Think you couldn’t be fooled into handing over crucial information? Read this and think again.
He’s written many books on hacking, notably his fascinating memoir Ghost in the Wires, but my favourite is still this handy guide to social engineering. Whether in relation to phishing emails or a phone call “from the bank” saying they’re calling about a fraudulent transaction, Kevin Mitnick wrote the book on exploiting such vulnerability. It’s a maxim in cybersecurity that the weakest point in a computer network is the human. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Kevin Mitnick Here are some of my favourite books on this shift in the zeitgeist.ġ. From online stalking to billion-dollar banking fraud, these days it’s mostly done by computer.
The microchip dominates many things in our life the same is true for crime. Ed teams up with his daughter’s friend, Phoenix, a teenage hacker, to find her, but they quickly find themselves on the run and off grid. She is harassed, doxed (whereby private information is published online to intimidate), and finally disappears. After Ed Truman’s daughter Ally throws a milkshake at the leader of popular new incel movement Men Together, she becomes a target for his followers. This new reality is at the heart of my novel The Box. Pension scams, identity thefts, all those strangers following our children on TikTok, everywhere we turn, someone is trying to turn the technology on which we rely against us. Whether it’s criminal gangs phishing to steal sensitive data to sell on the dark web, or that creep from college catfishing people on Facebook, or the daily texts asking us to click a link to claim a prize or verify a payment, we are under continuous attack. Now it’s a central feature of many novels. A generation ago cybercrime was as esoteric a subject to write about as quantum mechanics or fluctuations in the derivatives market.