Jeffrey Carr
 – Inside Cyber Warfare, Mapping the Cyber Underworld

O'Reilly Media

O’Reilly Media, 
2009
, Pages: 240, 
ISBN: 978-0-596-80215-8
One of the most speculated upon threats in the digital domain (though completely obscure for the majority of people) is so-called “cyber warfare.” Its obscurity is enhanced by the lack of a universally acknowledged definition, but it basically concerns the art of attacking systems and stealing sensitive data. After a couple of decades of digital crimes and endless sensational hyperboles crafted by the media, it’s time to check some facts. This book tries to outline the context and actors of attacks in their specific political and military scenarios. There are several reasons why these situations are interesting: from the legal perspective, the so-called “non-state hackers” (independent groups who pursue attacks) are very hard to prosecute (under the international war agreements), unless they attack their own country; furthermore, different means are used to accomplish attacks on a single person: from forging false identities (with forged documents) to using all the available data on social networks. The value of this book is as a clearly written primer, outlining concepts and supporting them with facts. The romantic myth of the single crazy black-hat hacker provoking an international crisis is here completely debunked, showing how people, organization, and (usually) external support by intelligence are required to accomplish such goals. The author is also the founder of Project Grey Goose, an open source intelligence experiment that provided the basis for the book.