It's a signal paradox of our time that we live in an information society but do not understand how it works. What is we knew better? In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott J. Shapiro draws on his popular Yale University class about hacking to show that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and culture. He tells the tales of notable perpetrators, including Robert Morris Jr., the graduate student who accidentally crashed the internet in the 1980s, and the Bulgarian "Dark Avenger," who invented the first mutating computer-virus engine. We also meet the sixteen-year-old from South Boston who took control of Paris Hilton's cell phone, the Russian intelligence officers who sought to influence a U.S., election, and others. In relating their stories, Shapiro exposes the hackers' tool kits and reveals that cybercriminals do not just abuse computer code, they also exploit the philosophical principles of computation: the very features that make computers possible also make hacking possible. He explains how our information society actually works, the ways in which our data is stored and manipulated, and why it is so vulnerable to exploitation. Both intellectual romp and dramatic true-crime narrative, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing exposes the secrets of the digital age. Here are hacking, espionage, war, and cybercrime as you've never read about them before. -- Provided by publisher.