Reviews of fiction and non-fiction cyber security media from a security professional’s point of view. Includes recommendations for which IT professionals may find the media useful to consume.
y fSummary The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knacke is a follow up to their 2010 novel Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do about It. This...
Synopsis Rise of the Locusts by Mark Goodwin is the first novel in his Cyber Armageddon series. The series follows a SOC Supervisor at a financial institute from the discovery of a breach through to the shutdown of critical infrastructure in the United States. The...
Synopsis The Gam3 is a 3 book series by the young author Cosimo Yap. The series follows the literary RPG style which blends the conventions of role-playing video games with a science fiction novel. In this style, the main protagonist is interacting with an RPG game...
Synopsis Gray Day is a first hand account by the former FBI agent Eric O'Neill on his direct involvement in capturing the Russian mole Robert Hanssen. This story was dramatized in the 2007 movie "Breach". Robert Hanssen was a tech saavy FBI agent who started selling...
Synopsis Zeroes is a technothriller set in mid 2010's that follows fiver hackers with different backgrounds. Two are more traditional skilled hackers while the other three have specialized niches: social engineering, scamming, and an old-school BBS admin. The story...
My Reaction This novel was a rough read but has some unique insights that make it worth finishing. I personally learned a lot about attacks conducted by the Chinese and Iranian nation states. I had heard of many, but some of the less public ones were interesting to...
Synopsis (heavy bias) Going into the 2020 elections, I thought it would be good to get some insights on how Russian cyber efforts affected the 2016 elections. The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election seemed liked...
Synopsis Kevin Mitnik's follow up to The Art of Deception is a closer look at some famous and not so famous hacks of the 90's. It focuses much more on the logistical and technical side of early hacking. It is again styled as anecdotes from both the author and people...
Synopsis At the time of my reading, The Art of Deception was 18 years old. It was published in 2001 and covered the career of a hacker that spanned from from the 80's to the turn of the millennium. As such, much of the information on specific technologies and tactics...
Synopsis Countdown to Zero Day, by Kim Zetter, is an in depth accounting of how the Stuxnet malware package was developed, discovered, and what impact it had on the world. Kim Zetter gives a behind the scenes peak from the perspective of malware researchers from...
Synopsis The follow up to Invasion of Privacy, Taking up Serpents is another techno-thriller in Ian Sutherland's Brody Taylor series. It continues the story of Brody, a white hat hacker this time following up on things that happen in the previous novel. Brody is on...
Synopsis Dark Territory was an interesting history of how the U.S. government has approached information security from Reagan's era through Obama's presidency. As the title suggests, most of the focus was on the offensive side of cyber. This meant that a majority of...