Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

Author Scott Shapiro
Narrator Jonathan Todd Ross
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Publish Date 1 January 1970
Run Time 15 hours and 9 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Computer security, Computing and Information Technology, Corporate crime / white-collar crime, Espionage and secret services, Impact of science and technology on society, Internet: general works, Politics and government, Science: general issues, Society and Social Sciences.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

It's a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understanding how our information is stored, used and protected, we are vulnerable to having it exploited. In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott Shapiro exposes the secrets of the digital age. With lucidity and wit, he establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society. And because hacking is a human story, he tells the fascinating tales of perpetrators including Robert Morris Jr, the graduate student who accidentally crashed the internet in the 1980s, and the Bulgarian 'Dark Avenger' who invented the first mutating computer-virus engine. We also meet a sixteen-year-old from South Boston who took control of Paris Hilton's cell phone and the Russian intelligence officers who sought to take control of a US election, among others.

In telling their stories, Shapiro exposes the hackers' tool kits and gives fresh answers to vital questions: why is the internet so vulnerable? What can we do in response? The result is a lively and original account of the future of hacking, espionage and war, and of how to live in an era of cybercrime.

©2023 Scott Shapiro (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

When does cyber-espionage tip into cybercrime or even cyber-warfare? … Scott Shapiro is well-placed to tackle these quandaries … masterful … His narrative zips between technical explanations, legal reasoning and the ideas of thinkers including René Descartes and Alan Turing … making the subject intelligible to non-specialist readers

Economist

His impish humour and freewheeling erudition suit a world saturated in pop culture

The Guardian

an impressive achievement … an absorbing tour of cyberspaces’s netherworld … illuminating

Observer

Full of such surprising human stories and colour … you might assume that hacking is the art of tricking a computer into letting you in. The reality, as Shapiro sets out, is more often about tricking humans … a lucid, grounded explanation of hacks, the mentality of the hackers behind them, and what it means for us.

The Spectator

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing is an essential book about high-tech crime: lively, sometimes funny, readable, and accessible. Shapiro highlights the human side of hacking and computer crime, and the deep relevance of software to our lives.

Bruce Schneier, author of A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules and How to Bend them Back

Shapiro’s snappy prose manages the extraordinary feat of describing hackers’ intricate coding tactics and the flaws they exploit in a way that is accessible and captivating even to readers who don’t know Python from JavaScript. The result is a fascinating look at the anarchic side of cyberspace.

Publishers Weekly

This scintillating book manages to hack the reader … it is a profound work on the idea of technology, the philosophical underpinning of it, the moral sensitivity we need to deal with fundamental problems and the jurisprudence relevant to it. If you think that books involving discussions of law must be boring, then Shapiro is a good antidote since he is a very humanist and humane writer … Ask yourself: did you have an email address or a mobile phone back in the way-back? … psychologically astute … erudite, witty and arch. I am now unplugging my computer

Scotsman

Scott Shapiro’s Fancy Bear Goes Phishing fills a critical hole in cybersecurity history, providing an engaging read that explains just why the internet is as vulnerable as it is. Accessible for regular readers, yet still fun for experts, this delightful book expertly traces the challenge of securing our digital lives and how the optimism of the internet’s early pioneers has resulted in an online world today threatened by spies, criminals, and over-eager teen hackers.

Garrett Graff, co-author of The Dawn of the Code War

The question of trust is increasingly central to computing, and in turn to our world at large. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing offers a whirlwind history of cybersecurity and its many open problems that makes for unsettling, absolutely riveting, and-for better or worse-necessary reading.

Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By and The Alignment Problem

This is an engrossing read … An authoritative, disturbing examination of hacking, cybercrime and techno-espionage

Kirkus

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