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 And some of the historical content was a little under-researched - we're told, for instance, that Turing died 'by suicide, after eating an arsenic-laced apple' - it was actually cyanide, and it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.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here