Robert K. Knake

Richard Alan Clarke

Presents an urgent assessment of how governments, businesses, and everyday citizens can counter and prevent attacks by criminal hackers determined to create a digital war zone.

Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

The Fifth Domain

Nico J

This might be something I need to buy. It was a little frightening, but in a alert, cautious way, and if you know anything about my reading habits as it is, I do love non-fiction that's terrifying like a dystopian. Coming off of a summer cohort in Cybersecurity, this delved deeper into what actual entities, public and private, are doing to combat the seemingly harmless things users are running into as they careen around the "open" internet. On a personal level, I've had credit cards replaced several times and had to establish a passphrase to talk to my bank because information was compromised in the huge Equifax situation. This is becoming a normal part of our lives, and it really shows that the average person needs to flex some cyber hygiene if they're able. 

There are people far more prudent than I and this book did reassure me -a little- that people are working to combat at least parts of this. The prevailing attitude for most is that government is always slow to develop strategies against the cutting-edge and new. (I think of law, cloud, and the internet as mainstay examples.) What did baffle me, even having an idea of it after my studies, is the pathetic security of all of our national infrastructure. It's mind-boggling. Not an expert on military spending, but god, where is it all going if we're not allocating enough to this? Specialization and experience are a delicate see-saw, in my view; you want it on your team but you need to have teams that can pull back and see the other issues. Not unlike the structure of many legacy corporations, top-heavy people with cloud sweep issues under the rug and believe solely and stubbornly in their own expertise. It's bordering on dangerous tunnel vision and we need to shake up this paradigm and reset our concepts of the internet, attack surfaces, warfare, and also the cultural tangles that are embedded in how we deal with the changes. 

Every single chapter of this was fascinating. The discussion of segmenting the internet gave me a little tinge of physical revulsion; why is that? Is there something cultural about borders that comes from me growing up in America, or am I in a place of privilege to be able to feel that way? That's a complicated question that should be untangled outside of the scope of this book. Maybe it's because I remember getting dial-up internet, sitting in a family / computer room while something so novel opened itself up. At a formative age, nonetheless. It forms your experiences in a way that's difficult to describe to those older or younger than you, because you remember the catalyst, the divide you were witnessing. 

Since government (and in my world, aviation hell) is full of acronyms, I had to keep a running list of things to research separately after finishing the book. Summarily, I'd like to read it again because it presented fantastic strategy for addressing these things, and even where I disagreed (not an expert, though, obviously), presented a way forward that I hope those with more power are considering.

Richard A. Clarke

An urgent new warning from two bestselling security experts--and a gripping inside look at how governments, firms, and ordinary citizens can confront and contain the tyrants, hackers, and criminals bent on turning the digital realm into a war zone. "In the battle raging between offense and defense in cyberspace, Clarke and Knake have some important ideas about how we can avoid cyberwar for our country, prevent cybercrime against our companies, and in doing so, reduce resentment, division, and instability at home and abroad."--Bill Clinton There is much to fear in the dark corners of cyberspace. From well-covered stories like the Stuxnet attack which helped slow Iran's nuclear program, to lesser-known tales like EternalBlue, the 2017 cyber battle that closed hospitals in Britain and froze shipping crates in Germany in midair, we have entered an age in which online threats carry real-world consequences. But we do not have to let autocrats and criminals run amok in the digital realm. We now know a great deal about how to make cyberspace far less dangerous--and about how to defend our security, economy, democracy, and privacy from cyber attack. This is a book about the realm in which nobody should ever want to fight a war: the fifth domain, the Pentagon's term for cyberspace. Our guides are two of America's top cybersecurity experts, seasoned practitioners who are as familiar with the White House Situation Room as they are with Fortune 500 boardrooms. Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake offer a vivid, engrossing tour of the often unfamiliar terrain of cyberspace, introducing us to the scientists, executives, and public servants who have learned through hard experience how government agencies and private firms can fend off cyber threats. Clarke and Knake take us inside quantum-computing labs racing to develop cyber superweapons; bring us into the boardrooms of the many firms that have been hacked and the few that have not; and walk us through the corridors of the U.S. intelligence community with officials working to defend America's elections from foreign malice. With a focus on solutions over scaremongering, they make a compelling case for "cyber resilience"--building systems that can resist most attacks, raising the costs on cyber criminals and the autocrats who often lurk behind them, and avoiding the trap of overreaction to digital attacks. Above all, Clarke and Knake show us how to keep the fifth domain a humming engine of economic growth and human progress by not giving in to those who would turn it into a wasteland of conflict. Backed by decades of high-level experience in the White House and the private sector, The Fifth Domain delivers a riveting, agenda-setting insider look at what works in the struggle to avoid cyberwar.

The Fifth Domain Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

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