From the very start, where an NSA director tells us that
for every company discovering it has been hacked, a
hundred
other companies have been hacked and don't know it, we are
in no doubt that this thriller revolves around cybercrime.
Chris Bruen is woken during the night and called to the
Silicon Valley headquarters of a world-famous search
engine, Zapper. They've found a serious INTRUSION and the
prime suspect behind the theft of their algorithms is the
Chinese government.
Chris is a lawyer and security expert specialising in
cybercrime and he meets known hackers and security
specialists, hired by Zapper to stop this wholesale theft
of intellectual property. Chris asks the young maverick
owner of Zapper to send him to China, where he hopes to
find proof. Shanghai is the point to which the hacking was
traced, and Chris, who speaks business Mandarin, takes
precautions while there, as he believes the Chinese
government use military grade hacking techniques. Will his
cover story be enough to let this conspicuous Westerner
uncover the plot, and what will happen if he does?
I appreciated the way that Chris is fleshed out for us
gradually as we watch him work. He has lost a wife to
cancer and is himself in remission from thyroid cancer,
which makes him unwilling to risk life and liberty in
defence of corporate money. He has a new girlfriend Zoey,
a
sometime hacktivist, who can reach people whom his staid
persona would never find, such as China's idealistic
dissidents. Chris isn't nearly careful enough and has no
backup on the ground, so he runs into trouble.
We also follow Tao Zhang who is trapped in a situation
requiring him to provide grim services to an influential
man. In this way we are shown the reality of life inside
the new industrial, shoddy, polluted cities, where suicide
nets have to be hung to prevent exhausted employees
jumping
off factory roofs. We also see something of women's lives,
and return to San Francisco, so Reece Hirsch has carefully
balanced the tale. This author's background is in data
security and privacy law, so INTRUSION brings the ring of
cold hard fact to the thriller arena. I started out
interested in the tale and was soon riveted. INTRUSION is
a
terrific new cybercrime story which carries a warning for
us all.
When a powerful client summons him for a midnight meeting, lawyer Chris Bruen knows something is very wrong. Zapper, the world’s most popular search engine, has been compromised and its most valuable asset—search algorithms—stolen. The company suspects that this most recent instance in a wave of high-tech crimes originated in China, and that the government itself is behind the systematic theft of US intellectual property. Chris travels to China to search for evidence that will link the intrusion to the People’s Liberation Army. With remote assistance from Zoey Doucet, the head of his firm’s computer forensics lab and his maybe-girlfriend, Chris uncovers information that takes him even deeper into the shadowy world of cybercrime. Now he is trapped in a foreign land with a hard drive containing information that puts his life in jeopardy. In this secretive world of Big Data, Chris will risk everything to fight an elusive enemy as far-reaching as the Internet itself.
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