NEW YORK TIMES and WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2015One of the world’s leading authorities on global security, Marc Goodman takes readers deep into the digital underground to expose the alarming ways criminals, corporations, and even countries are using new and emerging technologies against you—and how this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever … this makes everyone more vulnerable than ever imagined.
Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flip side: our technology can be turned against us. Hackers can activate baby monitors to spy on families, thieves are analyzing social media posts to plot home invasions, and stalkers are exploiting the GPS on smart phones to track their victims’ every move. We all know today’s criminals can steal identities, drain online bank accounts, and wipe out computer servers, but that’s just the beginning. To date, no computer has been created that could not be hacked—a sobering fact given our radical dependence on these machines for everything from our nation’s power grid to air traffic control to financial services.
Yet, as ubiquitous as technology seems today, just over the horizon is a tidal wave of scientific progress that will leave our heads spinning. If today’s Internet is the size of a golf ball, tomorrow’s will be the size of the sun. Welcome to the Internet of Things, a living, breathing, global information grid where every physical object will be online. But with greater connections come greater risks. Implantable medical devices such as pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity and a car’s brakes can be disabled at high speed from miles away. Meanwhile, 3-D printers can produce AK-47s, bioterrorists can download the recipe for Spanish flu, and cartels are using fleets of drones to ferry drugs across borders.
With explosive insights based upon a career in law enforcement and counterterrorism, Marc Goodman takes readers on a vivid journey through the darkest recesses of the Internet. Reading like science fiction, but based in science fact, Future Crimes explores how bad actors are primed to hijack the technologies of tomorrow, including robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. These fields hold the power to create a world of unprecedented abundance and prosperity. But the technological bedrock upon which we are building our common future is deeply unstable and, like a house of cards, can come crashing down at any moment.
Future Crimes provides a mind-blowing glimpse into the dark side of technological innovation and the unintended consequences of our connected world. Goodman offers a way out with clear steps we must take to survive the progress unfolding before us. Provocative, thrilling, and ultimately empowering, Future Crimes will serve as an urgent call to action that shows how we can take back control over our own devices and harness technology’s tremendous power for the betterment of humanity—before it’s too late.
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This book terrified me, and it ought to terrify you. OK, I’m a bit of a technophobe, but Marc Goodman’s an expert, and he’s alarmed about the way the internet has infiltrated our lives, compromising privacy and security and laying us open to the cyberpredators and massive system breakdowns. So yeah, I’m alarmed, too.
The basic message of the book is: everything is hackable. And, increasingly, everything you do is online, so get ready to be hacked. Goodman recounts horror stories of stolen identities, disrupted networks, crucial systems vulnerable to attack. Moore’s law (the exponential increase in computing power) has given us unprecedented capabilities and correspondingly immense vulnerabilities.
A central point of the book is that all of the wonderful things we get for free on the internet are not really free; in fact, we are the product. Google and Facebook are sucking up all the data you blithely give them and selling it. A reasonable bargain, you may think, until the burglars hit your house while you’re away on vacation, or that creepy guy from your last job finds out where you’re living now.
Security? Mostly ineffective, says Goodman. People are too lazy to maintain effective passwords and even good ones can be cracked. Not even the biggest corporations can keep their data safe. Criminals are working day and night to exploit vulnerabilities, and their hackers are always a step ahead of legislation and enforcement.
Just wait until the Internet of Things has your refrigerator, your baby monitor and your car ignition connected to those Russian hackers. And the Singularity (when machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence) looms…
Terrifying, as I said. Goodman’s final section is about what we can do to improve matters: better encryption, improved authentication, simpler, more user-friendly security procedures, updated legislation to catch up with the bad guys. But it comes down to you: if you’re not worried about online security, you’re part of the problem. Go tighten up your passwords now; me, I’m signing off.
If you truly want to know the depth of corporate data mining being stolen from us on a minute by minute basis, this is the go to book.
Corporations are stealing or “data mining” nearly every piece of online data that we as individuals produce and then selling it to the highest bidders including the NSA and other government agencies for hundreds of billions if not trillions per year. It’s an unregulated modern day gold rush happening under our very noses without notice.
There’s a reason we aren’t billed by Google, Facebook free apps and more. We’re not their consumers, we’re their product. The lion’s share of profits made by Google, Facebook, AT&T, Verizon, Cambridge Analytica, QuintilesIMS and scores of other corporations no one has ever heard of are from the data we individually produce daily. Facebook’s billion plus users are the largest unpaid workforce in history.
And if you think you’re immune then you’re wrong. If you use a credit card, shop at Krogers, use a wifi router at home, use an Android device, have a smart tv, have cable, a home computer, use a smartphone, have a smart device in your home such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Home, or smart thermostat, then they’re stealing your data and profiting from it.
This book goes into detail as to how this is happening and what we can do about it.
Like books that doesn’t have multiple boring sections this one doesn’t