Misha Glenny: Hire the Hackers

September 15, 2011 by Gail
Filed under VidStyle

Despite multibillion-dollar investments in cybersecurity, one of its root problems has been largely ignored: who are the people who write malicious code? Underworld investigator Misha Glenny profiles several convicted coders from around the world and reaches a startling conclusion.

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ABOUT Misha Glenny

“In minute detail, Misha Glenny’s 2008 book ‘McMafia’ illuminates the byzantine outlines of global organised crime. Whether it’s pot smugglers in British Columbia, oil/weapons/people traffickers in Eastern Europe, Japanese Yakuza or Nigerian scammers, to research this magisterial work Glenny penetrated the convoluted, globalised and franchised modern underworld, often at considerable personal risk.

The book that resulted is an exhaustive look at an unseen industry that Glenny believes may account for 15% of the world’s GDP. Legal society ignores this world at its peril, but Glenny suggests that conventional law enforcement might not be able to combat a problem whose roots lie in global instability.

While covering the Central Europe beat for the Guardian and the BBC, Glenny wrote several acclaimed books on the fall of Yugoslavia and the rise of the Balkan nations. He’s researching a new book on cybercrime, of which he says: “The key to cybercrime is what we call social engineering. Or to use the technical term for it, there’s one born every minute.”

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