ISBN:
B07JHV3W1Q
Title: Breaking and Entering Pdf The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called"Alien"
This taut, true thriller takes a deep dive into a dark world that touches us all, as seen through the brilliant, breakneck career of an extraordinary hacker - a woman known only as Alien.
When she arrived at MIT in the 1990s, Alien wanted to study aerospace engineering, but she was soon drawn to the school's venerable tradition of high-risk physical trespassing: the original "hacking". Within a year, one of her hallmates was dead, two others were on trial, and two had been institutionalized. Alien's adventures were only just beginning.
After a stint at the storied, secretive Los Alamos National Laboratory, Alien was recruited by a top cybersecurity firm where she deployed her large cache of virtual weapons - and the trespassing and social engineering talents she first developed while "hacking" at MIT. The company tested its clients' security by every means possible - not just coding, but donning disguises and sneaking past guards and secretaries into the C-suite. (She once got into the vault of a major bank by posing as its auditor.)
Alien now runs her own boutique hacking outfit that caters to some of the world's biggest and most vulnerable institutions - banks, retailers, government agencies. Her work combines devilish charm, old-school deception, and next generation spycraft.
In Breaking and Entering, cybersecurity finally gets the rich, character-driven, pacey treatment it deserves.
Real life thriller I came to MIT the year after Alien and lived in the same dorm on a different hall. While I didn't know Alien personally, I knew of her, and I remember many of the events and mindsets in the first parts of this book vividly. It's always fascinating to hear where life takes my fellow MIT alumni and how the experience changes and shapes you. This book was absolutely riveting from cover to cover. I inhaled it on a 9hour flight to Frankfurt. I highly recommend it for a true story of a brilliant person finding herself and changing the world.Intriguing, yet annoying Hacking -- whether for political gain, financial benefit, or plain disruption -- is a factor in our internet-intertwined lives. I couldn't resist a book that suggested it would explore white hat hacking, highlighting the many ways that hackers can and do break into systems we all use.As the reviews note, the story is told in three parts. In the first and least compelling, protagonist Alien is a student at MIT, one who avoids sitting through classes and spends most of her time sneaking onto roofs and breaking into locked buildings, drinking and doing drugs the rest of the time. I knew people like Alien in college -- the rich, entitled kids who seemed to think that college was a joke, four years of unrestricted self-indulgence while mom & dad paid the bills. The tales of her exploits became tiresome, and I was glad when we finally got to the computer section, part 2.The second part describes her various infosec jobs working for others. For reasons that are not discussed in any meaningful way, Alien has a hard time getting along with her bosses. There are other sides to these stories that we didn't hear. But the reader is supposed to think "so brilliant! so hard-working! how could anyone fire her?!?"In the final section, Alien is about to launch a new career as a bartender when she gets the opportunity to freelance as a subcontracting hacker. The book describes a series of engagements, and suddenly, abruptly, Alien is starting her own business, which flourishes almost from the beginning. Exactly how and why -- whether her new husband successfully promoted her services or simply word of mouth, who funded the offices and equipment -- was not clear to me (but I had started skimming by that point). Almost everything that happens during this phase is blissful and problem-free, even giving birth while running a company. Alien proves to be as adept a boss as she is a hacker.The storytelling moved along and mostly kept my attention, but there were a few elements that bothered me more and more as I paged along.* The cybersecurity industry is male-dominated, but women are hardly a rarity. Yet much of her success seems to hinge on the fact that almost every man she meets finds her irresistible and succumbs to her charms. It's kind of sad, because I love to read about smart, accomplished women, and instead I got the impression that for her it was about the leather, polka dot socks, and willingness to bring men back to her hotel room.* Although the author says that he spent a year interviewing people to put the story together, he also mentions that he's changed names and locations, and merged characters as needed. This may be why Alien feels like a caricature -- her background doesn't match with that of any of the prominent women in the industry -- and also made me wonder why everything had to be so secretive. If Alien is truly one unique individual rather than a composite, why not provide her real name (while concealing the names of her colleagues and college friends)? It's not as if the book gives away any secrets or shows her in a bad light.* Constant references to Moleskine notebooks made me wonder about product placement. I was also bothered by an anecdote about shopping for professional maternity clothes in 2011; there were none, according to the author, and Alien refused to wear the pink tents that maternity stores carried. I may not know much about cybersecurity, but I am positive that professional business attire for pregnant women was widely available well before 2011. All right, a minor detail, but the kind of detail that made me question whether the whole book was fiction, written by a guy who hadn't been paying much attention.The book doesn't really give much advice on how to prevent your own accounts from being hacked -- you're better off reading whatever clickbait article next hits your feed -- or offer much in the way of surprises. If the author's intent was to sow paranoia: for most of us, it's too late.
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