Invasion of Privacy: Fantasy for Pentesters

by Paul Jerimy | May 1, 2020 | Book Reviews

Synopsis

Invasion of Privacy is Ian Sutherland’s first full novel and a follow up to the short story Social Engineer. While reading Social Engineer is not necessary before picking up Invasion of Privacy, it follows the same protagonist for whom the series is named – Brody Taylor. Brody is a white-hat hacker that does penetration testing for companies in a style that is reminiscent of Kevin Mitnik’s stories from The Art of Deception and The Art of Intrusion.

Th story follows Brody as he accepts a challenge on an online hacker forum that leads into the more tactile criminal world. Brody works with police to solve murders while working against a more nefarious enemy online

My Reaction

This novel is a lot of fun. The events and elements in the story are very realistic and plausible – albeit highly dramatized. Taylor Brody is a believable character using real tactics to help in a criminal investigation. Ian Sutherland takes the time to draw a great picture of a paranoid hacker who takes extra precautions to keep his digital trail clean. I really enjoyed the story and hope Ian Sutherland continues to produce more.

Recommendation

I recommend this novel to people with an interest in “hacking” who want a realistic story. The tactics used are described in enough detail to entice more experienced IT professionals without getting so bogged down in jargon that a casual reader would get distracted.

That said, there’s not a lot to learn from the fictional story except possibly a look into a worse case scenario. But its a great break from the more serious histories of cyber warfare.

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CyberStorm: A Techno Thriller for the Masses

by Paul Jerimy | Mar 2, 2020 | Book Reviews

My Reaction

For IT and cyber security professionals, CyberStorm is a decent read that is just techy enough to relate to, but not techy enough to remind you of your day job.

Matthew Mather does a good job creating a scenario that is believable. Although I do not think this scenario could play out in reality, the effects do seem realistic. The perspective of a mildly tech-saavy group of family and friends stuck in a cyber war makes for an interesting analysis of what people might do in such a situation.

Mather does not go into great detail on the actual cyber attacks or what people are doing to recover. However he does go into what real people might do if our precious internet fails us. A highlight was when one of the characters creates a metropolitan area network in order to share information. In the event of a cyber attack that takes our or severely degrades our access to the internet, creating our own smaller internet is very viable and this novel explores how that could be useful.

Another highlight is how information doesn’t quite flow without technology. The people in the story don’t know what is happening and end up filling in the blanks with some preconceptions and rumors. This ends up paying off quite well in the end.

Lights out in Manhattan (Credit: Jeremy Echols)

One thing that I found quite jarring was that around halfway through the novel, chapters started ending with suspense that promised action in the next chapter. However, the next chapter would fast forward a few hours and tell what happened rather than show it. This wasn’t a consistent theme throughout the book, but it happened quite a few times in a single act making that section feel unsatisfying.

Recommendation

Overall, I was a little let down by how little this book utilized technology and cyber war concepts. However, the story was captivating with the sprinkling of technology and cyber security “what ifs”. After reading many reviews I understand that this book would not be popular if it were more technically complicated. I still enjoyed the read and liked most of the characters. I would recommend this book to my fellow IT professionals, but I won’t oversell it.

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