What does it actually take to win in cyberspace? And why does so much of it come down to something as human as a movie watched at Camp David?
Allie Mellen, author of Code War: How Nations Hack, Spy, and Shape the Digital Battlefield, joins David Moulton for a conversation that covers the full landscape of nation-state cyber operations — attribution, disinformation, the Great Firewall, AI-accelerated attacks, and why getting the general public to care about any of it might be the hardest problem in the industry.
Allie brings a rare combination of backgrounds to this conversation: hacker, researcher, former Forrester principal analyst, and now author. She spent years working alongside three-letter agencies and security teams across the world. All of it went into the book.
In this episode:
How attribution actually works — and why the Olympics false flag nearly pinned a Russian attack on North Korea
Why China has a 50-to-1 personnel advantage in cyber operations and still can’t match Russia’s influence campaigns
What the Great Firewall does to Chinese hackers the moment they get outside it
Why Europe built GDPR with a specific historical memory, and what that means for your data today
How AI is changing the full attack lifecycle — not just zero days
LINKS
Read Allie’s book, Code War, now: https://bit.ly/m/codewar
Connect with Allie Mellen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hackerxbella/
Connect with David Moulton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrmoulton/
Threat Vector on Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/threat-vector-by-palo-alto-networks/id1725324656?i=1000761747372
Threat Vector on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0N1UhtC1JYqU3VwGcRZF5F
#CyberSecurity #NationStateCyber #CodeWar #ThreatVector
00:00 How Nations Hack, Spy, and Win
00:15 Meet Ali Mellon
01:00 Confidence vs Concern
02:30 Trust and Global Power
03:43 Why She Wrote Code War
06:31 WarGames and Policy
11:25 Attribution Pitfalls
14:54 False Flags and Motives
16:10 Surveillance and Control
16:55 Offense Meets Defense
17:38 Russia China US Models
19:00 Freedom Versus Control
21:24 China Versus Russia Tactics
23:04 Great Firewall Side Effects
25:19 Why Write This Book
26:58 Why Your Data Matters
29:08 From Gulf War To Ukraine
31:05 AI Makes Attacks Harder
33:01 Closing Thanks And Outro
