Terebrate

Executive Summary Written by the author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern Warfare, Mark Bowden, Worm: The First Digital World War is the story of how the cyber security community came together to do battle with what seemed at the time to be the largest and most significant cyber threat to date: the Conficker worm. It was the time of the Estonian and Georgian distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and the Conficker botnet was growing to be the largest DDoS delivery system ever created. A white hat group of cyber übergeeks formed the Conficker Cabal to stop the worm because most of the world could not even understand it, let alone do something about it. Bowden accurately captures the essence of our cyber security community in times of crisis. He compares us all to cyber security superheroes, like the X-Men of Marvel Comics fame, because of what he sees as our superhuman or mutant ability to work with computers and our desire to help each other. Seasoned security pr...

Executive Summary  The Blue Nowhere is a cyber thriller set in the time of the Internet bubble of the 1990s. Jeffery Deaver is an accomplished novelist who knows how to tell a story, and he does a great job with a cyber theme. A hacker turned serial-killer chooses to kill his victims based on computer history milestones. As the body count rises, the cops recruit a different hacker from jail to help them investigate the murders. What results is a hacker-on-hacker blitzkrieg where hackers try to one-up each other in a series of social engineering and hacking operations. Deaver gets the technical details right describing real-world and fictional tools that each hacker uses to best the other. He even manages to accurately depict the relationship between the hacking and gaming cultures that was prominent during the decade. Security professionals will not learn anything new here, but they will fondly remember the way things were back in the day. The Blue Nowhere is a...

Executive Summary With Reamde , the author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon , Neal Stephenson, delivers a high octane, straight-up cyber thriller along the same lines as Mark Russinovich’s Zero Day and Trojan Horse and Tom Clancy’s Threat Vector , but Stephenson does it with more skill and elevates the genre in the process. The novel has everything that a cyber thriller needs: Chinese hackers, Russian mafia, cyber crime, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), hacking culture, and guns. It is classic Stephenson without the denseness of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle . While it is a wildly imaginative story, the details are real and correct. If you are a cyber security professional, you will not learn anything new here, but you will appreciate a ripping good story told within the boundaries of the cyber security community. It is a good candidate for the cyber security canon, and you should have read this by now. Introduction I am a Neal Stephenson f...