Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

* THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *

* Future-proof yourself and your business by reading this book *

Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways, but there is an ominous flipside. Criminals are often the earliest, and most innovative, adopters of technology and modern times have led to modern crimes. Today's criminals are stealing identities, draining online bank-accounts and wiping out computer servers. It's disturbingly easy to activate baby cam monitors to spy on families, pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt, and thieves are analyzing your social media in order to determine the best time for a home invasion.

Meanwhile, 3D printers produce AK-47s, terrorists can download the recipe for the Ebola virus, and drug cartels are building drones. This is just the beginning of the tsunami of technological threats coming our way. In Future Crimes , Marc Goodman rips open his database of hundreds of real cases to give us front-row access to these impending perils. Reading like a sci-fi thriller, but based in startling fact, Goodman raises tough questions about the expanding role of technology in our lives. Future Crimes is a call to action for better security measures worldwide, but most importantly, will empower readers to protect themselves against these looming technological threats - before it's too late.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

CHAPTER 1 Connected, Dependent and Vulnerable Technology...is a queer thing; it brings you great gifts with one hand and it stabs you in the back with the other. -- CHARLES PERCY SNOW Mat Honan's life looked pretty good on-screen: in one tab of his browser were pictures of his new baby girl; in another streamed the tweets from his thousands of Twitter followers. As a reporter for Wired magazine in San Francisco, he was living an urbane and connected life and was as up-to-date on technology as anyone. Still, he had no idea his entire digital world could be erased in just a few keystrokes. Then, one August day, it was. His photographs, e-mails, and much more all fell into the hands of a hacker. Stolen in just minutes by a teenager halfway around the world. Honan was an easy target. We all are. Honan recalls the afternoon when everything fell apart. He was play- ing on the floor with his infant daughter when suddenly his iPhone pow- ered down. Perhaps the battery had died. He was expecting an important call, so he plugged the phone into the outlet and rebooted. Rather than the usual start-up screen and apps, he saw a large white Apple logo and a mul- tilingual welcome screen inviting him to set up his new phone. How odd. Honan wasn't especially worried: he backed up his iPhone every night. His next step was perfectly obvious--log in to iCloud and restore the phone and its data. Upon logging in to his Apple account, he was informed that his password, the one he was sure was correct, had been deemed wrong by the iCloud gods. Honan, an astute reporter for the world's preeminent technology magazine, had yet another trick up his sleeve. He would merely connect the iPhone to his laptop and restore his data from the hard drive on his local computer. What happened next made his heart sink. As Honan powered up his Mac, he was greeted with a message from Apple's calendar program advising him his Gmail password was incor- rect. Immediately thereafter, the face of his laptop--its beautiful screen-- turned ashen gray and quit, as if it had died. The only thing visible on the screen was a prompt: please enter your four-digit password. Honan knew he had never set a password. Honan ultimately learned that a hacker had gained access to his iCloud account, then used Apple's handy "find my phone" feature to locate all of the electronic devices in Honan's world. One by one, they were nuked. The hacker issued the "remote wipe" command, thereby erasing all of the data Honan had spent a lifetime accumulating. The first to fall was his iPhone, then his iPad. Last, but certainly not least, was his MacBook. In an instant, all of his data, including every baby picture he had taken during his daugh- ter's first year of life, were destroyed. Gone too were the priceless photo- graphic memories of his relatives who had long since died, vanquished into the ether by parties unknown. Next to be obliterated was Honan's Google account. In the blink of an eye, the eight years of carefully curated Gmail messages were lost. Work conversations, notes, reminders, and memories wiped away with a click of a mouse. Finally, the hacker turned his intention to his ultimate target: Honan's Twitter handle, @Mat. Not only was the account taken over, but the attacker used it to send racist and homophobic rants in Honan's name to his thousands of followers. In the aftermath of the online onslaught, Honan used his skills as an investigative reporter to piece together what had happened. He phoned Apple tech support in an effort to reclaim his iCloud account. After more than ninety minutes on the phone, Honan learned that "he" had just called thirty minutes prior to request his password be reset. As it turns out, the only information anybody needed to change Honan's password was his billing address and the last four digits of his credit card number. Honan's address was readily available on the Whois Internet domain record he had created when he built his personal Web site. Even if it hadn't been, dozens of online services such as WhitePages.com and Spokeo would have pro- vided it for free. To ascertain the last four digits of Honan's credit card, the hacker guessed that Honan (like most of us) had an account on Amazon.com. He was correct. Armed with Honan's full name and his e-mail and mailing addresses, the culprit contacted Amazon and successfully manipulated a customer service rep so as to gain access to the required last four credit card digits. Those simple steps and nothing more turned Honan's life upside down. Although it didn't happen in this case, the hacker could have just as easily used the very same information to access and pilfer Honan's online bank and brokerage accounts. The teenager who eventually came forward to take credit for the attack--Phobia, as he was known in hacking circles--claimed he was out to expose the vast security vulnerabilities of the Internet services we've come to rely on every day. Point made. Honan created a new Twitter account to communicate with his attacker. Phobia, using the @Mat account, agreed to follow Honan's new account, and now the two could direct message each other. Honan asked Phobia the single question that was burning on his mind: Why? Why would you do this to me? As it turns out, the near decade of lost data and memories was merely collateral damage. Phobia's reply was chilling: "I honestly didn't have any heat towards you . . . I just liked your [Twitter] username." That was it. That's all it was ever about--a prized three-letter Twitter handle. A hacker thousands of miles away liked it and simply wanted it for himself. The thought that somebody with no "heat" toward you can obliterate your digital life in a few keystrokes is absurd. When Honan's story appeared on the cover of Wired in December 2012, it garnered considerable atten- tion . . . for a minute or two. A debate on how to better secure our every- day technologie ensued but, like so many Internet discussions, ultimately flamed out. Precious little has changed since Honan's trials and tribula- tions. We are still every bit as vulnerable as Honan was then--and even more so as we ratchet up our dependency on hackable mobile and cloud- based applications. As with most of us, Honan's various accounts were linked to one another in a self-referential web of purported digital trust: the same credit card number on an Apple profile and an Amazon account; an iCloud e-mail address that points back to Gmail. Each had information in common, including log-on credentials, credit card numbers, and passwords with all the data connected back to the same person. Honan's security protections amounted to nothing more than a digital Maginot Line--an overlapping house of cards that came tumbling down with the slightest pressure. All or most of the information needed to destroy his digital life, or yours, is readily available online to anybody who is the least bit devious or creative. Progress and Peril in a Connected World In a few years' time, with very little self-reflection, we've sprinted headlong from merely searching Google to relying on it for directions, calendars, address books, video, entertainment, voice mail, and telephone calls. One billion of us have posted our most intimate details on Facebook and will- ingly provided social networking graphs of our friends, family, and co- workers. We've downloaded billions of apps, and we rely on them to help us accomplish everything from banking and cooking to archiving baby pictures. We connect to the Internet via our laptops, mobile phones, iPads, TiVos, cable boxes, PS3s, Blu-rays, Nintendos, HDTVs, Rokus, Xboxes, and Apple TVs. The positive aspects of this technological evolution are manifest. Over the past hundred years, rapid advances in medical science mean that the average human life span has more than doubled and child mortality has plummeted by a factor of ten. Average per capita income adjusted for infla- tion around the world has tripled. Access to a high-quality education, so elusive to many for so long, is free today via Web sites such as the Khan Academy. And the mobile phone is singularly credited with leading to bil- lions upon billions of dollars in direct economic development in nations around the globe. The interconnectivity the Internet provides through its fundamental architecture means that disparate peoples from around the world can be brought together as never before. A woman in Chicago can play Words with Friends with a total stranger in the Netherlands. A physician in Bangalore, India, can remotely read and interpret the X-ray results of a patient in Boca Raton, Florida. A farmer in South Africa can use his mobile phone to access the same crop data as a PhD candidate at MIT. This interconnect- edness is one of the Internet's greatest strengths, and as it grows in size, so too does the global network's power and utility. There is much to celebrate in our modern technological world. While the advantages of the online world are well documented and frequently highlighted by those in the tech industry, there is also a down- side to all of this interconnectivity. Our electrical grids, air traffic control networks, fire department dis- patch systems, and even the elevators at work are all critically dependent on computers. Each day, we plug more and more of our daily lives into the global information grid without pausing to ask what it all means. Mat Honan found out the hard way, as have thousands of others. But what should happen if and when the technological trappings of our modern society--the foundational tools upon which we are utterly dependent--all go away? What is humanity's backup plan? In fact, none exists. Excerpted from Future Crimes by Marc Goodman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Our computers, cell phones, appliances, infrastructure, medical devices, and robots are being turned against us by robbers, terrorists, and tyrants, according to this hair-raising exposé of cybercrime. Cybersecurity consultant Goodman argues that our ever-expanding networks of digital devices with insecure software leave us vulnerable to hackers, and he recounts their exploits in spying on everything we do, casing houses, commandeering hard drives and cell phone cameras, stealing credit cards, luring children, and choreographing terrorist attacks on smart phones. Worse will soon come, he contends, when hackers take control of smart houses and refrigerators, tamper with car brakes, manipulate bionic limbs, instruct pacemakers to cause heart attacks, destroy the power grid, subvert military robots, and genetically engineer bioweapons; self-aware artificial intelligence programs may become international crime lords. Goodman's breathless but lucid account is good at conveying the potential perils of emerging technologies in layman's terms, and he sprinkles in deft narratives of the heists already enabled by them. His dark-edged portrait of the onrushing total surveillance state and robotization of everything is terrifying in its own right; at times illicit hacker-dom feels like the last stand of human agency against helpless subjection to machines. There's a tinge of dystopian paranoia here, but if a fraction of what Goodman forecasts comes true then this is a timely wake-up call. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Goodman, a cop turned counterterrorism analyst and cybercrime expert, wants you to know, in no uncertain terms, that you are not nearly as safe as you might think you are. You probably have antivirus software on your computer, maybe even top-of-the-line software, but, in real terms, it's only marginally effective (there are too many new viruses for antivirus software to keep up with them); protected computer systems are almost ridiculously easy for hackers to get into; free services like Facebook and Google are constantly gleaning personal information from their users and selling it; the private networks called darknets make it easy for criminals to share information with anonymity and relative safety; cyberstalking, identity theft, hate crimes, electronic robbery, and hacking are becoming more widespread on virtually a daily basis. Highly informative and very timely (in light of the recent Sony hacking scandal and the Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking saga), the book is both terrifying and encouraging, the former because we really had no idea how serious the cybersecurity problem is, the latter because Goodman says there are some things we can do to at least limit our risk. A real eye-opener and a solid choice for the technology and social-issues shelves.--Pitt, David Copyright 2015 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

An alarming view of the burgeoning dark side of the Internet."We are now entering the great age of digital crime," warns Goodman, a former police detective-turned-cybercrime consultant and founder of the Future Crimes Institute. In this highly readable and exhaustive debut, he details the many ways in which hackers, organized criminals, terrorists and rogue governments are exploiting the vulnerability of our increasingly connected society. "[W]e've wired the world," he writes, "but failed to secure it." Noting how easy it is to hack into computer systems, most notably smartphones, Goodman first describes the present era of digital crime, from cyberattacks on companies (Target, Sony) to the failure to protect information by data brokers and social media to the growth in identity theft (13 million Americans affected annually) to digital surveillance, cyberstalking and hate crimes. Most companies are hacked regularly and cannot detect it; when they find out (from customers or police), they often try to hide the loss of data. "What most people do not understandis that any data collected will invariably leak," writes the author, and the worst is yet to come. The online world's exponential growth is creating new opportunities, with easy profits and little detection, for sophisticated cyberunits of organized crime. The rise of the Internet of Things (chips and sensors in everyday objects, from cars to homes) will allow criminals to wreak havoc on such newly emerging technologies as robotics, 3-D manufacturing, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. There will be no way to protect against hacking of baby cams, GPS systems, imbedded medical devices, drones, assembly lines, personal care bots and other objects, some 50 billion of which will join the global grid by 2020. Goodman suggests solid actions to limit the impact of cybercrimes, ranging from increased technical literacy of the public to a massive government "Manhattan Project" for cybersecurity to develop strategies against online threats. A powerful wake-up call to pay attention to our online lives. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.