Information Warfare and Security

Front Cover
ACM Press, 1999 - Computers - 522 pages

What individuals, corporations, and governments need to know about information-related attacks and defenses!

Every day, we hear reports of hackers who have penetrated computer networks, vandalized Web pages, and accessed sensitive information. We hear how they have tampered with medical records, disrupted emergency 911 systems, and siphoned money from bank accounts. Could information terrorists, using nothing more than a personal computer, cause planes to crash, widespread power blackouts, or financial chaos? Such real and imaginary scenarios, and our defense against them, are the stuff of information warfare-operations that target or exploit information media to win some objective over an adversary.

Dorothy E. Denning, a pioneer in computer security, provides in this book a framework for understanding and dealing with information-based threats: computer break-ins, fraud, sabotage, espionage, piracy, identity theft, invasions of privacy, and electronic warfare. She describes these attacks with astonishing, real examples, as in her analysis of information warfare operations during the Gulf War. Then, offering sound advice for security practices and policies, she explains countermeasures that are both possible and necessary.

You will find in this book:

  • A comprehensive and coherent treatment of offensive and defensive information warfare, identifying the key actors, targets, methods, technologies, outcomes, policies, and laws;
  • A theory of information warfare that explains and integrates within a single framework operations involving diverse actors and media;
  • An accurate picture of the threats, illuminated by actual incidents;
  • A description of information warfare technologies and their limitations, particularly the limitations of defensive technologies.

Whatever your interest or role in the emerging field of information warfare, this book will give you the background you need to make informed judgments about potential threats and our defenses against them.

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From inside the book

Contents

GULF WARINFOWAR
3
A THEORY OF INFORMATION WARFARE
21
PLAYGROUNDS TO BATTLEGROUNDS
43
Copyright

19 other sections not shown

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1999)

Dorothy E. Denning is Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. She is the author of a classic book in the field, Cryptography and Data Security, a coeditor (with Peter J. Denning) of a more recent work, Internet Besieged: Countering Cyberspace Scofflaws, and the author of 100 papers on computer security. Dr. Denning has shared her special expertise on encryption in testimony before the U.S. Congress. 0201433036AB04062001