Before reading the introduction, I decided to have a look into the preface, to my surprise, it started off with a sentence that I would have never expected to read before starting a book.

“I have written this book partly to correct a mistake.”

From there, it goes into how his first book “Applied Cryptology” didn’t direct people in the direction he wanted. Instead, it lead to “lesser” security systems around the world. More importantly however, he immediately states three points about the novel I am going to read about:

“This book is about those security problems, the limitations of technology and the solutions”

“Read this book, from beginning to end”

“Many technical books are meant to skim, bounce around in,  and use as a reference. This book isn’t. It has a plot.”

In several senses, I was taken back, but lets just get straight to the point, shall we?

The introduction to the book first logs a number of security events during March 2000, whether they were defacing websites, security breaches, bugs or errors with software. This continues on for a bit before it his point becomes abundantly clear, that there are a multitude of problems and vulnerabilities in the software that is supposedly meant to be “secure”. He discusses in detail why and what can be done about the problem at hand, being the primary subject of his book.

Thus far, its been a fascinating book to read, and it really adds perception to the security in our world. It looks into detail about the underlying systems that go into creating the ‘security’ in our world, and how it seemingly may seem less secure then before.