Skip to main content

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later.

This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT team turning up), and even physical violence (usually between rival gangs).

With a mix of interviews and research, Tidy gives us valuable insights into the mindsets behind and causes of this hacking activity - how teens get into it, how some manage to turn their lives around (often going into cybersecurity), while others become career criminals. Although Tidy covers a number of gangs over around a 30 year period, a thread running through the book is the work of a single Finnish hacker Julius Kivimäki.

Kivimäki's most notorious hack involved blackmailing individuals by threatening to make public their records from a mental health clinic. However, he had been active since the age of 14 with numerous malicious online activities. For years, aided by the lax way that underage hackers have been treated by the law, Kivimäki had escaped punishment and believed himself untouchable. His story has a classic TV documentary feel (Tidy is a TV reporter), which is perhaps the weakest part of the book. It's fine to give us Kivimaki's life story and details of his hacking, but Tidy gives us far too many similar stories of victims and could tell us more about how these hacks were technically achieved and the practical actions that were taken to fight back and to prove Kivimaki's involvement. 

Despite some reservations about the storytelling, this is an extremely useful dive into the impact of hacks and of the character of the person that the book describes as arguably the most hated hacker in history (even other hackers were appalled by his release of mental health data). Though particularly of interest for those with an IT background, we are all at risk from hackers, giving the book a wide potential audience.

Hardback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support our online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all reviews and Brian's online articles or subscribe free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...