A credible, breathless account of the discovery and defeat (perhaps) of major Russian computer cyberattacks.
Cyberwar Armageddon hasn’t happened yet, but it’s coming, according to this disturbing but convincing journalistic chronicle.
Wired senior writer Greenberg (This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim To Free the World's Information, 2012) begins in 2014, when an analyst at a small, private intelligence firm learned of a security flaw in Microsoft Office, “one of the world’s most ubiquitous pieces of software,” and Russian malware designed to take advantage of it. Reverse engineering soon revealed that this malicious software, Sandworm, was not the usual effort to spread disinformation or steal data but was instead meant to cause physical damage. The analyst, Greenberg writes, considered this a whole new ball game: “Like many others in the cybersecurity industry, and particularly those with a military background, he’d been expecting cyberwar’s arrival: a new era that would finally apply hackers’ digital abilities to the older, more familiar worlds of war and terrorism.” In 42 short chapters, the author chronicles his travels around the world, with an emphasis on Ukraine, to describe the consequences of Sandworm and the efforts of software experts to analyze, ward off, and (ultimately) repair the damage. Ukraine, a test bed for cyberwarfare, remains in the crosshairs of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who ordered the invasion of Crimea in 2014, supports a nasty insurgency in border areas, and opposes closer Ukrainian ties with Western Europe and NATO. Since the invasion, Russian hackers have been honing their skills on Ukraine’s infrastructure, shutting down electric grids, internet, railroads, hospitals, and even ATMs. Confident that America’s systems are less vulnerable and hobbled by Donald Trump’s clear admiration of Putin, U.S. leaders have downplayed the risk, although Russia and a host of other hackers are already flexing their muscles and wreaking havoc across the world. Throughout, Greenberg writes in the fast-paced style that characterized his first book, and while the narrative is occasionally scattershot, he effectively captures the disturbing nature of this new global threat.
A credible, breathless account of the discovery and defeat (perhaps) of major Russian computer cyberattacks.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54440-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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