The Digital Big Bang. The Hard Stuff, The Soft Stuff, and the Future of Cybersecurity, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of The Digital Big Bang – The Hard Stuff, The Soft Stuff, and the Future of Cybersecurity. By Phil Quade, CISO, Fortinet, Published by Wiley, October 2019, hardcover and e-book, priced £22.99,

ISBN: 9781119617365 Available here.

Cybersecurity experts from across industries and sectors share insights on how to think like scientists to master cybersecurity challenges 

Humankind’s efforts to explain the origin of the cosmos birthed disciplines such as physics and chemistry. Scientists conceived of the cosmic ‘Big Bang’ as an explosion of particles—everything in the universe centered around core elements and governed by laws of matter and gravity. In the modern era of digital technology, we are experiencing a similar explosion of ones and zeros, an exponentially expanding universe of bits of data centered around the core elements of speed and connectivity.

One of the disciplines to emerge from our efforts to make sense of this new universe is the science of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is as central to the Digital Age as physics and chemistry were to the Scientific Age. The Digital Big Bang explores current and emerging knowledge in the field of cybersecurity, helping readers think like scientists to master cybersecurity principles and overcome cybersecurity challenges. 

This innovative text adopts a scientific approach to cybersecurity, identifying the science’s fundamental elements and examining how these elements intersect and interact with each other. Author Phil Quade distills his over three decades of cyber intelligence, defense, and attack experience into an accessible, yet detailed, single-volume resource. 

The Digital Big Bang. The Hard Stuff, The Soft Stuff, and the Future of Cybersecurity, reviewed

This is a good book for generalists looking to get up to speed with all the relevant issues and challenges to be considered. It is well laid out with a logical breakdown of the various topics covered and the issues within each area. As the blurb accurately says. It is “designed for non-specialist business leaders and cybersecurity practitioners alike, this authoritative book is packed with real-world examples”. Sometimes a range of contributors can result in a contradictory and confusing range of opinions. In this book however it has worked well as each section has its own domain expert to draw upon.

The book is aimed at the wider tech and less tech audience, to deliver an awareness of the issues to be considered, in order to better prepare your own inhouse teams to deal with them. The tone and writing help to successfully achieve this. It is of course still a slightly daunting challenge to prepare your own business to be more hacker resilient, but a lot of attacks aims to follow the line of least resistance. So if you can improve your own defenses you do begin to ensure that you are at least not going to be an easy target.

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