Richard A. Clarke warned America once before
about the havoc terrorism would wreak on our
national security—and he was right. Now he
warns us of another threat, silent but equally
dangerous. Cyber War is a powerful book about
technology, government, and military strategy; about criminals,
spies, soldiers, and hackers. This is the first book
about the war of the future—cyber war—and a convincing
argument that we may already be in peril of losing it.

Cyber War goes behind the “geek talk” of hackers and
computer scientists to explain clearly and convincingly
what cyber war is, how cyber weapons work, and how vulnerable
we are as a nation and as individuals to the vast
and looming web of cyber criminals. From the first cyber
crisis meeting in the White House a decade ago to the
boardrooms of Silicon Valley and the electrical tunnels
under Manhattan, Clarke and coauthor Robert K. Knake
trace the rise of the cyber age and profile the unlikely
characters and places at the epicenter of the battlefield.
They recount the foreign cyber spies who hacked into the
office of the Secretary of Defense, the control systems
for U.S. electric power grids, and the plans to protect
America’s latest fighter aircraft.

Economically and militarily, Clarke and Knake argue,
what we’ve already lost in the new millennium’s cyber
battles is tantamount to the Soviet and Chinese theft of
our nuclear bomb secrets in the 1940s and 1950s. The
possibilities of what we stand to lose in an all-out cyber
war—our individual and national security among them—
are just as chilling. Powerful and convincing, Cyber War
begins the critical debate about the next great threat to
national security.