A review by dorothy_gale
Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

4.0

4.4★: SCARY AS HECK!!! CURRENTLY QUESTIONING EVERYTHING I HAVE IN THE CLOUD! This book was eye-opening. I’m shocked that some of the biggest hacks so far were done by 16-year-old boys. It was interesting to hear about how cyber-security-savvy Hillary Clinton’s team actually was as that is not how the media characterized her in the emailgate scandal, and how complex those hacking events were. And I will NEVER question or skimp on multi-factor authentication again! I was also surprised by a few things with Bill Gates and Microsoft in the early Internet days. I didn’t have much interest in Paris Hilton, but that story was fascinating as well.

FUN SIDEBAR: It also had a bit of psychology and philosophy in it, and it had me ponder the question: ‘ARE HUMANS FUNDAMENTALLY RATIONAL?’ It’s funny that it’s something I’ve always just taken for granted, probably from a lifetime of arrogant, speciesist indoctrination. My answer is now NO. History is filled with irrationality across every culture I’ve learned about so far. We react emotionally and try to pass it off as logical choice. We have deeply imbedded biases that practically take dynamite to change. We make thousands of decisions on limited and faulty data ALL THE TIME — ego, emotions, biases, disinformation, misinformation, myths, and legends. Humans are distinguished from other animals by their capacity for reason, but it doesn’t mean we always use it and when we do, we don’t always use it correctly (that feels like it could be a meme). Obviously, we have been able to choose the correct course of action enough of the time to survive and reproduce. We are a successful species, but JUST BARELY. How many times have we been on the brink of World War 3 or nuclear annihilation? I feel like it has been just as much LUCK! And how much of that survival was instinct? Drives and reflexes for food, water, sleep, fight or flight, etc. — how much of that is hard-wired physical self-preservation (i.e. animal instinct?) Look how much has transpired in the world in the last few years: the pandemic, civil unrest, racial reckoning, climate change realities. Wouldn’t a rational choice to co-exist on the planet mean choosing to unlearn our biases and learn how to cooperate for the greater good? Isn’t a greater part of America driven by fear and/or denial? If we were fundamentally rational, the epidemic of school and other mass shootings wouldn’t be happening IMO.

This book was just published on 5/23/23, so about seven weeks ago. It has a 4.13-star rating by 193 people and I hope more people read it. It did fall short of a 5-star rating from me due to a couple chapters that were *YAWN* overly technical. And I wasn’t sure if his “upcode” and “downcode” terms were unique to him; I think it would’ve been better with plain English.