Skip to main content

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing - Scott Shapiro ****

In a wide-ranging book, Scott Shapiro uses five historical uses of computer worms, viruses and phishing to illustrate the processes involved in cybercrime at both the technological and human level.

We start inevitably with the ARPANET worm of 1988, with its ironic creator (his Dad worked for the NSA), that crippled many Sun and VAX computers on the proto-internet, even though it wasn't intended to do harm. This was well-documented two years later in Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg, but where Stoll gives a dramatic description from the point of view of a system administrator who faced the worm, Shapiro steps back more, both to give a wider context and to give reasonably accessible details of the mechanisms used by the worm. (I say 'reasonably' because some of Shapiro's analogies obscured rather than clarified what the worm's four means of attack did.)

We then move on to the early DOS viruses coming out of Bulgaria, the phone hack that released, amongst other things, Paris Hilton's personal info and pictures, the Russian state hacker team nicknamed Fancy Bear who used phishing emails to capture information from American Democratic Party political accounts, and massive denial of service attacks making heavy use of devices we tend not to think of as computers, from toasters to TVs.

Shapiro does all this with a clever mix of the technical and the human side of what's going on. Whether we are talking about programmers acting for enemy states or (quite often) bored teenagers who go from hacking for fun to trying to extort money, the people side tends to get less coverage unless we're talking about an attempt to extradite a teenager from the UK to the US, or dramas about evil state hackers like The Undeclared War. There is also enough detail on the technical side to get a feel for how the various mechanisms work without ever getting too complex. I found the denial of service details particularly interesting as it's the kind of thing that's often mentioned without giving any clue as to how it happened.

Much of the content was fascinating if, like me, you are into computers and computing history. Sometimes the text could be a little heavy going - the book is too long overall and could have been usefully slimmed down. I found Shapiro's attempt to divide the business into 'downcode' (actual computer code) and 'upcode' (human behaviour and rules) an unnecessary application of labels. And some of the historical content was a little under-researched - we're told, for instance, that Turing died 'by suicide, after eating an arsenic-laced apple' - it was actually cyanide, and it is entirely possible his death was accidental. We also get the old (incorrect) chestnut about the QWERTY keyboard being designed to avoid jamming.

Despite these occasional issues, the book worked well for me and it is great in the way that it gives an understanding of who hackers are and why they do what they do, the methods they use, the mechanisms used to find and deter them, and the whole political baggage that goes along with this potential threat to everyone from individuals to corporations and governments.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more