Cyberphobia: Identity, Trust, Security and the Internet - Softcover

Edward Lucas has achieved the near-impossible: equipping us all with a highly readable yet instructive guide to the dangers behind our everyday internet use and how best to stay safe. Parents should buy for their children - and vice versa (Sir David Omand, former Director of GCHQ and UK Intelligence and Security Coordinator)

The internet is our greatest vulnerability as well as our greatest resource: hackers and hoodlums can steal your most important resources and disappear into the ether. Edward Lucas not only demonstrates just how vulnerable we are. He demonstrates how we can fight back against the cyber-criminals. And he does so with panache and style - explaining complicated concepts in plain words and brings light to even the darkest corners of the internet (Adrian Wooldridge, author of The Great Disruption: How Business is Coping with Turbulent Times)

Putin [and] his friends ... are gangsters on a scale that makes Al Capone or the Corleones seem small-time ... Lucas is right to castigate our folly in treating all this so lightly (Max Hastings, Sunday Times on Deception)

Entertaining and informative ... Lucas contrasts our complacency and delusion with Russia's ruthless ingenuity (Mail on Sunday, on The New Cold War)

Highly informed, crisply written and alarming ... Outstanding (Evening Standard, on The New Cold War)

An impressive polemic arguing that the West still underestimates the danger that Putin's Russia poses (Sunday Times on The New Cold War)

Unlike all too many authors of books on technology, Lucas does not presume that his readers are au fait with the baffling jargon that puts so many off the subject. His book will be comprehensible even to seemingly incurable cyberphobes. If they confront their fears and read it they will have joined Lucas's fightback against the crooks and spooks who want to exploit our ignorance ( Standpoint 2015-09-01)

Not only does Cyberphobia lay bare the dangers of the internet, it also explores the most successful defensive cyber strategies, options for tracking down transgressors and argues that we are moving into a post-digital age where once again face-to-face communication will be the only interaction that really matters ( Daily Telegraph 2015-08-29)

Cyberphobia provides a readable, exciting, and unusually accurate introduction to the dangerous side of information technology, which is now shaping most people's lives more than they realize. It will make it clear why people like me, who deal with this subject all day long, have trouble sleeping. (Scott Borg, Director (CEO) and Chief Economist, U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit)

A primer on the subject for people who haven't a clue about how the internet works and yet depend on it every day. But people don't need to be experts to learn how to protect themselves. This is Lucas's most compelling point, and his most urgent . Here, Lucas is doing a public service . Where Lucas gets really provocative is in laying blame on institutions for their failure to shore up a system that they know is rife with dangers ( Literary Review 2015-09-01)