Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott Shapiro review – a gripping study of five extraordinary hacks

A professor of law who's a computer geek carves an undaunted path through the conceptual and technical undergrowth in this illuminating tour of cyberspace's dark side

As we head towards 2030, a terrible realisation is dawning on us - that we have built a world that is critically dependent on a set of technologies that almost nobody understands, and which are also extremely fragile and insecure. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing seeks to tackle both sides of this dilemma: our collective ignorance, on the one hand, and our insecurity on the other. Its author says that he embarked on the project seeking an understanding of just three things. Why is the internet so insecure? How (and why) do the hackers who exploit its vulnerabilities do what they do? And what can be done about it?

In ornithological terms, Scott Shapiro is a pretty rare bird - an eminent legal scholar who is also a geek. Wearing one hat (or perhaps a wig), he teaches jurisprudence, constitutional law, legal philosophy and related topics to Yale students. But wearing different headgear (a reversed baseball cap?), he is also the founding director of the university's cybersecurity lab, which does pretty good research on security and information technology generally.