What I learned from This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends

Intro

This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends is a non-fiction book by journalist Nicole Perlroth that covers the underground exploit market, threat actors and their motives, along with zero-day exploits being deployed as weapons against whole nation states.

Key Ideas:

• Zero-day markets.
• Nation-state cyber operations.
• Prevalence of vulnerabilities and the disclosure of them.
• Offensive and Defensive cybersecurity

My takeaway

I thought the book was structured well, each topic rolled into the next so that uninformed readers would be able to understand the topics being discussed. It was eye opening the extremes nations will go to enact cyber warfare against one another, from the simplest and most utilized tactic: social engineering, to conniving ways to breach air gapped systems. Stuxnet and its far reaching damage, Eternalblue as the greatest trojan horse.

The author does a good job at engaging the reader to think as well, pondering on "what ifs". This is a good skill to deploy when building things or troubleshooting things, what if a machine is compromised? How far will the reach be and the damage? What if an attacker gains access to this VLAN or LAN, what can they reach and how did they gain access? What if this dependency or software is implanted? Is there an expert eye to overlook things?

Network security is critical, the first creators of the internet and relaying messages across the country did not build it with security in mind it was built solely to do its purpose, this is still how it functions today with all the security services and build blocks built on top to make our modern Internet.