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Operation Desolation: The Case Of The Anonymous Bank Defacement (2012)

by Mark Russinovich(Favorite Author)

3.65 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Thomas Dunne Books

review 1: After having read his two novels (Zero Day and Trojan Horse) I finally came around to also read his short story, which kind of lies in between. As already said its quite short (just the first half of the book is actually the story itself), but nevertheless its clearly written in the same style as his novels.The case itself is not too exciting, but as a real fan of "Jeff Aiken" I enjoyed it quite much and definitively would recommend this to everyone who has also read one of his novels.
review 2: I didn't particularly like this book which is a shame because I enjoyed Zero Day. I read these technothriller kind of books specifically for stories that have accurate technology behind them. As a technology expert, I cannot stand books and movies that gloss over the ... moretech just to further the plot, because I know what they are doing are technically impossible. When you see characters breaking supposed high end encryption in a matter of minutes, or looking at surveillance video footage to which they just need to "zoom in... and enhance" to solve the mystery, you know exactly what I mean. This genre of books are my last refuge because they should make technological sense and therefor be grounded in reality.This is where I have a problem with this book:SPOILER ----In the book there is a defacement to a company website by a member of Anonymous while at a security conference. When the main character goes to investigate the issue he somewhat easily finds the IP address of the attacker, does a simple IP trace to figure out that it was from the hotel where the convention came with a lame way of connecting the attacker to the IP address.The thing is that anyone sophisticated enough to do any attack like this would also be sophisticated enough to employ ways of obfuscating his true IP address. The attacker could have easily used The Onion Router (TOR) network, or at very least gone through a VPN located in a foreign country that the authorities couldn't have subpoenaed. Instead he decides to commit a felony from a hotel's network. If the main character didn't find him, the authorities surely would have. He made his attack almost trivial to trace -- something not even so called "script kiddies" would do.Also, creating a "game" to connect this IP address to the hacker was really lame. In real life, one would talk to the hotel/convention management about who provides the network. Then they'd either politely ask this company to get access to their customer/networking records, or talk to one of the many CIA/FBI agents supposedly attending the conference to get a subpoena to do so. Then they connect the IP address to the customer that purchased the internet access using these records. It's a very straightforward process that happens every day.These two things just didn't make sense to me and that ruined the whole book.---- End Spoiler.Plus, the book was really really really short. It ended when I got to about the 55% mark. The rest of it was an advertisement for Trojan Horse, which I had already preordered. I don't particularly like purchasing an advertisement.Is it worth the $0.99? Yes, but barely. less

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