Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

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

By: Scott Shapiro

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

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

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)

Hacking for dummies with a conscience

I was referred to this book by my for boss in IT Security & was nearly immediately outraged & insulted. The early chapters broke down some of the fundamentals of hacking & I assumed my boss was inferring I was a noob. Turns out I may not be a noob but something worse; a solutionist. The book breaks down the predictable ‘why’ of cyber attacks. That is substandard “down code”. The book isn’t just for people in Cyber Security but for anyone who wants to get past the rhetoric & sensationalism of publishers & politicians who deal in melodrama.
Scott Shapiro carefully lays out the when, what & who of several major events in cyber security to reveal the why it has happened & will continue to happen. Anyone can read this book & in our modern interconnected society, everyone should