reviewed Perfect Weapon by David E. Sanger

Review of 'Perfect Weapon' on Goodreads

4 stars

Sanger manages to cover the issue of cyberconflict broadly while also offering the most comprehensive account of what occurred during the 2016 election. He rarely infers, basing the accounts contained within on his sources from the top levels of the United States government.

Considering the role contractors play in the intelligence industrial complex, it would have been nice to have a greater representation of non-government sources, but the book never suffers from a lack of credibility.

It reads like a very long New York Times article with an op-ed at the end. This isn't necessarily I enjoyed, but I appreciate the author's pragmatism.

If you want to understand what's been happening at the dawn of information warfare, this is your book.