Cybersecurity Reading List

I hope to create dedicated pages for the most notable of entries on this list, but for now just need a place to quickly jot them all down.

Books

While I tend to prefer nonfiction titles for this genre, there are some notable works of fiction that I feel are good reads for interested parties to be familiar with as well.

Nonfiction

• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, 1984. A series of stories about the people who created modern computing.

• The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll, 1989. A junior university employee’s fall down the rabbit hole of international hacking, law enforcement, national security, and cyberspace in the twilight years of the Cold War.

• Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier by Katie Hafner and John Markoff, 1992. From the original Dark Side Hacker, Kevin Mitnick, to the Hanover Hackers that Clifford Stoll battles in The Cuckoo’s Egg, this book covers some of the most notable hackers of the time.

• Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michelle Slatalla, Joshua Quittner, 1995. A look at a New York City hacker gang in 1990s, beyond the keyboard and into their lives.

• Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government - Saving privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy, 2001. Very much a follow up to his earlier work, this time zeroing in on cryptography and privacy rights.

• Schneier on Security By Bruce Schneier, 2008. A collection of Schneier’s previously published articles on topics like National Security, person privacy, and computer security.

• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu, 2010. A historical look at communications technology in the electric age, with an eye towards the future.

• Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick and William L. Simon, 2011. A fascinating recollection from one of the world’s most notorious hackers. His story helps to show how much “hacking” is social engineering more than technical exploits. It also sheds light on issues with law enforcement and journalism practices that can all to often result in miscarriages of justice.

• Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulson, 2011. Written by a former black hat, Kingpin tells the story of an awkward kid from Idaho who grew up to run some of the largest carding schemes of the earlier aughts.

• Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier, 2014. A fantastic look at security fundamentals starting from single-celled organisms up to modern societies.

• This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information by Andy Greenberg, 2012. If the XL sized subtitle didn’t make it clear already, this book is about Wikileaks. Beyond the titular website, the book explores hackers, activism, and whistlblowing and their confrontations with government.

• Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter, 2014. Deep dive into what we know (as of 2014) about the Stuxnet virus that crippled Iranian nuclear reactors (for a while). Touches on national security, compromise of air gapped systems, and nuclear proliferation. This is all especially relevant given recent (2026 recent) developments.

• Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime — from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs, 2014. This was a surprisingly fascinating topic that involves Russian gangsters, globalized manufacturing, stifling academic research, and effective use of federal policy to address a growing issue.

• Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier, 2015. Discusses the information asymmetry of modern life, what the risks are, and what we can do about it.

• Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan, 2016. A deeply insightful look at the US development and use of cyber weapons and defenses. This book covers Reagan’s initial mandate from 1983 through to the 2014 hack of Sony’s networks.

• The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu, 2016. A follow up to his 2010 book The Master Switch, this time diving into advertising.

• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil, 2016. Are computer programs really unbiased? This book looks into the then burgeoning field of machine learning (so called AI now) and investigates how it is being used, and abused.

• The Perfect Weapon: How the Cyber Arms Race Set the World Afire by David E. Sanger, 2018. A look at how cyber warfare has taken over as the largest national security threat of the modern age from a New York Times chief correspondent.

• Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World by Bruce Schneier, 2019. Explores the world of Internet-of-Things devices from thermostats to cars, their designs, business strategies, and what it all means to public, and private, safety.

• Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg, 2019. Russian hackers, NotPetya and the cyber attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure in 2014 and 2017.

• This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perloth, 2021. A look into the shadowy world of exploitation market places.

• Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg, 2022. A harrowing series of stories about modern cyber and crypto crime, the law enforcement agencies and officer that are tasked to deal with them (and sometimes become the criminals themselves). The final story in this anthology touches on some of the darkest corners unimaginable to most people.

• A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back by Bruce Schneier, 2023. I love this one. What is the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance? Several years in prison. This book looks at the hacker mindset of exploiting loopholes and questions public narratives about this mentality between professions and industries.

• Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever by Joseph Cox, 2024. What happens when the FBI runs the largest global cellphone company dedicated to criminals?

Fiction

• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, 1999. A head of its time, this book envisions what we would now call Stable Coin, and looks at the practical application of cryptography following two intertwined stories spanning WW2 and the 1990s. One of my all time favorite books, and a must read.

Movies

• Hackers staring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, and Fisher Stevens, 1995. A fictional tale of a young man transplanted from Seattle to New York who finds friends in the local hacker scene, while trying to escape his past. While the story is fictional, everything else is based of the lives, actions, and prosecutions of New York City hackers in 1990s.

Online Media

Podcast, YouTube channels, blogs, and dating profiles. Anything that doesn’t fit in the above categories that you primarily access online will end up here.

The Great Courses

Though I consume this material primarily through Audible I think it deserves its own section here. Each of The Great Courses is presented as a university level lecture series.

• Thinking about Cybersecurity: From Cyber Crime to Cyber Warfare by Paul Rosenzweig, 2013.

• The Surveillance State: Big Data, Freedom, and You by Paul Rosenzweig, 2016.

• Taking Control of Your Personal Data by Jennifer Golbeck, 2020.

Podcasts

• Black Hills Information Security: Information security professionals discussing the week’s news stories.

• Darknet Diaries: A collection of interviews with the threat hunters, penetration testers, blue team security professionals, journalists, victims, and perpetrators of cybercrime. Each episode explores another dark alley in the murkier places online.

YouTube Channels

• Fireship: Code tutorials and tech news with ample snark and 2020s era editing.

• Linus Tech Tips: A grab bag of content that spans topics and the last 20+ years. While perhaps not the most directly useful for seasoned pros, the channel offers a lot of quick explainer videos that are well produced and easy to digest when sent to less tech savvy friends and family.

• Low Level: Breakdowns of all the latest vulnerabilities from a researcher with 10+ years experience.

• You Suck at Programming: Primarily a bash coding channel, but shows some very low-level *nix workings.

Websites/Blogs

• Dark Reading 20 years of reporting on cybersecurity.

• KrebsOnSecurity A blog from one of the top journalists in the field. Find out about his surprising origin story in Spam Nation.