Washington Free Beacon senior editor Bill Gertz discussed his new book iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age during a radio interview with Ross Kaminsky on Tuesday.
Gertz said the premise of the book is that the world is currently engulfed in information warfare, which is a combination of both cyber and technical attacks. Examples include the "WannaCry" malware that recently wreaked havoc on the British health system and the Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election.
Adversaries of the U.S. like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Islamic radical terrorists are employing these techniques, and the U.S. is "totally unaware" of it, he said.
"We're living in an information age," Gertz said. "Those countries have figured that they can't confront the United States on the kinetic, military front, so they're using information operations. This is really to sound the alarm that the United States needs to take steps to first of all counter this foreign information warfare, and then to get into the fight on our own level."
Gertz, who frequently writes on cybersecurity and national security, and Kaminsky also delved into new strain of ransomware called "EternalRocks," which, according to researchers, attacks similarly to the "WannaCry" ransomware.