Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
The blurb from Goodreads:
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 Godel, 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.
This was so incredibly informative and useful. My main takeaway from reading this actually has more to do with me than the content of the book, and that’s holy cow I’ve just blithely swanning about the internet for almost 30 years having NO IDEA how it actually works, and just completely taking it for granted. Even as a person who considers herself pretty on top of cyber security, you know, for an average person. I use a Password Manager! I encrypt emails with sensitive information! I never click on the links!
So, this was eye-opening in that regard, and I learned a TON about how the Internet actually works and how it was built and evolved, all while learning about how hackers and other actors, both bad and good, exploit loopholes both in the technology, and perhaps even more importantly, in human behavior (called here upcode, vs. the downcode of software and hardware and programming).
Highly, highly recommend this one.
