Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

In 1984, a young French engineer and his literary associate published a technology thriller titled Softwar. In the novel, a secretive US agency named the National Software Agency or NSA implants a smart bomb in a supercomputer exported by the French government for a meteorological station in the Soviet Union. The Russian officer investigating the case discovers that, when fed with a certain password, all Soviet computers equipped with US-manufactured components are turned down and destroyed, effectively paralyzing the public utilities, industries, and militaries that they are serving. Shortly after the publication, the young author received the visit of two men in black who wanted to know where he had gotten the idea for the novel. His explanation was simple. While teaching math at the Lycée Français de New York as part of his military service through cooperation, he had created a software-engineering company that sold computer programs to various clients in France and abroad. Some clients were bad payers, and so to recover his claims, he had inserted a smart bomb in the delivered software that could be activated by a simple telephone call through a modem. The Americans were quite impressed. Without any insider information, Thierry Breton—the young French entrepreneur, who later went on to become Minister of Finance and the CEO of a major IT company in his home country—had involuntarily set his foot on a secretive program very much similar to the one depicted in his book.The 1984 novel is now but a distant memory in the mind of its readers, and Softwar isn’t even mentioned in Fred Kaplan’s book on “the secret history of cyber war.” But it is startling how our perception of cyber warfare—the adequate term that came to designate what the French novel had named “la guerre douce”—is shaped by the popular media. From the plane of technicians and operators up to the highest executive level, bestseller novels and popular movies alert us to new realities that are otherwise clouded in a shroud of secrecy—or dismissed as too technical. There is a wonderful episode in Dark Territory in which President Ronald Reagan, who liked to relax by watching Hollywood movies, sees the film War Games starring Matthew Broderick and then asks his top brass whether it was possible for a teenager like the one portrayed in the film by the young actor to hack into sensitive Pentagon computers. The answer—“yes, and it’s much worse than you think”—sets in motion a whole chain of events leading to the adoption of the first presidential directive on the topic of cyber war. Another popular production mentioned in the book is the movie called Sneakers, where Ben Kingsley involuntarily gives the NSA director his new mission statement in a prescient soliloquy (“The world is run by ones and zeroes… There’s a war out there… It’s about who controls the information.”). Yet another movie that had an impact on national policy was The Interview, the film that provoked the ire of the North Korean regime because it made ridicule of its leader. North Korea’s cyberattack on Sony Picture in retaliation for making the movie prompted the United States to declare it would “respond proportionally” to the attack “in a place and time and manner that we choose.”There were many ways in which the book Softwar was prescient. It brought to the attention of the wide public notions that were yet to find a proper name—logic bombs, viruses and worms, malware, hacking, backdoors—while pointing to some of the security challenges that the computer age brought in its wake. The plot line’s plausibility was enhanced by references to the geopolitical context—Mikhail Gorbachev features as a character in the plot, at the time he was only a rising star in the Soviet Union’s party system. The book even introduces the NSA by its acronym, at a time the intelligence agency was so secretive that insiders joked that the initials stood for “No Such Agency.” Yet “softwar”, the term coined by the authors, didn’t stick: it reeked too much of soft power, and the militaries who handled the matter didn’t want to appear as soft. Instead, the word that imposed itself was the prefix “cyber”, as in cyberspace or cyberwar, cybercrime or cyberterrorism. It stemmed from William Gibson’s science-fiction novel, The Neuromancer, also dated 1984, that became a cult classic among computer specialists. Many hackers and counter-hackers were also inspired by Cliff Stoll’s 1989 book, The Cuckoo’s Egg, in which the author working as a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory details the investigation that led to the capture of a East German hacker who had penetrated the system.Written by a Pulitzer-winning journalist, Dark Territory demonstrates that cyber war is now firmly entrenched, not just in popular culture, but also in the US’s defense and security apparatus. While other analysts would focus on geopolitics or insist on the vulnerability of the American economy to attacks through cyberspace, Fred Kaplan chose to concentrate on the domestic scene and write a history of cyber warfare. He demonstrates that this history is not limited to the twenty-first century. In fact, the concern about computer security is almost as old as computers themselves. It predates by a few months the launch of ARPANET, the ancestor of the Internet designed by DARPA (then ARPA) to connect the computers of military scientists and researchers. It is altogether fitting that the author of the first paper on the topic later went on to advise the scenarists of the two movies mentioned earlier, War Games and Sneakers. The first cyber attacks, including the ones designed as military exercises to expose the security gaps of government systems, took the military and civilian establishments entirely off-guard. No guidelines had ever been issued, no chain of command drawn up. No one was in charge or even capable of fixing the problem. According to Fred Kaplan, and despite the many reports and action plans that have been written about the topic, we have made little progress since then.Much of the story is about bureaucratic wrangling, office politics, inter-agency skirmishes, and administrative process. I have to confess I quickly lost track of all the expert working groups, administrative reports, blue-ribbon commissions, and presidential decrees that punctuated the way Washington dealt with the issue. Typically, each time a problem erupts, an expert group gathers and ultimately recommends that the president appoint a commission which, in turn, holds hearings and writes a report, which culminates in the drafting of another presidential directive. For somebody like me who knows how bureaucracies ‘work’, this can be rather frustrating. Yet even I was impressed by the skills exhibited by some players in the bureaucratic game. The officials who drafted directives and reports often concluded that a senior official position should be created and typically recommended the job should be theirs. An NSA director who was nominated as deputy director of the CIA sent memos to himself (from NSA head to CIA number two) in the six-week period when he held dual positions, thereby settling many of the scores between the two agencies and giving the NSA sole control of computer-based intelligence. I was also sensitized to the importance of getting the president’s attention time: on the rare occasions were presidents were briefed on cyber warfare, NSA directors typically strayed from their presentation on cyber attack to cover the much murkier ground of cyber protection, where no government agency had a clear mandate.At several junctures in his narrative, Kaplan insists on the realization by decision makers that “what the United States was doing to its enemies, its enemies could also do to the United States.” Information warfare isn’t just about gaining an advantage in combat; it also has to be about protecting the nation from other countries’ effort to gain the same advantage. There is a extremely fine line between offense and defense in the cyber domain: Computer Network Attack and Computer Network Defense—CNA and CND—are two sides of the same coin. Administrative reports regularly pointed out the vulnerability of electrical power grids, oil and gas pipelines, dams, railroads, waterworks, and other pieces of a nation’s critical infrastructure. Some classified exercises simulated attacks on such civilian infrastructures, and the results were devastating. And yet nobody seemed willing to address the problem. The reason was simple: “private companies didn’t want to spend the money on cyber security, and they resisted all regulations to make them do so; meanwhile, federal agencies lacked the talent or resources to do the job, except for the NSA, which had neither the legal authority nor the desire.” In addition, government agencies had no incentive to help private companies patch the holes and “zero day” points of vulnerability they discovered in commercial computer programs: they used them as points of entry into the systems of foreign governments that bought the same software applications. The void was partly filled by private consulting firms, often staffed by former government officials, that made small fortunes by finding these holes and selling their discoveries to private companies and governments—or to spies and criminals.It is on the side of Computer Network Attack, or cyberwar operations, that I found the book most revealing—but also the most frustrating, due to the inherent limitations on that kind of information. The least known details are disclosed on the earliest uses of computer warfare: how Saddam Hussein’s phone conversations with his generals were tapped during Operation Desert Storm after the fiber-optic network had been destroyed; how the US planned to turn off all radars and anti-aircraft batteries during its aborted 1994 invasion of Haiti through what is now called a denial of service attack; or when the NSA, along with the Pentagon and the CIA, spoofed the Serbian air-defense command by tapping into its communication lines and sending false data to its radar screens. Interestingly, these three episodes relied on the use of telecom networks—listening on conversations, flooding the entire phone system with busy signals, or hacking into telecommunication software to feed false information. By contrast, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the fight against the insurgency exploited the full gamut of cyber capabilities. Owing to the dispatch of six thousand NSA officials in these theaters, the lag time between collecting and acting on intelligence was slashed from sixteen hours to one minute. Signals intercepted from the chips of cellphones allowed SIGINT teams to track the location and movements of enemy fighters even if their phones were turned off, thereby guiding drone strikes and ground attacks. Penetrating and probing the email and cell phone networks of Iraqi insurgents also allowed US operators to send them false messages that lead them to ambushes.By contrast, the cyber operations waged by foreign powers get much less coverage. Russia’s cyber attacks on Estonia and on Georgia are only succinctly described, and Ukraine isn’t even mentioned. We don’t know who operates Russia’s hacker brigades: the general who answers a US delegation investigating the Moonlight Maze incident by putting the blame on “those motherf***s in intelligence” suddenly disappears from the scene. We get only minimal information on China’s PLA Unit 61398, whose deeds were partly uncovered in the 2013 report by Mendiant, a software-security firm. The role of Unit 8200, Israel’s cyber war bureau, in the development of stuxnet is not specified: we don’t know what specific contribution they made to this elaborate spy worm that paralyzed Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities in 2010. We don’t learn about the cyberwar capabilities of European countries, and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States is mentioned only in passing. This is a secret history of cyber war written only from the US perspective. In an age when cyberspace knows no borders and every big nation competes to build their own cyberwar capabilities, this is a serious limitation in an otherwise well-informed and highly readable book.

Kaplan provides an essential public history of cyber war in this thought-provoking narrative that details the enduring challenges faced by U.S. senior government officials in crafting effective policies and institutions that can concurrently “establish Justice, … provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.” Dark Territory is a good read that challenges not only practitioners and students of intelligence and cyber policy, history, and war, but also more critically charges “We the People” to engage in charting how intelligence and cyber institutions will play in our networked democratic society going forward.The historical context for security policy issues in Dark Territory could have been expanded and extended to the pre-net/early-net left by also considering the themes in works such as Techno-Bandits, The Cox Report, and Corporate Espionage. Even so, as Kaplan highlights, the emerging cyber arms race establishes a new playing field where the opportunity to apply cyber power is perhaps more opportunistic and democratic, but less predictable, knowable, and controllable than traditional instruments of war. In that context, Kaplan concludes that We the People are ultimately responsible for owning, understanding, and steering the evolution and employment of our intelligence and cyber institutions.

This book is amazing and scary at the same time. The world is changing at ever increasing rates. The pace is so fast I think most people don't realize it. This book will make you realize how fast things change. War itself is changing too. The book is about the emergence of cyber warfare. This new trend is relatively new. Most of it just in the past 15 years. All of it is recorded in the book. That alone will amaze you. That is only part of story here.The book talks about both the emergence of the field from a meeting in the Reagan White House asking if the movie "War Games" could be real to today's events. You see how the program emerges from birth to defense to offensive operations. The reader will learn about scores of new information never reported anywhere else. That is a second reason to buy the book. Every page has these great stories. The story of the stuxnex virus is explained plus scores of others. The mysterious Israeli strike against the Syrian reactor is talked about. One interesting piece I learned is how the US was reading the insurgents emails in Iraq. The US then sent out inaccurate information back out to the insurgents to lead them to ambushes. Another story is how the US jammed up the Haiti air defense system through what is now called a denial of service attack.The book also takes you behind the scenes from the gee whiz stuff to the bureaucratic wrangling. You learn about the debates and inter agency challenges connected to the idea. The internal debates about offensive cyber attacks was eye opening. Many felt it would open up Pandora's box upon the world.The last chapter is real scary. The author chronicles a 2014 attack against the Sands Corporation by Iran because its majority stock holder said something on youtube that offended Iran. A virus destroyed thousands of computers and stole customer credit card numbers. The book could have listed scores of other similar stories, Target, Home Depot, OPM, etc.. and other now are fighting cyber warfare too. Pandora has definitely has been let out of the bottle.The book