TLDR; The Cuckoo's Egg

TLDR; is a series dedicated to books that might help the automation professional. While this is not quite in the realm of industrial control, it is an eye-opener on the complexities of adversarial actors and what can be involved in detecting them.

The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll, is excellent. Anyone who works in industrial control would do themselves a disservice by not reading this book. It follows the path of a grad student pursuing what appears to be a trivial computer error... which is not so trivial. It reads like a thriller, despite being non-fiction.

Those who understand the older communication networks will gain a little more out than those who do not. Many of the systems that existed then were far less tightly coupled than the systems that exist now.

It should be read as a warning to both complacency and underestimating the resourcefulness of cyber attackers. If does not terrify you, knowing this could happen in the much-less connected world from decades ago, I seriously question if you read the book.