The Ransomware Hunting Team
A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A real-life technological thriller about a band of eccentric misfits taking on the biggest cybersecurity threats of our time.
“What Michael Lewis did for baseball in Moneyball, Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden do brilliantly for the world of ransomware and hackers. Cinematic, big in scope, and meticulously reported, this book is impossible to put down.” —Doug Stanton, New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers
Scattered across the world, an elite team of code crackers is working tirelessly to thwart the defining cyber scourge of our time. You’ve probably never heard of them. But if you work for a school, a business, a hospital, or a municipal government, or simply cherish your digital data, you may be painfully familiar with the team’s sworn enemy: ransomware. Again and again, an unlikely band of misfits, mostly self-taught and often struggling to make ends meet, have outwitted the underworld of hackers who lock computer networks and demand huge payments in return for the keys.
The Ransomware Hunting Team traces the adventures of these unassuming heroes and how they have used their skills to save millions of ransomware victims from paying billions of dollars to criminals. Working tirelessly from bedrooms and back offices, and refusing payment, they’ve rescued those whom the often hapless FBI has been unwilling or unable to help. Foremost among them is Michael Gillespie, a cancer survivor and cat lover who got his start cracking ransomware while working at a Nerds on Call store in the town of Normal, Illinois. Other teammates include the brilliant, reclusive Fabian Wosar, a high school dropout from Germany who enjoys bantering with the attackers he foils, and his protégé, the British computer science prodigy Sarah White. Together, they have established themselves as the most effective force against an escalating global threat. This book follows them as they put their health, personal relationships, and financial security on the line to navigate the technological and moral challenges of combating digital hostage taking.
Urgent, uplifting, and entertaining, Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden’s The Ransomware Hunting Team is a real-life technological thriller that illuminates a dangerous new era of cybercrime.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalists Dudley and Golden (Spy Schools) deliver an intriguing profile of volunteer tech experts who work to combat digital extortionists. The story centers on Illinois tech support professional Michael Gillespie, "the most prolific member of the Ransomware Hunting Team, an elite, invitation-only society of about a dozen tech wizards who are devoted to cracking ransomware." The authors detail how gangs of hackers, many with ties to crime syndicates or hostile foreign governments, target vulnerable computer systems, introducing viruses that encrypt files, then demanding payment for a decryption key. The U.S. government's response has been hampered, Dudley and Golden explain, by the rigid culture of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, where cooperation with outsiders is discouraged and cybercrime experts are often denigrated as the "Geek Squad." However, in the aftermath of high-profile ransomware attacks such as the May 2021 Colonial Pipeline incident, which paralyzed fuel distribution on the East Coast, the government has coordinated more closely with recognized experts like Gillespie. Dudley and Golden render their subjects—some of whom endured poverty and bullying in their teens—with warmth and admiration while acknowledging that competition between hacker gangs and ransomware hunters has helped spur more sophisticated viruses and bigger paydays. Readers will put down this engrossing underdog story just long enough to back up their own files.
