On May 4, 2017, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington D.C., I had the honor and the privilege to host the fourth annual Cybersecurity Canon Awards where we inducted six books into the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame.
This year’s inductees are (in alphabetical order):
- “Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age” by Steven Levy
- "Hacking Exposed” the series" by Stuart McClure
- “How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity” by Douglas W. Hubbard & Richard Seiersen
- "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win” by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Stafford
- “The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response” by Richard Bejtlich
- “Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World" by Bruce Schneier
This was the Cybersecurity Canon’s fourth annual awards, and five of the nine chosen authors came to the ceremony. The audience was a mix of cybersecurity book lovers, security practitioners from the local area and students/teachers from the the tri-state region. Having the students there really brought an excitement and energy to the celebration. They were full of questions, excited to be in the room with a collection of seasoned security professionals, and grateful to have a resource like the Cybersecurity Canon for study and reference. At the end of the awards ceremony, the authors signed autographs, and most of the students walked away with a pile of books under their arms.
This year’s awards event showed me how and why the Cybersecurity Canon is not just a real thing, but an important real thing; and not just a real thing for our community, the cybersecurity practitioners, but for everyone with an interest or need to understand cybersecurity. The website, the committee, and the book reviews of the most important books to our community all make up a wonderful resource for research and study. If you are a newbie to the field, we have something for you. If you are an old and gnarled cybersecurity professional, we have something for you. If you are trying to train your clueless boss, we have something for you.
And remember, the Cybersecurity Canon is not just a book list. No book makes it onto the candidate list or into the Hall of Fame unless somebody from the community writes a book review and makes the case that it is a book that all of us should have read by now. Reviews come from the Cybersecurity Canon Committee and anybody with the passion to make the case for their favorite cybersecurity book.
To this year’s Cybersecurity Canon author winners, congratulations. To the rest of the network defender community, please support this wonderful and useful project.
Register for Ignite ’17 Security Conference
Vancouver, BC June 12–15, 2017
Ignite ’17 Security Conference is a live, four-day conference designed for today’s security professionals. Hear from innovators and experts, gain real-world skills through hands-on sessions and interactive workshops, and find out how breach prevention is changing the security industry. Visit the Ignite website for more information on tracks, workshops and marquee sessions.