Cyber Warfare – Truth, Tactics, and Strategies

Dark gray book cover with orange swirl on the bottom, titled "Cyber Warfare-Truth, Tactics, and Strategies

Book written by Chase Cunningham

Book review by Rick Howard 

Book Review

 Good niche bookI don't recommend this nonfiction book for the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame, but if you are interested in the topic, this is a good one to read.

Review

I've known the author of this book, Dr. Chase Cunningham, for a number of years now. When the Canon project was just getting started, the committee chose his graphic novels "The Cynja: Volume 1," and "Code of the Cynja: Volume 2" as Hall of Fame candidates because they were perfect books for that budding hacker teenager you might have in your family. But the audience for this book, "Cyber Warfare –Truth, Tactics and Strategies" is the professional security practitioner.

The book's title is a bit of a misnomer. It's not really about Cyber Warfare per se, although Dr. Cunningham does mention the origin of the APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) term. You won't find any details about how adversary groups from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and the U.S. pursue their continuous-low-level-cyber-conflict operations; cyber harassment for espionage, influence operations, and even some destruction in the 2010s and into the 2020s.

The book is really about network defender strategic planning to deal with those threats in the future. He makes the case that perimeter defense is dead and we should all be thinking about edge security. When I interviewed him for my podcast on the Cyberwire network, he said that technologies like SASE and Software Defined Perimeter were the future and I wholeheartedly agree with him.

That said, it's not a must read. There are a lot of interesting ideas here and Dr. Cunningham has been doing this a long time and his insights are always worth considering.

We modeled the Cybersecurity Canon after the Baseball or Rock & Roll Hall-of-Fame, except for cybersecurity books. We have more than 25 books on the initial candidate list, but we are soliciting help from the cybersecurity community to increase the number to be much more than that. Please write a review and nominate your favorite. 

The Cybersecurity Canon is a real thing for our community. We have designed it so that you can directly participate in the process. Please do so!

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