The books came out of the same habit as the day job.

Ronan Blake is a pen name. Behind it is a cybersecurity practitioner with nearly twenty years in the field, spanning application security, vulnerability management, data security, identity and strategy, across some of the most regulated and security-conscious environments in the UK — financial services, government, defence and critical national infrastructure.

Most of those years were spent writing the documents nobody wants to read: threat models, control standards, incident write-ups, the honest version of the risk register. He has interviewed many candidates and been interviewed many times, and the career books come out of both.

The Hacker Chronicles began as an attempt to explain real intrusions to people who were not in the room — colleagues in other departments, family, anyone who had read a headline and understood nothing beneath it. Four volumes in, it is still that: careful reconstruction, no mythology.

The Honest Guide books came from the other end of the job, the interview panel. Most career advice in this field is written for a different job market, or by someone selling a course. These were written by someone who has sat on the hiring side and would rather nobody wasted two thousand pounds on the wrong certification.

The fiction is the other half of the same interest. There is not a computer in it. It is nonetheless about the thing I have spent my professional life watching: what institutions do with information they would rather not have.

Method

Draft early, revise late. Everything gets checked by listening to it read aloud on long walks — if a sentence survives that, it usually stays. The non-fiction gets fact-checked twice and lawyered once.

Enquiries

Rights, festivals, podcasts, and corrections to anything I have got wrong are all welcome. The contact page reaches me directly.