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Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

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Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

By: Scott Shapiro
Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
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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 Freedom & Security History & Culture Politics & Government Security & Encryption Technology & Society True Crime Espionage Computer Security Hacking Technology Cybersecurity Russia Software Cyber Warfare War
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Critic reviews

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)
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)
All stars
Most relevant
Even though this is all stuff I am very familiar with I still found it useful set into such a connection and overview. Great telling and always good with a repeat for us who knows.

Great overview

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I learnt a lot listening to this. I found the history of how the internet and operating systems developed through the stories of the early hacks fascinating. The concept of upcode versus down code was also new to me and thought provoking. However, I did get lost later in the book which was down to my lack of knowledge rather than a failure of the author.

If you have tech knowledge you'll be fine

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The book uses very basic terms that you wouldn't find in cyber security but the story's are good, and treating the reader like a 'noob`with some of the terms used
like mainframe.

very basic terms

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Cyber breaches are older than most think. This book is an entertaining education of its history and what is to come. Enjoyed the reading voice too.




Fascinating history of hacking’s past and a view to its future

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…it was just a bit heavy going. Reading out code rather than having a PDF attachment to look at, inventing own terms like vorms and wiruses, all added up to a disappointing experience. If you haven’t read/listened to This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends, that is vastly better.

I wanted to like this but…

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