What Everyone Needs to Know® - Cybersecurity and Cyberwar

1-16-14. Having been a cybersecurity professional for over 20 years (long before it was called "cyber security") I am delighted to find a presentation that I can recommend to my non-technical family and friends who look at me with the "deer in the headlights" stare when I attempt to explain the complexities of the Internet and the security issues. The authors have gone to great lengths to simplify a very complicated topic and my "hat is off" to them. Nice job. Great book.

Good overview of cybersecurity and cyberwar
and great examples.
The references given provide a great source of further information.
You do not need to be an IT expert to get a lot out this book.

Doesn't provide much detail on how cyber attacks occur and how as a leader you should approach cyber security. It provides rather a basic overview of the history of cyber security and some detail on signicant cyber events/incidents that have occurred. It's not the worst book I have read but not worth the money.

Great read, informative, interesting at times entertaining. I recommend it for any looking to begin study in the field. It also delves into some challenging policy issues of cybersecurity from a national perspective.

For anyone that uses a mobile device or computer, this is a must read. This book does a nice job breaking down the cyber security risks of such devices and what we as netizens need to know to not only better protect our own devices, but everyone's. I liked how the authors offered some excellent examples of what users, industry, and government can do, and really should do, to make all of our online data safer.

Overall, a decent primer to the issues of cybersecurity. But. While there are nuggets of useful information here, they are concealed by the amount of redundant material. You have to be a patient and persistent reader to work your way to the end of the book. Chop 20% or 30% from the text and you'd have a book that would be more engaging and more broadly appealing.

I started this book and was quickly disappointed with its lack of content. The first part gives the reader some random facts about the history of the internet and cybersecurity, some generic technical information and that was about it. I was not impressed but I kept going.

The second part of the book got me puzzled. How could the authors display such a poor understanding (or such a poor confidence) in the power of distributed architecture, open source software and basically everything that makes the Internet. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect but it’s not Armageddon everyday either. At that stage I felt I was in a Bruce Willis movie “It’s a DDOS attack, we’ll all gonna die”…. I went from being not impressed to feeling I was wasting my time but I kept going.

Then came the part where the authors make recommendations. In short, their solution is lots of government supervision, hire lots of people and spend lots of money. There is nothing in the book about how to manage risk. It is all about avoiding risk at all cost. There is no practical recommendations that organizations concerned with their bottom line can implement…. Then I gave up. I must admit I did not finish the book.

My only rational explanation is that this book is a job application by the authors to some government job.

Books on cybersecurity and cyberwar are often aggressively hysterical. They too often exaggerate how badly and how often things can go wrong. Perversely, they don't describe exactly _how_ things can go wrong, at least not by building a *realistic* chain of plausible events that result in some sort of cyber disaster.

Singer and Friedman's Cybersecurity and Cyberwar is not such a book. It's a realistic assessment of the state of security in the age of the Internet. While it doesn't provide complete scenarios of how something could go wrong, it does a good job of listing well-known problems and their possible conséquences, but without suggesting we have cause to panic.

They offer some practical solutions to these problems and they promote the idea of better governance to improve information security. The authors offer mostly thoughtful, practical and just plain doable advice.

The title is only thing I dislike about the book. I find titles with words like "Cyberwar" unnecessarily dramatic, but I suppose it helps sales, and it's the only instance of security theater in the book. At least, the subtitle redeems the cover: "What Everyone Needs To Know" without any reference, thank goodness, to a coming cyber apocalypse.

Vincent Poirier, Québec City

The book is rather boldly subtitled, "What Everyone Needs To Know." I disagree with this assessment. There are actually only two pages at the very end that deal with practical measures the average computer user can employ to increase personal security while using the Internet. Much more that could be said on the topic of personal security has been left out of this book. This book is more likely to be of interest to corporate and government officials and their IT staffs.

The authors clearly know a lot about this topic and they present it in a way that's easily understandable for most people. I got the feeling reading this, they hoped some less technical folk (like upper management) would take the time to read this. They make the point periodically about how companies fail to see the importance of cybersecurity and even users will forget to update their software or change passwords periodically. If everyone did these things, the authors claim 85% of security problems would be solved. That sounds far-fetched until you read about people who use 'password' or '123456' as their password or the apparent ignorance of cybersecurity issues at some businesses. Some of the advice given makes perfect sense to me but I'm pretty aware of security risks. Many people aren't and they above all others should read this book. Kudos to the authors for a well-written and informative book.

This is a wonderful book for beginners and those who want to understand what is going on. The general public is inundated with all kinds of buzzwords like cyber-this and cyber-that in the media's ongoing broadcast of doom and gloom. This book takes the topics or cybersecurity and cyberwar and explains what they mean, come from, tips on dealing with them and make it readable for the lay person and student alike. I have used them as a resource and suggested this book's use as study material in classes (leaving the rest up to the authors and layweers to figure out their fees for use). I hope they keep it updated.

Good book, easy to follow and understand. The trouble with a book like this is that by the time it's published, it's somewhat obsolete. What is needed are regular updates to the book to keep up with the changes in this field.

Excellent Story line. It shows how things can back fire when industry or the government decide it easier and cheaper to out source everything to other countries. Something to ponder. This could really happen. A great ending. Not an easy read. I took me 3 1/2 days, but was well worth it.

A very useful primer for both technical and non-technical folks. While the book is thrust at those who don't know the difference between Java and JavaScript, the short chapter format should appeal to those out there who ascribe success to moving quickly and breaking things. For those in the policy world, this book is for you. It will provide an enjoyable introduction to those "pipes" that aren't "big trucks" and fill you with enough anecdotes about cyber to run a whole room of Washingtonites.

This book is “pro-America” in the extreme, and especially anti-China. The “bad” countries include every other non-USA alliance country. If you can get over this bias, there are still only a few pages of useful information in the whole book. It mostly gives a history of the internet and cyber security, and a one-sided political background to these events. There is a lot of padding. But it is short on what you can actually do.

1-16-14. Having been a cybersecurity professional for over 20 years (long before it was called "cyber security") I am delighted to find a presentation that I can recommend to my non-technical family and friends who look at me with the "deer in the headlights" stare when I attempt to explain the complexities of the Internet and the security issues. The authors have gone to great lengths to simplify a very complicated topic and my "hat is off" to them. Nice job. Great book.