We Are All Targets: How Renegade Hackers Invented Cyber War and Unleashed an Age of Global Chaos - Hardcover

Potter, Matt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0306925737 ISBN 13: 9780306925733

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 2023

Synopsis

The incredible, untold origin story of cyberwar and the hackers who unleashed it on the world, tracing their journey from the ashes of the Cold War to the criminal underworld, governments, and even Silicon Valley--while the Pandora's Box they opened changed the world forever

Two years before 9/11, the United States was attacked by an unknown enemy. No advance warning was given, and civilians weren't the target. Instead, tomahawk missiles started missing their targets, US agents were swept up by hostile governments, and America's enemies seemed to know its every move in advance. The Pentagon was so confused that its distress call simply read: ?This shouldn't be happening.? A new phase of warfare cyberwar had arrived. And within two decades, it escaped Pandora's Box, plunging us into a state of total war where every day, countless cyber attacks perpetrated by mercenaries and states are reshaping the world.

After receiving an anonymous email with secret NATO battle plans, journalist Matt Potter embarked on a twenty-year investigation into the origins of cyberwar and how it came to dominate the world. He uncovered its beginnings worthy of a Bond movie in the last days of the Cold War, as the US and its allies empowered a generation of Eastern European hackers, only to look away when the Berlin Wall fell, waking up less than a decade later in a new world order. The story winds through Balkan hacking culture, Russia, Silicon Valley, and the Pentagon, following characters like a celebrity hacker with missing fingers who has escaped prison 27 times, FBI agents chasing the first generation of cyber mercenaries in the 90s, and Russian generals obsessed with a Cold War rematch. Never before told, this is the riveting secret history of cyberwar not as governments want it to be controlled, military-directed, discreet, and sophisticated but as it really is: anarchic, chaotic, dangerous, and often thrilling.

About this title

About the Author

Matt Potter writes and presents on global politics, security, and crime for the Washington Post, the BBC, Telegraph, London Evening Standard, Men's Journal, and the Discovery Channel. He has reported for the BBC from Russia, the Balkans, the USA, Afghanistan, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia, and he has won two Sony Awards for radio. As a journalist, his nose for the unusual has seen his writing appear in places as diverse as the Daily Telegraph, Golf Monthly, Esquire, Sunday Telegraph, Jack, Maxim, the Irish Examiner and Q, and his stories on cocaine trafficking in Latin America have been published in Russian, Spanish and English. As a journalist in Belgrade, he broke the story of the NATO "spy" giving away secrets to Serbian forces on the web. His 2011 book Outlaws Inc has been published in 4 different languages and more than 17 countries, and won praise from places as diverse as The Literary Review, BBC5Live, the Washington Post, Bizarre magazine and Fox News. For almost two decades, he has ghostwritten for world leaders, Hollywood actors, CEOs, and rock stars. He lives in London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Pub
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0306925737
• ISBN 13: 9780306925733
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352