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A review by peter__b
The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger
2.0
This is a well-written book on a very specific topic from a one-sided point of view with an unfortunate audiobook narrator.
That summary above is the response I'd give if anyone asked me what I think of the book. The two-star rating might seem a bit harsh, but I couldn't really justify anything higher from my perspective since I already knew the broad strokes of all the events the book covered. The details of those events were somewhat interesting, but I really didn't need 400 pages to satisfy my curiosity. However, that's very much a biased opinion coming from someone who works in IT and follows international news. For people only vaguely aware of the current cyber environment and political landscape, this is a very informative book covering the last decade or so on the topic of cyber threats.
I should note that this is told from a very biased perspective, one of a journalist working in the USA, seemingly for an American audience and from the viewpoint that America is the world's only bastion of freedom, fighting a lonely war against the rest of the world's evil powers. That's not to say it pulls any punches though since the author was very critical of most of the decisions the country's national security agencies have made up to this point.
This is far from a bad book and like I said earlier, the two stars are primarily because I found it quite boring due to my prior knowledge of the events. I still learned a few things and would definitely recommend this to people curious about the topics. However, I would warn that there's a lot the general public probably still doesn't know and as much as this book tried to 'expose' a lot of 'secret' details, you can be quite sure that those are already out of date and only scratching the surface of what's really going on behind closed doors.
That summary above is the response I'd give if anyone asked me what I think of the book. The two-star rating might seem a bit harsh, but I couldn't really justify anything higher from my perspective since I already knew the broad strokes of all the events the book covered. The details of those events were somewhat interesting, but I really didn't need 400 pages to satisfy my curiosity. However, that's very much a biased opinion coming from someone who works in IT and follows international news. For people only vaguely aware of the current cyber environment and political landscape, this is a very informative book covering the last decade or so on the topic of cyber threats.
I should note that this is told from a very biased perspective, one of a journalist working in the USA, seemingly for an American audience and from the viewpoint that America is the world's only bastion of freedom, fighting a lonely war against the rest of the world's evil powers. That's not to say it pulls any punches though since the author was very critical of most of the decisions the country's national security agencies have made up to this point.
This is far from a bad book and like I said earlier, the two stars are primarily because I found it quite boring due to my prior knowledge of the events. I still learned a few things and would definitely recommend this to people curious about the topics. However, I would warn that there's a lot the general public probably still doesn't know and as much as this book tried to 'expose' a lot of 'secret' details, you can be quite sure that those are already out of date and only scratching the surface of what's really going on behind closed doors.