Written
by Kevin Mitnick (with Robert Vamosi), known as the number one hacker in the
world, “The Art of Invisibility” is a book about “staying online while
retaining our precious privacy” (p.299), destined for everyone.
Nowadays,
and because we have been living for some decades with an illusion of privacy,
it is not an easy task to be invisible online and anonymous. There is daily data
“about whom we e-mail, text, and call; what we search (…); what we buy; and
where were travel (…)” (p.7). That is why we
need to create a separate identity, unrelated to us, according to Mitnick
(p.282).
In this
sense, the author presents a set of different situations in which we are putting
our online privacy at risk. At same time, he offers a solution, a way to keep us
safe and invisible/anonymous in each of these situations… and master this “art
of invisibility”.
The book
is divided into sixteen chapters, being the last one – chapter 16 - a kind of
conclusion: chapter 1 “Your password
can be cracked!” (in which Mitnick underlines the importance of creating long
passwords, having different passwords for different accounts, …); chapter 2 “Who
else is reading your e-mail?” (it could be a bad idea to keep your e-mail open
while you are searching something in internet… is one of the ideas defended by
him, for example) ; chapter 3 “Wiretapping 101” (focused on our mobile phones);
chapter 4 “If you don’t encrypt, you’re unequipped.” (encryption seems to be
the key and especially if it is end to end – this is, the data storage is “on
the individual devices”); chapter 5 “Now you see me, now you don’t” (the author
writes here about the “history” kept in our browsers); chapter 6 “Every mouse
click you make”(related with tracking every habit and search that we have on internet and Bitcoin as "the Internet's standard anonymous currency" (p.120));
chapter 7 “Pay up or else!”(about wi-fi and routers protection); chapter 8 “Believe
everything, trust nothing” (focused on VPN’s advantage as "a secure "tunnel" that extends a private network (from your home, office, or a VPN service provider) to your device on a public network" (p.145)); chapter 9 “You have no
privacy?” Get over it!” (Mitnick makes the reader aware of the danger
represented by photos that we decide to put online - "Remember also that no one is compelling you to post personal information. You can as much or as little as you want." (p.167)-); chapter 10 “You can run
but not hide” (GPS disadvantages is the main topic); chapter 11 “Hey, Kitt, don’t
share my location” (here the author writes about GPS in cars and in UBER app,
storing all the information about our localizations and travels); chapter 12 “The
Internet of Surveillance”; chapter 13 “Things your boss doesn’t want you to
know”; chapter 14 “Obtaining anonymity is hard work”; chapter 15 “The FBI
always gets its man” (in which he presents, between other things, the 3 Internets:
the surface web – containing sites like Amazon and Youtube and representing
only 5% of the entire Internet -, the deep web, and the dark web – accessible only
through a TOR browser); chapter 16 “Mastering the Art of Invisibility”.
TOR (The Onion Router) network, VPNs (Virtual Private Network), passwords, wi-fi, GPS, encryption, are always present in the book and are not exclusive to a chapter. Central too, are our mobile phones, given its importance in our lives for almost everything (including its role in multi-factor authentication (MFA)): calls, messages, e-mails, search for something, buy something, pay something, fitness apps...
So, the essential message of this book is... mastering the art of invisibility means to pay attention/be careful not only to what we share consciously, but also unconsciously online (whether on our laptop or on our mobile phone) in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data.
Comentários
Enviar um comentário