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Price: $28.00 - $14.98
(as of Dec 23,2024 21:59:02 UTC – Details)
Customers say
Customers find the book an engaging read with a fascinating story. They appreciate the informative and thought-provoking content about cyber security. The writing style is described as well-crafted and easy to understand. However, some readers feel the hacking details are predictable and lack depth. There are mixed opinions on the character development, with some finding them well-developed and relatable, while others felt they were poorly developed.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Hard to put down!
**Breaking and Entering** is excellent! This book about Alien, the hacker, is totally wild. Itâs like a crazy rollercoaster ride through the world of computers and crime. The author, Jeremy Smith, makes this super complicated stuff easy to understand and totally addictive. If youâre into tech, true crime, or just love a good story, you gotta check it out.
Intriguing, yet annoying
Hacking — whether for political gain, financial benefit, or plain disruption — is a factor in our internet-intertwined lives. I couldn’t resist a book that suggested it would explore white hat hacking, highlighting the many ways that hackers can and do break into systems we all use.As the reviews note, the story is told in three parts. In the first and least compelling, protagonist Alien is a student at MIT, one who avoids sitting through classes and spends most of her time sneaking onto roofs and breaking into locked buildings, drinking and doing drugs the rest of the time. I knew people like Alien in college — the rich, entitled kids who seemed to think that college was a joke, four years of unrestricted self-indulgence while mom & dad paid the bills. The tales of her exploits became tiresome, and I was glad when we finally got to the computer section, part 2.The second part describes her various infosec jobs working for others. For reasons that are not discussed in any meaningful way, Alien has a hard time getting along with her bosses. There are other sides to these stories that we didn’t hear. But the reader is supposed to think “so brilliant! so hard-working! how could anyone fire her?!?”In the final section, Alien is about to launch a new career as a bartender when she gets the opportunity to freelance as a subcontracting hacker. The book describes a series of engagements, and suddenly, abruptly, Alien is starting her own business, which flourishes almost from the beginning. Exactly how and why — whether her new husband successfully promoted her services or simply word of mouth, who funded the offices and equipment — was not clear to me (but I had started skimming by that point). Almost everything that happens during this phase is blissful and problem-free, even giving birth while running a company. Alien proves to be as adept a boss as she is a hacker.The storytelling moved along and mostly kept my attention, but there were a few elements that bothered me more and more as I paged along.* The cybersecurity industry is male-dominated, but women are hardly a rarity. Yet much of her success seems to hinge on the fact that almost every man she meets finds her irresistible and succumbs to her charms. It’s kind of sad, because I love to read about smart, accomplished women, and instead I got the impression that for her it was about the leather, polka dot socks, and willingness to bring men back to her hotel room.* Although the author says that he spent a year interviewing people to put the story together, he also mentions that he’s changed names and locations, and merged characters as needed. This may be why Alien feels like a caricature — her background doesn’t match with that of any of the prominent women in the industry — and also made me wonder why everything had to be so secretive. If Alien is truly one unique individual rather than a composite, why not provide her real name (while concealing the names of her colleagues and college friends)? It’s not as if the book gives away any secrets or shows her in a bad light.* Constant references to Moleskine notebooks made me wonder about product placement. I was also bothered by an anecdote about shopping for professional maternity clothes in 2011; there were none, according to the author, and Alien refused to wear the pink tents that maternity stores carried. I may not know much about cybersecurity, but I am positive that professional business attire for pregnant women was widely available well before 2011. All right, a minor detail, but the kind of detail that made me question whether the whole book was fiction, written by a guy who hadn’t been paying much attention.The book doesn’t really give much advice on how to prevent your own accounts from being hacked — you’re better off reading whatever clickbait article next hits your feed — or offer much in the way of surprises. If the author’s intent was to sow paranoia: for most of us, it’s too late.
Great Read
Definitely no imaginary 400 pound guy on a bed. Instead– enter Jeremy Smithâs real life Alien, tall, tan, and lovely and clad mostly in black leather and knee high red polka-dot socks. A brilliant high school underachiever, Alien manages to craft a college admissionâs essay that convinced MIT that she deserved a play at the prestigious university . Endowed with a penchant and passion for going into places where youâre not supposed to be, Smith introduces us to the life of a hacker… as Alien guides the reader first through the architectural interstices throughout the MIT campus, and then into the servers and hard drives of major banks and hospitals, Los Alamos National Laboratory, defense contractors and government agencies…all part of what others might have considered a manâs world, and just another place where Alien was not supposed to be. A true tale, wonderfully written, and a fun read from beginning to end.
Reads like sci-fi but itâs NOT
The story is amazing. Alien is a gutsy, admirable, even a bit scary person who doesnât let setbacks beat her down. Itâs most interesting that she IS a real person, that this is a biography. Wow. I enjoyed all of it, although I definitely had to skim over the âtechieâ parts and jump to the narrative. Iâm glad to know that she has a thriving business, a marriage and a couple of kids who will benefit from growing up with such a role model. At least thatâs what I choose to think!The cybersecurity lessons are truly scary and we should all be wary.
As a non-techie, I thought I was going to be bored by this book but it was fascinating. Breathless and rather unimaginative prose which is more than made up for by the astonishing story. Starting with Alien first learning how to hack (i.e. gain illegal entry) to unauthorised buildings at MIT, the story progressed through various illegal and legal entries into corporate security until such time as the hacking world was turned upside down and the best hackers started sharing their skills to prevent their clients being breached. What was particualrly fascinating was that a hacker, with good interpersonal skills, could penetrate the highest levels of an organisation without being detected or suspected. The book is a good read. Many of the simple techniques that Alien used are still being employed today to get unauthorised entry to organisations. These are a few sections in the book about computer code but I skipped those and didn’t see what they added to the narrative except possibly to gain credence with more technical readers. THe conclusion is that the main vulnerabillity of organisations is not the computers, it is the people who operate them. Alien shows how.
This was a pretty decent read about a woman who has made it in the IT Security field. I was impressed with the story and how it was told by the author.I was not bored while reading this and genuinely liked how Alien’s evolution in to becoming a White Hat Hacker occurred. I can relate to a lot of what was going on having been through similar, professional, experiences during the same time period, although not so directly as Alien.I’m giving this more like 4.25 stars. The read is not boring but then it’s not over the top either. Technical references included in the issues faced by Alien are well presented and give it that extra push. I recommend it if you like feel good stories and/or are looking for a light overview of someone progressing in to Cyber Security.