Nick’s lessons from 25 years on the digital battlefield

If anything is guaranteed about the future, it’s that technological innovation will advance more quickly every year.

The technology that empowers you can also imperil you, making digital risk management an existential priority for your company.

Some of our most famous predecessors also faced unprecedented obstacles, and their stories are more than good folklore—they provide us with principles that transcend time and space.

In Cyber War…and Peace, you will learn:

• How to manage digital risk strategically by applying lessons learned from history’s most poignant moments
• How to increase risk resiliency within your organization, no matter its size
• How to reexamine the past, solve new problems, and embrace timeless techniques for better security

Praise for Cyber War …and Peace

“It is very rare to find a seasoned security, risk, and privacy executive who can successfully combine storytelling, historic military leadership analogies, and technology and management challenges into a very compelling, readable, and relevant reference book that reads like a novel. Most importantly, rather than teaching the reader how to “do” security, privacy, and risk management, Nick describes how to “think” about it and stay in front of the challenges and ever-changing landscape . . . the psychology of security, privacy, and risk management, if you will. A must-have book for those interested in how to gain awareness of the digital threat landscape and continually strategize defensives relevant to both the business and technology within their organization.”

— DR. JAMES RANSOME, CISSP, CISM, VETERAN CISO, CPSO, AND AUTHOR

“Applying the wisdom of the sages of military strategy to IT in general and to security in particular is long overdue. Nick’s tangible passion for the topic illuminates issues he and every contemporary CISO confront on a daily basis. The insights are extremely timely in that CISOs are now confronting an attack space generated by work-from-home jobs where the exposure has exponentially increased. Going forward, ubiquitous edge computing connected by low-latency XG will create yet another dimension of vulnerability. While technology can provide some of the solution with zero trust as the mantra, the savvy CISO understands well its perils.

The book begins with a personal memoir of Nick’s childhood exposure to the dark side. As any VC will attest, firsthand experience of pain is an essential foundation for innovation. Forged in this cauldron, Nick cleverly applies the fundamental principles of military strategy from Sun Tzu to Lee and Grant (with significant contributors in between) to the contemporary nightmares CISOs confront.

This book is no academic exercise; Nick captures the key tenets of the strategists and their teachings and then pulls them down to actionable practices a CIO/CISO could deploy. This is the hallmark of every chapter. For example, in Chapter Four, he applies the teachings of Sun Tzu and Marcus Aurelius to digital warfare. The depth of context in which Nick illuminates the principles he applies is stunning. As a student of philosophy, I had no idea Zeno, famed for his paradoxes, was a Phoenician merchant who fermented oysters to extract purple dye used for royal garments. This and other insights make Cyber War . . . and Peace a captivating read as well as a playbook for the contemporary CISO and CIO. Some of the stories will elevate the boardroom discussions these modern warriors confront.

As a student of the topic, Napoleon’s strategy at Austerlitz continues to be a quintessential lesson in dynamic strategies. How to apply it to modern- day security is key. Promoting flexibility as the key to managing in a state of constant flux is a fundamental principle. Nick illustrates this with his advice on when to hunker down to be robust and resilient and when to feint and use guile to deceive an adversary, just as Napoleon did with the fog obscuring his Old Guard elite troops to lure his enemies into a trap. “The book is loaded with templates and exercises. The conclusion provides many checklists as a practical guide for the digital CISO to help them see through the fog of digital warfare. There’s help in dealing with questions board members may have concerning cybersecurity too. Taken together, Nick’s book is both an intellectual sojourn into the intricacies and lessons we can derive from the sages of military strategy, and yet he has the practical experience to transfer these insights into practical guides. This book is a must for every CISO’s top drawer!”

— STUART EVANS, DISTINGUISHED SERVICE PROFESSOR AT CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

What readers are saying

“Wisdom is costly and telling stories is hard. If your job includes explaining cyber risk management to non-technical executives, the sound historical wisdom in Nick’s book will help get your point across.“

— Earl Crane, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

“[Cyber War…And Peace is] an analogical thinking Rosetta Stone, translating lessons from the past into cyber risk insights today.”

— Jay Chaudhry, Founder and CEO, ZScaler.

download a free copy of chapter 1.