Dark Territory Quotes

“When a director at Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the nation’s largest utilities, testified that all of its control systems were getting hooked up to the Internet, to save money and speed up the transmission of energy, Lacombe asked what the company was doing about security. He didn’t know what Lacombe was talking about.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“The NSA was hacking into Chinese networks to help defeat them in a war; China was hacking into American networks mainly to help enrich its economy. What made one form of hacking permissible and the other form intolerable? Even”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“A common critique of the intelligence failure on 9/11 was that the relevant agencies possessed a lot of facts—a lot of data points—that might have pointed to an imminent attack, but no one could “connect the dots.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“(On the day of the 9/11 attacks, Rice was scheduled to deliver a speech on the major threats facing the land; the draft didn’t so much as mention bin Laden or al Qaeda.) In”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“The team had the hardest time hacking into the server of the J-2, the Joint Staff’s intelligence directorate. Finally, one of the team members simply called the J-2’s office and said that he was with the Pentagon’s IT department, that there were some technical problems, and that he needed to reset all the passwords. The person answering the phone gave him the existing password without hesitating. The Red Team broke in.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“More than that, to the extent computer hardware and software had security holes, the NSA’s managers were reluctant to patch them. Much of this hardware and software was used (or copied) in countries worldwide, including the targets of NSA surveillance; if it could easily be hacked, so much the better for surveillance.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“One word was floating around in stories about hackings of one sort or another: “cyber.” The word had its roots in “cybernetics,” a term dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, describing the closed loops of information systems. But in its present-day context of computer networks, the term stemmed from William Gibson’s 1984 science-fiction novel, Neuromancer, a wild and eerily prescient tale of murder and mayhem in the virtual world of “cyberspace.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“allowed the government to conduct electronic surveillance inside the United States—“with the assistance of a communications service provider,” in the words of that law—as long as the people communicating were “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. The”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Stone was no admirer of Snowden: he valued certain whistleblowers who selectively leaked secret information in the interest of the public good; but Snowden’s wholesale pilfering of so many documents, of such a highly classified nature, struck him as untenable. Maybe Snowden was right and the government was wrong—he didn’t know—but he thought no national security apparatus could function if some junior employee decided which secrets to preserve and which to let fly.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“The companies that were hacked would also have preferred to stay mum—no point upsetting customers and stockholders—but the word soon spread, and they reacted by pressuring the White House to do something, largely because, after all these decades of analyses and warnings, many of them still didn’t know what to do themselves. This”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“email to the target-company’s employees. If just one employee clicked the email’s attachment (and all it took was one), the computer would download a webpage crammed with malware, including a “Remote Access Trojan,” known in the trade as a RAT. The RAT opened a door, allowing the intruder to roam the network, acquire the privileges of a systems administrator, and extract all the data he wanted. They did this with economic enterprises of all kinds: banks, oil and gas pipelines, waterworks, health-care data managers—sometimes to steal secrets, sometimes to steal money, sometimes for motives that couldn’t be ascertained. McAfee,”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“During his eight years as president, at Camp David and in the White House screening room, Reagan watched 374 movies, an average of nearly one a week, though often more.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Stuxnet spurred the Iranians to create their own cyber war unit, which took off at still greater levels of funding a year and a half later, in the spring of 2012, when, in a follow-up attack, the NSA’s Flame virus—the massive, multipurpose malware from which Olympic Games had derived—wiped out nearly every hard drive at Iran’s oil ministry and at the Iranian National Oil Company. Four months after that, Iran fired back with its own Shamoon virus, wiping out 30,000 hard drives (basically, every hard drive in every workstation) at Saudi Aramco, the joint U.S.-Saudi Arabian oil company, and planting, on every one of its computer monitors, the image of a burning American flag. Keith”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Bush might have gone for the idea a few years earlier, but he was tiring of Cheney’s relentless hawkishness.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“NSA lawyers even altered some otherwise plain definitions, so that doing this didn’t constitute “collecting” data from American citizens, as that would be illegal: under the new terminology, the NSA was just storing the data; the collecting wouldn’t happen until an analyst went to retrieve it from the files, and that would be done only with proper FISA Court approval. Under”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“the lag time between collecting and acting on intelligence was slashed from sixteen hours to one minute. By”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“six thousand NSA officials were deployed to Iraq and, later, Afghanistan;”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Instead of a single, monolithic system that tried to do everything, Turbulence consisted of nine smaller systems. In part, the various systems served as backups or alternative approaches, in case the others failed or the global technology shifted.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t acknowledge that there was an insurgency. (Rumsfeld was old enough to know, from Vietnam days, that defeating an insurgency required a counterinsurgency strategy, which in turn would leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq for years, maybe decades—whereas he just wanted to get in, get out, and move on to oust the next tyrant standing in the way of America’s post–Cold War dominance.) Out”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“C-CNE, for Counter-Computer Network Exploitation—penetrating an adversary’s networks in order to watch him penetrating our networks.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“the only point, of the town hall theatrics was to get their buy-in—to”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Clarke, the architect of those policies, stayed on in the White House and retained his title of National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. But, it was clear, Bush didn’t care about any of those issues, nor did Vice President Dick Cheney or the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“During the Cold War, American spy planes penetrated the Russian border in order to force Soviet officers to turn on their radar and thus reveal information about their air-defense systems. Submarine crews would tap into underwater cables near Russian ports to intercept communications, and discover patterns, of Soviet naval operations.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“CND (Computer Network Defense) and CNA (Computer Network Attack); now there was also CNE (Computer Network Exploitation). CNE”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“division of labor within the intelligence community, especially between the NSA and the CIA. In the old days, this division was clear: if information moved, the NSA would intercept it; if it stood still, the CIA would send a spy to nab it. NSA intercepted electrons whooshing through the air or over phone lines; CIA stole documents sitting on a desk or in a vault. The line had been sharply drawn for decades. But in the digital age, the line grew fuzzy.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“called counter command-control warfare: just knowing that you’d been hacked, regardless of its tangible effects, was disorienting, disrupting. Meanwhile,”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“terrorism, seen as a nuisance during the nuclear arms race and the Cold War, was emerging as a major threat.)”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Sneakers was cowritten by Larry Lasker and Walter Parkes—the same pair that, a decade earlier, had written WarGames.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Joint Chiefs of Staff, called an emergency meeting”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Clinton admired Zatko’s cowboy boots, hoisted his own snakeskins onto his desk, and disclosed that he owned boots made of every mammal on the planet. (“Don’t tell the liberals,” he whispered.)”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War