Fancy Bear Goes Phishing - Books.Infosec.Exchange

English language

Published April 9, 2023 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-0-374-60117-1

(1 review)

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing is 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 …

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing is 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.

2 editions

norb reviewed Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott J. Shapiro

Insightful Book That Helps Put the Humanity into Cybersecurity

4 stars

Cybersecurity is my job, so I came into this book with some amount of knowledge of the subject, but I still found it a fascinating read.

At first, I was slightly annoyed that Shapiro was making up new words (downcode, upcode, metacode) to describe things we already have word for in the industry, but as I read the book I started to see why he's using these words.

Shapiro does a great job of using the ideas of downcode (what you might consider regular computer code), upcode (generally the ethics or rules that the computer user has), and metacode (the rules that exist "above" the user, such as laws). By defining these three ideas, Shapiro makes the case that cybersecurity is not a technology problem at all, but rather a human problem.

This idea is something that I've tried to instill in others at my day job, but it is …

Cybersecurity is my job, so I came into this book with some amount of knowledge of the subject, but I still found it a fascinating read.

At first, I was slightly annoyed that Shapiro was making up new words (downcode, upcode, metacode) to describe things we already have word for in the industry, but as I read the book I started to see why he's using these words.

Shapiro does a great job of using the ideas of downcode (what you might consider regular computer code), upcode (generally the ethics or rules that the computer user has), and metacode (the rules that exist "above" the user, such as laws). By defining these three ideas, Shapiro makes the case that cybersecurity is not a technology problem at all, but rather a human problem.

This idea is something that I've tried to instill in others at my day job, but it is something that is hard for people to understand, even those that work in the IT/cybersecurity industry. Many technical people think you can solve all problems via technical means. This is what Shaprio calls "solutionism" near the end of this book (if I remember correctly, the word "solutionism" is actually coined by someone else).

I found myself comparing this book to another one I read recently, A City on Mars by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith. Both of these books take what is ostensibly a "technical problem" and then start to apply the human element to it, with the end result being about the same. Technology cannot and will not solve all of our problems. We really have to do it in the messy human world.

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Macmillan Publishers (ePub)
Purchasable
Macmillan Publishers (ePub)
Purchasable