Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

A bold and entertaining account of the history, philosophy and technology of hacking--and why we all need to understand it.

It is a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information age and yet we do not know how it works. In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, the Yale law and philosophy professor Scott J. Shapiro draws on his popular class on computer hacking to explore three vital questions: Why is the internet so vulnerable? How do hackers exploit its vulnerabilities? What can we--individuals, organizations, states--do in response?

To address these questions, Shapiro tells the colorful stories of five extraordinary hacks. We meet the graduate student Robert Morris Jr., who created the so-called Morris Worm in the 1980s, accidentally crashing the internet, and becoming the target of the first federal prosecution for hacking; a Bulgarian hacker named "Dark Avenger" who invented the first mutating computer virus; a 16-year-old from South Boston who hacked Paris Hilton's cell phone, and leaked its contents; a Rutgers undergraduate who nearly destroyed the internet in an attempt to take down the online game Minecraft; and the Russian intelligence officers who broke into the Democratic National Committee's computer network and disrupted the 2016 presidential election.

Writing with humor and lucidity, Shapiro shows how in each of these cases, our vulnerability has less to do with faulty programming--the "downcode"--than with faults in what he calls our "upcode" the laws, policies, habits, and mindsets that shape cyberspace. He also shows that computer systems can never be entirely secure, in large part because hackers exploit a fundamental ambiguity of all computers: that numerical symbols can represent either code or data, permitting hackers to disguise one as the other.

Combining ingenious philosophical investigation in the manner of Godel, Escher, Bach, entertaining storytelling, and a crucial new take on what kind of security we can achieve and how to get it, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing is a lively and original contribution to understanding the future of hacking, espionage, and war, and to the literature on how to live in a dangerous new era of cybercrime.

Includes black-and-white illustrations