Stetson's Reviews > Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott J. Shapiro turns his Yale Law class on cyber security into an accessible nonfiction book. He explores the history, mechanics, and philosophy of hacking, as well as the vulnerabilities of the digital infrastructure that underpin modern society. The premise is we're all digital natives know, but we're ignorant of the mechanics of our world. This knowledge/ignorance paradox will only become more exaggerated over time. However, I'm not sure it is that meaningful given the complexity inherent to any successful capitalist polity.

Shapiro does a decent job of making the technical insights meaningful to readers without experiences with hacking or computer science. The chain of historical anecdotes (e.g. Morris Worm, Stuxnet, and Russia hacking the DNC) knit the work together reasonably well. The book of course harps on the idea that hacking is not merely a technical problem but also a social and human one. We are deeply intertwined with the structures and limitations of the internet and computer systems but ultimately things have to happen in the real-world to matter. We'll see how long this distinction will endure though (in the coming age of AI agents).

Shapiro introduces an important metaphor with respect to the computing "stack," dividing it into "upcode" (human systems plus to some extent software and applications visible to users or "the code above your fingertips on the keyboard") and "downcode" (deeper infrastructure like operating systems and hardware - "code generated below your fingertips"). Shapiro explains how cyberattacks can target any part of this stack, from phishing attacks on users (upcode) to vulnerabilities in firmware or hardware (downcode). Increasingly, the vulnerabilities are on the upcode side, but the way the computing stack (scaling, sharing, and profiting drove design choices) was designed and the human systems around them will always create vulnerabilities.

I'm not well read in these sorts of books, but this seemed like a decent primer on cybersecurity issue and provided some reasonable insights into how these interface with our existing institutions and human nature. There is a lot more to these subjects of course, but this was a reasonable and accessible introduction.