LIVE from Black Hat Las Vegas: AI, Nation-States, and the Battlefield That Keeps Changing

All right, cool.

So one of the first questions that I have, at least reading both of the books, they're coming from two different angles and they don't necessarily mean to speak about the same thing, but it's almost as if you both wrote the book in the same library and you maybe heard the other person.

but they converge in a really interesting place.

So I think like maybe like what's something that, what inspired like each of you to, I guess, write a part of your book or what kind of brought you to the conclusions that you kind of reached in your books?

So I was inspired to write my book because I've worked with a lot of threat intelligence teams over the years.

And one of the things that I've found working with them is that they always talk about, especially when they're releasing threat research, how if you understand the history of the nations that are performing the cyber operations, then you can really get to the root of what's going on and why.

And the problem that I saw was that while they talked some of the history in their blog posts about the research, they couldn't get into the nitty gritty, into the weeds about exactly why these nations made the decisions that they did based on the history.

So what Code War does is it goes into China, Russia and the US and does historical vignettes from many, many years ago.

We're talking like Tsarist Russia, Imperial China.

to compare those types of situations to why they made the decisions that they do today from a cyber attack perspective.

Because it's really fascinating.

There's a ton of overlap in the historical precedent that's been set by these nations and the reasons that they take the actions they do today.

I think for me, I'm just like always thinking about security teams.

You know, every security team that I know and that I have known, they never have enough people.

They never have enough money.

And so I really wanted to explore the idea of how does AI change that? At the same time, we are in a moment where AI and everything cybersecurity seems to be changing so incredibly quickly.

I wanted to kind of get out like a foundational primer so that folks could feel like they had their feet underneath them and understand at a foundational level like what's going on so that we can be able to interpret things that are happening every single day.

One of the funny things about the book is I finished writing it in September of 2025.

And then when it came out in March of 2026, it was already out of date.

So I do have like a companion website, the AICyberhandbook.com. And that's where I continue to publish about just more things that I'm learning and seeing as time goes on.

And I think that we have to give a shout out to Jim Minitel, who is our really fabulous editor and publisher.

Thanks, Jim.

We love you, Jim.