Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

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

• gripping, entertaining, yet intellectually rigorous

  Prospect Magazine

• a clever mix of the technical and the human side of what’s going on

  Popular Science

• We have a deep fascination with the threats that computer hackers pose to society – and a profound misunderstanding of how they work. Seeking to address this Scott Shapiro … explains in surprising detail how the internet works – and why it isn’t safer

  Sunday Times