// Comparison

La cyberdéfense vs The Hacker and the State: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Geopolitics, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Intermediate

4/52024

La cyberdéfense

Stéphane Taillat, Amaël Cattaruzza, Didier Danet

French academic textbook on cyber defense — political, military, legal. The authors (researchers and former military-school faculty) cover the French organizational layer and the international ecosystem.

Beginner

5/52020

The Hacker and the State

Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics

Ben Buchanan

Ben Buchanan's argument that state-on-state cyber operations are not deterrence-shaped (like nuclear) but signaling-shaped: countries use cyber to shape the environment, not to threaten escalation. Builds the case from declassified incidents.

Read this if

International-relations, security, and defense students; CISOs in regulated industries; anyone wanting the French strategic frame for cyber defense (COMCYBER, ANSSI, doctrine).

Anyone trying to think clearly about state-sponsored cyber: policy staff, threat-intel analysts, journalists, and security leaders who have to brief on "the cyber threat" without resorting to vendor decks. The single best academic-grade synthesis of the last twenty years of state cyber operations.

Skip this if

Readers looking for technical depth. The book is political science and strategy; technical chapters are intentionally high-level.

Readers wanting forensic detail on specific operations. Buchanan synthesizes; for the procedural blow-by-blow on Stuxnet, NotPetya, or the SolarWinds incident, go to Zetter, Greenberg, and the post-incident reports respectively.

Key takeaways

The reference French-language textbook on cyber-defense doctrine — Francophone equivalent of The Perfect Weapon (Sanger), at higher abstraction.
Authors come from military-academic backgrounds; French institutional sourcing is more precise than English sources on the same material.
The 2nd edition updates post-Ukraine doctrine and COMCYBER evolution — the first edition aged quickly.

Cyber is poorly modeled by deterrence theory: states use it constantly, below the threshold of war, to shape the environment rather than to threaten escalation.
The signaling/shaping distinction (espionage, sabotage, destabilization, election interference) is the right taxonomy for analyzing modern campaigns and is the book's most reused contribution.
Attribution and accountability remain genuinely hard, and that asymmetry is itself a structural feature of cyber statecraft, not a temporary condition awaiting better tools.

How they compare

We rate The Hacker and the State higher (5/5 against 4/5 for La cyberdéfense). For most readers, that means The Hacker and the State is the primary pick and La cyberdéfense is a useful follow-up.

La cyberdéfense is pitched at intermediate level. The Hacker and the State is pitched at beginner level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

La cyberdéfense and The Hacker and the State both cover Geopolitics, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading