The attack had been years in the making, but the sailors on the USS Wayne E. Meyer (DDG-108) had no way of knowing it. For the bridge team, time seemed to grind to a halt. Amid the myriad alarms and the captain shouting at everyone, the officer of the deck knew only that the ship seemed to have suffered a catastrophic power failure in the middle of the South China Sea.1 Down in the combat information center, the scene was dark—literally. A few sailors managed to turn on flashlights and battle lanterns, but the darkness was foreboding.
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1. T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, Robert Faturechi, and Agnes Chang, “Collision Course,” ProPublica, 20 December 2019.
2. CDR Kirk Lippold, USN (Ret.), Front Burner: Al Qaeda’s Attack on the USS Cole (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013).
3. James Cook, “How a Chinese Agent Used LinkedIn’s ‘Relentless’ Algorithm to Find Targets,” The Telegraph, 27 July 2020.
4. Alex Weinert, “Your Pa$$word Doesn’t Matter,” Microsoft.com, 9 July 2019; Secretary of the Navy, Cybersecurity Readiness Review, 4 March 2019; “APT1: Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units,” Mandiant, 19 February 2013.
5. Ellen Nakashima and Paul Sonne, “China Hacked a Navy Contractor and Secured a Trove of Highly Sensitive Data on Submarine Warfare,” Washington Post, 8 June 2018.
6. Maria Korolov, “New Malware Makes Air-Gapped Data Center Networks Less Bulletproof,” Data Center Knowledge, 8 June 2020; Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2015).
7. Andy Greenberg, “The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History,” Wired, 22 August 2018.
8. Mark Lapedus, “A Crisis In DoD’s Trusted Foundry Program?” Semiconductor Engineering, 22 October 2018.
9. Jordan Roberston and Michael Riley, “The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 4 October 2018.
10. Gregory Slabodkin, “Software Glitches Leave Navy Smart Ship Dead in the Water,” GCN, 13 July 1998.
11. Greenberg, “The Untold Story of NotPetya.”
12. Brandon Keim, “Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire,” Wired, 16 February 2012.
13. Danny Palmer, “Hacking Attacks on Your Router: Why the Worst Is Yet to Come,” ZDNet, 3 January 2019.
14. Peter Pomeratsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
15. Mark Harris, “Ghost Ships, Crop Circles, and Soft Gold: A GPS Mystery in Shanghai,” MIT Technology Review, 15 November 2019.
16. Andy Greenberg, “How 30 Lines of Code Blew Up a 27-Ton Generator,” Wired, 23 October 2020.
17. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel Griffith (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).
18. H. I. Sutton, “The Realities of Tracking Aircraft Carriers with Civilian Satellites,” Forbes, 7 May 2020; “Anatomy of a Firmware Attack,” Eclypsium, 20 December 2019.
19. Paul Tullis, “GPS Is Easy to Hack, and the U.S. Has No Backup,” Scientific American, 1 December 2019.
20. H. I. Sutton, “Satellite Images Show that Chinese Navy Is Expanding Overseas Base,” Forbes, 10 May 2020.
21. “The Launching of the Oops-Missile,” Fregatten Peder Skram; David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, “N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway into Computers,” New York Times, 14 January 2014.
22. Secretary of the Navy, Cybersecurity Readiness Review.
23. David Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
24. Lily Hay Newman, “Hacker Lexicon: What Is Steganography?” Wired, 26 June 2017.
25. Mark Pomerleau, “When Information Moves Fast, Who Has Time to Make a Decision?” C4ISRnet, 13 November 2020.
26. Josef Koller, “U.S. Forces Can’t Hide from Ubiquitous Satellites. They Need to Fool Them,” DefenseOne, 16 December 2019.
