I thoroughly enjoyed ‘Fancy Bear Goes Phishing.’ The author is uniquely well-placed to explore the nuances of the cyber threat landscape today. The narrative is engaging and the content is accessible, but the nuances of the subject are not lost for the more experienced reader. I would definitely recommend this read for anyone with an interest in cybersecurity, computing or technology more generally.

Many thanks to the author and publisher for an advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest, impartial review.

This book was thoughtful, in depth, and very much a compelling read. I learned a lot about computer history that I had not ever heard of and the way Shapiro structured this book was well thought out. The language he used was easy to grasp and I think anyone interested in technology could understand and get something from this book. 4.5/5 stars

In "Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks" Scott J. Shapiro presents a solid introduction to the history of Cybersecurity in a form that will be accessible to most readers. This deeply researched book opens the door to the age of internet (in)security by profiling five different attacks of expanding scope and complexity.

The actual choice of incidents seems somewhat arbitrary and some get far more coverage than they deserve. Thus, topics such as the Stuxnet worm or Edward Snowden’s leaks are mentioned but not given main billing and the hack of Paris Hilton’s cell phone and the possible use of her chihuahua’s name as a password absorbs too much attention. This fairly clumsy approach ensures that many key topics are covered as afternotes without getting the full attention they deserve.

The above quibbles aside, the strongest feature of this book is Shapiro’s focus on human factors over technology. Too often, treatments of cybersecurity get lost in the technical weeds. Shapiro steers clear of this hazard and focuses on how human perceptions and societal expectations not only drive decisions about cybersecurity but are the most important element in creating solutions.

In any case, this book is an engaging and accessible treatment of an important subject that should prove useful and informative to a wide range of readers no matter their experience or technical skills.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book is an interesting history of hacking with a detailed view of several high profile hacks. There's a lot of technical detail in here, which I personally loved but others might find a bit daunting, although the author does an excellent job of making it easy to understand even for the less technically astute readers. Overall this is a great dive into tech history that makes for an entertaining and thoughtful read.

This was an entertaining and informative read. I found myself sharing what I learned from this book with those around me. I recommend it to fans of good and highly readable non-fiction.

Recently I read a history of the warez scene, charting a history of illegal software distribution. I found this book really interesting, as it contributed further to this underground history of the internet.

A fascinating look into how the issue of cybercrime and resulting cybersecurity have evolved as the internet developed and computers became more complex. With technology being such an integrated part of our lives, it's imperative that there is a way to keep personal information secure. Shapiro uses five different hacks to show how hackers find innovative ways to exploit weaknesses, as well as the industry and government responses to patching those weaknesses. Part of the book also focuses on the psychology of hacking and another on the every changing legislation on how to address cybercriminals. Despite being a rather technical book, the writing is very accessible and Shapiro provides numerous examples and metaphors to help the reader understand the various processes and problems.

This book felt very disjointed and was not what I was expecting. The description made it seem more like a history of hacking, through the story of five hacks. Instead it is very technical. It also does not seem to flow smoothly for the bits that are based on the history of hacking. Maybe if you're interested in the more technical side of things this book will be for you.

I featured this book on my Booktube channel. The video can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/oWORAm6N34U

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, despite what the title may sound like, is not about an adorable bear in a top hat who goes and catches some fish. It is instead about the Hillary Clinton campaign hack of 2016 and 4 other equally sized acts of cybercrime. One of them involves toasters. It is a history of hacking, from the first time someone accidentally brought the nascent internet down, to the aforementioned toasters (and routers and webcams and other things with default passwords we never bother changing). Written by Scott J. Sapiro, a professor at Yale, the book has the format of a class because it is one. It is a history lesson and warning of where things are going where just like in War Games (which Reagan saw, screened, and had laws written because of), the only winning move [at least on the nation state level] continues to be not to play.

My thanks to NetGalley for this ARC.

I was not expecting this book to give me the deep dive into hacking it did - but I’m so glad! I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that more solidly explained a topic at the same time as delivering a compelling narrative.

I’ve been a programmer for most of my adult life, but hacking has mostly eluded me. From the origins of hacking to more recent ones - both that we’ve heard about or haven’t - this is a great history of hacking and hacking culture. I loved how accessible the technical aspects were written, even my husband who has zero tech knowledge was able to follow when I would tell him about it or read him excerpts. The stories are written like I’m talking to a friend who’s telling me about a crazy day they had at work, and the overarching narrative of security made me much more interested in the field.

This would absolutely be a good read for anyone interested in technology, regardless of current knowledge.

I enjoyed discussing this book with my husband who works in systems engineering and was already familiar with the case studies presented. It ended up being too technical for me overall but I enjoyed the author's writing style and would read other books from him in future.

If you’re looking for true [cyber] crime and investigative journalism about five hacks, this book isn’t that. As the subtitle indicates, it’s about the HISTORY of hacking, loosely outlined by five hacks, and I would also emphasise that it’s more history, less cultural analysis, and more technical than I expected. The hacks include the Morris Worm, Bulgarian “Dark Avenger,” celebrity phone hack (Paris Hilton), Fancy Bear DNC hack, and Mirai botnet, which range from scientific projects gone wrong to creative expression to crime to espionage.

The Morris Worm was a funny one. Cornell PhD student Robert Morris Jr ran an experiment to see how many computers he could infect and accidentally crashed the internet. Then he called his dad… who was head of cybersecurity at the NSA. The worm was meant to spread harmlessly and wasn’t supposed to be malicious, but Morris accidentally set the reinfection rate too high so the network collapsed. Morris’ colleague called him an idiot because Morris ruined his experiment on the first try and there’d never be another chance to try it again. Morris was expelled and indicted.

We learn how the internet was created for efficient communication, not security, so time-consuming tasks like security are pushed away from the centre of the network towards its edges, putting the onus on users, and how hacking is just as much about cognitive science as it is about computer science. We also learn a lot of technical stuff that didn’t personally interest me beyond the high level, but this book is really more for those who are interested in the technical stuff and history than the drama or cultural analysis.

“Fancy Bear Goes Phishing” is such a clever title.

The name of this book is unfortunate, because it sounds like a children's book, which it certainly is not! Author Scott J. Sapiro has given a detailed look into what computer hacking looks like today and some of the history behind it. Although the book is technical in its explanations, it is highly readable, and I enjoyed reading it even though I was horrified at the naivate and the reasons that these young, and not-so-young hackers give for their attempts at disrupting other people's computers. "Fancy Bear" is the name of a Russian hacking group that, among others, hacked the Democratic National Committee. Shapiro also goes into how the Edward Snowden leaks changed U.S. laws, so that we are all safer. After reading this book and "Permanent Record," the autobiography of Edward Snowden, I am convinced that we should bring Snowden home from Russia.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing is a loose story of the history of computing written around five "hacks" of increasing sophistication. The background, modus operandi and vulnerabilities of each of the hacks are explained.

Despite the massive technological changes which have swept society, human nature remains largely the same. Across the decades, many of the hacks follow the same pattern, and often the point of attack is what the author calls the "up code", which is essentially humans and human-led organisations which use computers, as opposed to the down code (the software and hardware of the computer systems). Although there have been problems with down code, it's generally poor practices by people or manufacturers which are the attack surface for the bad actors featured here, as well as their contemporaries. Poor security/passwords, and clicking on links in emails are still commonplace.

The hackers are also looked at in some detail - and their motivations. Most of the hackers are the cliched teenage boys you'd expect. In the beginning, they tended to be lone wolves a la War Games, but as computers got more sophisticated and it became easier to communicate they worked in tandem more and could manipulate huge organisations from a bedroom in their parents' house.

There's a lot in this book about the infamous 2016 US Election and there has been so much said and written about it, that it was good to read a coherent account of what actually happened. It certainly became a lot clearer to me after reading the relevant sections what the Russians did (and why) and what happened to the Democratic National Committee.

There are also sorts of interesting asides and tangents. If you love writing or using software you'll love this book. If you are interested in geopolitics Fancy Bear will also be of interest to you, there's a lot there about nation-states and spying on one another which is only going to get bigger and more important in the coming years.

It was a journey through the last few decades for me, revisiting half-forgotten memories of software past. I wrote my first line of code in 1982 and not many weeks have gone by since when I have not added to my oeuvre or learned something new. I have written in Assembler, C, used floppy disks and Unix, sent emails in the 1990s and scoured bulletin boards and Usenet when they were in vogue. I remember desperately backing machines up onto floppies in preparation for Friday the 13th. I was never a hacker but I did "improve" a virus once and sent it back out into the wild, so I understand something of the mentality of the subjects of this book.

Fancy Bear is a well-researched volume where the author explains at length what happened (and how it was done) in each of the hacks and knits them together with a convincing narrative which connects each incident with similarities of both the victims and the perpetrators. The author does offer some suggestions at the end on what can but done, but I suspect the arms race between the hackers and the hacked will continue. An ever-changing army of teenage boys on the front line will continue to take on establishment individuals and organisations for a while yet.

This book is a history of the internet focusing on certain hackers, and the motivation of this behavior. Interestingly enough the Ukrainian/Russian War has spurred the level of hacking for political reasons and created the term hacktivist. Satellite signals in particular are used for navigation and are a target for hackers. Even SPACEX was hacked by some University of Texas researchers.

Author Scott J. Shapiro (a professor of law and philosophy at Yale Law School and the director of Yale’s Center for Law and Philosophy and Yale’s CyberSecurity Lab) explains in the introduction to Fancy Bear Goes Phishing that although he had an early introduction to coding (his Dad had worked at Bell Labs and young Shapiro had access to basic computer parts before there even was a World Wide Web), it wasn’t until recently — with a professional interest in the future plausibility of cyberwars — that he really looked into the history of personal hacking, intranational cyberattacks, and the security measures put in place to protect against them. This book not only explains the history of hacking through the exposition of five different types of attacks over the years, but as a professor of the humanities, Shapiro explains the mental processes — the upcodes and downcodes, the heuristics and biases — that both lead to computer hacking and to our ongoing failure to defend against it. To the extent that Shapiro shares the history of hacking through the stories of true crimes and espionage, this made for quite an interesting read; however sometimes the technical (whether talking hacking code or human cognition) became a little dull and esoteric to me, but I will allow that another reader might want precisely this level of technical data. Overall, a fascinating read on a subject we should all know more about.

fancy Bear Goes Phishing is about the Dark History of the Information Age and tells it by documenting 5 extraordinary hacks.  Since hacking and cybersecurity are of interest to me, I was excited to read about these hacks.  Some of which were eve before my time - starting with a grad student who accidentally crashed the internet creating one of the first worm viruses.  Also interesting was how things got names - viruses, worms, Fancy Bear, etc. All of which is documented in this book.

I was also quite pleased with myself after reading about a hack to T-Mobile that ended up getting Paris Hilton's data that my website is now better secured than T-Mobile's was at the time and how easy it was for anyone to get into their database and get the user data stored there. (I'm assuming they know a lot more now than they did in 2005 or thereabouts when the hack was.)

This book is written by a Yale University professor and he has a class at Yale that goes through some of this information as well ( think they'll let me take it?) and while it is long and there's a decent amount of tech jargon I didn't feel lost at all when reading it and found it really broke things down in an interesting and informative way.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

Thanks to the publisher for a digital ARC of this book. The author has been peripherally involved with IT for much of his life but got himself back up to speed in preparation for this book. There have been several books written on this topic over the past couple of years and this author endeavors to write this in a slightly less dramatic tone than the rest. Overall I enjoyed this book and found it to be technical without overdoing it.