Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

18.00

With lucidity and wit, Scott Shapiro 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 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 and the Russian intelligence officers who sought to take control of a US election, among others. In telling their stories, he exposes the hackers’ tool kits and gives fresh answers to vital questions – why is the internet so vulnerable, and what can we do in response?

In stock

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.

Additional information

Weight 0.654 kg
Dimensions 24.2 × 16.8 × 4 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Hardback

Pages

420

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

364.168 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K

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