Rating: 
Summary: A MUST READ! IT, Telecommunications, Managers.........
Review: MUST READ!! Should be mandatory reading for ALL IT Managers and anyone involved in System design, Disaster Recovery Planning, Company Operations, or anyone involved in making decisions. This book should sound the alarm to everyone who reads it. I found the book to be well written, very entertaining, and factual.
The detailed events and status of the IT and Telecommunications surrounding 9/11 were all to real. This book should cause all who read this to reevaluate their own environments and their interdependcies on other infrastructures.
Rating:
Summary: One of the most important issues of the 21st century
Review: The sad fact is that even after Sept 11, 2001, the technology-dependent Western world is sleepwalking towards another disaster. The blackout of October 14, 2003 is a shining example of just how great an impact an act of cyberterrorism can have. Granted it does not seem that the blackout was malicious, but it seems that the systems that control these vital lifelines of our modern society are increasingly being connected to public networks (i.e. the Internet) without good regard for the impact this can have. Dan Verton goes into a good level of detail for the non-technical reader about how vulnerable we really are - in every critical industry from power, water, energy, to banking and telecommunications. He also discusses another issue that goes largely ignored - the telecommunications industry is very vulnerable to a physical attack. An oft-neglected lesson of Sept. 11 is that the physical damage of that terror act took out an important chunk of our telecommunications that serves the finance industry - the point being that telecomms are vulnerable to physical attacks, and that this could produce a ripple effect throughout almost every facet of modern life. These are serious issues laid out in the course of this book that need to be discussed in the wider public discourse, but unfortunately the very extent of the disaster that could potentially occur is just too politically embarassing for the people that are charged with keeping us safe. If you are interested in public policy or technology, or just want to be an informed citezen - read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Hype or Fact.
Review: This book is far too melodramatic. Also, Verton quotes himself left and right. He used the word "I" a few hundred times too many. He quotes and copies from his articles in magazines. This book seems to be more of hype for himself than a serious look at things. Don't read this book, it will only confuse the hell out of you.
Rating: 
Summary: How many times can Verton quote himself in his own book?
Review: This book is far too melodramatic. Also, Verton quotes himself left and right. He used the word "I" a few hundred times too many. He quotes and copies from his articles in magazines. This book seems to be more of hype for himself than a serious look at things. Don't read this book, it will only confuse the hell out of you.
Rating:
Summary: Page Turner That Kept Me Reading
Review: This guy is among the best tech journalists out there and this book is proof. Nobody has documented the cyber-terrorist threat like this. And from the negative comments I've seen here on Amazon it is clear that those people didn't read the book or care to acknowledge the compelling nature of the argument. If you're blind to the future, you won't be interested in reading this book or giving it any credit, and that's probably par for the course for you. But if you are an independent thinker who understands the nature of the terrorist threat, you will want to read this book and you will undoubtedly benefit and learn something from it.
Rating:
Summary: Mandatory Reading
Review: This is a tough book to describe -- in content, it resembles a compilation of all of Verton's newsstories but presenting them all together as a connected narrative gives one a better overview of how serious things are out there. I was left with two conflicting impressions after finishing the book -- anger at the lack of preparedness and ignored intelligence that allowed September 11th to happen and a deep sense of humility when contemplating the complexity of defending a free society against such attacks in the future. This book should be required reading for anyone that seeks the appelation of "a thinking American."
Rating:
Summary: Black Ice falls into a black hole
Review: Verton's book is full of hyperbole, repetition, unsupported statements, and contradictions. It is poorly written, poorly organized, and poorly edited. His "research" consists mostly of quoting his own magazine articles (29 times) and the magazine he writes for (16 times). By comparison, he quotes from only three books. Example of hyperbole: In commmenting on a admittedly fictional scenario called Dark Winter, the author claims that, "entire communities and cities could be rendered as helpless as those affected by the Black Death of the 14th century, a bubonic plague that killed one third of Europe's population." Yet, he fails to support that claim with any evidence or even a reference to the report on the exercise. He repeats the same story about an al Qaeda interview with an Italian journalist in his introduction and again at p. 98. He writes nearly the same sentence about radical terrorists living in the U.S. once in the main text on p. 5 and again in a footnote on the same page. He tells a story about the Ptech company at p. 111 and again at p. 223-25, and uses nearly the identical paragraph in each. Where is the editing to catch these duplications? Worse yet, his uses the Ptech story to draw two contradictory conclusions. In the first telling, he says that Ptech is an example of al Qaeda using American companies as fronts for terrorist financing. He claims that "evidence was uncovered" to show this connection. Yet, two pages later, he asserts that the FBI has been "unsuccessful in finding any evidence linking Ptech to terrorism financing." Then in the second telling of the Ptech story, he uses it as an example of how the War on Terrorism has turned into a "virtual witch-hunt," using a "scorched-earth strategy" [more hyperbole] that has "left many innocent casualties in its wake." The reader is left confused whether Ptech serves as an example of al Qaeda using American companies as fronts for terrorist financing, or an example of the War on Terrorism spoiling the reputation of innocent American enterprises. Even his definition of cyber-terrorism is contradicted by his own material. He defines cyber-terrorism as either the use of cyber-tools to destroy critical infrastructure, or traditional terrorism that has a destructive effect on electronic and Internet infrastructure. See Introduction at xx. But in his appendix, he quotes the FBI definition of cyber-terrorism, which is narrower--the use of cyber-tools to shut down or destroy critical national infrastructures. From his overly broad definition of cyber-terrorism, the author strays into three fictional scenarios of terrorism that seem to be the centerpiece of his book. They are supposed to scare us into thinking that cyber-terrorism can really happen. But if they are fictional, how can they alarm us? And, even as fiction, none of them even fits the FBI's definition of cyber-terrorism. The first, Black Ice, starts with a ice storm, not a cyber-attack. The second, Blue Cascades, was described vaguely as "a cyber system failure ... caused by a prolonged power outage." The third, Dark Winter, was a smallpox outbreak. Many years ago, a famous fast food restaurant ran an ad that said, "where's the beef?" After reading this book, I have to ask, "where's the cyber-attack?"
Rating:
Summary: Terrific, high-quality investigative journalism
Review: Without a doubt a book of monumental importance to the nation during this time of war and increased threat from terrorism. I recommend this book to anybody who is interested in homeland security and how terrorism may be changing and evolving its strategy against the U.S. Well-written, full of intrigue and first-hand interviews with top security officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Verton had unfettered access to those directly involved in the Sept. 11 response, including Richard Clarke. You will not find another book on this subject that is this well researched and written. And because Verton is a journalist, he wrote this book so that you don't have to be a computer expert to understand the issues. Buy this book. You will not be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: A Real Eye-Opener
Review: Without a doubt the best mainstream book on this topic to date. Everybody should read this and then ask the Department of Homeland Security what they're doing to prevent the vulnerabilities that Verton has discovered from being used against us.
| 
