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SANDWORM

A NEW ERA OF CYBERWAR AND THE HUNT FOR THE KREMLIN'S MOST DANGEROUS HACKERS

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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