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

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