Book Review: "Breaking and Entering"

'Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called "Alien"' by Jeremy N. Smith, is a new, anonymized cyber security novel, based on real events. I got into this at the recommendation of a friend, but I'm frankly disappointed as I learned the book has little to do with the art of breaking and entering and is far from extraordinary in terms of hacker stories. I listened to the book on audible for ~$20, which felt long at 12hrs (300+ pages). Ultimately, I give this 3 out of 10 stars, as this book felt forced, lacking detail, and fairly ordinary. I recommend this to people that like personal novels and maybe those considering an infosec career. Don't get me wrong, people like this book, and it has high reviews on Amazon, it just wasn't for me. It felt like a dramatized, 12 hour long episode of Getting Into Infosec, only less 'real'. You can't compare this book to something like Kingpin, which is shorter, has more impressive hacking, and is verifiable. I kept asking myself why I was reading this as a hacker, as I didn't feel like I was getting anything out of it. The following are the chapters of the book, so you can see at a high-level what it entails:

Author's Note
Preface: The Hacker Next door
Part I: Course 19
Chapter 1: Inside Out
Chapter 2: The Coffeehouse Club
Chapter 3: Earth to Alien
Chapter 4: A Death in the Family
Part II: In Security
Chapter 5: Up All Night
Chapter 6: I Spy
Chapter 7: Wild Wild Web
Chapter 8: A Hackable Heart Transplant
Part III: Agents and Jedis
Chapter 9: Capture the Flag
Chapter 10: Check Please
Chapter 11: Up in the Air
Chapter 12: Europe on Five Hacks a Day
Part IV: Owner's Manual
Chapter 13: The Bartender
Chapter 14: The Best Around
Chapter 15: Phoning Home
Epilogue: Fast Forward
Acknowledgments

I felt like this was the average story of a journeyman in infosec, that is to say it sounded like your typical college experience, entry level jobs, and startups in infosec to me. I kept waiting for the big twist, the thing that made this story extraordinary, but it never came. Whats worse, they kept trying to force very basic infosec activities as exceptional or extraordinary, when I felt like they were barley passing for infosec activities to begin with. For example, the whole first part of the book they would call non-destructive entry or lock picking hacking. Another cringe worthy event was solving the first digital forensics investigation (involving a case of porn), not through network analysis or digital detection, but because a printer would run out of paper every night. The book screamed novice to me; with a lack of details and underwhelming hacks, it felt forced while trying to be cool and ground breaking. It was also hard to keep track of all the characters because there were no consistent characters throughout the story other than the main charter "Alien". At the end I just kept asking myself why, why did I just read a biography on this random person in infosec? I think some people find this version of hacking entertaining, but I am the wrong audience for this as I was ultimately unimpressed with the hacks or the journey and I didn't really learn anything. Jeremy runs a personal site, which answers some questions, such as the level of authenticity presented in this book. This is a non-fiction story, but he has taken liberties and changed the names to keep it largely anonymous. That was one of my major gripes with the book, which is that I couldn't verify things I was reading as I was going along, which I do with most other non-fiction books. As you've seen with my other reviews, I tend to rate books higher when you can verify the details, and even higher when they cite their sources and link to more details! Finally, I debated not publishing this review, as I've been leaving most of my reviews below 5 stars in draft mode, but this was too cringe worthy to let alone.