News in the Category "Book Reviews"
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Open Letters Review on Click Here to Kill Everybody
Electronic security expert Bruce Schneier’s studiously terrifying new book Click Here To Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World, is a concerted counter-playbook to the end of human civilization, and the deaf ears it will fall upon have been deadened by two completely erroneous assumptions: that an unregulated Internet is better than a regulated one, and that Internet problems only affect people on the Internet.
Ninety percent of Schneier’s readers have more than one “smart” electronic device, be it a cellphone or a tablet or a laptop or a new-model automobile. And ninety percent of that ninety percent have the same personal password for all of those separate devices and haven’t changed that password in years. Virtually every single one of Schneier’s readers who choose to download his book instead of buying a printed copy in a bookstore leaves a wide and easily-followed data-trail back to themselves. Every one of Schneier’s readers who orders a printed copy of the book from online retailers like Amazon leaves an equally-accessible data-trail and never even thinks not to. Many of Schneier’s reader who decide to buy a printed copy in a bookstore will use some kind of electronic preferred-customer discount card, and the bookstore’s cash register system is electronically linked to its inventory system, and both systems have a D-grade security setup that a computer-literate 10-year-old could hack wide open. And a great many of those customers probably used the store’s free Wi-Fi while they were browsing, which means any malware prowling that Wi-Fi is now in their phone, which means it will be in their laptop later that evening when they plug their phone into it to charge…
Takeaways from Bruce Schneier's New Book
FIX THE INTERNET BEFORE IT FIXES US— Technologist Bruce Schneier is out with his latest book and his most alarming title yet: “Click Here to Kill Everybody.” In fact, it’s one of the most ominous in the entire cybersecurity canon. Even in his introduction, Schneier admits to hyperbole, yet writes the title isn’t without merit since “we’re already living in a world where computer attacks can crash cars and disable power plants—both actions that can easily result in catastrophic deaths if done at scale.”
So, OK, it’s scary. In this outing, published last week, Schneier digs into the dangers posed by the rapid spread of internet connectivity into all our things. But since he doesn’t think the marketing term “internet of things” is encompassing enough, he coined his own term: Internet+. If you’ve followed Schneier’s career or seen his many talks at cybersecurity conferences, much of what he’s writing about won’t seem new. And since that’s probably many of you, we’re going highlight just a few of his policy recommendations (there are many more in the book) and predictions (more of those, too) when it comes to fixing what he calls the “sloppy state of Internet+ security.”…
Book Review: Click Here to Kill Everybody
The great and memorable title of Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Click Here to Kill Everybody, certainly caught the eye of those in my household—my children kept trying to touch the button on the front cover to ‘kill everybody’! (Indeed, the book’s attention-grabbing title may make me a little wary about reading it openly on the Tube or while going through airport security.)
Of course, the book is not really about how to kill everybody, but rather how, from an ethical standpoint on the part of tech, and a moral standpoint on the part of government, we appear to be sleep-walking into a scenario where something, whether by accident or design, could possibly ‘click here’ and kill everyone…
Book Review: “Click Here To Kill Everybody”
If I were still doing radio shows, I would happily welcome Bruce Schneier back as a guest. He’s a security expert who I first spoke with when he revealed the uselessness of the TSA’s screening procedures at airports, which he labelled “security theater.” Since then, he’s made multiple appearances with me.
Bruce has just published a new book, Click Here To Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World, and asked me to review it.
As in his previous works, Bruce sees the holes that exist in the digital world and explains the risks of having so many more things connected as part of the Internet of Things, from thermostats to refrigerators to manufacturing equipment to your kid’s dolls. In an age where everything is a computer, my favorite example he cites is the casino network that was penetrated by hackers in 2017 through an internet-connected fish tank…
Schneier's "Click Here To Kill Everybody"
Pervasive connected devices mean we REALLY can't afford shitty internet policy
Bruce Schneier (previously) has spent literal decades as part of the vanguard of the movement to get policy makers to take internet security seriously: to actually try to make devices and services secure, and to resist the temptation to blow holes in their security in order to spy on “bad guys.” In Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World, Schneier makes a desperate, impassioned plea for sensible action, painting a picture of a world balanced on the point of no return.
Click Here… describes a world where all the bad policy decisions of PCs and laptops and phones are starting to redound onto embedded systems in voting machines and pacemakers and cars and nuclear reactors. He calls this internet-plus-IoT system the “Internet+” and the case he makes for its importance is by turns inspiring and devastating…
Kirkus Review: Click Here To Kill Everybody
Big Brother is watching and scheming and up to no good—and, writes security technologist Schneier (Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, 2015), it looks like he’s winning.
By way of an opening gambit, the author posits three scenarios in which hackers take over machines and computer systems, from printers to power plants, both to demonstrate their ability to do so and to show how the interdependence of the web can easily be put to work against us. In one of those scenarios, real-world to the core, Russian hackers came into a Ukrainian power plant through a malware backdoor, “then remotely took control of the center’s computers and turned the power off.” That’s not just a threat to life, but it also erodes trust in social and economic systems, the basis for civil society. In another scenario, which gives the book its title, a “bio-printer” is hacked to “print a killer virus”—and does. Given all this, why don’t the governments and corporations of the world band together to do a better job of cybersecurity? Because, Schneier answers, there are powerful forces that thrive on the “wicked problem” of cybersecurity and insecurity, for one thing; for another, “big companies with few competitors don’t have much incentive to improve the security of their products, because users have no alternative.” With due pessimism, the author argues that individuals must do their best to harden their own security even as governments battle against encryption, anonymity, and other security measures by claiming that the “Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse—terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime”—will be the ultimate beneficiaries of secure systems. On a larger level, Schneier proposes resilient systems that provide multiple defensive layers as well as reform of international laws and the establishment of protocols for enhanced protection against the real bad guys…
Governments Want Your Smart Devices to Have Stupid Security Flaws
Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World Bruce Schneier W. W. Norton (2018)
Hardly a day now passes without reports of a massive breach of computer security and the theft or compromise of confidential data. That digital nightmare is about to get much worse, asserts security technologist Bruce Schneier in Click Here to Kill Everybody, his critique of government inertia on Internet security.
The burgeoning threat, writes Schneier, arises from the rapid expansion of online connectivity to billions of unsecured nodes. The Internet of Things, in which physical objects and devices are networked together, is well on its way to becoming an Internet of Everything. Over the past decade or so, a growing number of products have been sold with embedded software and communications capacity: household appliances, cars, medical instruments and even clothing can now be monitored and controlled from afar. More of the same is on the way, as smart homes yield to smart cities and automated systems assume a larger role in the management of critical infrastructure. The Stuxnet computer worm used to attack Iran’s uranium-enrichment programme remotely in 2010 was an early, audacious indicator of the threat…
Click Here to Kill Everybody by Bruce Schneier
The early architects of the internet did not want it to kill anybody. In cyber security expert Bruce Schneier’s new book, David Clark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recalls their philosophy: "It is not that we didn’t think about security. We knew that there were untrustworthy people out there, and we thought we could exclude them".
Schneier describes how the internet, developed as a gated community, is now a battleground where these untrustworthy people cause great harm: harnessing computers to kill by crashing cars, disabling power plants and perhaps, soon enough, using bioprinters to cause epidemics…
Bruce Schneier (2015) Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, London & New York, W. W. Norton & Compan
Skepticism was the attitude governing my state of mind when I stared reading this book but it vanished as soon as I realized it challenged one of my deepest beliefs, namely: My life is so ordinary that no one, in their right minds, would bother monitor the routines. Out of my personal reflex as a psychiatrist I attributed paranoid tendencies to those concerned about being surveilled with the use of electronic devices. It might be that at an individual level, one’s life is not of primary interest, unless one is a public figure or is prosecuted for some sort of crime, but at a global level, the individual becomes an inexhaustible source of useful information no matter how mediocre their lives are and this is what the author wants to highlight from the very beginning…
[Book Review] Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier
With today’s rapid technological advancement, almost every activity such as communication, work, and business can be done easily and efficiently through the many available devices and applications. Although it seems that we have so many benefits of the rapid development of technologies, many unseen threats also await. One of the most serious issues in this digital era is concerning our privacy and data protection. Today, in this big data era, governments and private companies can easily obtain our data from various media—such as devices and applications developed by the governments and private companies—and use these data to “surveil” us. Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s foremost security experts, elaborates “surveillance in the digital era” issue comprehensively in his book …
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.