Dawn of the Code War

Dawn of the Code War by John P. Carlin covers the inside story cyber war, mostly by North Korea, China, Russia and Iran. It took me a little while to get into it but once it gets going it’s very interesting.

The book covers cyber from the earliest days of phone phreaking, where phreakers would use audio tones to hack the telephone system in order to get calls for free. While this is a little before my time, as someone born in 1969, the books walk through time from the earliest days of the internet is nostalgic. Being someone who started to use computers when they first became available to regular people and being a very early to the internet I remember and recognize many of the events in this book. Of course I didn’t have the insiders perspective that this book provides, but it’s relevancy to my journey and career is poignant.

While reading this book the Solar Winds hack was unfolding in real time. This hack perpetrated by Russia is actually worse than anything in the book, with large numbers of government agencies and commercial entities hacked for considerable periods of time without realizing. This event combined with the book has made me look at my own cyber security with a bit more critical eye and made me elevate the care I take with my data and cyber hygiene including moving my cloud files to encrypted storage with two factor authentication.

I’d recommend this book to anyone with an interest in espionage in general. It’s impossible today to separate espionage, both commercial and state sponsored, from technology.