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

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