KINGDOM OF LIES

A breezy exploration of the many bad guys who lie in wait out on the other end of the cyberwire.

“What makes cybersecurity complicated is the complexity of human beings,” writes Fazzini, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who is now the cybersecurity reporter for CNBC. The hacker community, for instance, is hardly a community at all: There are people who hack computers in just about every human community, period, and not all of them are up to no good. It’s against the ones who do have nefarious ends that the cybersecurity community has evolved, and again, it’s a rather motley congregation, with few Lisbeth Salanders among it; indeed, as Fazzini writes, only 9 percent of the workers in the field are women. “I know a lot of them,” she notes, “maybe because we are such a rare lot.” They need to be less rare, she adds, because there’s greater demand than supply for cybersecurity experts, and that need will only grow, requiring people who are risk-averse, hypervigilant, and imaginative in thinking of scenarios that few other people would consider—“three characteristics of so many new mothers,” she concludes. Threats come from all sides. Some of the author’s cases in point are pimply experimenters; some are very thoughtful, technologically adept sociopaths; some are the agents of unfriendly governments such as Russia and Iran, about the second of which she describes the countermeasures taken by one lonely white-hat hacker: “As the suits pile in, act interested, and watch Carl sit at the computer and fight the Iranian Army every fucking day, as he becomes more detached and more alone.” The most susceptible targets, writes Fazzini, are banks, which are probed and tested every waking moment for weaknesses from every corner of the globe, all good reasons for being hypervigilant about online transactions and remembering to change your password regularly.

Good reading for anyone contemplating a career in cybersecurity and a useful tool for turning people’s thoughts in that direction.