Within the final 30 years or so, cybersecurity has gone from being a distinct segment specialty inside the bigger area of pc science, to an trade estimated to be value greater than $170 billion product of a globe-spanning group of hackers. In flip, the trade’s development, 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 infinite record 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 Go away The World Behind. However maybe essentially the most prolific medium for cybersecurity tales — each fiction and primarily based on actuality — are books.
Now we have curated our personal record of finest cybersecurity books, primarily based on the books we now have learn ourselves, and those who the group urged on Mastodon and Bluesky.
This record of books (in no specific order) will likely be periodically up to date.
Countdown to Zero Day, Kim Zetter
The cyberattack coordinated by Israeli and U.S. authorities hackers generally known as Stuxnet, which broken the centrifuges on the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz, is nearly actually the most well-known hack in historical past. Due to its affect, its sophistication, and its sheer boldness, the assault captured the creativeness not solely of the cybersecurity group, however the bigger public as nicely.
Veteran journalist Kim Zetter tells the story of Stuxnet by treating the malware like a personality to be profiled. To realize that, Zetter interviews nearly all the principle investigators who discovered the malicious code, analyzed the way it labored, and found out what it did. It’s a should learn for anybody who works within the cyber area, nevertheless it additionally serves as an excellent 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 Defend, 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 had been utilizing communication gadgets particularly designed to keep away from surveillance. In actuality, all their supposedly safe messages, photos, and audio notes had been being funneled to the FBI and its worldwide legislation 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 gadgets.
The Cuckoo’s Egg, Cliff Stoll
In 1986, astronomer Cliff Stoll was tasked with determining a discrepancy of $0.75 in his lab’s pc community utilization. At this level, the web was principally a community for presidency and tutorial establishments, and these organizations paid relying on how a lot time on-line they spent. Over the following yr, 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 arduous to understate how necessary this guide was. When it got here out in 1989, hackers had been barely a blip within the public’s creativeness. The Cuckoo’s Egg confirmed younger cybersecurity fans how you can examine a cyber incident, and it confirmed the broader public that tales about pc 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 shortly gone from a expertise that appeared omnipotent in motion pictures and TV reveals — however was really janky and imprecise in real-life — to an necessary and comparatively correct software for legislation enforcement in its every day operations. Longtime tech reporter Kashmir Hill tells the historical past of the expertise by way of the rise of one of many controversial startups that made it mainstream: Clearview AI.
Not like different books that profile a startup, at the least one among Clearview AI’s founders partially engaged with Hill in an try to inform his personal facet of the story, however the journalist did lots of work to fact-check — and in some instances debunk — a few of what she heard from her firm sources. Hill is the very best positioned author to inform the story of Clearview AI after first revealing its existence in 2020, which provides the guide an enticing 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 out to be 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 safety heroes who helped to safe a lot of the world’s fashionable applied sciences and communications.
Menn’s guide celebrates each what the hackers achieved, constructed, and broke alongside the best way within the title 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 necessary learn for anybody who needs to grasp the unimaginable and wealthy historical past of the hacking world and its many cultures. The guide’s creator, Emily Crose, a hacker and safety researcher by commerce, covers a number of the earliest hacks that had been rooted in mischief, by way of to the trendy day, with no element spared on the a long time in between.
This guide is deeply researched, nicely 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 strong 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 revealed by a mysterious (and nonetheless unknown) determine known as Satoshi Nakamoto. That laid the inspiration for Bitcoin, and now, nearly 20 years later, crypto has turn out to be its personal trade and embedded itself within the international monetary system. Crypto can also be highly regarded amongst hackers, from low-level scammers, to classy North Korean authorities spies and thieves.
On this guide, Wired’s Andy Greenberg particulars a collection of high-profile investigations that relied on following the digital cash by way of 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 internet market Silk Highway, in addition to the operations in opposition to darkish internet hacking marketplaces (Alpha Bay), and the “world’s largest” little one 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 huge open the huge scale of the U.S. authorities’s international surveillance operations by leaking hundreds of prime secret information to a handful of journalists. A kind of journalists was Barton Gellman, a then-Washington Put up reporter who later chronicled in his guide Darkish Mirror the within story of Snowden’s preliminary outreach and the method of verifying and reporting the cache of categorized authorities information supplied by the whistleblower.
From secretly tapping the non-public 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 had 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 ought to be required studying for all cyber journalists.
