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Related Reviews: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race then Attack Surface

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

And the hits just keep on coming! This excellent book details an unrelenting onslaught of cyberattacks, and outlines the author's own gradual realization of the dangers of internet warfare. It is a lengthy but worthwhile read -- actually, I lost the book for a while because I did not want to read it at bedtime, for fear of nightmares or disrupted sleep! Indeed the book is changing my stance toward online security -- multi-factor authentication, definitely! As with most of us, the author first downplayed the fear tactics promoted by sellers of security packages; but after years of research she has come to wonder that more disaster has not happened yet. She briefly but baldly calls out the recent presidentical administration for wreaking havoc on US defense, by eliminating a cybersecurity department, incensing the Iranian and Chinese governments (both of which had been tamped down by Obama negotiations), and suppressing mention of Russian hacking. Our only defense seems to have come from thoughtful officials who acted under the radar of the administration. The book ends in 2020; we wonder what the author would write now -- what has the new Biden administration done to bolster our security? Another important point continually reinforced in the book is the hubris of secrecy, when digital weapons are so easily copied and used against us, as happened many times in the last decade -- our secrecy-bureaucrats are so protective of their own budgets and privileges they are blind to the dangers of inevitable publicity. We are still not emotionally conditioned to understand the immediacy of digital weaponry; we still think in terms of physical action and the limitations of construction and delivery across time and space -- we grow up in physical bodies, learning about physical interactions over many years; how can we fully imagine internet-speed attempts and attacks and disinformation and chaos? Perhaps the "digital native" generation will be more innately sensitive to this speed, and its dangers? We can only hope. 

Review of Attack Surface, by Cory Doctorow

How prescient! The author sketches an unusual but believable protagonist and describes an all-too-believable parallel world of omnipresent government and -- even more believable -- government-contracted surveillance and manipulation. We also join the protagonist on a sort of bildungsroman, as she struggles with her place in the world and decides to Do the Right Thing, even to the end. Thanks to some tricky last-minute coincidences she is saved. The reader feels a bit tricked by those last-minute coincidences, but the overall ride is scary and all-too-believable. The afterword by the Toronto-based Citizen Lab outlines the verisimilitude of the tactics described by the author. This is an apt companion to the non-fiction This is How They Tell Me the World Ends. Be afraid. Be very afraid. For Real.
Attack Surface is must-reading for dystopians or hacker enthusiasts. Others may feel overwhelmed by the (realistic) technical jargon, though the author keeps the plot moving at a fast pace.


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