Fancy Bear Goes Phishing

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

By: Scott J. Shapiro

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Long-listed, Amazon.com Best Books of the Year, 2023

"Unsettling, absolutely riveting, and—for better or worse—necessary reading."—Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By and The Alignment Problem

An entertaining account of the philosophy and technology of hacking—and why we all need to understand it.

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 J. Shapiro draws on his popular Yale University class about hacking to expose 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-interest 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, the Russian intelligence officers who sought to take control of a US election, and 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? Combining the philosophical adventure of Gödel, Escher, Bach with dramatic true-crime narrative, 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2023 Scott J. Shapiro (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Ingenious coding, buggy software, and gullibility take the spotlight in this colorful retrospective of hacking . . . 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 is an engrossing read . . . An authoritative, disturbing examination of hacking, cybercrime and techno-espionage.”—Kirkus Reviews

"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

Good pacing, but a little all over

Overall good. But when he said "Apartment 28" instead of APT 28, my inner cyber analyst cringed. I enjoyed the content and could make a drinking game out of the number of times he says "up-code" or "down-code".

Interesting and entertainingly written.

The author takes complex material and breaks it down for those who may know a lot about hacking, and those who don’t. His wry observations add to the storytelling.

A Decent Read / Listen

Writing can be cringy and narrator has problems with some pronunciations but otherwise a decent read.

Familiar stories with new twists

Although I've heard some of these stories a hundred times, I still learned new things. The angle he took to describe everything is very accessible and I encourage anyone from beginner to advanced to check out this book. The narrator's voice was great and he only fumbled a couple times over some of the IT terms. I visited the author's social media and was not disappointed. I'd definitely take any course he decided to teach.

Great combination of history and current events

Really enjoyed the in depth stories about the origins of our operating systems, early hackers, and the premise and motives behind hacking events. I appreciate the author’s research and ability to share their personal knowledge and experience in a way that makes the book compelling to the reader.