Crime Dot Com: From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global by Geoff White
Julia Gül Erdogan · Technology and Culture · 2021
Reviewed by: Crime Dot Com: From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global by Geoff White Julia Gül Erdogan (bio) Crime Dot Com: From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global By Geoff White. London: Reaktion Books, 2020. Pp. 341. If you want to keep on enjoying the computerized world, do not read this book. But, if you want to enjoy and understand how the computerized world works, as well as the dangers that lie within, this book offers a valuable perspective. Investigative journalist Geoff White provides comprehensive and accessible insight into a mostly hidden world, reminding us how computers significantly shape our everyday lives. What happens in the "darkness" of the digital world affects our financial systems, our communication, and our infrastructures. Each relies on computer networks to function. In Crime Dot Com, White aims to show how cybercrime developed so that readers are aware of the dangers. Throughout the ten chapters, White draws on case studies like the Love Bug worm that infected about 45 million computers or actions by Anonymous to emphasize the vulnerabilities in our computerized world (ch. 1, 7). White spots three types of criminals who can control and crash it: organized gangs, hacktivist movements, and nation-state hackers. White's terminology for these criminals creates a problem of nuance. Not every manipulation of digital communication described in this book is hacking. For instance, he wants to revive the word "cracker" for those who destroy systems and exploit hardware and software vulnerabilities for their own interests, but mostly uses the word hacker (p. 24). In his defense, even if a more consistent distinction was desirable, understandably he resorts to the common term for a general audience. For a brief outline of the history of hackers and online worlds, White's account is very good. However, concerning "firsts," it has some minor errors. Likely because White's focus is the 1990s and online hacking, he misses the historical firsts preceding that decade. For example, the HoHoCon in 1990 was not the first big hacker conference (p. 22). Since 1984, hackers in Germany have organized the Chaos Communication Congress, which had 300 participants by the late 1980s. Hackers's first gathering was not in the era of Bulletin Board Systems (p. 15), as hardware hackers had already met at the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s and the newsletter TAP enabled networking before these online message boards. This criticism aside, White's research gives the reader profound investigations and thrilling heist stories of hackers, law enforcement, and victims. In between these tales, White delivers the political, economic, and cultural backgrounds as well as technical prerequisites to understand how it became possible to hack. A particularly interesting example is the correlation between global hacking and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc (ch. 2). [End Page 1272] The author gives a knowledgeable description of the people and processes as well as a deep insight into the difficulties of tracing cybercriminals. The book's balanced account highlights hackers' creativity and how they are inevitably linked to the digital age—for good or bad. Even though his focus is the criminal side of hacking, White also points out the benefits of the tools and practices that hackers have developed. For instance, the dark web, largely known for the distribution of drugs, also enables secure communication for journalists and activists (ch. 6). Leaks can end in a damaging smear campaign against a hacker's enemy or lead to the publication of documents like the Panama Papers (ch. 7). The author notably considers the role of nation-states and cyberwarfare that threaten computerized infrastructures, too. It is great that White incorporates a brief gender perspective. One method hackers use to obtain access to data is faking identities to which the user would provide information. This form of so-called "social engineering" mainly exploits trust, and because women seem more trustworthy, one hacker group programmed software to generate female voices to talk to their potential victims (pp. 129–30). Another hacker disguised himself as a girl in his online identity for distraction purposes (p. 206). Since, as White shows, women are hardly ever part of these criminal groups, femininity serves as...