Within the final 30 years or so, cybersecurity has gone from being a distinct segment specialty inside the bigger subject of laptop science, to an trade estimated to be price greater than $170 billion fabricated from a globe-spanning group of hackers. In flip, the trade’s progress, and high-profile hacks such because the 2015 Sony breach, the 2016 U.S. election hack and leak operations, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware assault, and a seemingly countless checklist of Chinese language authorities hacks, have made cybersecurity and hacking go mainstream.
Popular culture has embraced hackers with hit TV reveals like Mr. Robotic, and flicks like Depart The World Behind. However maybe probably the most prolific medium for cybersecurity tales — each fiction and based mostly on actuality — are books.
Now we have curated our personal checklist of greatest cybersecurity books, based mostly on the books we’ve got learn ourselves, and people who the group prompt on Mastodon and Bluesky.
This checklist of books (in no explicit order) might be periodically up to date.
Countdown to Zero Day, Kim Zetter
The cyberattack coordinated by Israeli and U.S. authorities hackers often known as Stuxnet, which broken the centrifuges on the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz, is sort of actually the most well-known hack in historical past. Due to its impression, its sophistication, and its sheer boldness, the assault captured the creativeness not solely of the cybersecurity group, however the bigger public as effectively.
Veteran journalist Kim Zetter tells the story of Stuxnet by treating the malware like a personality to be profiled. To attain that, Zetter interviews just about all the principle investigators who discovered the malicious code, analyzed the way it labored, and discovered what it did. It’s a should learn for anybody who works within the cyber subject, however it additionally serves as a terrific introduction to the world of cybersecurity and cyberespionage for normal people.
Darkish Wire, Joseph Cox
There haven’t been any sting operations extra daring and expansive than the FBI’s Operation Trojan Protect, during which the feds ran a startup known as Anom that offered encrypted telephones to a number of the worst criminals on the earth, from high-profile drug smugglers to elusive mobsters.
These criminals thought they have been utilizing communication units particularly designed to keep away from surveillance. In actuality, all their supposedly safe messages, photos, and audio notes have been being funneled to the FBI and its worldwide regulation enforcement companions. 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox masterfully tells the story of Anom, with interviews with the sting operation’s masterminds within the FBI, the builders and employees who ran the startup, and the criminals utilizing the units.
The Cuckoo’s Egg, Cliff Stoll
In 1986, astronomer Cliff Stoll was tasked with determining a discrepancy of $0.75 in his lab’s laptop community utilization. At this level, the web was largely a community for presidency and educational establishments, and these organizations paid relying on how a lot time on-line they spent. Over the following 12 months, Stoll meticulously pulled the threads of what appeared like a minor incident and ended up discovering one of many first-ever recorded instances of presidency cyberespionage, on this case carried out by Russia’s KGB.
Stoll not solely solved the thriller, however he additionally chronicled it and turned it right into a gripping spy thriller. It’s onerous to understate how necessary this e-book was. When it got here out in 1989, hackers have been barely a blip within the public’s creativeness. The Cuckoo’s Egg confirmed younger cybersecurity fanatics the way to examine a cyber incident, and it confirmed the broader public that tales about laptop spies may very well be as thrilling as these of real-life James Bond-like figures.
Your Face Belongs to Us, Kashmir Hill
Face recognition has rapidly gone from a know-how that appeared omnipotent in motion pictures and TV reveals — however was truly janky and imprecise in real-life — to an necessary and comparatively correct software for regulation enforcement in its day by day operations. Longtime tech reporter Kashmir Hill tells the historical past of the know-how via the rise of one of many controversial startups that made it mainstream: Clearview AI.
Not like different books that profile a startup, at the very least certainly one of Clearview AI’s founders partially engaged with Hill in an try to inform his personal facet of the story, however the journalist did a number of work to fact-check — and in some instances debunk — a few of what she heard from her firm sources. Hill is the perfect positioned author to inform the story of Clearview AI after first revealing its existence in 2020, which provides the e-book an attractive first-person narrative in some sections.
Cult of the Useless Cow, Joseph Menn
Investigative cyber reporter Joseph Menn tells the unimaginable true again story of the influential Cult of the Useless Cow, one of many oldest hacking supergroups from the ’80s and ’90s, and the way they helped to rework the early web into what it has turn into immediately. The group’s members embody mainstream names, from tech CEOs and activists, a few of whom went on to advise presidents and testify to lawmakers, to the security heroes who helped to safe a lot of the world’s fashionable applied sciences and communications.
Menn’s e-book celebrates each what the hackers achieved, constructed, and broke alongside the best way within the identify of bettering cybersecurity, freedom of speech and expression, and privateness rights, and codifies the historical past of the early web hacking scene as advised by a number of the very individuals who lived it.
Hack to the Future, Emily Crose
“Hack to the Future” is a vital learn for anybody who desires to know the unimaginable and wealthy historical past of the hacking world and its many cultures. The e-book’s writer, Emily Crose, a hacker and security researcher by commerce, covers a number of the earliest hacks that have been rooted in mischief, via to the fashionable day, with no element spared on the a long time in between.
This e-book is deeply researched, effectively represented, and each part-history and part-celebration of the hacker group that morphed from the curious-minded misfits whistling right into a phone to attain free long-distance calls, to changing into a robust group wielding geopolitical energy and featured prominently in mainstream tradition.
Tracers within the Darkish, Andy Greenberg
The idea of cryptocurrency was born in 2008 a white paper printed by a mysterious (and nonetheless unknown) determine known as Satoshi Nakamoto. That laid the muse for Bitcoin, and now, nearly 20 years later, crypto has turn into its personal trade and embedded itself within the international monetary system. Crypto can also be very fashionable amongst hackers, from low-level scammers, to classy North Korean authorities spies and thieves.
On this e-book, Wired’s Andy Greenberg particulars a sequence of high-profile investigations that relied on following the digital cash via the blockchain. That includes interview with the investigators who labored on these instances, Greenberg tells the behind the scenes of the takedown of the pioneering darkish net market Silk Highway, in addition to the operations towards darkish net hacking marketplaces (Alpha Bay), and the “world’s largest” youngster sexual abuse web site known as “Welcome to Video.”
Darkish Mirror, Barton Gellman
Over a decade in the past, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew large open the huge scale of the U.S. authorities’s international surveillance operations by leaking hundreds of high secret information to a handful of journalists. A kind of journalists was Barton Gellman, a then-Washington Publish reporter who later chronicled in his e-book Darkish Mirror the within story of Snowden’s preliminary outreach and the method of verifying and reporting the cache of categorised authorities information offered by the whistleblower.
From secretly tapping the personal fiber optic cables connecting the datacenters of a number of the world’s greatest corporations, to the covert snooping on lawmakers and world leaders, the information detailed how the Nationwide Safety Company and its international allies have been able to spying on nearly anybody on the earth. Darkish Mirror isn’t only a look again at a time in historical past, however a first-person account of how Gellman investigated, reported, and broke new floor on a number of the most influential and necessary journalism of the twenty first century, and must be required studying for all cyber journalists.
