The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

Overview

NOW AN HBO® DOCUMENTARY FROM AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR JOHN MAGGIO • “An important—and deeply sobering—new book about cyberwarfare” (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times), now updated with a new chapter.

The Perfect Weapon is the startling inside story of how the rise of cyberweapons transformed geopolitics like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. Cheap to acquire, easy to deny, and usable for a variety of malicious purposes, cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists. Two presidents—Bush and Obama—drew first blood with Operation Olympic Games, which used malicious code to blow up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and yet America proved remarkably unprepared when its own weapons were stolen from its arsenal and, during President Trump’s first year, turned back on the United States and its allies. And if Obama would begin his presidency by helping to launch the new era of cyberwar, he would end it struggling unsuccessfully to defend the 2016 U.S. election from interference by Russia, with Vladimir Putin drawing on the same playbook he used to destabilize Ukraine.

Moving 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 reveals a world coming face-to-face with the perils of technological revolution, where everyone is a target.

“Timely and bracing . . . With the deep knowledge and bright clarity that have long characterized his work, Sanger recounts the cunning and dangerous development of cyberspace into the global battlefield of the twenty-first century.”—Washington Post

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451497901
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/14/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	393,492
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

David E. Sanger is national security correspondent for the New York Times and bestselling author of The Inheritance and Confront and Conceal. He has been a member of three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, including in 2017 for international reporting. A regular contributor to CNN, he also teaches national security policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Read an Excerpt

Mary Louise Kelly (NPR): Is there a Stuxnet for North Korea?
John Brennan (CIA director under President Obama): [Laughter] Next question.
—December 2016
 
In the spring of 2016, North Korea’s missiles started falling out of the sky—if they even made it that high.

In test after test, Kim Jong-un’s Musudan missile—the pride of his fleet—was exploding on the launch pad, crashing seconds after launch, or traveling a hundred miles or so before plunging prematurely into the Sea of Japan. For a missile that Kim imagined would enable him to threaten the American air base on Guam and form the technological basis for a larger missile that could reach Hawaii or Los Angeles, the failures were a disaster.
All told, Kim Jong-un ordered eight Musudan tests between mid-April and mid-October 2016. Seven failed, some spectacularly, before he ordered a full suspension of the effort. An 88 percent failure rate was unheard-of, especially for a proven design. The Musudan was based on a compact but long-range missile the Soviets had built in the 1960s for launching from submarines. Its small size but high power made it perfect for Kim’s new strategy: shipping missiles around the country on mobile launchers and storing them in mountain tunnels, where Ameri­can satellites would have trouble finding them.

As part of his effort to boost the range and lethality of the North’s missile fleet, Kim had invested heavily in modifying the Soviet engines. The Musudan was far more complex than the Scud, the short-range missiles the North had made billions selling to Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, among other nations. Developing the Musudan technology was critical for Kim: He hoped it would pave the way for a whole new generation of single-stage and multistage missiles. With those in his arsenal, he could make good on his threat that no Ameri­can base in the Pacific—and ultimately no American city—would be beyond his reach.

The North had been in the missile-launching business for a long time and had gained a reputation for mastering the art. So the serial run of Musudan failures in 2016—three in April, two in May and June, then two more in October, after the North had taken a pause to figure out what was happening to them—was confounding. The his­tory of missile testing suggested that everyone suffered a lot of failures in the beginning, then figured it out and made things work. That’s what happened during the race between the United States and the So­viet Union to build intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s and ’60s, an era marked by many spectacular crashes before the engineers and missileers figured out the technology. The Musudan experience reversed the usual trend. After years of successful tests of other missiles, it was as if North Korea’s engineers forgot everything they’d learned.

Kim and his scientists were highly aware of what the United States and Israel had done to the Iranian nuclear program, and they had tried to insulate themselves from the same kind of attack. But the high failure rate of the missiles forced the North Korean leader to reas­sess the possibility that someone—maybe the Americans, maybe the South Koreans—was sabotaging his system. By October 2016, reports emerged that Kim Jong-un had ordered an investigation into whether the United States had somehow incapacitated the electronic guts of the missiles, perhaps getting inside their electronics or their command-and-control systems. And there was always the possibility that an in­sider was involved, or even several.

After each North Korean failure, the Pentagon would announce that it had detected a test, and frequently would even celebrate the mis­sile’s failure. “It was a fiery, catastrophic attempt at a launch that was unsuccessful,” a Pentagon spokesman told reporters in April 2016, after the first full test of the Musudan, timed to celebrate the birthday of the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung. When subsequent attempts failed, the official news release from the Pentagon included dryly worded boilerplate that “The North American Aerospace Defense Command de­termined the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America.” The statements never speculated about what went wrong.

But there was a lot of speculation inside the Pentagon, the NSA, and the White House, among the select group who knew about the classified US program to escalate cyber and electronic attacks against North Korea, with a particular focus on its missile tests. Each explo­sion, each case of a missile going off course and falling into the sea, prompted the same urgent question: “Was this because of us?”

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Prologue From Russia, With Love 1

Chapter I Original Sins 7

Chapter II Pandora's Inbox 37

Chapter III The Hundred-Dollar Takedown 55

Chapter IV Man In The Middle 78

Chapter V The China Rules 100

Chapter VI The Kims Strike Back 124

Chapter VII Putin's Petri Dish 152

Chapter VIII The Fumble 171

Chapter IX Warning From The Cotswolds 194

Chapter X The Slow Awakening 215

Chapter XI Three Crises in the Valley 240

Chapter XII Left of Launch 268

Chapter XIII Reckonings 295

Afterword 318

Acknowledgments 332

Notes 337

Index 365

Editorial Reviews

"[Sanger’s] description of the cyber portion of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election is thorough and convincing. It ought to be required reading for anyone who doubts the extent and seriousness of the Russian effort… The great value of The Perfect Weapon is less in its specific policy prescriptions than in its being the most comprehensive, readable source of information and insight about the policy quandaries that modern information technology and its destructive potential have spawned.”
—The New York Times

“Timely and bracing… With the deep knowledge and bright clarity that have long characterized his work, Sanger recounts the cunning and dangerous development of cyberspace into the global battlefield of the 21st century… A reader finishes this book fully understanding why cyberwar has moved rapidly to the top of America’s official list of national security threats. And why, for the first time in three generations, this nation’s power in the world is seriously threatened.”
—David Von Drehle, The Washington Post

"This encyclopedic account by a Times correspondent traces the rapid rise of cyberwarfare capabilities and warns that ideas about how to control them are only beginning to emerge."
—The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

“In his new book, The Perfect Weapon, Sanger offers a panoramic view of the rapidly evolving world of cyber-conflict. He covers incidents from the covert U.S. cyber-campaign to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program (a story we know about largely because of Sanger’s diligent reporting) to Edward Snowden’s epic heist of National Security Agency data. And yes, there’s also plenty of background on Russia’s active measures during the 2016 campaign. But there’s also a wealth of gripping material on stories that have probably been missed by the broader public… It all adds up to a persuasive argument for the truth of the book’s title.”
—Christian Caryl, The Washington Post

“[The Perfect Weapon is] an important—and deeply sobering—new book about cyberwarfare.”
—Nicholas Kristof, New York Times

"A chilling new book."
—The Financial Times

“Anyone who doubts cyber’s unintended consequences should read David Sanger’s new book The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age. Sanger, a reporter for The New York Times, has been a dogged and diligent observer of cybersecurity issues for years. His book is a readable account of what went wrong.”
—Robert Samuelson, The Washington Post

“[The Perfect Weapon] reads like a thriller spy novel, except the stories are true, which makes the book more terrifying… Sanger shows the political, military, and economic impacts of actual hacks, moves made by governments and industry to counter moves and protect against future attacks, and the counter to the counter to the counter, all told at a breathtaking pace. But this is more than just a real-life drama; it also is a cautionary tale of the policy of information power… This book at turns was both fascinating in its detail and access and terrifying in its implications.”
—Proceedings

“[Sanger] has penned one of the most comprehensive and accessible histories of cyberwar to date… Sanger’s book is more than a history and primer. It also advances a series of arguments, among them that the United States is not ready for the kind of cyberattack to come.”
—Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

From the Publisher

…an encyclopedic account of policy-relevant happenings in the cyberworld. Sanger…stays firmly grounded in real events, including communication systems getting hacked and servers being disabled. He avoids the tendency, all too common in futuristic discussions of cyber issues, to spin out elaborate and scary hypothetical scenarios…The principal focus of the book is cyberwarfare…but its scope extends as well to other controversies that flow from advances in information technology…and the book's inclusiveness makes it useful as a one-stop reference for citizens who want to think intelligently about all issues of public policy having a cyber dimension…The great value of The Perfect Weapon is less in its specific policy prescriptions than in its being the most comprehensive, readable source of information and insight about the policy quandaries that modern information technology and its destructive potential have spawned.

The New York Times Book Review - Paul R. Pillar

06/11/2018
Computer and cyber warfare is a burgeoning mode of conflict that poses serious threats to the United States, Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondent Sanger (Confront and Conceal) argues in this perhaps overly worried investigation. Sanger rehashes the notorious Russian hacks during the 2016 American election along with lesser-known digital assaults on the United States, including the installation of Russian malware on systems that control—and could shut down—U. S. power and communications grids; Russian hacks of White House, Pentagon, and NSA networks, the last putting secret American hacking tools in the hands of miscreants; and Iranian and Chinese hacks of banks, corporations, and government databases. America, he notes, is hardly innocent, having engineered the Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear centrifuges and a possible sabotage of North Korean missiles. He further warns that federal responses to these attacks have been feckless and shrouded in a secrecy that makes prevention harder. Sanger gives a lucid account of national programs for digital espionage and warfare, but it’s not always clear that the various technologies described hold much danger; for example, he doesn’t make a strong case that Russian spoofing of social media accounts really undermines American democracy. Readers could use a more thorough exploration of the limitations of supposedly perfect digital weapons. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Sanger offers a scouring critique of our nation’s failure to prepare for the cyberattack on the 2016 election and those ahead, particularly given how active the U.S. has been in enacting cyber warfare abroad. Sanger's concerns sound all the more ominous in the gravelly voice of narrator Robertson Dean. There is a soft element to his deep voice that comes through in useful ways, such as when he’s explaining the history and various complex technologies that created the present moment. But there are still times during his narration of the significant harm that can come to the U.S. when one feels as if one is listening to Darth Vader. Given the gravity of Sanger's work, Dean has the perfect voice for convincing listeners to wake up to the dangers ahead. L.E. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2018 - AudioFile

Sanger offers a scouring critique of our nation’s failure to prepare for the cyberattack on the 2016 election and those ahead, particularly given how active the U.S. has been in enacting cyber warfare abroad. Sanger's concerns sound all the more ominous in the gravelly voice of narrator Robertson Dean. There is a soft element to his deep voice that comes through in useful ways, such as when he’s explaining the history and various complex technologies that created the present moment. But there are still times during his narration of the significant harm that can come to the U.S. when one feels as if one is listening to Darth Vader. Given the gravity of Sanger's work, Dean has the perfect voice for convincing listeners to wake up to the dangers ahead. L.E. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2018 - AudioFile