What do you think?
Rate this book
Ars Technica
Ars Technica offers news and reviews, analysis of technology trends, and expert advice on topics ranging from the most fundamental aspects of technology to the many ways technology is helping us enjoy our world.
Kindle blogs are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so you can read them even when you're not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle contain full text content and images, and are updated wirelessly throughout the day.
Kindle Edition
First published March 9, 2011
5 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 2, 2018
This book is like its subject matter. Fun, fascinating, and unpretentious in style (hence the three stars), but also disorganized (essentially, a bunch of web articles from multiple creators), repetitive (so many overlaps including repetitions of the same quotes), without a coherent vision (seemingly, zero editing), and ultimately a true product of the age of the social web (amateurish, and lacking a considerable degree of thoroughness and seriousness).
March 2, 2012
What kind of a jerk would want to bring down WikiLeaks? The kind of socially inept and morally bankrupt asshole that is Aaron Barr, CEO of internet security firm HBGary Federal.
This book documents Barr's WikiLeaks-whacking work, ostensibly for the US government, that brought him into contact with the Julian Assange-supporting hacktivist group Anonymous. It eventually led to Barr's downfall.
Barr thought he had hit upon a way to unmask hackers by identifying them through their social networking habits. Yet even his own staff were taking the piss out of what he thought was pioneering work.
"Throughout Barr’s research," says the book, "the coder he worked with worried about the relevance of what was being revealed. Barr talked up the superiority of his 'analysis' work, but doubts remained. An email exchange between the two on January 19 is instructive:
Barr: [I want to] check a persons friends list against the people that have liked or joined a particular group.
Coder: No it won’t. It will tell you how mindless their friends are at clicking stupid shit that comes up on a friend's page.... You keep assuming you’re right, and basing that assumption off of guilt by association.
Barr: Noooo….its about probabilty based on frequency...c’mon ur way smarter at math than me.
Coder: Right, which is why i know your numbers are too small to draw the conclusion but you don’t want to accept it. Your probability based on frequency right now is a gut feeling. Gut feelings are usually wrong."
Nevertheless, Barr pressed ahead. As his company bled cash, he managed to get a story in London's Financial Times saying he had found a way to unmask Anonymous. He then confronted the group online with his work. Anonymous's response was to hack into his company's network, his Twitter account and iPad, publish all his emails and destroy 1TB of the company's backup files. In one memorable exchange, an Anonymous hacker taunts Barr's ultimate boss, HBGary director Penny Leavy, with the words: “How does it feel to get hacked by a 16yr old girl?”
Anonymous's banter is often immature and offensive - in typical exchanges, they taunt their victims as "faggots" and tell them to "get aids and die slow and painfull". They make Assange look almost restrained and conservative.
Unmasked is a collection of articles, rather than a well-rounded book, so is repetitive in parts. Still, it works as a fascinating introduction to WikiLeaks' possible successors and a group fighting for democracy in the most-cutting edge way possible.
This book documents Barr's WikiLeaks-whacking work, ostensibly for the US government, that brought him into contact with the Julian Assange-supporting hacktivist group Anonymous. It eventually led to Barr's downfall.
Barr thought he had hit upon a way to unmask hackers by identifying them through their social networking habits. Yet even his own staff were taking the piss out of what he thought was pioneering work.
"Throughout Barr’s research," says the book, "the coder he worked with worried about the relevance of what was being revealed. Barr talked up the superiority of his 'analysis' work, but doubts remained. An email exchange between the two on January 19 is instructive:
Barr: [I want to] check a persons friends list against the people that have liked or joined a particular group.
Coder: No it won’t. It will tell you how mindless their friends are at clicking stupid shit that comes up on a friend's page.... You keep assuming you’re right, and basing that assumption off of guilt by association.
Barr: Noooo….its about probabilty based on frequency...c’mon ur way smarter at math than me.
Coder: Right, which is why i know your numbers are too small to draw the conclusion but you don’t want to accept it. Your probability based on frequency right now is a gut feeling. Gut feelings are usually wrong."
Nevertheless, Barr pressed ahead. As his company bled cash, he managed to get a story in London's Financial Times saying he had found a way to unmask Anonymous. He then confronted the group online with his work. Anonymous's response was to hack into his company's network, his Twitter account and iPad, publish all his emails and destroy 1TB of the company's backup files. In one memorable exchange, an Anonymous hacker taunts Barr's ultimate boss, HBGary director Penny Leavy, with the words: “How does it feel to get hacked by a 16yr old girl?”
Anonymous's banter is often immature and offensive - in typical exchanges, they taunt their victims as "faggots" and tell them to "get aids and die slow and painfull". They make Assange look almost restrained and conservative.
Unmasked is a collection of articles, rather than a well-rounded book, so is repetitive in parts. Still, it works as a fascinating introduction to WikiLeaks' possible successors and a group fighting for democracy in the most-cutting edge way possible.
May 26, 2013
Interesting read about Anonymous and HB Gary, though for such a short book there's too much repeating of the same material, which I guess is because it's taken from previously published articles. Still, it's a quick and interesting read.
May 26, 2014
This book gives some decent basic information about the entire HBGary versus Anonymous saga. However, since it's a collection of several different articles, it's repetitive. Some parts of it read like a book and some others like a news report. A lot of inconsistency.
May 19, 2011
Great collections of articles
April 11, 2012
zero day exploits "on the shelf" and for sale... cowboys pretending to be security specialists.
December 14, 2012
This is a fascinating story. A very well researched and well written series of articles. It's almost hard to believe this happened in real life, let alone only a couple of years ago.
November 22, 2017
An interesting story about a hacking incident but much too thrown together. Lots of little articles with no central editing leads to a huge amount of redundant content.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews