William Clements

On the whole, I can confirm that this appears to be a solid overview of the coastal defense of Singapore during the whole period of British predominance. The chronic problem is that there was never enough money to do what needed to be done, assuming that British naval supremacy failed. At the end of the day, while the artillery installations around the city could have been brought into play for landward defense with not too much effort, the lack of appropriate ammo, and General Arthur show more Percival's allergy to taking static defense seriously, hamstrung any chance of trying to conduct a successful defense of Fortress Singapore. show less

"Check the checkables!" NASA mission control manages launch risk with checklists. Mechanics use a checklist when performing a multi-point inspection. Hikers make sure their packs have the "10 essentials" before hitting the trail. Estate planners use checklists to gather all financial information in one place and manage risk.

And businesses use an information security checklist to manage cybersecurity risk.

If you don't have one, in my opinion, the checklist in this book is a solid enough show more starting point as any. Set aside a few hours and do a self assessment of everything in Chapter 5. Then start tightening things up where needed.

If you already have a checklist, maybe spend 15 minutes picking off anything from this checklist that you like and isn't in yours.

This is a book that has items that can get pretty technical pretty fast. Also, the checklist approach to security tells you what to do ("implement MFA") but doesn't always tell you how to do it.

If you don't have an expert handy, an AI assistant like CoPilot or ChatGPT might help clarify things. These AI's are also pretty good at generating checklists of their own. Attackers are using them for attack checklists so we might as well put them to use on the defense side.

I feel like this is a solid basic checklist and a good starting point for the average business that has the desire and enough technical expertise to self-assess and mitigate issues. I have seen checklists much more thorough than this even -- but you have to start somewhere!

I loved the supporting anecdotes. Even though anyone reading this book is already likely convinced of the need for locking things down, the real world examples are truly mind blowing.

One thing that may be a pro or a con for different readers of the book is the promotion of the consulting business in the early chapters and lead generation funnels embedded as links and even QR codes within later chapters. And then the supplemental downloads collect name and email address. I did not go that route, so this review does not cover those extra downloads or the professional consulting services being advertised in the book. show less

I think, as a sole proprietor with no employees, I am not really the target audience for this book. Many of the recommendations involve hiring a dedicated team (or outsourcing) to handle some risk. I did find many things to think about in terms of inventorying what kind of data and assets are where and what kinds of access they have. There are definitely many practical suggestions for medium and large businesses and a lot of what is discussed is applicable even to me. I think the author does show more a good job of providing facts and examples without pinpointing specific software recommendations since these are always evolving, and thus the book will age well. show less

The book covers a wide range of cybersecurity aspects concisely. Considering it’s a small book I couldn’t expect it to dig deeper into most of the concepts. Though I admit that this acts as a starting point for non-IT/non-security folks, it stops at that as well.

For someone who’s in the IT industry for long, I found most of the book to be pretty basic and mundane. Many of the steps mentioned were repeated like using an SOC, implementing MFA, cyber insurance and such in all aspects. The show more author could have disclosed some advanced concepts about threats from AI/ML bots, changes we’re bound to see if Quantum Computers come into existence etc.,

Not much complaints since it was a quick read for me. show less