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

Ingenious coding, buggy software, and gullibility take the spotlight in this colorful retrospective of hacking. Shapiro (Legality), director of the cybersecurity lab at Yale’s Center for Law and Philosophy, revisits spectacular computer intrusions and the characters responsible for them, including a Cornell grad student’s 1988 experiment gone awry that crashed the fledgling internet; the battle of wits between Bulgarian hacker Dark Avenger and the computer scientist who worked to defeat his destructive viruses; a Boston 16-year-old’s hacking of nude photos from Paris Hilton’s cellphone; and the exposure of Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election by the Russian military’s Fancy Bear hacking team. He emphasizes the human forces behind the technology, describing the callow malevolence of hackers, the cognitive blind spots that phishing attacks manipulate to get people to click on bogus email links, and the reluctance of profit-hungry corporate executives to pay for cybersecurity. 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. (May)