Researching DevilsGame, about an Internet meltdown caused by an unknown evil, I exposed myself to some harrowing truths. I learned how astonishingly frail our internet ecosystem is and how imperiled it is by bad actors who have burrowed deeply and often invisibly into its infrastructure. So, beyond writing a fictional thriller, I was moved to ring a warning bell! And I hope by formatting DevilsGame as “hyperlinked fiction,” mixing real news sites with fictional sites created for the novel, readers will experience the story in a way that parallels and parodies the way we experience real, live crises these days: navigating from fact to fiction, often without observing the boundaries.
My project is...
DevilsGame
Nathan Rifkin, a video-game maven, and Claire Bodine, a televangelist, are bitter adversaries–until a digital virus threatens global destruction, and they alone have the knowledge and faith to defeat it. Their real-time text messages reveal a plot to steal our digital identities, fortunes, and secrets as, over the next 24 hours, a tsunami of hacking horrors tests the world’s faith–and the volatile, essential chemistry connecting Nathan and Claire.
Designed to be read on your digital device, it uses the power of hyperlinks to enhance and expand the story. You decide whether to click a link that will open a pop-up illustration or take you to a curated or specifically created website to enrich the story and your experience.
I found the gist of this powerful book to best summed up by former National Cybersecurity Center director Rod Beckstrom's maxim: (1) anything connected to the Internet can be hacked; (2) everything is being connected to the Internet; (3) as a result, everything is becoming vulnerable.
I was shocked by the harrowing detail with which the author demonstrates our vulnerabilities: Our medical and financial information is potentially held hostage by our internet connectivity, as evidenced by innumerable ransomware attacks worldwide, and the internet dependence of our utilities, our factories, our ports, and our military imperils our physical existence.
I also took away powerful insights offered by Schneider, who blames "surveillance capitalism" for an internet that has gotten out of control and provides practical pathways for re-establishing our control.
We have created the ultimate hive-mind robot: an Internet of interconnected devices that senses, thinks and acts. Bruce Schneier calls it the "World-Sized Web". It includes everything from driverless cars to smart thermostats, from billboards that respond to specific people to drones equipped with their own behavioural algorithms. While the World-Sized Web carries enormous potential, Schneier argues that we are unprepared for the vulnerabilities it brings. Cutting-edge digital attackers can now crash your car, pacemaker and home security system and everyone else's.
Click Here to Kill Everybody explores the risks and security implications of the World-Sized Web and lays out…
I was impressed by the way author Auerbach distills what has changed in our relationship with the internet over the past 20 years: there has been a gradual but momentous shift from “search” on the web” to “recommendations” offered by the web. Initially, we searched for what we were interested in–but now, networks tell us what we are interested in!
Auerbach defines the meganet as that “new creature…born [to] manage the data boom and absorb, filter, and recommend it,” and I was sobered by his graphic warning of the dangers that emerge from “off-loading our decision-making” to the internet.
How the autonomous digital forces jolting our lives - as uncontrollable as the weather and plate tectonics - are transforming life, society, culture, and politics.
David Auerbach's exploration of the phenomenon he has identified as the meganet begins with a simple, startling revelation: There is no hand on the tiller of some of the largest global digital forces that influence our daily lives: from corporate sites such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit to the burgeoning metaverse encompassing cryptocurrencies and online gaming to government systems such as China's Social Credit System and India's Aadhaar.
I was stunned by the authors' dire and dramatic warning that the interests and methods of two mighty authoritarian regimes–China and Russia–are increasingly coming into alignment, and this alignment is spawning increasingly deadly threats to, and attacks on, the very foundations of our democracy and national security.
I found myself agreeing as the authors demonstrate how the United States government is failing to fully acknowledge and effectively respond to these massive threats–but I was also somewhat encouraged, as they do offer solutions and provide a ray of hope that we can restructure our approach to Chinese and Russian threats by streamlining our bureaucratic agencies and purpose-building them to directly confront them.
The United States is being bombarded with cyber-attacks. From the surge in ransomware groups targeting critical infrastructure to nation states compromising the software supply chain and corporate email servers, malicious cyber activities have reached an all-time high. Russia attracts the most attention, but China is vastly more sophisticated. They have a common interest in exploiting the openness of the Internet and social media—and our democracy—to erode confidence in our institutions and to exacerbate our societal rifts to prevent us from mounting an effective response. Halting this digital aggression will require Americans to undertake sweeping changes in how we educate, organize…
I found myself catching my breath as I read this riveting nonfiction tale chronicling "perhaps the first true, wide-scale cyberwar in history,” launched by the hacker group now known as Sandworm.
I was thrilled to be swept along on the high-stakes hunt for an “invisible force….striking out from an unknown origin to sabotage, on a massive scale, the technologies that underpin civilization,” and I was gratified by the meticulous tracing, tracking, and revelation of the Russian villains of Sandworm.
"With the nuance of a reporter and the pace of a thriller writer, Andy Greenberg gives us a glimpse of the cyberwars of the future while at the same time placing his story in the long arc of Russian and Ukrainian history." —Anne Applebaum, bestselling author of Twilight of Democracy
The true story of the most devastating act of cyberwarfare in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it: "[A] chilling account of a Kremlin-led cyberattack, a new front in global conflict" (Financial Times).
The most philosophical of my recommendations, I found this book wonderfully heartening because it places the responsibility for understanding and responding to the negative impacts of our internet-driven era firmly in our own hands.
Ward made me realize that I am (along with the multitudes!) a victim of “the Loop, “ which is when our unconscious tendencies feed into the business and cultural forces working hard and happily “to convince us we’re making independent choices when we’re doing the opposite.”
I was grateful for Ward's suggestions for becoming self-aware and freeing ourselves—and our futures—from the “shrinking choices” imposed by the Loop.
"The best book I have ever read about AI." -Roger McNamee, New York Times bestselling author of Zucked Artificial intelligence is going to change the world as we know it. But the real danger isn't some robot that's going to enslave us: It's our own brain. Our brains are constantly making decisions using shortcuts, biases, and hidden processes-and we're using those same techniques to create technology that makes choices for us. In The Loop, award-winning science journalist Jacob Ward reveals how we are poised to build all of our worst instincts into our AIs, creating a narrow loop where each…
Nathan Rifkin, a video-game maven, and Claire Bodine, a televangelist, are bitter adversaries–until a digital virus threatens global destruction, and they alone have the knowledge and faith to defeat it. Their real-time text messages reveal a plot to steal our digital identities, fortunes, and secrets as, over the next 24 hours, a tsunami of hacking horrors tests the world’s faith–and the volatile, essential chemistry connecting Nathan and Claire.
Designed to be read on your digital device, it uses the power of hyperlinks to enhance and expand the story. You decide whether to click a link that will open a pop-up illustration or take you to a curated or specifically created website to enrich the story and your experience.
I have been writing for many years, and my main preference is political thrillers with criminal overtones. I first became interested in politics when I worked at several political conferences in the 60’s and 70’s. I have been involved in several criminal cases, including my own, and within my family, I have a nephew in the police force. For many years I have had the opportunity to mix with the upper tiers of society as well as the criminal classes and this has given me great insight into creating my characters and plots.
Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.
Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…
Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.
Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…
