Red Team Blues

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

"That's the problem with blue teaming it—you need to be perfect, while—" "The red team only has to find a single error."

“Complexity is the enemy of security, after all. The more moving parts and seams a system has, the more places there are for an attacker to find purchase and slip inside.”

If you like tales of cybersecurity, the genius of spreadsheets, a gentle critique of Silicon Valley and a rebel with a cause, you'll enjoy this book.

Cory Doctorow, who is also the author of Enshittification, writes books that are somewhat scathing critiques of tech, but he has good points and questions about what we're doing with this industry.

In this novel, Marty Hench is a forensic accountant. He investigates financial crimes and realizes in the 1980s that spreadsheets could be a tool to steal a lot of money. He was one of the very few people who thought, "Boy, I'm going to find a lot of money stolen by people dumber than me using this thing."

I enjoyed the whole series of three novels, but this first one is my favourite. It was published first but takes place last in the story's timeline, which works perfectly as an entry point.