Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

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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.

Reviews

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
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
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

Author Bio

Scott J. Shapiro is the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School, where he is the Director of the Centre for Law and Philosophy and the CyberSecurity Lab. He is the author of Legality and the co-author, with Oona Hathaway, of The Internationalists- How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.