As cyber-attacks dominate front-page news, as hackers join the list of global threats, and as top generals warn of a coming cyber war, few books are more timely and enlightening than Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Slate columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Fred Kaplan.
Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-top-secret cyber units in the Pentagon, the “information warfare” squads of the military services, and the national security debates in the White House to tell this never-before-told story of the officers, policymakers, scientists, and spies who devised this new form of warfare and who have been planning—and, more often than people know, fighting—these wars for decades.
From the 1991 Gulf War to conflicts in Haiti, Serbia, Syria, the former Soviet republics, Iraq, and Iran, where cyber warfare played a significant role, Dark Territory chronicles, in fascinating detail, an unknown past that shines an unsettling light on our future.
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“Kaplan draws from conversations with prominent American government leaders, including former directors of the National Security Agency, to deliver a behind-the-scenes look at policy formulation over the last several decades…Anything we can do, he argues, adversaries could replicate or learn to do better. The book traces the United States’ advances in cybersecurity, and Kaplan concludes that though a fair amount of effort is put into developing cyberoffenses, less is focused on protecting the country from potential attacks.
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New York Times