Cybersecurity and Cyberwar ─ What Everyone Needs to Know

A generation ago, "cyberspace" was a little known word in science fiction used to describe the nascent network of computers linking a few university labs. Now, our global pattern of life, from communication to commerce to conflict fundamentally depends on it. Cyber issues affect literally everyone: politicians wrestling with new issues of global stability; generals planning new cyberwars; CEOs trying to figure out what to invest in and how to defend their firms from new kinds of threats; lawyers and ethicists trying to understand new questions of right and wrong. Most of all, they affect us as individuals, from wondering how to protect ourselves and our families in the online world to the role that we all play as citizens and the new political questions we have to decide in everything from privacy to policy. And, yet there is perhaps no issue that has grown so important, and touches so many, and that is so poorly understood.

In Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know, New York Times best-selling author P. W. Singer and noted cyber expert Allan Friedman team up to provide the kind of easy to read, yet informative resource book that has been missing on this crucial issue of 21st century life. Written in a lively, accessible style, filled with fun stories and anecdotes, the book is structured around answering the key questions areas of cyberspace: how it all works, why it all matters, and what can we do? Along the way, they take readers on a tour of the important (and entertaining) issues and characters of cybersecurity, from the "Anonymous" hacker group and the Stuxnet computer virus to the new cyber units of the Chinese and US militaries. In sum, Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know is the definitive account on the subject for us all, which comes not a moment too soon.

Peter W. Singer is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
Allan Friedman is a Fellow in Governance Studies and Research Director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution.