U.S. Vulnarable to Cyber Attacks?

From the NY Times "Books of the Times" Blog is a book by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K.Knake, entitled, Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security and What to do About it.


Who defends our banking system?  Our subway system? Our electrical grid?  If your answer to any of these questions is, "our government", you are wrong.  In this book Clarke, an anti-terrorist expert to both Clinton and Bush administrations, warns that we have become so dependent on our technology that cyber attacks from foreign nations is inevitable.

After the first gulf war, he explains, the Chinese “began to downsize their military” — which reportedly has about one-eighth of the Pentagon’s budget (before adding in the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) — and invest in new technologies, which they believed could give them an asymmetric advantage over the United States, despite America’s overwhelming conventional arsenal.

One of the problems, according to Clarke is the fact that many private entities that control our infrastructure do not communicate well with each other. Also, there is no coordinated defense in place to thwart these attacks.
 
This book is a definite must read.

290 pages
Ecco/HarperCollins