Lateral Movement

A Friday evening, in an ordinary organization. Files lock, one after another. A ransom noteappears. The backups do not answer.The hour is no accident. Attackers learned long ago to strike once the defenders havealready left for the weekend.You may already have lived through one of those Fridays without knowing it. A checkoutthat suddenly declines every card. A counter closed "for technical reasons." A hospitalprocedure put on hold. What is at stake on those nights is not computers. It is a piece ofyour life, running through other people's machines.From Morris to Mythos, Lateral Movement traces forty years of cyberattacks throughtwenty-five moments when everything tipped. A student's accidental worm in 1988.Stuxnet, the first digital weapon. The night an entire region went dark while operatorswatched, helpless, as the cursor moved across the screen on its own. And, very recently,the first time the machine itself led the attack.David Dewulf does not recount a string of technical flaws. He tells the story of womenand men: those who invent, those who hijack, those who err, those who betray, thosewho repair. After forty years, one certainty stands. Cybersecurity is not, first of all, amatter of technique. It is a human one. We know how to secure a machine. You cannotpatch a human being.You do not need to be an engineer to read this book. You only need to rely, every day, onthis invisible infrastructure to pay, to get care, to travel, to speak. It asks you to remembera single thing: there is no longer a border between the virtual world and the real one.There probably never was.David Dewulf is a cybersecurity executive at one of Europe's leading firms in the field.Lateral Movement is his first work of narrative non-fiction.