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Fred Kaplan. Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016)
Fred Kaplan's new book Dark Territory is a history of cyber war. It traces the origins of efforts to protect computers and networks from hostile intrusions and then development of offensive capabilities to eavesdrop and even sabotage adversary's computers and networks. Fred introduces us to many diverse characters from computer geeks to senior government officials involved in a struggle that has rarely seen sunshine as most of the work is highly classified. It was a 1983 movie War Games that prompted President ronald reagan to ask Pentagon if someone could break into Department of Defense (DoD) computers and tamper with missile launch. Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Vessey came back a week later with the answer that the problem was much worse than they thought. This prompted the first attempts of cyber security.
Fred provides the details of a 1997 exercise by National Security agency's (NSa) 'red team' to check the vulnerability of DoD computer networks. NSa's 'hackers' were able to penetrate DoDs network in four days. When they encountered difficulty in hacking into intelligence directorate of Joint Chiefs J-2, one of the team members simply called a J-2 officer. He told the officer...