Yale Library Book Talk: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott Shapiro

Scott Shapiro, Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, will present on his new book “Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks.”

In “Fancy Bear Goes Phishing,” Scott J. Shapiro draws on his popular Yale University class about hacking to expose the secrets of the digital age. With lucidity and wit, he establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society. And because hacking is a human-interest story, he tells the fascinating tales of perpetrators, including Robert Morris Jr., the graduate student who accidentally crashed the internet in the 1980s, and the Bulgarian “Dark Avenger,” who invented the first mutating computer-virus engine. In telling their stories, Shapiro exposes the hackers’ tool kits and gives fresh answers to vital questions: Why is the internet so vulnerable? What can we do in response?

Scott Shapiro is the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School. His areas of interest include jurisprudence, international law, constitutional law, criminal law and cybersecurity. He is the author of Legality (2011), The Internationalists (2017) (with Oona Hathaway) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (2002) (with Jules Coleman). He is also the founding director of the Yale CyberSecurity Lab, which provides cutting-edge cybersecurity and information technology teaching facilities.