Cory Doctorow's Little Brother . I could not put it down, and read it in one sitting.
This is truly an amazing read. I also enjoyed this book immensely. It is required reading for my teenage children.
Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
91–100 of 160 posts
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#92I think you will enjoy Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen.
Came here to say this. Great book. Not a novel, but still worthy of a mention. It definitely reads like one with the pacing and writing.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#93Mark Russinovich's Jeff Aiken Trilogy. If you're looking for a quality bestseller similar to Dan Brown books. Zero day, Trojan Horse and Rogue Code are all excellent novels. Some common themes include computer virus epidemics, cyber armies, cyber warfare, dangers of an overnetworked but undersecured society
I only read Zero Day and I thought it was pretty bad. Obviously he's got much better tech credentials than most authors, and I felt he probably should have gone for a more niche tech-literate market than just write tech-oriented bad fiction. Just looking now, his later novels seemed to get slightly better goodreads reviews so perhaps his writing got a little better.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#94This isn't quite in the category, but John Carreyrou's nonfiction book "Bad Blood", which covered the rise and fall of Theranos, satisfied me in a similar way. There's plenty of crime, although it's really about pretending to be high-tech rather than actually being high tech. For people in tech who love a good fraud story, I highly recommend it.
Also in the nonfiction realm - Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon was really good. Ended up reading the entire thing in one go on an airplane.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#95Reamde , by Neal Stephenson. Yeah, the big daddy of cyberpunk ("Snowcrash") also wrote a contemporary technothriller set in organized cybercrime organizations.
I'm a big Stephenson fan, and I thought Reamde was terrible. His usual quirky pacing just turns into a dragging nightmare that never pays off, it's uncharacteristically full of questionable technical premises, and if it weren't for a few islands of genuinely entertaining scenes I would not have made it through. I honestly believe it's the result of some suit pressuring him to write about topics people see on Dateline
Maybe - but he finally figured out how to write an ending.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#96This isn't quite in the category, but John Carreyrou's nonfiction book "Bad Blood", which covered the rise and fall of Theranos, satisfied me in a similar way. There's plenty of crime, although it's really about pretending to be high-tech rather than actually being high tech. For people in tech who love a good fraud story, I highly recommend it.
100% agree. Cyber true-crime, maybe? The toxicity of that place, of her, of Sunny! That guy seems like a real piece of work. I was struck by how amazingly well connected she was, collecting former and current high ranking government officials and industry titans. For me the highlight was the surreal depiction of that birthday party with Kissinger.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#97Not a novel, but super interesting story about how the Feds caught Russian Mega-Carder Roman Seleznev: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#98[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#99Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. I read it 5 years ago. Recommend it
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#100Halting State by Charlie Stross
And also its sequel Rule 34.