front matter
Security used to be one of those system features that most people felt they could safely ignore. Unless you were working for the CIA, the military, perhaps law enforcement, or of course Google, you needed it, but it wasn’t top of your list of concerns. After all, most of the people who used your system probably came from your organization. And in any case, why would someone want to attack your system rather than a more interesting one?
How times have changed! As the list of damaging, expensive, and simply embarrassing security failures grows; as more and more personal data gets released after data breaches; and as more and more companies suffer ransomware attacks, it has become obvious that security is now everyone’s problem.
I have spent a number of years trying to bridge the historical gap between the communities of software development and software security, so I was overjoyed to find that my colleague Laurenţiu Spilcă was planning to write a book on Spring Security. The reason I was so pleased is that, as my colleague at Endava, I know that Laurenţiu is a highly competent software engineer, a great engineering leader, and a Spring Security expert. But more than that, he can really communicate complex topics effectively, as his educational work in the Java community and beyond plainly illustrates.