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

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more