18 October 2026
IT’s post-9/11 moment
After 9/11, nobody asked travellers whether they preferred shorter queues or safer flights. IT is entering its own post-9/11 moment.
Intent
From accident to intent
“Crime no longer needs proximity.”
Out 12 October 2026 · Oak Tree Press
Lateral Movement
Forty years of cyberattacks, from Morris to Mythos
A Friday evening, in an ordinary organisation. Files become unreadable one after another, a ransom demand appears on screen, the backups stop responding.
1988 → today
Twenty-five moments when everything changed
Seven parts, twenty-five chapters: from a student’s accidental worm to the first attack led by a machine.
Part I
The age of innocence
Morris · ILOVEYOU
Part II
The age of criminal empires
SQL Slammer · MyDoom · Storm · Zeus
Part III
The age of the military turn
Tallinn · Aurora · Stuxnet
Part IV
The age when data became a weapon
PlayStation · Yahoo · Sony Pictures
Part V
The age of attacks on civilisation
TV5Monde · Bundestag · the Ukrainian grid · the US election · WannaCry · NotPetya · Olympic Destroyer
Part VI
The age when everything went cyber
SolarWinds · Colonial Pipeline · Conti · Lapsus$ · Airbus · Operation Endgame
Part VII
Mythos
When the machine leads the attack itself
The interludes
Five arguments that cut across the story
Between the parts, five interludes step back from the narrative: what these forty years add up to, theme by theme.
Criminalisation
The threat gets organised
“Trust no one. Ever.”
Militarisation
The myth of the victim
“There are no allies any more. There are targets, ranked by priority.”
The human factor
The faces of defeat
“You cannot ask engineers to repair the geopolitical sins or the incompetence of their states.”
Accountability
The price of negligence
“As long as the fine costs less than security, companies choose insecurity.”
Publisher
Oak Tree Press
Published
12 October 2026
Pages
284 pages
Format
17 × 24 cm
Price
€32.50
ISBN
978-1-78119-715-8
Also in French as Déplacement latéral (EDIPRO).
After forty years, one certainty
We know how to secure a machine. You can’t patch the human.
Read the preface and prologue
The author
David Dewulf
A cybersecurity professional and author, he leads cybersecurity services for BeLux, the Netherlands and the Nordics at Atos, drawing on more than two decades in enterprise technology and managed services. Lateral Movement is his first book.
Method
How this book was written
The book is mine: the subject, the six-part structure, the choice of the twenty-five cases, the five interludes where I set out my own arguments, the interviews, and more than six hundred references, every one documented and checked against primary sources.
I wrote the French text, and artificial intelligence assisted me at several stages of the work: exploring lines of research, correcting, smoothing the language and style. This English edition was translated with the same tools, then revised sentence by sentence against the French text, which remains authoritative.
I’ll say it plainly: a book about forty years of technology is written with the tools of its time, and I make no secret of it. But the tool proposes; it does not decide. What matters is not who polished a sentence or opened a line of enquiry, but who checked every fact and answers for it. I do.
Substack
The stories that didn’t make it into the book
Attacks in progress, court cases, and what the press left out. I publish on Substack as the reporting comes: subscribe to get each new piece. No advertising, one-click unsubscribe.
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10 October 2026
On air with Eddy Caekelberghs
Just recorded an interview with Eddy Caekelberghs for “Les Couleurs de l’info” on RTBF La Première. We talked about 40 years of cyberattacks — and why cybersecurity has always been a human story.
12 September 2026
Munich, AI and cybersecurity
Still catching up on a very full stretch. Last week started in Munich, at the Microsoft Experience Center, looking at what’s coming next on AI and cybersecurity.
2 September 2026
The cover
Here it is. The cover of my book. “Lateral Movement”. If you work in security, you know the term. It’s what an attacker does once inside a network.
24 August 2026
A slightly crazy project
Two years ago, I started a slightly crazy project. The great cyberattacks of the past 40 years are always told the same way: reports, acronyms, diagrams. But dig into them, and you find something else.
Agenda
Where to hear me
Broadcasts, bookshop events and talks. Dates are added as they are confirmed.
Press
For journalists
Review copy, interview request, high-resolution images: write to my press officer.
Speaking
“You can’t patch the human”
A talk drawn from the book. Keynote, panel or in-house session.
Request a talk
Tell me about your event
A few details are enough for a useful answer. Reply within 48 hours.