Everything You Need to Know About the Next Attack–And Fun,
February 6, 2002
Winn Schwartau
This book is a based on a *non-fiction* manuscript about U.S. vulnerabilities to electronic that was so hot that the author's lawyers insisted he turn it into a novel to avoid liability.It is absolutely superb and written by one of the most authoritative persons around. Unlike most academic and industry security specialists, the author has from the very beginning understood, respected, and been in touch with the elite hackers who worked very hard in the 1980's to expose the outrageously vulnerable electronic systems used by our financial, transportation, power, and communications industries.
In my view, books like this as well as the non-fiction books such as “Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway” have been vital elements in educating consumers, stockholders, and voters. If you want to know just how vulnerable your bank account is, read this book.
I won't reveal the surprise ending, but will say that it is absolutely a shocker, and totally credible.
There will be those quick to trash this book as sensationalist, and they are partly right. What most people, including the critics, do not realize is that Winn Schwartau went out on a limb in the late 1980's and early 1990's and is *the* primary reason Congress got concerned enough about these issues to demand a Critical Infrastructure Protection program funded at over $1B–it was Winn, not others quick to claim the line, that testified to Congress about an “electronic Pearl Harbor” on 24 June 1991. This book is unabashedly populist and seeks to make this very complex threat entertaining and understandable, and for that reason alone it is worth the time to consider. There are many other serious books for engineers, this is the one for anyone at all from housewife to student to executive. Great airplane book, won't save the world, but will certainly increase your consciousness across the board. Worthy.
This is the cover letter to the US Government official most responsible for thinking about the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and the security of that infrastructure. Three “top guns,” one of the the foremost authority in the public arena, another the foremost expert on these matters advising the National Security Agency (NSA) all agreed on the need, in 1994, for a $1 billion a year program.
Today (Fall 2009) NSA has asked for $12 billion a year, and they are not letting on that the real reason they are building their own power plant is because the Chinese have mastered the art of riding the public electrical grid into any computer running on public electricity. Below are the cross walk and the contributing letters from the top experts in 1004. NSA has let us all down.
Both Bill Caelli and Winn Schwartau have new books coming out in 2017, the bottom line of which is that we can indeed secure cyberspace, but it requires that governments and the providers of communications and computing software and hardware have integrity — not the case today. Below is the concept Robert Garigue (RIP) and Robert Steele developed in 1997. No one has implemented this to date.
