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Andy Greenberg

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers Hardcover – November 5, 2019

by Andy Greenberg (Author)

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The true story of the most devastating cyberattack in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it: "An important front-line view of the changing cyberthreats that are shaping our world, their creators, and the professionals who try to protect us” (Nature).

"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

In 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world's largest businesses—from drug manufacturers to software developers to shipping companies. At the attack's epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion dollars in damage—the largest, most destructive cyberattack the world had ever seen.

The hackers behind these attacks are quickly gaining a reputation as the most dangerous team of cyberwarriors in history: a group known as Sandworm. Working in the service of Russia's military intelligence agency, they represent a persistent, highly skilled force, one whose talents are matched by their willingness to launch broad, unrestrained attacks on the most critical infrastructure of their adversaries. They target government and private sector, military and civilians alike.

A chilling, globe-spanning detective story, Sandworm considers the danger this force poses to our national security and stability. As the Kremlin's role in foreign government manipulation comes into greater focus, Sandworm exposes the realities not just of Russia's global digital offensive, but of an era where warfare ceases to be waged on the battlefield. It reveals how the lines between digital and physical conflict, between wartime and peacetime, have begun to blur—with world-shaking implications.

Print length

368 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Doubleday
Publication date

November 5, 2019
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0385544405
ISBN-13

978-0385544405
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Popular Highlights in this book

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A zero day, in hacker jargon, is a secret security flaw in software, one that the company who created and maintains the software’s code doesn’t know about.
Highlighted by 538 Kindle readers
This is what cyberwar looks like: an invisible force capable of striking out from an unknown origin to sabotage, on a massive scale, the technologies that underpin civilization.
Highlighted by 537 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

Winner of the Cornelius Ryan Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club of America

"Sandworm is a sobering examination of an underreported story: The menace Russian hackers pose to the critical infrastructure of the West. 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, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gulag and Red Famine

"An important front-line view of the changing cyberthreats that are shaping our world, their creators, and the professionals who try to protect us.”
—Nature

“As Russia has attacked, Greenberg has not been far behind, reporting on these incursions in Wired while searching for their perpetrators. Like the best true-crime writing, his narrative is both perversely entertaining and terrifying.”
—New York Review of Books

"Sandworm is much more than a true-life techno-thriller. It's a tour through a realm that is both invisible and critical to the daily lives of every person alive in the 21st century."
—Los Angeles Times

“Immensely readable…A hair-raising, cautionary tale about the burgeoning, post-Stuxnet world of state-sponsored hackers…Greenberg lays out in chilling detail how future wars will be waged in cyberspace and makes the case that we have done little, as of yet, to prevent it.”
—Washington Post

"[A] chilling account of a Kremlin-led cyber attack, a new front in global conflict."
—Financial Times

“Shocking…The book reads like a novel.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

"Sandworm offers both a ripping narrative of a hack that broke the world and a worrying glimpse at cyberwar's rapidly evolving future."
—Wired

"The most detailed account yet of Russia's most destructive government-backed hackers."
—Axios

“The must-read guide to state-sponsored hacking.”
—Business Insider

"Andy Greenberg’s Sandworm has achieved what I thought was no longer possible: it scares me. Sandworm is the story of the Russian GRU hacking team that has evolved in a few short years into the most methodical, persistent, and destructive intelligence agency cyber warriors. After reading Sandworm you will not doubt those superlatives."
—Forbes

“Chilling.”
—USA Today

"A beautifully written deep-dive into a group of Russian hackers blamed for the most disruptive cyberattack in history, NotPetya, This incredibly detailed investigative book leaves no stone unturned, unravelling the work of a highly secretive group that caused billions of dollars of damage."
—TechCrunch

"[A] fascinating historical document that renders the often bland world of cybersecurity as a human tale that warrants our deepest attention."
—Fast Company

“A terrifying and infuriating look at a future in which cyberwar hawks and cyberwar deniers join forces to literally threaten our ability to continue civilization. Sandworm shows how, in our leaders’ focus on maintaining digital weapons to attack our enemies, they've left our own critical infrastructure defenseless.”
—Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother and Radicalized

"Sandworm hits that sweet spot of being both informative and entertaining as hell. In a journey that hopscotches from war-torn Ukraine to shadowy chatrooms to the halls of the UN, Greenberg takes readers on the hunt for the network of Russian hackers behind the most damaging cyberattack to occur so far. It is well worth your read."
—P.W. Singer, author of Ghost Fleet and LikeWar

“The good news about Andy Greenberg's Sandworm is that no one has ever dived so deeply into a major hack to illuminate the evolving crisis of a never-ending cyberwar. The bad news is when you finish this gripping narrative, you won't be sleeping as soundly as you did before.”
—Steven Levy, New York Times bestselling author of In the Plex and Hackers

“Lucid and compelling, Sandworm shows us how high-tech warfare is waged today in Eastern Europe: battlefields of computer viruses, software vulnerabilities, and faked digital fingerprints. Where foreign hackers remotely black out cities and feed false election results to television networks. Where laptops become weapons and a word processor becomes a tool to invade a nation’s critical infrastructure. The first half of Greenberg's meticulously researched book leaves us wondering: How long before it happens here? The second provides the chilling answer."
—Clifford Stoll, New York Times bestselling author of The Cuckoo's Egg

“An in-depth investigation of what the Russian military’s best cyber unit has already done to disrupt corporations, penetrate utilities, and prepare for cyberwar. Sandworm is a sword of Damocles over the US economy that any US president has to take into account when deciding on whether and how to counter the Kremlin.”
—Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism coordinator, author of The Fifth Domain and Cyber War

“A taut inquiry…Greenberg is an adroit investigator and gifted metaphorist. His lucid, dynamic exposé is a must-read for those worried about the vulnerabilities of the digital world.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A credible, breathless account…[Greenberg] effectively captures the disturbing nature of this new global threat.”
—Kirkus

"Told with the fast-paced style of a thriller, this book is highly recommended for all fans of international intrigue and cyberwarfare. An exceptional account."
—Library Journal (starred review)

"Loaded with original reportage, Greenberg's urgent and clarifying book will inform and worry everyone concerned about national andcyber security...Readers will revel in the details Greenberg provides."
—Booklist

About the Author

ANDY GREENBERG is an award-winning senior writer for Wired magazine, where he covers security, privacy, information freedom, and hacker culture. He is the author of the 2012 book This Machine Kills Secrets. Sandworm and excerpts from it have won a Gerald Loeb Award for International Reporting, a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, two Deadline Club Awards from the New York Society of Professional Journalists, and the Cornelius Ryan Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, documentary filmmaker Malika Zouhali-Worrall.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The Zero Day

Beyond the Beltway, where the D.C. intelligence-industrial complex flattens out to an endless sea of parking lots and gray office buildings marked with logos and corporate names designed to be forgotten, there’s a building in Chantilly, Virginia, whose fourth floor houses a windowless internal room. The room’s walls are painted matte black, as if to carve out a negative space where no outside light penetrates.

In 2014, just over a year before the outbreak of Ukraine’s cyberwar, this was what the small, private intelligence firm iSight Partners called the black room. Inside worked the company’s two-man team tasked with software vulnerability research, a job that required focus intense enough that its practitioners had insisted on the closest possible office layout to a sensory-deprivation chamber.

It was this pair of highly skilled cave dwellers that John Hultquist first turned to one Wednesday morning that September with a rare request. When Hultquist had arrived at his desk earlier that day in a far-better-lit office, one with actual windows on the opposite side of the iSight building, he’d opened an email from one of his iSight colleagues in the company’s Ukraine satellite operation. Inside, he found a gift: The Kiev-based staff believed they might have gotten their hands on a zero-day vulnerability.

A zero day, in hacker jargon, is a secret security flaw in software, one that the company who created and maintains the software’s code doesn’t know about. The name comes from the fact that the company has had “zero days” to respond and push out a patch to protect users. A powerful zero day, particularly one that allows a hacker to break out of the confines of the software application where the bug is found and begin to execute their own code on a target computer, can serve as a kind of global skeleton key—a free pass to gain entrance to any machine that runs that vulnerable software, anywhere in the world where the victim is connected to the internet.

The file Hultquist had been passed from iSight’s Ukraine office was a PowerPoint attachment. It seemed to silently pull off exactly that sort of code execution, and in Microsoft Office, one of the world’s most ubiquitous pieces of software.

As he read the email, Klaxons sounded in Hultquist’s mind. If the discovery was what the Ukrainians believed it might be, it meant some unknown hackers possessed—and had used—a dangerous capability that would allow them to hijack any of millions of computers. Microsoft needed to be warned of its flaw immediately. But in a more self-interested sense, discovering a zero day represented a milestone for a small firm like iSight hoping to win glory and woo customers in the budding security subindustry of “threat intelligence.” The company turned up only two or three of those secret flaws a year. Each one was a kind of abstract, highly dangerous curiosity and a significant research coup. “For a small company, finding a nugget like this was very, very gratifying,” Hultquist says. “It was a huge deal for us.”

Hultquist, a loud and bearish army veteran from eastern Tennessee with a thick black beard and a perpetual smile, made a point of periodically shouting from his desk into a room next door known as the bull pen. One side of that space was lined with malware experts, and the other with threat analysts focused on understanding the geopolitical motives behind digital attacks. As soon as Hultquist read the email from iSight’s Ukrainian staff, he burst out of his office and into the bull pen, briefing the room and assigning tasks to triage what would become, unbeknownst then to any of them, one of the biggest finds in the small company’s history.

But it was down the hall, in the black room, that the hacker monks within would start to grapple with the significance of iSight’s discovery: a small, hidden marvel of malicious engineering.

■

Working on computers whose glowing monitors were the room’s only light source, the reverse engineers began by running the Ukrainians’ malware-infected PowerPoint attachment again and again inside a series of virtual machines—ephemeral simulations of a computer housed within a real, physical one, each one of them as sealed off from the rest of the computer as the black room was from the rest of the iSight offices.

In those sealed containers, the code could be studied like a scorpion under an aquarium’s glass. They’d allow it to infect its virtual victims repeatedly, as the reverse engineers spun up simulations of different digital machines, running varied versions of Windows and Microsoft Office, to study the dimensions and flexibility of the attack. When they’d determined that the code could extract itself from the PowerPoint file and gain full control of even the latest, fully patched versions of the software, they had their confirmation: It was indeed a zero day, as rare and powerful as the Ukrainians and Hultquist had suspected. By late in the evening—a passage of time that went almost entirely unmarked within their work space—they’d produced a detailed report to share with Microsoft and their customers and coded their own version of it, a proof-of-concept rewrite that demonstrated its attack, like a pathogen in a test tube.

PowerPoint possesses “amazing powers,” as one of the black room’s two reverse engineers, Jon Erickson, explained to me. Over years of evolution, it’s become a Rube Goldberg machine packed with largely unnecessary features, so intricate that it practically serves as its own programming language. And whoever had exploited this zero day had deeply studied one feature that allowed anyone to place an information “object” inside a presentation, like a chart or video pulled from elsewhere in the PowerPoint file’s own bundle of data, or even from a remote computer over the internet.

In this case, the hackers had used the feature to carefully plant two chunks of data within the presentation. The first it loaded into a temporary folder on the target computer. The second took advantage of PowerPoint’s animation feature: PowerPoint’s animations don’t merely allow speakers to bore audiences with moving text and cartoons but actually execute commands on the computer on which the presentation is running. In this case, when the presentation loaded that animation file, it would run an automated script that right-clicked on the first file the presentation had planted on the machine and click “install” on the resulting drop-down menu, giving that code a foothold on the computer without tipping off its user. The result was something like a harmless-looking package left on your doorstep that, after you bring it inside, sprouts an arm, cuts itself open, and releases tiny robots into your foyer. All of this would happen immediately and invisibly, the instant the victim double-clicked the attachment to open it.

Erickson, the reverse engineer who first handled the zero day in iSight’s black room, remembers his work disassembling and defusing the attack as a somewhat rare, fascinating, but utterly impersonal event. In his career, he’d dealt with only a handful of real zero days found in the wild. But he’d analyzed thousands upon thousands of other malware samples and had learned to think of them as specimens for study without considering the author behind them—the human who had rigged together their devious machinery. “It was just some unknown guy and some unknown thing I hadn’t seen before,” he said.

But zero days do have authors. And when Erickson had first begun to pull apart this one in his blacked-out workshop that morning, he hadn’t simply been studying some naturally occurring, inanimate puzzle. He was admiring the first hints of a remote, malevolent intelligence.

2

BlackEnergy

Once iSight’s initial frenzy surrounding its zero-day discovery had subsided, the questions remained: Who had written the attack code? Whom were they targeting with it, and why?

Those questions fell to Drew Robinson, a malware analyst at iSight whom John Hultquist described as a “daywalker”: Robinson possessed most of the same reverse-engineering skills as the black room’s vampire crew but sat in the sunlit bull pen next to Hultquist’s office, responsible for a far wider angle analysis of hacking campaigns, from the personnel who carried them out to their political motives. It would be Robinson’s job to follow the technical clues within that PowerPoint to solve the larger mysteries of the hidden operation it represented.

Minutes after Hultquist had walked into the bull pen to announce the all-hands-on-deck discovery of the PowerPoint zero day that Wednesday morning, Robinson was poring over the contents of the booby-trapped attachment. The actual presentation itself seemed to be a list of names written in Cyrillic characters over a blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag, with a watermark of the Ukrainian coat of arms, a pale blue trident over a yellow shield. Those names, Robinson found after using Google Translate, were a list of supposed “terrorists”—those who sided with Russia in the Ukrainian conflict that had begun earlier that year when Russian troops invaded the east of the country and its Crimean peninsula, igniting separatist movements there and sparking an ongoing war.

That the hackers had chosen an anti-Russian message to carry their zero-day infection was Robinson’s first clue that the email was likely a Russian operation with Ukrainian targets, playing on the country’s patriotism and fears of internal Kremlin sympathizers. But as he searched for clues about the hackers behind that ploy, he quickly found another loose thread to pull. When the PowerPoint zero day executed, the file it dropped on a victim’s system turned out to be a variant of a piece of notorious malware, soon to become far more notorious still. It was called BlackEnergy.

BlackEnergy’s short history up to that point already contained, in some sense, its own primer on the taxonomy of common hacking operations, from the lowliest “script kiddies”—hackers so unskilled that they could generally only use tools written by someone more knowledgeable—to professional cybercriminals. The tool had originally been created by a Russian hacker named Dmytro Oleksiuk, also known by his handle, Cr4sh. Around 2007, Oleksiuk had sold BlackEnergy on Russian-language hacker forums, priced at around $40, with his handle emblazoned like a graffiti tag in a corner of its control panel.

The tool was designed for one express purpose: so-called distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks designed to flood websites with fraudulent requests for information from hundreds or thousands of computers simultaneously, knocking them off-line. Infect a victim machine with BlackEnergy, and it became a member of a so-called botnet, a collection of hijacked computers, or bots. A botnet operator could configure Oleksiuk’s user-friendly software to control which web target its enslaved machines would pummel with spoofed requests as well as the type and rate of that digital bombardment.

By late 2007, the security firm Arbor Networks counted more than thirty botnets built with BlackEnergy, mostly aiming their attacks at Russian websites. But on the spectrum of cyberattack sophistication, distributed denial-of-service attacks were largely crude and blunt. After all, they could cause costly downtime but not the serious data breaches inflicted by more penetrating hacking techniques.

In the years that followed, however, BlackEnergy had evolved. Security firms began to detect a new version of the software, now equipped with an arsenal of interchangeable features. This revamped version of the tool could still hit websites with junk traffic, but it could also be programmed to send spam email, destroy files on the computers it had infested, and steal banking usernames and passwords.

Now, before Robinson’s eyes, BlackEnergy had resurfaced in yet another form. The version he was looking at from his seat in iSight’s bull pen seemed different from any he’d read about before—certainly not a simple website attack tool, and likely not a tool of financial fraud, either. After all, why would a fraud-focused cybercrime scheme be using a list of pro-Russian terrorists as its bait? The ruse seemed politically targeted. From his first look at the Ukrainian BlackEnergy sample, he began to suspect he was looking at a variant of the code with a new goal: not mere crime, but espionage.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday; 1st edition (November 5, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385544405
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385544405
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #54,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11 in Computer Viruses
- #44 in Computer Hacking
- #47 in Espionage True Accounts

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Andy Greenberg

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Andy Greenberg is an award-winning senior writer for WIRED, covering security, privacy, information freedom, and hacker culture. He's the author of the book SANDWORM: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers. The book and excerpts from it published in WIRED won a Gerald Loeb Award for International Reporting, a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, two Deadline Club Awards from the New York Society of Professional Journalists, and the Cornelius Ryan Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club. Greenberg's first book was THIS MACHINE KILLS SECRETS, about WikiLeaks, cryptography, and the cypherpunks, which was selected as an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review in 2012. Before coming to WIRED, Greenberg worked as a senior reporter for Forbes magazine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, filmmaker Malika Zouhali-Worrall.

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Jackie Henrion

Global Psychiatrists Needed

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 15, 2022

Verified Purchase

I grew up reading and watching science fiction and horror so I learned to compartmentalize from "real life." But Greenberg's description of actual events in this cyber connected world has caused me to take action to change my use of certain software and technology. At the end of the book, there is a hint of how to be more resilient and survive the possible future disruptions.

From events described, it seems that Russia is like a child who has grown up with severe violence and abuse. It appears this child has even learned from none other than us how to create chaos via technology. The resulting lack of confidence in personal security and infrastructure benefits only the criminals and bullies. Digital manipulation, blackmail, fear, and propaganda are the new battlegrounds. The US appears to be vulnerable to ever-increasing destructive hacking attacks and threat implications. It leads me to value our institutions more than ever.

Technology has provided a glimpse of global intimacy and interdependence, yet it appears that we lack the maturity to handle it. It astounds me to know that on a person to person level, when I travel. I see that individuals can interact with respect and compassion. However, world leaders continue to act as if nation states should only look out for their own interests. Like neanderthals, we are stuck in old paradigms. If the human race does not heed the warnings presented in this book, it will be a shame for our descendants.

One person found this helpful

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Cam Sbl

Just... Wow

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 28, 2022

Verified Purchase

I stumbled upon that book thanks to my favorite podcast "Darknet Diaries".
It totally changed my perspective on the cyber threats and suddenly I see them everywhere in the media.
Fascinating book, fascinating discourse on the cyber war on Ukrainie and the worldwide repercussions.

One person found this helpful

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A.J. McMahon

Great Narrative Structure for Russia's Cyber-Military Unit 74455

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 8, 2021

Verified Purchase

Sandworm by Andy Greenberg sounds like some mythical creature from some Science-Fiction novel, and in fact, it is.

Sandworm is the name of a Russian super-hacker team (supposedly, the cyber military Unit 74455 in Russia's GRU) which wreaked havoc in Ukraine in 2015 and 2017, interfered in the French presidential election in 2017, and unleashed a cyberattack on the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony.

But Sandworm is also a mythical creature from Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel Dune.

Through Andy Greenberg's amazing narrative in the book Sandworm we are put on the trail of this team of Russian cyber military super-hackers. Greenberg details the cyber military team's exploits throughout their short history as well as the Malware experts who are chasing every lead in order to understand the group's motives and next targets.

It is through Greenberg's narrative where we see the pieces fall together in understanding what and who Sandworm really is.

One key part is where INSight's technical analyst Drew Robinson begins to find references to Dune in the malware used by the cyber military group. This is where the name Sandworm comes from.

What I liked about Andy Greenberg's Sandworm:
- the book lays out the history and investigative trail of the Russian super-hacker group in a well-formed narrative instead of a boring objective, analytical essay
- the book provides a lot of genuine context surrounding the group and where their motives may lie
- the book provides technical details where you can actually understand how the group did what they did, rather than relying on simple metaphors like 'logic bombs'
- the book details the group's evolution from using simple malware in order to disrupt Ukraine's electrical grid in 2015 to them utilising multiple zero-days and NSA tools in order to cause worldwide havoc in the 2017 NotPetya Ransomware Outbreak.

What I didn't like about Andy Greenberg's Sandworm:
- In some parts, the book went on a few different tangents that increase the word count unnecessarily
- There was no strong conclusion but instead a lot of mysteries still to be dealt with

Overall:
5 out of 5 stars

Recommendations:
- I would recommend it to people more interested in cyberwar and its evolution in the Russian and Ukrainian context
- The narrative structure of the book was well written which made the less interesting parts of cyberwar more exciting and more enjoyable to read

Full book review at flyintobooks.com

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bwv659

Eye opening reality of the current Cyberwar environment

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 18, 2022

Verified Purchase

Highly readable introduction to the current state of cyber warfare. Really brings home possibilities of the risk we have embraced by fully embracing the comforts of digital age. The public needs to be made aware of the risks; how we could be one stroke away from chaos as bad actors damage our infrastructure... Made me realize I need to start thinking about a back up plan. Made me realize how thin the digital floor that we are all walking on; that we could all go crashing through with a single push of a button on a keyboard

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Top reviews from other countries

Dragojevic Aleksandar

Biased

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

An interesting read, but very biased and anti-Russian. I would prefer a more neutral tone - there is cleary a lot that Russia is doing and it shouldn't.

I learned about just how far cyber attacks can go and have gone. The hystorical overview is very questionable though,
which makes me doubt the rest of the book. For instance, "Russians oppressing Ukrainians for hundreds of years" is a very strange interpretation of history. Outrage at the Russian meddliing in US elections is also very odd. This is not something they should do, but the US and Europe have been doing that for decades. Similarly, attacks on civil infrastructure are to be condemned, but that happens in war. The author actually mentions bombing of Serbian power infrastructure in 1999, but then hypocritically states that those power plants supplied the army, when in reality those were supplying power to the civilians as well. These are just some of the examples.

A more objective book on the topic would have been much more enjoyable.

19 people found this helpful

Diana

The best cyber book I ever read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 4, 2021

Verified Purchase

This book is just fantastic. So well written and explained. You don't have to be a cyber professional to understand it as Andy Greenberg explains the term that are not that familiar. 100% recommend it and if you want to understand better the political reasoning for certain attacks, it's a must

4 people found this helpful

Stuart

Interestingly terrifying

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 26, 2020

Verified Purchase

I was drawn to the book by a colleague who forwarded an extract from an article referencing Sandworm.

The detail is excellent and does not lose the unskilled Non-IT person.

Will make you want to ask questions in work but also made me sit up and take notice when my Prime Minister recently mentioned additional funds for cyber defence.

2 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 22, 2019

Verified Purchase

this is an excellent book covering many aspects of cybercrime, cyberwar and cyberterrorism. it reads like a thriler but is chillingly real. Along side the invesrigation and research into the malware by the titular group Sandworm it also provides a good history of prior strains unleashed on the digital world.

An essential read for anyone interested in digital security.

4 people found this helpful

RobRothwell

Required Reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 6, 2022

Verified Purchase

An excellent book. Meticulously researched and very well written.

This book illustrates why cyber security is not just about 1s and 0s getting scrambled or leaked. Computers can absolutely affect the real world in tangible and fundamental ways

It also gives an insight into the attackers,the humans behind the keyboards clearinghouse threats.

Required reading for anyone with an interest in cyber.

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Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers Hardcover – November 5, 2019

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Buy new:

$37.89

FREE delivery: Sunday, Nov 6

Ships from: Amazon

Sold by: AZ Dream Crew

Buy used::

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