Information Security

Akkerman and Langman reconstruct the tools of early modern intelligence - ciphers, inks, seals, locks, poisons - and show that the cycle of measure and countermeasure was already fully formed.

The definitive account of Stuxnet, read here as an operational case study: how attackers crossed an air gap, borrowed trusted credentials, and made a control room see normal.

A documentary history of the NSA built from declassified paper. Aid's real subject is the gap between what an organization collects and what it actually understands.

How Britain moved American opinion in wartime Washington through dinner parties, patrons and placed stories — a study in influence operations that needed no burglary, only access.

Two German volumes on cyber conflict, written from Berlin rather than Washington. Gaycken's argument: for European industry the threat is patient theft of technical intellectual property, not spectacular disruption.

Sacked and broke in the Depression, Herbert Yardley published what American codebreakers had been reading. He took no documents, only what he knew, and it cost years.

Fred Kaplan's history of cyber warfare finds the threat was foreseen almost immediately and repeatedly deprioritized. Your organization probably has its own version of that pattern in a filing cabinet.

A seventy-five-cent accounting error at Berkeley in 1986 led Clifford Stoll to a KGB-linked intruder. The founding text of intrusion investigation, and still the best argument against ignoring small anomalies.

Jenny Radcliffe is hired to break into her clients' buildings, and she rarely touches a lock. People Hacker shows why the human layer is the one nobody tests.