But that’s not the only place an implant can be. It could be in utility companies’ control rooms, as the US Department of Homeland Security recently warned some Russian malware was. This interview has been edited and condensed.īAS: Could you briefly explain what implants are and why they matter?ĭS: An implant is nothing more than malware that is hiding in a system. He was at his house in Vermont, on the edge of the Green Mountain National Forest, where that morning he had spied a black bear. Sanger spoke to the Bulletin about all this and more by telephone in August. In other words, Sanger writes, “The early damage has been limited.” But it will expand and accelerate, he believes, with virtually no chance that the hyperconnected and therefore target-rich Western democratic world will escape unscathed.

Major cyberattacks have struck city services in Atlanta, the health-care system in Britain, centrifuges in Iran, a steel plant in Germany, a casino in Las Vegas, a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia, and missile systems in North Korea. It also advances a series of arguments, among them that the United States is not ready for the kind of cyberattack likely to come, that the extreme degree of secrecy surrounding cyberweapons is excessive, and that the world needs to move ahead with setting some limits on cyberwarfare-perhaps a sort of “Digital Geneva Convention”-even if governments aren’t ready to do that yet. Sanger’s book is more than a history and primer. He lays out events since then, up to and beyond the Russian hacking of the US Democratic National Committee a decade later, the repercussions of which are still being felt. He begins with the first sophisticated state-on-state cyberattack, in which the United States and Israel used a computer worm dubbed Stuxnet, which they began developing in 2006, to shut down Iranian nuclear enrichment plants. Sanger, the national security correspondent for the New York Times and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has penned one of the most comprehensive and accessible histories of cyberwar to date. But with governments fighting ongoing cyberwars, inflicting damage that has cost billions of dollars and undermined democracy, it is time for a much larger public conversation on the subject, as David Sanger insists in his new book The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age. After all, cyberweapons are new, shrouded in secrecy, and invisible to the untrained eye, making them harder to comprehend than bullets or bombs.

Even though major newspapers cover the thrust and parry of cyberwar, it can be difficult to grasp the bigger picture.

The perfect weapon sanger