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A review by ashrafulla
Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro
4.0
Accessible to all, the book offers a thorough analysis of five hacks from the dawn of the Internet to the 2020s. Each hack gets two chapters. The end is then a long epilogue that is a reasonable and even-keeled call to action.
The book benefits from the author being tangential to programming, as someone who coded for a bit, then did a different field, then came back to coding for this research. As a result, the description of the engineering flaws in each hack is more layman than most technical treatises.
The book is also very good at avoiding some of the elevated emotion of other cybersecurity books. Readers stay within the paved path without veering off to being overly patriotic or pessimistic or fanboyish. So none of your guard against potential biases is triggered. You're just reading a story about mistakes.
There are some new terms that will be added to your vocabulary from the book: virus vs worm vs vorm vs wirus, and downcode vs upcode. The repeated use of the words helped reinforce the mental model of programming between the humans and the computers.
A good book, maybe too juvenile for the cybersecurity experts but a nice decent-sized read for the rest of us.
The book benefits from the author being tangential to programming, as someone who coded for a bit, then did a different field, then came back to coding for this research. As a result, the description of the engineering flaws in each hack is more layman than most technical treatises.
The book is also very good at avoiding some of the elevated emotion of other cybersecurity books. Readers stay within the paved path without veering off to being overly patriotic or pessimistic or fanboyish. So none of your guard against potential biases is triggered. You're just reading a story about mistakes.
There are some new terms that will be added to your vocabulary from the book: virus vs worm vs vorm vs wirus, and downcode vs upcode. The repeated use of the words helped reinforce the mental model of programming between the humans and the computers.
A good book, maybe too juvenile for the cybersecurity experts but a nice decent-sized read for the rest of us.