Description

Hacking, espionage, war and cybercrime as you’ve never read about them before

Fancy Bear was hungry. Looking for embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton, the elite hacking unit within Russian military intelligence broke into the Democratic National Committee network, grabbed what it could, and may have contributed to the election of Donald Trump.

Robert Morris was curious. Experimenting one night, the graduate student from Cornell University released “the Great Worm” and became the first person to crash the internet.

Dark Avenger was in love. To impress his crush, the Bulgarian hacker invented the first mutating computer virus-engine and nearly destroyed the anti-virus industry.

Why is the internet so insecure? How do hackers exploit its vulnerabilities? Fancy Bear Goes Phishing tells the stories of five great hacks, their origins, motivations and consequences. As well as Fancy Bear, Robert Morris and Dark Avenger, we meet Cameron Lacroix, a sixteen-year-old from South Boston, who hacked Paris Hilton’s cell phone because he wanted to be famous and Paras Jha, a Rutgers undergraduate, who built a giant botnet designed to get him out of his calculus exam and disrupt the online game Minecraft, but which almost destroyed the internet in the process. Scott Shapiro’s five stories demonstrate that computer hacking is not just a tale of technology, but of human beings.

Yet as Shapiro shows, hackers do not just abuse computer code – they exploit the philosophical principles of computation: the very features that make computers possible also make hacking possible. He explains how our information society works, the ways our data is stored and manipulated, and why it is so subject to exploitation. Both intellectual romp and dramatic true-crime narrative, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing exposes the secrets of the digital age.

Publisher Review

When does cyber-espionage tip into cybercrime or even cyber-warfare? … Scott Shapiro is well-placed to tackle these quandaries … masterful … His narrative zips between technical explanations, legal reasoning and the ideas of thinkers including Rene Descartes and Alan Turing … making the subject intelligible to non-specialist readers * Economist * His impish humour and freewheeling erudition suit a world saturated in pop culture * The Guardian * an impressive achievement … an absorbing tour of cyberspaces’s netherworld … illuminating * Observer * Full of such surprising human stories and colour … you might assume that hacking is the art of tricking a computer into letting you in. The reality, as Shapiro sets out, is more often about tricking humans … a lucid, grounded explanation of hacks, the mentality of the hackers behind them, and what it means for us. — James Ball * The Spectator * Fancy Bear Goes Phishing is an essential book about high-tech crime: lively, sometimes funny, readable, and accessible. Shapiro highlights the human side of hacking and computer crime, and the deep relevance of software to our lives. — Bruce Schneier, author of A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules and How to Bend them Back 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. — Publishers Weekly This scintillating book manages to hack the reader … it is a profound work on the idea of technology, the philosophical underpinning of it, the moral sensitivity we need to deal with fundamental problems and the jurisprudence relevant to it. If you think that books involving discussions of law must be boring, then Shapiro is a good antidote since he is a very humanist and humane writer … Ask yourself: did you have an email address or a mobile phone back in the way-back? … psychologically astute … erudite, witty and arch. I am now unplugging my computer — Stuart Kelly * Scotsman * Scott Shapiro’s Fancy Bear Goes Phishing fills a critical hole in cybersecurity history, providing an engaging read that explains just why the internet is as vulnerable as it is. Accessible for regular readers, yet still fun for experts, this delightful book expertly traces the challenge of securing our digital lives and how the optimism of the internet’s early pioneers has resulted in an online world today threatened by spies, criminals, and over-eager teen hackers. — Garrett Graff, co-author of The Dawn of the Code War The question of trust is increasingly central to computing, and in turn to our world at large. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing offers a whirlwind history of cybersecurity and its many open problems that makes for unsettling, absolutely riveting, and-for better or worse-necessary reading. — Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By and The Alignment Problem This is an engrossing read … An authoritative, disturbing examination of hacking, cybercrime and techno-espionage * Kirkus * gripping, entertaining, yet intellectually rigorous * Prospect Magazine * a clever mix of the technical and the human side of what’s going on * Popular Science * We have a deep fascination with the threats that computer hackers pose to society – and a profound misunderstanding of how they work. Seeking to address this Scott Shapiro … explains in surprising detail how the internet works – and why it isn’t safer * Sunday Times *