Synopsis
Gray Day is a first hand account by the former FBI agent Eric O’Neill on his direct involvement in capturing the Russian mole Robert Hanssen. This story was dramatized in the 2007 movie “Breach”.
Robert Hanssen was a tech saavy FBI agent who started selling secrets to the USSR and later Russian governments early in his career. He was able to identify technical ways to gather a lot of information that he would later sell to the Russian government to the great harm of the United States and its agents. In his legitimate FBI career, Hanssen promoted information assurance and information sharing between and in government agencies but was mostly ignored as a grump trouble maker.
My Reaction
Gray Day is an interesting read that helps shed light on the state of information security in the FBI at the turn of the millennium. The story itself is more about the emotional stress Eric O’Neill endured while trying to help prove Robert Hanssen was a spy, but there were plenty of tid bits that help quantify some of the common complaints about early government information security. For instance, the main personnel system was run on a mainframe and had almost no role based security attached to it allowing any agent to see very important information on FBI agents. Eric comically describes agents who don’t know how to use a mouse and the sorry state of technology used even in his new team – the FBI’s information assurance section.
Recommendation
Overall I recommend this book to people looking for some history in U.S. government cyber security and/or spycraft. The book is not very technical but does infer some past capabilities and strategies. I recommend this book more than the movie “Breach” which changed facts enough to take away a lot of the fun for cyber security professionals.