September 28, 2015
Despite the title, there’s nothing irrational about the fears that Economist editor Lucas (The New Cold War) evokes in this deeply disturbing look at how our increasing dependence on an online world has made us vulnerable to attacks from “spies, soldiers, hooligans, pranksters, criminals, or commercial rivals.” Using language that’s easily accessible for non-techies, Lucas traces the roots of the current crisis to the failures of those who designed the Internet to connect academic networks; they never foresaw its exponential expansion to every aspect of modern life, and they neglected to pay close attention to security issues. Even informed readers will benefit from Lucas’s synthesis of chilling incidents—for example, the Gameover Zeus botnet attack that caused more than $100 million in financial losses after infecting more than 500,000 computers between September 2011 and May 2014—as he places them in context. Not content just to summarize the current ways that identity theft and invasions of privacy can tarnish the lives and reputations of ordinary people, Lucas describes how the shift of the Internet from a mode of human communication to “a network for machines to talk to other machines” will create even more serious challenges. His grim warnings will serve as a wake-up call for citizens and their leaders alike. Agent: Zoë Waldie, Rogers, Coleridge and White.
October 1, 2015
Lucas (senior editor, The Economist) outlines major types of security threats, their causes, and preventive or corrective measures. Using analogies related to locks and keys, transportation systems, biology, and public health, he explains personal threats such as phishing, cookie-tracking, and identity duplication, as well as their connection to larger dangers to corporate and governmental networks, including data breaches, espionage, and cyberwarfare. The author is a fan of security expert Dan Geer Jr. and Estonia's identity cards and decidedly not a fan of insecure passwords and the technological monoculture and buggy code that forms the Internet's infrastructure, a holdover from the days when the network was based on convenience, communication between known individuals, and interconnectivity. Supplemental materials include a glossary of security terms, a basic explanation of encryption, and advice from the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) that seems more applicable to enterprise-level network security than to ordinary people. VERDICT A realistic view of what can (and cannot) be done on both the individual and at a policy level to protect privacy and deal honestly on the Internet. Useful for nonexperts wanting a larger picture of cybersecurity.--Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 1, 2015
Ominous look at how our love of technology and "the Internet of things" have made society newly vulnerable. Economist senior editor Lucas (Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today, 2012, etc.) argues that our reliance on smartphones and platforms like Google, combined with a gulf between technology designers and policymakers, has enabled criminals to wreak high-tech havoc. "Digital technology exposes every area of our lives to attacks," he writes, "and renders outdated our assumptions about safety." The author builds a grim catalog of hidden dangers faced by both individuals and corporations, detouring to examine such minutiae as the sale of "zero-day vulnerabilities" for software and "swamping" attacks by botnets (hijacked computers owned by the unwitting). To punctuate his argument, he imagines a hypothetical middle-class couple who enjoy the bourgeois benefits their wired lifestyle offers while remaining blissfully unaware of risks to their identity, privacy, and financial well-being: "Our friends are only one click away to falling victim to scams organized by...gangs." Lucas enumerates these dangers in well-structured chapters that suggest fraud, piracy, and malware lurk behind ordinary online interactions. For example, the cellphone "enables probably the most sophisticated and pervasive attacks on privacy and anonymity yet invented." Email, of course, continues to enable all manner of "phishing" attacks and assumed-identity scams, despite the availability of encryption and countermeasures. "On the Internet," writes the author, "distance is irrelevant: your attacker can be on the other side of the world." Lucas examines the geopolitics of such malfeasance, noting how Russia and China have encouraged industrial hacking, while Israel and the U.S. may have unleashed the Stuxnet worm on Iran's nuclear program. Lucas can be witty, and he orients his discussion more toward the lay reader than some similar titles. While his scary techno-narrative at times becomes overwhelming or generalized, he tries to articulate common-sense precautions for such readers. An engaged overview of technology's strange new virtual hazards.
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October 15, 2015
We want computers to be easy to use, keep track of the details of our lives, and keep us connected. And even though with every click we are exposing more and more of our lives and identities, we don't want to be responsible for securing that information. Economics writer Lucas understands this and offers a guide to the vulnerabilities of which we are barely aware as we go about our lives in cyberspace. Lucas details the various schemes by criminals, pranksters, hacktivists, and government agencies to gain access to information on computers to steal identities, data, and records and to wreak havoc. Among the more infamous attacks are breaches of security at Target, Sony, and numerous banks and government agencies, and the efforts by Chinese and Russian governments to steal intellectual property and secrets of geopolitical competitors. Through case studies and vignettes, Lucas analyzes the threats to individuals, corporations, and governments. Regulations for improved security are hampered by paranoia following Edward Snowden's disclosures of how national security surveillance programs are being used to spy on citizens. An enlightening, highly accessible look at security threats on the Internet, with sound solutions for protection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)