Fancy Bear Goes Phishing
The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Unsettling, absolutely riveting, and—for better or worse—necessary reading.” —Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By and The Alignment Problem
An entertaining account of the philosophy and technology of hacking—and why we all need to understand it.
It’s a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understanding how our information is stored, used, and protected, we are vulnerable to having it exploited. In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott J. Shapiro draws on his popular Yale University class about hacking to expose the secrets of the digital age. With lucidity and wit, he establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society. And because hacking is a human-interest story, he tells the fascinating tales of perpetrators, including Robert Morris Jr., the graduate student who accidentally crashed the internet in the 1980s, and the Bulgarian “Dark Avenger,” who invented the first mutating computer-virus engine. We also meet a sixteen-year-old from South Boston who took control of Paris Hilton’s cell phone, the Russian intelligence officers who sought to take control of a US election, and others.
In telling their stories, Shapiro exposes the hackers’ tool kits and gives fresh answers to vital questions: Why is the internet so vulnerable? What can we do in response? Combining the philosophical adventure of Gödel, Escher, Bach with dramatic true-crime narrative, the result is a lively and original account of the future of hacking, espionage, and war, and of how to live in an era of cybercrime.
Includes black-and-white images
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ingenious coding, buggy software, and gullibility take the spotlight in this colorful retrospective of hacking. Shapiro (Legality), director of the cybersecurity lab at Yale's Center for Law and Philosophy, revisits spectacular computer intrusions and the characters responsible for them, including a Cornell grad student's 1988 experiment gone awry that crashed the fledgling internet; the battle of wits between Bulgarian hacker Dark Avenger and the computer scientist who worked to defeat his destructive viruses; a Boston 16-year-old's hacking of nude photos from Paris Hilton's cellphone; and the exposure of Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election by the Russian military's Fancy Bear hacking team. He emphasizes the human forces behind the technology, describing the callow malevolence of hackers, the cognitive blind spots that phishing attacks manipulate to get people to click on bogus email links, and the reluctance of profit-hungry corporate executives to pay for cybersecurity. Shapiro's snappy prose manages the extraordinary feat of describing hackers' intricate coding tactics and the flaws they exploit in a way that is accessible and captivating even to readers who don't know Python from JavaScript. The result is a fascinating look at the anarchic side of cyberspace.
