Fancy Bear was hungry. Looking for embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton, the elite hacking unit within Russian military intelligence broke into the Democratic National Committee network, grabbed what it could, and may have contributed to the election of Donald Trump.

Robert Morris was curious. Experimenting one night, the graduate student from Cornell University released “the Great Worm” and became the first person to crash the internet.

Dark Avenger was in love. To impress his crush, the Bulgarian hacker invented the first mutating computer virus-engine and nearly destroyed the anti-virus industry.

Why is the internet so insecure? How do hackers exploit its vulnerabilities? Fancy Bear Goes Phishing tells the stories of five great hacks, their origins, motivations and consequences. As well as Fancy Bear, Robert Morris and Dark Avenger, we meet Cameron Lacroix, a sixteen-year-old from South Boston, who hacked Paris Hilton’s cell phone because he wanted to be famous and Paras Jha, a Rutgers undergraduate, who built a giant botnet designed to get him out of his calculus exam and disrupt the online game Minecraft, but which almost destroyed the internet in the process. Scott Shapiro’s five stories demonstrate that computer hacking is not just a tale of technology, but of human beings.

Yet as Shapiro shows, hackers do not just abuse computer code – they exploit the philosophical principles of computation: the very features that make computers possible also make hacking possible. He explains how our information society works, the ways our data is stored and manipulated, and why it is so subject to exploitation. Both intellectual romp and dramatic true-crime narrative, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing exposes the secrets of the digital age.

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‘From an early age, locked doors, high fences and the secrets kept by businesses, buildings and people, fascinated me. I wanted to find out what they wanted to hide away.’

A  burglar for hire, con-artist and expert in deception and physical infiltration – Jenny Radcliffe is a professional people hacker. After being schooled in the art of breaking and entering by her family, she became an expert social engineer, doing an insider’s job to exploit the flaws and weaknesses in top-grade security operations.

In People Hacker, Jenny reveals how she uses her inimitable blend of psychology, stagecraft and charm to gain access to top-grade private and commercial properties. From the back streets of Liverpool to the City of London’s Square Mile, across rooftops, cellars and staircases in Europe to the mansions of gangsters in the Far East, Jenny has risked it all to earn the title ‘People Hacker’.

This is Jenny insider’s account of how her working-class upbringing, northern sense of humour and femininity in a male-dominated industry all helped her to become one of the most sought-after social engineers in the world. Told in her trademark colourful style, and packed full of stories of the crazy and dangerous situations she has found herself in along the way, Jenny shines a light on the security mistakes we all make – and how to avoid them.  

Fancy Bear was hungry. Looking for embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton, the elite hacking unit within Russian military intelligence broke into the Democratic National Committee network, grabbed what it could, and may have contributed to the election of Donald Trump.

Robert Morris was curious. Experimenting one night, the graduate student from Cornell University released “the Great Worm” and became the first person to crash the internet.

Dark Avenger was in love. To impress his crush, the Bulgarian hacker invented the first mutating computer virus-engine and nearly destroyed the anti-virus industry.

Why is the internet so insecure? How do hackers exploit its vulnerabilities? Fancy Bear Goes Phishing tells the stories of five great hacks, their origins, motivations and consequences. As well as Fancy Bear, Robert Morris and Dark Avenger, we meet Cameron Lacroix, a sixteen-year-old from South Boston, who hacked Paris Hilton’s cell phone because he wanted to be famous and Paras Jha, a Rutgers undergraduate, who built a giant botnet designed to get him out of his calculus exam and disrupt the online game Minecraft, but which almost destroyed the internet in the process. Scott Shapiro’s five stories demonstrate that computer hacking is not just a tale of technology, but of human beings.

Yet as Shapiro shows, hackers do not just abuse computer code – they exploit the philosophical principles of computation: the very features that make computers possible also make hacking possible. He explains how our information society works, the ways our data is stored and manipulated, and why it is so subject to exploitation. Both intellectual romp and dramatic true-crime narrative, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing exposes the secrets of the digital age.

Key Features

• Define and determine a cyber-defence strategy based on current and past real-life examples
• Understand how future technologies will impact cyber warfare campaigns and society
• Future-ready yourself and your business against any cyber threat

Book Description

The era of cyber warfare is now upon us. What we do now and how we determine what we will do in the future is the difference between whether our businesses live or die and whether our digital self survives the digital battlefield. Cyber Warfare – Truth, Tactics, and Strategies takes you on a journey through the myriad of cyber attacks and threats that are present in a world powered by AI, big data, autonomous vehicles, drones video, and social media.

Dr. Chase Cunningham uses his military background to provide you with a unique perspective on cyber security and warfare. Moving away from a reactive stance to one that is forward-looking, he aims to prepare people and organizations to better defend themselves in a world where there are no borders or perimeters. He demonstrates how the cyber landscape is growing infinitely more complex and is continuously evolving at the speed of light.

The book not only covers cyber warfare, but it also looks at the political, cultural, and geographical influences that pertain to these attack methods and helps you understand the motivation and impacts that are likely in each scenario.

Cyber Warfare – Truth, Tactics, and Strategies is as real-life and up-to-date as cyber can possibly be, with examples of actual attacks and defense techniques, tools. and strategies presented for you to learn how to think about defending your own systems and data.

What you will learn

• Hacking at scale – how machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) skew the battlefield
• Defending a boundaryless enterprise
• Using video and audio as weapons of influence
• Uncovering DeepFakes and their associated attack vectors
• Using voice augmentation for exploitation
• Defending when there is no perimeter
• Responding tactically to counter-campaign-based attacks

Who this book is for

This book is for any engineer, leader, or professional with either a responsibility for cyber security within their organizations, or an interest in working in this ever-growing field.