Synopsis
Ripped from recent headlines, this gripping cyber-attack tale has all the elements of an international thriller, including a floating corpse in the Gulf of Finland. Meet an underground criminal supply chain, its innocent victims, and an unlikely midwestern IT group with an ingenious way to fight back against the theft of millions of credit-card numbers. If data breaches were not routine by now, this story would be unbelievable.
Instead, it’s a snapshot of life in today’s interconnected world, and an unforgettable Internet safety education. IT security has never been so riveting!
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Review
I have to say I’m a bit of a geek and I really liked this book. We hear about companies getting hacked all the time and this story describes what might have happened occurred when the company was breached.
I enjoyed how the author told the story with enough technical detail, but not so much that a non-technical person couldn’t understand or enjoy the story. I may not have understood all the jargon, but a lot of it was familiar.
The characters in this book were very real. One example were the heads of companies (CEO and such) sometimes do not understand the importance of security when it comes to their computer infrastructure. And this doesn’t just mean large companies, but the smaller ones too. As the author put it, you have to guard your front door, back door and several side doors. There there were some IT employees/management that didn’t understand the importance either. And while I’m not wild about outsourcing to other countries, in this book there was actually a group in India that sharing concerns but not being heard.
The only thing that disappointed me about this book was that a minor story about a woman named Regina that was getting her life together and how she was affected by this breach/hack. Her story wasn’t really finished in my book. We can guess what might have happened but it would have been nice to know for sure how her story ended.
Overall this was a really good book and fast paced (I had a hard time putting it down at times). While fiction, the story is very real and it might make you think twice about how you approach technology.
We give this 4 paws up.
Trailer
About the Author
Greg Scott is a veteran of the tumultuous IT industry. After working as a consultant at Digital Equipment Corporation, a large computer company in its day, Scott branched out on his own in 1994 and started Scott Consulting. A larger firm bought Scott Consulting in 1999, just as the dot com bust devastated the IT Service industry. Scott went out on his own again in late 1999 and started Infrasupport Corporation, this time with a laser focus on infrastructure and security. In late summer, 2015, after “Bullseye Breach” was published, he accepted a job offer with an enterprise software company.
He currently lives in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area with wife, daughter, and two grandchildren. He holds several IT industry certifications, including CISSP number 358671.
Scott graduated from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1979 with a double major of math and speech. He earned an MBA from the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis in 1996.
In the 1990s, he wrote a popular column on the back page of IT industry publication ENT Magazine titled, “NT Heartland,” and another column in Enterprise Linux Magazine titled, “Converts Corner.”
Inspired by The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt, a business textbook disguised as a fiction story about the resurgence of a rundown factory, Scott decided to write what would become Bullseye Breach after becoming frustrated from too many sensational headlines about preventable data breaches.
