Cyberjutsu

Introduction

First and foremost: I am not a ninja. Nor am I a ninja historian, a sensei, or even Japanese.

However, I did perform cyber warfare for the US Army, where my fellow soldiers often described our mission as “high-speed ninja shit.” That’s when I really started noticing the odd prevalence of “ninja” references in cybersecurity. I wanted to see if there was anything substantive behind the term’s use. I started researching ninjas in 2012, and that’s when I found recent English translations of Japanese scrolls written more than 400 years ago (more on those in the “About This Book” section that follows). These scrolls were the training manuals that ninjas used to learn their craft—not historical reports but the actual playbooks. One of ...