Our Summer Reading List: 13 Must Read Cybersecurity Books
One popular activity to do in the summer in Canada is to lay out in the sun and enjoy a good book. If you are looking for a good Cybersecurity related book to read (or listen to), here are some of our favourites.
General History
Cult of the Dead Cow / Fatal System Error by Joseph Menn. One is about the evolution of the other about the evolution of a hacker group. Both are great.
Tribe of Hackers by Marcus J Carey and Jennifer Jin. There are currently four books in the series. We read them in the order they came out but start wherever your interests lie.
The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. Some of us are old enough to have read it when it first came out. Little did we know how that while technologies have changed, the practices for detection and response would still be valid decades later. For a look at the other side of the story, check out CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier by Katie Hefner and John Markoff
Spam Nation The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime by Brian Kreps. Gives the reader a deep view of the dark side of the web.
This is how They tell me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth. Not a technical book but an explanatory book about cyber events that have happened over the last 30 years with a focus on exploit development. While there has been some talk in the security community about some potential factual errors, we still think this is a great read/listen.
Lights Out A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath by Ted Koppel. With everything connected imagine a cyber attack on our power grid and we have to go weeks or months with no power. What would we do? Can this really happen?
Fiction (or are they)
Freedom™ Daemon Series – Daniel Suarez – An excellent plot and full of action. There is also a great audible version read by Jeff Gurner.
Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer than It Appears by William Hertling. Once you read this, every time you start replying to an email you wonder it ELOPe is there.
Pretty much anything by Neal Stephenson but Cryptonomicon and Reamde stands out.
The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford. The title says it all. If you have worked in IT for any amount of time, particularly in a management capacity, you will be able to identify with this story.
There are dozens more that we would have liked to include, but it would have taken you whole summer to read our list ;-). If you want even more options, we highly recommend checking out the Cybersecurity Canon project at Ohio State University.
Stay tuned for our back-to-school edition where we will list some of our favourite learning by doing books.