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Book Summary and Reviews of Dark Territory by Fred Kaplan

Dark Territory by Fred Kaplan

Dark Territory

The Secret History of Cyber War

by Fred Kaplan

  • Published:
  • Mar 2016, 352 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

"A book that grips, informs, and alarms, finely researched and lucidly related." - John le Carré

As cyber-attacks dominate front-page news, as hackers join terrorists on the list of global threats, and as top generals warn of a coming cyber war, few books are more timely and enlightening than Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, by Slate columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Fred Kaplan.

Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-top-secret cyber units in the Pentagon, the "information warfare" squads of the military services, and the national security debates in the White House, to tell this never-before-told story of the officers, policymakers, scientists, and spies who devised this new form of warfare and who have been planning - and (more often than people know) fighting - these wars for decades.

From the 1991 Gulf War to conflicts in Haiti, Serbia, Syria, the former Soviet republics, Iraq, and Iran, where cyber warfare played a significant role, Dark Territory chronicles, in fascinating detail, a little-known past that shines an unsettling light on our future.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review, An important, disturbing, and gripping history arguing convincingly that, as of 2015, no defense exists against a resourceful cyberattack." - Kirkus

"Fred Kaplan has illuminated not merely the profound vulnerabilities of our nation to cyber warfare, but why it has taken so long for our policy-makers to translate indifference into concern and concern into action. This is a vitally important book by a meticulous journalist." - Ted Koppel, author of Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath

"A fascinating account of the people and organizations leading the way towards a cyber war future." - Dorothy E. Denning, author of Information Warfare and Security, 1st Inductee, National Cyber Security Hall of Fame

"Fred Kaplan has put the people, the technologies, the dramatic turning points, and the strategic and economic stakes together in a way no author has done before." - James Fallows, national correspondent, The Atlantic

This information about Dark Territory was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Fred Kaplan

Fred Kaplan is the national-security columnist for Slate and the author of four other books, including The Wizards of Armageddon, 1959, Daydream Believers, and, most recently The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, which was a New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist. A former Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Boston Globe, he graduated from Oberlin College, earned a PhD from MIT, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone.

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