- The Atlantic – The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well—the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president [...]

- Wired – A look at Eugene Kaspersky, whose company is a worldwide leader in anti-virus software, and friend of Vladimir Putin and the Russian FSB.

- Foreign Policy – John Arquilla asks could the age of cyberwarfare lead us to a brighter future?

- New York Times – From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

- Wired – A look at how cyberwar was waged by Libya against its citizens.

- Technology Review – How civilians helped win the Libyan information war.

- Wired – James Bamford writes that under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store [...]

- New York Times – The elusive hacker movement known as Anonymous has carried out Internet attacks on well-known organizations like Sony and PBS. In August, the group went after its most prominent target yet: the Vatican. A nice look at how they do it…

- BBC – Hackers are alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois.

- Defense Technology International – Moscow-based Aviaconversiya Ltd., makes and sells GPS jammers…to anyone who wants to buy them, no questions asked.

- Economist – Warfare is changing as weapons that destroy electronics, not people, are deployed on the field of battle.

- Los Angeles Times – Mark Bowden writes that as modern society leans more heavily on the Internet, its fragility becomes an ever greater concern.

- Vanity Fair – Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet [...]

- New York Times – The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal. Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on [...]

- The New Yorker – Peter Maas describes how the media inflated a minor moment in a long war.

- New Yorker – Should we be worried about a cyber war?

The Economist – War in the fifth domain Are the mouse and keyboard the new weapons of conflict?

The Atlantic – The Enemy Within Mark Bowden writes that when the Conficker computer “worm” was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cyber-security experts didn’t know what to make of it. It infiltrated millions of computers around the globe. It constantly checks in with its unknown creators. It uses an encryption code so sophisticated [...]

The Atlantic – Cyber Warriors When will China emerge as a military threat to the U.S.? In most respects the answer is: not anytime soon—China doesn’t even contemplate a time it might challenge America directly. But one significant threat already exists: cyberwar. Attacks—not just from China but from Russia and elsewhere—on America’s electronic networks cost [...]

New York Times – In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks. The results were dispiriting. The enemy had all [...]