65 Books Like Cyberspace in Peace and War

There is no better starting point for preparing yourself to work on disease biology as it applies to cybersecurity than The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which are incredible and I have read (as have some Nobel prize-winning physicists) multiple times over my career.

Most recently, I read the chapters on optics and vision in the first part of 2025 because of research I am now doing on octopuses.

Richard Feynman has been a well-deserved hero in science for at least 65 years. He became a broader cultural hero in the mid 1980s with the publication of Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and then in the 2000s when Alan Alda starred in essentially a one-person play about Feynman.

These lectures were originally given to first-year physics students at the California Institute of Technology, and you might think that they are not appropriate for most people. Well, yes and no. It… show more.

This is one of two books (the other is Cyberspace in Peace and War) that I think anybody seriously interested in cyber security (which should be everybody) should have on their shelf.

It is filled with insights on a wide range of topics. I refer to it many times in my book, including why biology is a better metaphor for cyber defense than war, how people new to analytical thinking about cyber systems should approach the topic, the general meaning of cyber security, what it means for a cyber system to be resilient, and the need for operational cyber drills (analogous to experiments in biology).

The writing in this book is accessible, and it is both fun to read and really informative.

This is a classic! I have had (and worn through copies) since 1969.

There is no explicit mention of disease in Maynard Smith’s book, but the two chapters on population regulation will give you all the tools you need to start applying ideas from disease biology.

As with the Feynman lectures, there is mathematics in this book – but it begins with arithmetic. I recommend it for much the same reason that I recommend Feynman because it will show you how mathematical reasoning can illuminate biology and was written by one the great mathematical biologists of the 20th century.

The book is written for biologists and has the same quality as Feynman’s lectures of having plenty of words that bring the mathematics to life.

This is a short (about 100 pages) and relatively new (2020) book showing how mathematical modeling of the dynamics of populations can be used to give new insights to the classic experiments by the scientist Georgy Gause on predation by one kind of single-celled organism called Didinium on another single celled organism Paramecium (which may sound familiar from high school biology), where the populations are the numbers of the two species and to the outcomes of classical military battles like Trafalgar, where the populations are the sizes of the forces of each side.

McCue’s book is very well written and most of it is accessible with relatively simple mathematics. It will also show you how we can include the randomness that is inherent to nature (and to all operational situations) in models.   

McCue is a top flight operations analyst; as with Feynman and Maynard Smith, reading this book – even… show more.

I was stunned by the authors' dire and dramatic warning that the interests and methods of two mighty authoritarian regimes–China and Russia–are increasingly coming into alignment, and this alignment is spawning increasingly deadly threats to, and attacks on, the very foundations of our democracy and national security.

I found myself agreeing as the authors demonstrate how the United States government is failing to fully acknowledge and effectively respond to these massive threats–but I was also somewhat encouraged, as they do offer solutions and provide a ray of hope that we can restructure our approach to Chinese and Russian threats by streamlining our bureaucratic agencies and purpose-building them to directly confront them.

There are cyber mercenaries too. Called “hackback” companies, they are illegal, offshore hackers who hack the hackers. While they cannot retrieve hacked material, they can cause a world of hurt for anyone who tries to hack you, and that’s why they matter: deterrence. CEOs and others around the world sometimes turn to hackback firms to make them hard targets. Also, countries like the United Arab Emirates hire former NSA hackers. New York Times reporter details some of this industry in his book about cyberwar. Like many in cyberspace, his claims are often sensationalized, but his reportage cannot be beat.

Lights Out is another great non-fiction book about electrical grid vulnerabilities. Koppel also spotlights High Power Transformers as the Achilles Heel of our electrical system 

But Koppel also does a deep dive on the survivability—or rather lack thereof, of our society if the grid were to be taken down. He even broke down various social classes of people: rural versus urban, and talked about how each group would survive based upon their skillsets and resources available to them. FYI: Ranchers fare best

He even discussed the amazing organization the Mormon Church has put together with regards to the preparedness of each of their members, as well as how they would leverage their collective strengths together as a group.

Amoroso’s experience started with academic research at Bell Labs and Stevens Institute of Technology but moved quickly to practically fill voids at AT&T and NSA. His book reduces technical concepts in cybersecurity to basic principles and explains generically how they are effectively implemented. For the true techy who wants to fully understand all the formal logic behind the theories in Cyber Attacks, reach back to Ed Amoroso’s Fundamentals of Computer Security Technology (1994). 

I love this book because Perlroth chronicles the proliferation of cyberweapons, which began in the hands of mischievous young hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in widely used software. Once some of those hackers joined the NSA, their tools were developed into sophisticated weapons to undercut technological developments in enemy states like Iran.

Once NSA’s hacks leaked to the wider world, they spawned an arms race and fueled rampant criminal ransomware attacks on vulnerable institutions. Informed by Perlroth’s book, I see a future in which dwindling human fertility and the ballooning costs of advanced weaponry will enhance the military role of cyber-attacks, leading to Mutually Assured Cyber Destruction, in which many countries have cyberweapons deeply embedded in the critical infrastructure of their adversaries, just waiting to activate them.

Where to start with this one? It is probably considered one of the original titles that brought in the cyberpunk genre and takes you on a wild ride. 

What I liked best about this series is the way it delves into the concepts of a soul (a ghost) and whether people who have become cyborg or with a cyborg brain are indeed still human. At what point does the line between human and android overlap?

These greater philosophical questions are brilliantly intertwined with political intrigue, espionage, terrorism, and murder. Plus the main character is a badass sexy cyborg and pro hacker that likes to shoot guns, kick people and drive really fast. What’s not to love?