Moreover, Monzano himself soon becomes a prime suspect, after a suspicious email emerges, suggesting he’s one of the conspirators. However, the perpetrators are very successful in hiding their traces, making it difficult for Manzano to uncover them. Very soon, he identifies further traces proofing a cyber-attack on the Europeen power grid. Because nobody takes him seriously, he starts an investigation on his own. After recognizing that the backdoor can be used to switch off smart meters, which he believes to be a potential root cause for the outages, Piero tries to warn local law enforcement. The story starts with Piero Manzano, a former hacker who discovers malicious code installed on his smart meter at home before the blackout. Since then, Marc Elsberg has been invited on a regular basis to professional cybersecurity conferences to discuss critical infrastructure. For example, in 2014, “Blackout” was selected as Scientific Book of the Year by the German Scientific Society. Since its release in 2012 (German) and 2017 (English), this book contributed significantly to the discussion about the vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and the importance of cybersecurity in its journey to digitalization. The author describes, in a well-researched way, how simple tampering with smart meter software could cause a domino effect leading to a fatal disaster for our society. It’s an exciting thriller about a former hacker and IT professional trying to hunt for a terrorist group that used cyber and physical-enabled attacks to cause a collapse of the electrical grids across Europe. “Blackout” is a conspiracy thriller describing an intercontinental collapse of power grids caused by a terrorist group. But what happens if we suddenly lose this privilege?
Electricity is an indispensable, integral part of everybody’s life in the twenty-first century. It gives us warmth, light, food and the possibility of social connectivity through the internet and mobile phones. Our modern society will not work without electricity. Bottom Line: I recommend this book for the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame.
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