The Next War Zone: Confronting the Global Threat of Cyberterrorism (Consumer One-Off)

Rating:
Summary: Aimless Wandering
Review: "Pundit-itis" is an occupational hazard for those folks who must develop and speak quotable-quotes on anything from the meaning and construction principles of a "dirty bomb" to the likelihood of various nations succeeding in a clandestine nuclear weapons program -- after a while, it must seem like they can "pundit-ize" on just about anything. This book has some surprising errors of fact -- for example, using a discussion of "logic bombs" in a definition of a worm. It does have the obligatory chapter bashing Microsoft for their poor record in the security area but it just doesn't have a lot else -- I think "Black Ice" does a much better job of presenting how bad it really could be out there and "Beyond Fear" gives a much superior introduction to the security area for the lay reader. My advice -- spend your $$ somewhere else.

Rating:
Summary: Second-rate description and no proposal: a pointless book.
Review: This is a totally pointless book, written by a not-so-knowledgeable person. The book describes bunch of cracker attacks, like viruses and trojan horses, DDOS attacks and buffer overflows.

He then describes some war zones where information or computer whatever had some role (but then, that would include almost ANYTHING).

He does explain why some vulnerability persists. Like the origin of the Internet and Microsoft this and that.

But then, he does nothing to properly put it in perspective. He does not have any overview, or anything new to propose. It's just a laundry list and shopping list of various computer security related issues. No ideas on what to do with it, other than the usual "plug your security holes and use caution".

He tries to make them into a big deal by calling it Cyberwar and Cyberterrorism. But there's hardly any mention of military action aspect. Yeah, the army may have a web site, or you may re-write a web site. But that's hardly war. Basically, it's just your normal computer security issues. And the author is not particularl knowledgeable in this area. So why bother to read it, when you can read books by REAL experts like Bruce Schneier?

And the final conclusion reads;

"If you do all you reasonably can to keep your PC safe, there's no point in getting upset if something nasty hits you anyway. Forwhatever gets to you under those circumstances is probably hitting a lot of other people and Web sites." (p.264)

... and this guy is supposed to be some expert on war. So if everybody else gets bombed, you shouldn't be upset when you are bombed? How interesting. No, this is clearly not how you should think about security, or "war" or "terrorism".

Besides, if all you have to do is to do some normal security stuff (like patch your security holes, use anti-virus software) to be happy under what the author calls "cyberwar" and "cyberterrorism," why did the author even bother to go through all this scare and fear-mongering?

So, to summarize, the problem is disorganized, its description is second rate, and there's no real solution or proposal --- now that's what I call pointless. Don't bother.