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

Unsettling, absolutely riveting, andfor better or worsenecessary reading. Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By and The Alignment ProblemAn entertaining account of the philosophy and technology of hackingand why we all need to understand it.Its 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 humaninterest 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 computervirus engine. We also meet a sixteenyearold from South Boston who took control of Paris Hiltons 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 Gdel, Escher, Bach with dramatic truecrime 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 blackandwhite images