Breach - True Stories from the Front Line of the Cyber War

A casino was brought down by a ten-minute phone call. A supermarket's shelves went bare. The largest theft in human history was pulled off in a single afternoon. And almost every time, the door was left open by someone having an ordinary day.

Your data lives on machines you will never see, run by strangers, flowing through plumbing you cannot inspect. When that plumbing bursts, you get a letter that begins, "we are writing to inform you of a data security incident."

This is the gripping true story behind every one of those letters.

From a Las Vegas casino floor to a central bank in Dhaka, from a young man's bedroom in Devon to the empty shelf in your local high-street shop, these fifteen true stories trace the most consequential cyberattacks of our time.

And they reveal an unsettling truth.

The attackers are rarely the hooded geniuses of the movies. They are opportunists who keep walking through the same few doors, because we keep leaving them open.

Inside these pages:

The teenagers who toppled a multi-billion-dollar casino empire with a single phone call The forgotten password that emptied a nation's petrol stations The largest theft in history, carried out against a company that did almost everything right The worm that crippled hospitals, and the young man who switched it off from his bedroom The police who climbed inside the world's most feared ransomware gang and turned its own weapon against it The enemy who does not break in at all, but is hired, onboarded, and paid a salary

Who it is for:

Curious readers who want to understand how the modern world really gets hacked, with no technical background required. True-crime fans looking for a fresh genre that is unfolding in real time. And anyone who works near data, which is now almost everyone, and wants to know how these attacks truly begin and end.

Each chapter reads like a thriller, then pulls back the curtain, explaining in plain language exactly how the attack worked, and exactly how it could have been stopped.

By the final page, you will not just have read about the breaches that defined the decade. You will understand them, well enough to recognise the next one when it comes knocking at your door.