My Reaction
For IT and cyber security professionals, CyberStorm is a decent read that is just techy enough to relate to, but not techy enough to remind you of your day job.
Matthew Mather does a good job creating a scenario that is believable. Although I do not think this scenario could play out in reality, the effects do seem realistic. The perspective of a mildly tech-saavy group of family and friends stuck in a cyber war makes for an interesting analysis of what people might do in such a situation.
Mather does not go into great detail on the actual cyber attacks or what people are doing to recover. However he does go into what real people might do if our precious internet fails us. A highlight was when one of the characters creates a metropolitan area network in order to share information. In the event of a cyber attack that takes our or severely degrades our access to the internet, creating our own smaller internet is very viable and this novel explores how that could be useful.
Another highlight is how information doesn’t quite flow without technology. The people in the story don’t know what is happening and end up filling in the blanks with some preconceptions and rumors. This ends up paying off quite well in the end.
One thing that I found quite jarring was that around halfway through the novel, chapters started ending with suspense that promised action in the next chapter. However, the next chapter would fast forward a few hours and tell what happened rather than show it. This wasn’t a consistent theme throughout the book, but it happened quite a few times in a single act making that section feel unsatisfying.
Recommendation
Overall, I was a little let down by how little this book utilized technology and cyber war concepts. However, the story was captivating with the sprinkling of technology and cyber security “what ifs”. After reading many reviews I understand that this book would not be popular if it were more technically complicated. I still enjoyed the read and liked most of the characters. I would recommend this book to my fellow IT professionals, but I won’t oversell it.