Book Review: Fancybear Goes Phishing from blog The Technology blog and podcast

Book Review: Fancybear Goes Phishing

Some time back, I finished Fancybear Goes Phishing. I have been meaning to write a review for it for quite awhile and things just continued to come up, but now … here we are.

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This book is definitely something worth reading. From convictions to people to learning how they either got convicted or not, you’ll definitely learn something.

Scott, who is not a security expert by trade, really diives in to it with the first ever worm we know about, the Morris Worm.

wikipedia

In the first several chapters, we learn how Robert created this worm, and eventually his conviction. I’m not giving you any details on his conviction except to say that he was f0ound guilty of causing over $1,000 of damage which was under the just created CFAA.

Wikipedia

This book also covers Fancybear themselves as well as other Russian folk under the various names we’ve been talking about for years.

One of the best stories that really sticks out at me is with a gentleman who gets picked up young, promises that he will fly right, but ends up getting the maximum 5 years for the crimes he commited. As we’ve talked about on these podcasts, the crimes for hacking, DDOS and taking personal info that doesn’t belong to you must be higher than the 5-10 years these guys get. The gentleman in question was to get out in July of this year, spending about half of his life already in prison.

The other big non-surprise of this book that we have covered numerous time of, was the biggest phone company problem T-Mobile. How easy it was to get at the data talked about back in 2006 was mindblowing, although as we’ve discussed, they’ve continued to have breaches since. Can anyone say 8 this year to date?

The ending chapter, which is not numbered has to be one of the best bow ties I’ve ever seen in a book as great as this. From someone who had no knowledge of this field, tying the bow was great. The final 13 minute conclusion was good too.

You definitely want to pick up this book, it was a must read.

This book is not available on BARD, but may possibly be found on Bookshare. We link to Amazon here so you get the full book title.

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Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

about the book

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“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

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Have fun reading this one! You’ll thank me later.Its 434 print pages and over 14 hours in audio. This book is a 2023 book.

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Informazioni sull'articolo

Book Review: Fancybear Goes Phishing was released on September 16, 2023 at 5:30 pm by tech in books.
Last modified: September 16, 2023.

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