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

Reviewed by SEGGY

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro, 2023, ISBN: 978-0374601171

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing is a very good book by (((Scott J. Shapiro))).  Fans of 2600 Magazine should consider reading it from cover to cover.

At the outset, in the introduction, the author avers he has learned "Much of what is said about hacking is either wrong, misleading, or exaggerated."  Some quoted in the book commend hackers for their skills and ingenuity.

His inquiry as to why "the Internet is so vulnerable to attack" shows that the five major hacks recounted benefited from a heedless disregard for needed security in transactions with hardware, software, networks, and humans.

Backdoor functions left in the released version of Sendmail, one of four attack vectors exploited by Robert Morris' worm which crippled the Internet in 1988, return nearly a decade later in the late-1990s, with power easier to exploit via MS Office macros, also lacking security measures.

His telling of Microsoft's delinquent decision - made only after hasty bloatware pushing secured their OS dominance - to prioritize security may be unduly moderate.  However, his botnet war accounts astound.

Some hack narratives deserve further technical detail and explanation, but he intelligently situates hacking from wider perspectives of philosophy, psychology, heuristics, citizenship, war, sovereignty, legality, morality, and the limits of solutionism: the idea that technology can solve all problems.

He smartly curates an array of luminaries and rogues, from (((Marx))), (((Trotsky))), Snowden, Turing, Mr. Robot, WarGames, the GRU, NSA, FBI, Amartya Sen, to Rousseau.

Hacker profiles are scrupulous, filling the book with richly human and technically savvy characters, many who would have benefited tremendously from this book had it been available when they needed a broader outlook on the world in which they were inflicting much havoc.

Those unmoved by the book, the perennial skeptics, are addressed adeptly in the epilogue, so be sure not to miss a single page.