There’s a decent love story between Wyatt and his estranged wife and a feel-good father-son mentorship side-story between the lead detective and Wyatt. On the good-guy side, the recruited hacker is Wyatt Gillette (a.k.a. Members merged skateboard jargon and hacker jargon into a unique lexicon called “leet-speak” where letter substitutions were common on bulletin board communication systems: “ph” for “f”, “z” for “s”, “e” for “3”, etc. “Cracking” the software so that others members could use it gave the group their name. The nickname of the serial-killer-hacker is “phate,” intentionally spelled with a “ph” instead of an “F.” Members of the “cracker” subculture that emerged in this decade were mostly teenagers determined to play and share games and other programs they did not pay for. What results is a hacker-on-hacker escalation where hackers try to one-up each other in a series of social engineering and hacking operations.Īs was the custom in the 1980s, self-proclaimed hackers gave themselves nicknames. When the cops in Deaver’s book realize they have a serial killer-hacker on the loose, they break another hacker out of jail temporarily to be their subject-matter expert. The Blue Nowhere feels more like real people in a cyber story as opposed to a cyber premise populated with cookie-cutter characters. Compared to Clarke and Russinovich, Deaver may not have as much of a technical background, but he knows how to flesh out his characters.

Clarke’s Breakpoint (2007) and Mark Russinovich’s Zero Day (2011) and Trojan Horse (2012), all of which I’ve reviewed in previous installments in the Cybersecurity Canon. It is interesting to compare this to other more recent cyber thrillers written by cyber experts who are writing their first novels, such as Richard A. The Blue Nowhere is a cyber thriller written by an accomplished novelist about the hacking culture. He is not normally associated with technical thrillers, but he turned his writing skills in this book to a manhunt-type story where the serial killer in question is also a world-class hacker. Jeffery Deaver is best known in literary circles as a crime novelist. I love a good argument, so feel free to let me know what you think.

I’ll be presenting on this topic at RSA 2014, and between now and then, I’d like to discuss a few of my early candidates for inclusion. For the past decade, I have had this notion that there must be a Cybersecurity Canon: a list of must-read books where the content is timeless, genuinely represents an aspect of the community that is true and precise and that, if not read, leaves a hole in cybersecurity professional’s education.

The blue nowhere book