Book Review: Information Warfare and Security by Dorothy E. Denning

I found this book while following a citation trail for my MSc. Published before the 21st Century (fuck, I'm old) it's a run-down of this new-fangled thing called Information Warfare. It covers electronic attacks, espionage, computer security and more.

In the last 20 years, depressingly little has changed. If you removed the mentions of ActiveX and floppy disks, it'd still be 90% relevant. It sets out in clear detail why information warfare is the new frontier - and some practical takes on how it can be defended against.

There is a lot of detail in here - 400 pages of explanation of technical terms. There's also lots of anecdotes - some of which are a little repetitive. You will probably find yourself skipping over a few bit.

But it is a great primer on everything to do with cybersecurity. Even if you don't want to read the details of some proto-h4x0r war dialling the Pentagon, you'll still find loads in here which is useful for the modern IT professional.

The book is, sadly, only available 2nd hand - albeit for a reasonable £3. The only electronic version is a poorly OCR'd copy from The Internet Archive.

Here are a few interesting snippets I found:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentMy first time reading a paper book in several years.
The font is too small and none of the references are clickable 😆
Mind you, *none* of the URls in the preface work any more.
iwar.org
infowar.com
cs.georgetown.edu/~denning# pic.x.com/2affhezdxy

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Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentSo far, this pre-21st Century book has got its predictions spot on! pic.x.com/hlrwh4ul3l

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Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edent"Information warfare will move away from hardware toward ideas and perceptions. It will involve the manipulation of “memes”"

I'm not saying that Dorothy Denning travelled back in time to warn us, but… pic.x.com/qbfanrwjkn

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Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentQuarter of the way through the book, and this is the first duff prediction!
It correctly identifies the problem of deep fakes (via Forrest Gump) - but speculates that we should have holographic projections by now.
Sadly not! pic.x.com/eyzd0jcras

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Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentI kinda wish that the term "Cyberplague" had taken off 😁 pic.x.com/rljihatwzo

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Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentThis book - from 1998 - is very sure that IPv6 adoption will be happening soon… 😭

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Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentA few other predictions which didn't make it.
The W3C's PICS didn't stop web filtering.
The V-Chip didn't stop TVs showing adult material.
The .adult TLD eventually morphed into .xxx but didn't become the only place to find adult content.

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Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentI wonder if this has ever happened in the last 20 years?

North Korea was already under heavy sanctions.
The USA's sanctions against China weren't just about cyber attacks.
Any others? pic.x.com/onrftpyemt

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