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A review by nick_latanick
The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin D. Mitnick
2.0
I work in IT, and am interested both professionally and personally in info-sec. In addition, I've been a fan of Kevin Mitnick himself since tuning in to 2600 as a kid and hearing "Not Kevin" as a frequent guest. Combining these two fact, I thought this book would be a slam-dunk and bought it immediately -what a mistake.
This book is disappointingly not about Kevin's own time being 'invisible' while on the run from the FBI in the 90's (when he earned the moniker "World's most wanted hacker"), instead Kevin wants to teach YOU how to be invisible online, and takes you behind the scenes to reveal such esoteric secrets of the deep web as: 'why you shouldn't download email attachments from strangers', 'how to clear your internet browsing history', and 'don't reuse the same weak password on every website'. If you're even moderately tech-savvy (or a millennial) this book is not for you; it's for your grandparents.
That's fine I guess. A book on basic internet hygiene is, I'm sure, genuinely useful to a lot of people, and the information provided about various attack vectors is thorough. But then many of Kevin's solutions to avoid run-of-the-mill corporate tracking are way too advanced for folks just learning what a "strong" password means: he suggests using TOR and Bitcoin, and spoofing your laptop's MAC address every time you connect to a new WiFi network (just to list a few) - tasks your grandparents are unlikely to master with aplomb (and are completely unnecessary for most people).
On the plus side, many of the anecdotes recounted in the book are interesting, and Kevin uses them to dissect real-world attack scenarios and show how users (even sophisticated ones) can fall prey to clever threat-actors, but disappointingly few stories are Kevin's, most are taken from the news. And an unfortunately large amount of the rest of the book is numbingly dry, at least as an audiobook: URLs, click-paths for settings and configurations, and technical details make it a bit hard to get though. The narrator's attempt to add dramatic gravitas to these sections almost seems like a self-parody.
TL;DR, I think this book would have been better if it was not written by Kevin Mitnick. No one who knows who he is should read it, and no one who should read it knows who he is. Think of it more like a sort of "Idiot's guide to internet security".
This book is disappointingly not about Kevin's own time being 'invisible' while on the run from the FBI in the 90's (when he earned the moniker "World's most wanted hacker"), instead Kevin wants to teach YOU how to be invisible online, and takes you behind the scenes to reveal such esoteric secrets of the deep web as: 'why you shouldn't download email attachments from strangers', 'how to clear your internet browsing history', and 'don't reuse the same weak password on every website'. If you're even moderately tech-savvy (or a millennial) this book is not for you; it's for your grandparents.
That's fine I guess. A book on basic internet hygiene is, I'm sure, genuinely useful to a lot of people, and the information provided about various attack vectors is thorough. But then many of Kevin's solutions to avoid run-of-the-mill corporate tracking are way too advanced for folks just learning what a "strong" password means: he suggests using TOR and Bitcoin, and spoofing your laptop's MAC address every time you connect to a new WiFi network (just to list a few) - tasks your grandparents are unlikely to master with aplomb (and are completely unnecessary for most people).
On the plus side, many of the anecdotes recounted in the book are interesting, and Kevin uses them to dissect real-world attack scenarios and show how users (even sophisticated ones) can fall prey to clever threat-actors, but disappointingly few stories are Kevin's, most are taken from the news. And an unfortunately large amount of the rest of the book is numbingly dry, at least as an audiobook: URLs, click-paths for settings and configurations, and technical details make it a bit hard to get though. The narrator's attempt to add dramatic gravitas to these sections almost seems like a self-parody.
TL;DR, I think this book would have been better if it was not written by Kevin Mitnick. No one who knows who he is should read it, and no one who should read it knows who he is. Think of it more like a sort of "Idiot's guide to internet security".