“A spectre is haunting Europe”: this sentence opens The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels between 1847 and 1848. The spectre at hand – of course – was that of communism, against which all European powers, from the Pope to the Czar, had joined forces according to the authors in a “holy witch hunt”. Well, even nowadays a spectre is haunting Europe (and not only that). In this case, however, it is hacking.

The digitization and the spreading of the Internet have indeed reached such an extent that not only individual behaviors and social relationships, but also production chains and governmental governance have been incorporated into cyber space, and are carried out there in greater and greater ways. This poses unprecedented dangers to the security of information and data traveling on the web. A good example of this situation lies in recent news about the ransomware “Wannacry” that infected thousands of systems in 150 countries, the hacking that hit Emmanuel Macron a few days before the second round of voting for the French presidential election, along with the controversy that accompanied the recent US and Dutch elections, and finally with the attack that seems to have hit the European Commission.

Faced with these new risks, governments and the international community alike, as well as companies, are developing prevention and countermeasures to ensure the efficiency of digital procedures and in order to protect the citizens, as well as the operators that turn the procedures themselves. However, this is a set of actions that, due to their themes and their relative novelty, can be complex. To explain it all, a new book by Raffaele Marchetti and Roberta Mulas, by the title of Cyber security, analyzes the dynamics of cyber space security and all related activities on a national, European and global level.

The book, out on LUISS University Press, is inspired by the ponderings developed within the course for senior public executives “Digital Revolution and Cyber Security” organized by the LUISS School of Government.