Future Crimes
How Our Radical Dependence on Technology Threatens Us All
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From one of the world's leading authorities on global security, Future Crimes takes readers deep into the digital underground to illuminate the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you—and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than you ever thought possible.
Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways—but there is an ominous flip side. Criminals are often the earliest, and most innovative, adopters of technology, and modern times have lead to modern crimes. Today's criminals are stealing identities, draining online bank accounts and wiping out computer servers. It's disturbingly easy to activate baby monitors to spy on families, pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity, and thieves are analyzing your social media in order to determine the best time for a home invasion. Meanwhile, 3D printers produce AK-47s, terrorists can download the recipe for the Ebola virus, and drug cartels are building drones. This is just the beginning of the tsunami of technological threats coming our way. In Future Crimes, Marc Goodman rips opens his database of hundreds of real cases to give us front-row access to these impending perils. Reading like a sci-fi thriller, but based in startling fact, Future Crimes raises tough questions about the expanding role of technology in our lives. Future Crimes is a call to action for better security measures worldwide, but most importantly, it will empower readers to protect themselves against looming technological threats—before it's too late.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Our computers, cell phones, appliances, infrastructure, medical devices, and robots are being turned against us by robbers, terrorists, and tyrants, according to this hair-raising expos of cybercrime. Cybersecurity consultant Goodman argues that our ever-expanding networks of digital devices with insecure software leave us vulnerable to hackers, and he recounts their exploits in spying on everything we do, casing houses, commandeering hard drives and cell phone cameras, stealing credit cards, luring children, and choreographing terrorist attacks on smart phones. Worse will soon come, he contends, when hackers take control of smart houses and refrigerators, tamper with car brakes, manipulate bionic limbs, instruct pacemakers to cause heart attacks, destroy the power grid, subvert military robots, and genetically engineer bioweapons; self-aware artificial intelligence programs may become international crime lords. Goodman's breathless but lucid account is good at conveying the potential perils of emerging technologies in layman's terms, and he sprinkles in deft narratives of the heists already enabled by them. His dark-edged portrait of the onrushing total surveillance state and robotization of everything is terrifying in its own right; at times illicit hacker-dom feels like the last stand of human agency against helpless subjection to machines. There's a tinge of dystopian paranoia here, but if a fraction of what Goodman forecasts comes true then this is a timely wake-up call.
Customer Reviews
Exceptional in its scope and explanation
Very eye opening and yet I am certain that in the time it took to read the book (on my iPad, ironically) there have been innumerable new weaknesses found, schemes dreamed and privacy, dignity and dollars lost. We are looking into the abyss.