*online* Thinking On Sunday: Crime Dot Com - From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global

Geoff White, one of the UK’s leading technology correspondents, charts the astonishing development of hacking - one of the most dangerous and pervasive threats to our digital world.

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On 4 May 2000, an email was sent from a computer in the Philippines that read ‘kindly check the attached LOVELETTER’. Attached was a virus, the Love Bug, and within days it had been circulated across the globe, paralysing banks, broadcasters and businesses in its wake, and extending as far as the UK Parliament and, reportedly, the Pentagon. The out-break presaged a new era of online mayhem: the age of Crime Dot Com.

Investigative journalist Geoff White charts the astonishing development of hacking, from its conception in America’s hippy tech community in the 1970s, through its childhood among the ruins of the Eastern Bloc, to its coming of age as one of the most dangerous and pervasive threats to our digital world. He takes us inside the workings of real-life cy-bercrimes, drawing on interviews with those behind the most devastating hacks and re-vealing how the tactics employed by high-tech crooks to make millions are being har-nessed by nation states to target voters, cripple power networks and prepare, even, for cyber-war.

From Anonymous to the Dark Web, Ashley Madison to election rigging, White’s book Crime Dot Com is a dizzying and terrifying account of hacking, past and present, of what the future has in store and of how we might protect ourselves from it.

Geoff White is an investigative journalist and one of the UK’s leading technology corre-spondents. His work has featured in numerous outlets, including the BBC and Channel 4 New