News in the Category "Book Reviews"
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The Hacking of Organizational Systems
“There are only two types of organizations. Those that have been hacked and those that don’t know it yet.”—John Chambers
Comcast said nearly 36 million U.S. Xfinity accounts were compromised after hackers accessed its systems through a vulnerability in third-party cloud-computing software. The breach occurred between October 16 and October 19, 2023.
On Sunday, February 18, 2024, at the Munich Security Conference, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China’s cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure are “unprecedented.”
AT&T announced that the cause of its 12-hour nationwide outage on February 22, 2024, was the “execution of an incorrect process,” not a cyberattack. In simpler terms, the company admitted to human error…
The Best Information Security Books of 2023
Excerpt
It’s been a year since I wrote The 5 Best Information Security Books of 2022, two years since The 5 Best Information Security Books of 2021, which was preceded by The Best Information Security Books of 2020 and The Best Information Security Books of 2019. With that, as the year is coming to a close, here’s my list of the Best Information Security Books of 2023.
Information security book of the year
When it comes to information security rock stars, Bruce Schneier is on everyone’s list. He’s written numerous books over the decades, the most important of which may be his classic …
Book Review: A Hacker’s Mind
When asked to name the world’s largest hacking firm, most people would think along the lines of Rapid 7 or Check Point. But in truth, it is Deloitte and PwC who are the largest hacking firms. It’s not because they have so many penetration testers. Instead, it is due to how many accountants and lawyers they employ.
And that is the underlying theme Bruce Schneier makes in his excellent new book A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back (W.W. Norton Publishing). His premise is that hacking is, in fact, a universal trait. While those in the information security field think of hacking in terms of zero days and Windows vulnerabilities, finding gaps in things is a normal human response…
Book Review: A Hacker’s Mind by Bruce Schneier
I have known Bruce Schneier for many years, and met him most recently just after he gave one of the keynotes at this year’s RSA show. The keynote extends his thoughts in his most recent book, A Hacker’s Mind, which he wrote last year and was published this past winter. (I reviewed some of his earlier works in a blog for Avast here.)
Even if you are new to Schneier, not interested in coding, and aren’t all that technical, you should read his book because he sets out how hacking works in our everyday lives.
He chronicles how hacks pervade our society. You will hear about the term Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich (how Google and Apple and others have hacked and thus avoided paying US taxes), the exploits of the Pudding Guy (the person who hacked American Airlines’ frequent flyer system by purchasing thousands of pudding cups to obtain elite status), or when the St. Louis Browns baseball team hacked things by hiring a 3’7″ batter back in 1951. There are less celebrated hacks, such as when investment firm Goldman Sachs owned a quarter of the total US aluminum supply back in the 2010’s to control its spot price. What was their hack? They moved it around several Chicago-area warehouses each day: the spot price depends on the time material is delivered. Clever, right?…
Hacking Procedure
A long time ago I joined Bruce Schneier on a panel on cyber security. I spoke on legal issues, developing a theme on self-defense which I later turned into a paper which won a little prize. Schneier was the real expert though, knowledgeable not just on technical details, the state of the art, but also the human factor and organizational causes of insecure computer systems. He’s since come out with a series of books on computer security, privacy, and related issues, and publishes a fairly regular “Crypto-Gram” newsletter.
Hacker’s Mind
Schneier’s latest book is “A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back.” This plays off the old notion of the hacker—the one I grew up with—as one who delights in understanding and manipulating systems to generate unexpected results- or at least results unintended by the system’s developer. A hacker is not a crook, but an exploder of limits. “Hacks follow the rules of a system but subvert their intent,” Schneier writes in his March 15, 2023 Crypto-Gram. Hacks aren’t necessarily illegal, although some are. Some are normalized and eventually accepted as a feature of the system. Banks that play fast and loose with reserve requirements might lead Congress to make the practice illegal (or the opposite: Congress might bail out the banks and allow bankers to keep their bonuses). Tax loopholes which plainly subvert the public intent of the tax system are often subsumed as an acceptable practice…
A Hacker’s Mind—How the Elites Exploit the System
What does the computer world have to teach us about designing for resilience in other domains? Quite a lot, argues Bruce Schneier, in a new book that sees the security expert turn his gaze to the increasingly vulnerable financial, legal and political systems that underpin society.
“When most people look at a system, they focus on how it works,” writes Schneier, whose popular books and practical expertise have earned him a stellar reputation in the computer security field. “When security technologists look at the same system, they can’t help but focus on how it can be made to fail.”…
Hacking and the Social Contract
View or Download in PDF Format
The concept of “hacking” is not an invention of the digital age. Nor is it a purely technical process, although today it often requires some technical expertise. Humans have always tried to find loopholes in the systems of rules we find ourselves beholden to. When we reach a wall, we try to find a way around it.
Bruce Schneier’s A Hacker’s Mind is a collection of fairly short, often insightful commentaries about hacking. Schneier is one of the nation’s most well-known cybersecurity experts, and his prose is clear, jargon-free, and a pleasure to read. A reader might pick up this book for the numerous instructive cases and vignettes it offers, but conceptually, …
Review: Digital Tech Advances, AI Spur Hacking of Society
This Associated Press book review was reprinted by: ABC News, The Buffalo News, The Chicago Tribune, The Lexington Clipper-Herald, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tucson.com, The Winchester Star, and WRAL News.
“A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back” by Bruce Schneier (W.W. Norton & Company)
Hacking is universally understood as the exploitation of a software vulnerability by a malicious actor.
But hacking encompasses oh, so much more. By gaming systems, it achieves outcomes for which they were not designed. People do it to the economy, the tax code, the law. Discover a loophole, profit from an oversight…
How to Know if You’re a Hacker, and Other Life Hacks
In “A Hacker’s Mind,” Bruce Schneier goes beyond the black-hoodie clichés.
In the popular imagination, a hacker has one of two goals: to crusade as a modern-day folk hero against totalitarianism and corporate duplicity, or to steal your identity. In either case, he—for pop culture dictates that the hacker must be a man—looks much the same in his dark, windowless room, his pallid features bathed in the glow of computer monitors (at least three) and swaddled in a cloud of e-cig vapor. He’s a furtive underdog consigned to a realm of greasy pizza boxes, Guy Fawkes masks and, especially, black hoodies, which hackers are apparently issued at birth…
Pluralistic: Bruce Schneier’s A Hacker’s Mind (06 Feb 2023)
A Hacker’s Mind is security expert Bruce Schneier’s latest book, released today. For long-time readers of Schneier, the subject matter will be familiar, but this iteration of Schneier’s core security literacy curriculum has an important new gloss: power.
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393866667
Schneier started out as a cryptographer, author of 1994’s Applied Cryptography, one of the standard texts on the subject. He created and co-created several important ciphers, and started two successful security startups that were sold onto larger firms. Many readers outside of cryptography circles became familiar with Schneier through his contribution to Neal Stephenson’s …
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.