News

What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously? Not minimal-change seriously. Not here-and-there seriously. But really seriously. What will it take for policy makers to take cybersecurity seriously enough to enact substantive legislative changes that would address the problems? It’s not enough for the average person to be afraid of cyberattacks. They need to know that there are engineering fixes—and that’s something we can provide.

For decades, I have been waiting for the “big enough” incident that would finally do it. In 2015, Chinese military hackers hacked the Office of Personal Management and made off with the highly personal information of about 22 million Americans who had security clearances. In 2016, the Mirai botnet leveraged millions of Internet-of-Things devices with default admin passwords to launch a denial-of-service attack that disabled major Internet platforms and services in both North America and Europe. In 2017, hackers—years later we learned that it was the Chinese military—hacked the credit bureau Equifax and stole the personal information of 147 million Americans. In recent years, ransomware attacks have knocked hospitals offline, and many articles have been written about Russia inside the U.S. power grid. And last year, the Russian SVR hacked thousands of sensitive networks inside civilian critical infrastructure worldwide in what we’re now calling Sunburst (and used to call SolarWinds)…

“Pig butchering” is the colorful name given to online cons that trick the victim into giving money to the scammer, thinking it is an investment opportunity. It’s a rapidly growing area of fraud, and getting more sophisticated.

Tuesday was the official publication date of A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back. It broke into the 2000s on the Amazon best-seller list.

Reviews in the New York Times, Cory Doctorow’s blog, Science, and the Associated Press.

I wrote essays related to the book for CNN and John Scalzi’s blog.

Two podcast interviews: Keen On and Lawfare. And a written interview for the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Lots more coming, I believe. Get your copy here.

And—last request—right now there’s one Amazon review, and it’s not a good one. If people here could leave reviews, I would appreciate it…

The tax code isn’t software. It doesn’t run on a computer. But it’s still code. It’s a series of algorithms that takes an input—financial information for the year—and produces an output: the amount of tax owed. It’s incredibly complex code; there are a bazillion details and exceptions and special cases. It consists of government laws, rulings from the tax authorities, judicial decisions, and legal opinions.

Like computer code, the tax code has bugs. They might be mistakes in how the tax laws were written. They might be mistakes in how the tax code is interpreted, oversights in how parts of the law were conceived, or unintended omissions of some sort or another. They might arise from the exponentially huge number of ways different parts of the tax code interact…