Emily Crose’s Hack to the Future: How World Governments Relentlessly Pursue
and Domesticate Hackers traces hacker culture from exploratory experimentation
to a foundational role in modern cybersecurity. It examines how governments,
corporations, and society shifted from treating hackers primarily as criminals
to recognizing their value in security, innovation, and national strategy.
The book provides useful context for understanding the origins of penetration
testing, vulnerability research, responsible disclosure, and the complicated
relationship between independent researchers and institutions.
Bernardo Quintero’s Infected tells how a simple idea grew into VirusTotal,
then into a company, and eventually into a globally recognized security
capability acquired by Google. More than a corporate timeline, it explores how
curiosity, community building, and entrepreneurial persistence shaped both
Quintero’s career and a cornerstone of modern malware analysis.
Its strongest themes include community building, disciplined entrepreneurship,
resource constraints, local talent, and innovation driven by curiosity and
conviction rather than capital and scale.
Dominik Merli’s Engineering Secure Devices uses embedded security to teach
broader lessons about system integrity, device identity, and engineering
trade-offs. Its constrained systems make trust boundaries especially clear,
but its mental models also apply to containerized applications and cloud
runtimes.
The book’s treatment of secure boot, firmware updates, cryptographic
implementation, and hardware-anchored identity makes it a valuable addition
for practitioners interested in how integrity is engineered from the ground
up.