Summary of Andy Greenberg's Sandworm

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 iSight Partners, a private intelligence firm, had a team that specialized in software vulnerability research. In 2014, they discovered a secret security flaw in Microsoft Office that allowed hackers to break out of the confines of the software application and begin to execute their own code on a target computer.

#2 iSight’s Ukrainian staff found the email, and Hultquist, the company’s loud and bearish army veteran, made a point of periodically shouting from his desk into the bull pen. He burst out of his office and into the room, briefing the room and assigning tasks to triage what would become one of the biggest finds in the small company’s history.

#3 The hackers had used the feature to carefully plant two chunks of data within the presentation. The first was loaded into a temporary folder on the target computer. The second took advantage of PowerPoint’s animation feature: when the presentation loaded that animation file, it would run an automated script that right-clicked on the first file and click install on the resulting drop-down menu, giving that code a foothold on the computer without tipping off its user.

#4 Zero days do have authors. When Erickson had first begun to pull apart the attack in his blacked-out workshop that morning, he hadn’t simply been studying some naturally occurring, inanimate puzzle. He was admiring the first hints of a remote, malevolent intelligence.