Review by New York Times Review
when the F.B.i. warned the Democratic National Committee that hackers had broken into its system before the 2016 elections, the help desk dismissed it as a potential prank call. And when the Russians used a phony Google alert to try to snatch the email password from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, the I.T. guy incorrectly said the warning was legitimate. In "Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called 'Alien,'" Jeremy N. Smith tells a tale of computer intrigue, but not through the eyes of the black hats whose misdeeds have dominated recent political news. Instead, Smith wants you to meet the people behind the help desk - the tech gurus and security consultants standing between us and digital carnage. With his 1989 best seller "The Cuckoo's Egg," the author Clifford Stoll demonstrated that the lowly computer technician can make a wonderful hero. He described tracking Russian spies across networks and solving an espionage mystery of the early internet era. Without such a singular case to crack, however, Smith must rely on the career trajectory of a cybersecurity expert to propel the story. That's a lot to ask. When someone from your I.T. department sends an email telling you to change your password, does anyone stop and think, "I bet that guy has an interesting story!" Smith addresses this problem head-on, making clear at the onset that we are not talking about just any computer geek. We meet our leatherclad hero - a woman nicknamed Alien who runs a boutique cybersecurity firm - as she swaggers through a Las Vegas hacking conference. And Smith poses the story's central question: How did she get to be such a badass? Despite the book's subtitle, however, the answer turns out to be more predictable than extraordinary. Alien studied computer science at M.I.T. and parlayed a connection there into a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which launched her into the information security world. Further complicating things, Smith gives every character and company a pseudonym and changes the locations of key events. We are told this is to protect their privacy, but the effect is that Alien, on whom so much is riding, feels distant. This distance is compounded by the fact that "Breaking and Entering" includes long stretches of dialogue and precise details from decades-old events. When you never quite know how much about a character is fictionalized, such precision can make the scenes feel reimagined. Smith's writing style, though, is crisp as he charts the course of Alien's life in a series of vignettes, from uncertain undergraduate to successful business owner. The structure works because Smith is a lively storyteller. We are in capable hands as Alien tests corporate security by crafting phishing emails and schmoozing her way into executive suites to steal computers. But the format is also restrictive. Alien came of age during the birth of the modern information security age, and at times I wished we could have stepped back a bit from her story to see the bigger picture. Instead, tethered to Alien, we can see only as far as she can in the moment. For instance, Alien experiences several gut-punch reminders that she is a woman in a male-dominated industry. She is saddled with administrative tasks. A male peer introduces her as a "junior consultant." And a roomful of men eye her with curiosity at a conference. These moments cry out for a pause, some context, a bit of reflection on the security industry in the #MeToo moment. But instead we are whisked off to the next vignette. The story offers just enough technological details to establish its bona fides without slowing its pace. It is a difficult balance. Alien's social-engineering techniques have been detailed in books by and about the hacker Kevin Mitnick and elsewhere, and will come as no surprise to techsavvy or security-conscious readers. More casual readers will get an introduction to that world, but not a guide to help them understand it. Which is a shame, since the real Alien - she is easily identifiable if one is so inclined - has a wellearned reputation as an expert in her field. Her work is taught at universities, bar associations and the world's top conferences. She is, as Smith set out to show, a security badass. Yet we hear very little from her in the present. The focus on how she got there is interesting, and at times quite fun, but it comes at the expense of the wisdom she acquired on the journey. If there's one lesson to be learned from Alien's story, it is this: As Russian hackers challenge democracies and criminal attacks turn our personal data into commodities, we cannot turn to technology to save us. Security is only as strong as the employee who tapes his passwords to his cubicle, the overworked guard at the front desk and, yes, the person on the other end of the line when you call the help desk. matt APUZZO, an international investigative correspondent for The Times, is the co-author of "Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden's Final Plot Against America."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
When the woman now known as Alien turned up at MIT more than 20 years ago, she took a while to figure out that what interested her was hacking. First, in the term's original meaning, came physical trespassing, but eventually she settled on computer hacking and wound up working for a company that specialized in testing business security systems. Later, she founded her own cybersecurity firm. This riveting book follows Alien as she transforms herself from a young woman up for pretty much any challenge, no matter how dangerous, to a woman who is among the best in the world at what she does. Freelance journalist Smith writes with gusto, giving Alien's story the feel of a novel (or, perhaps, a movie along the lines of 1995's Hackers). The world of hacking and cybersecurity still carries a mystique; only the privileged few are permitted to learn the secrets that lie within the close-knit hacker community. This book opens the gates and invites readers inside. It's not only a powerful story about a specific hacker; it's also a fascinating look at the hacking world, in general.--David Pitt Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A chance encounter with a college acquaintance led Smith (Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients) to write this poorly sourced life of Elizabeth Tessman, who was introduced to hacking while an MIT undergrad in the late 1990s, when she adopted the alias of Alien, the name used throughout the text. Smith, who presents Alien's story, complete with dialogue and details from decades ago without any documentation, doesn't even assert that he utilized his subject's detailed diary or other contemporaneous records, and concedes that he changed certain facts. But even readers who put aside their reservations about the book's credibility may find it hard to get engaged. Once at MIT, Alien joins a group of students who specialize in breaking into off-limits areas of campus to play pranks. Soon one of the group is dead, and federal arrests are made at MIT for internet piracy. After MIT and a stint at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Alien is recruited by a cybersecurity firm that makes use of the trespassing and social engineering talents she developed at MIT. The writing is uneven at best, and neither Alien, who now works in information security, nor the people she interacted with leave much of an impression. This account fails both as a look at a person for whom living "a normal, boring life... would be the hardest hack of all," and as a warning that there is "no such thing as absolute security in this world." Agent: Michelle Tessler, Tessler Literary. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Elizabeth Tessman is the pseudonym for a widely respected information security expert. In this extensive biography, Smith (Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients) tells the story of her mastery of this difficult subject. Unfortunately, the slow-paced book is about as interesting as watching a computer program load. The author tells of Tessman's entry into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at a time when "hacking" did not mean breaking into a computer but, rather, attempts by college students to break into restricted spaces around the campus. Much of Tessman's MIT years are excessively casual--casual sex, casual attitudes towards attending a college which is out of bounds to many young people, casual drug use, and casual observance of rules. Tessman prefers the nickname "Alien," which is cute at first, but soon gets tiring the thousandth time it is used. When Alien leaves MIT to pursue a career, she gravitates toward computers, and her path through the newly emerging field of cybersecuirty may interest computer experts, though it hardly constitutes the labels of "taut" and "thriller" used by the publishers to advertise the book. Despite his weird pronunciation of the word moleskin, reader Jonathan Todd Ross does his best to infuse tension into this complex story, but time passes slowly and only hardcore computer buffs will stick around until the end of the book. VERDICT This is an optional purchase for most public libraries.--Joseph Carlson, Vandenberg Air Force Base Lib., Lompoc, CA
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A novelistic tech tale that puts readers on the front lines of cybersecurity.For all whose lives and connections depend on the internetnearly everyonethis biography of the pseudonymous "Alien" provides a fast-paced cautionary tale. Smith (Epic Measures: One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients., 2015, etc.) has enough experience as a computer programmer to understand the technicalities of this world, but his storytelling makes it intelligible to general readers; indeed, the narrative is more character-driven than technology-driven. The book requires a few leaps of faithnot only that Alien is who the author says she is, but that she can so vividly recount events and conversations that happened years before she met the author. The story begins with Alien at MIT. Lacking focus and direction, she was drawn to a hacking community in a time when the term could extend from picking locks to taking drugs and didn't become more focused on technology until computers became more central to society. The hackers often lived more adventurous lives than many students, and Alien experienced plenty of casual sex, drug use, and a few tragic casualties along the way. She graduated from hacking computer systems to helping protect them from hackers at a time when "Corporations from Microsoft and Cisco on down had begun hiring hackers of their own to help defend themselves against other hackers." Some worked one side of the fence, some worked the other, and some straddled the line and were capable of "going rogue." Smith goes into great detail to demonstrate how Alien could penetrate the security of whomever was employing her, showing how a real criminal would do it, and makes fearfully clear that there is "no such thing as absolute security in this world, or any definitive and final fixes." Alien now runs a small hacking company that assists with security for banks, governments, and other organizations.A page-turning real-life thriller, the sort of book that may leave readers feeling both invigorated and vulnerable. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
