The Back Door Man, by Dave Buschi

ISBN: 9780983915034
Amazon ID: B005Q0X6C8

If you know nothing, or almost nothing, about computer networks, cybersecurity and data centres, then you can probably enjoy this book.

It's not a bad story, but the author's ignorance of technical details (which are important to the story), and the lack of a competent proof-reader (both technically and linguistically) make it difficult to overlook these faults if you know enough to notice them.

The great British comedian Eric Morecambe performed a sketch with the pianist, composer and conductor André Previn, in which Eric plays the piano badly, and André tells him that he's playing all the wrong notes.

Eric replies that he's playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order.

The technical terminology in this book is very much like that - plenty of cybersecurity and plain I.T. words appear in the text, but not necessarily in the right contexts. It's as though the author skimmed through The Hacker's Handbook and lifted a bunch of good-sounding words and phrases, and then fitted them in to the story without asking anyone, who really knew what they meant, whether they made sense in those places.

Given that this is a book about cybercrime, it would have been good to have it proof-read by someone competent with networks, and IP addresses, and the like.

If you don't know how to write about this stuff properly, don't try to - just refer to it in the story. If you're going to put in this sort of detail, it's important to get it right.

Also, even if you do know the stuff in detail, don't try to show off and confuse the reader by putting programming code into the story - it achieves nothing that simply describing what's going on won't, and does so far better.

In chapter 44, several (very silly) IPv4 network ranges are quoted.

Then, in chapter 64, IP addresses are referred to as "128-bit numbers", and contain "both the location of the source and destination nodes."

Firstly, IPv4 addresses are 32 bits in length, whereas IPv6 addresses are 128 bits long; secondly, each of these is either a source address or a destination address. Nothing ever contains both, unless you're referring to an IP packet header, which is at least 20 bytes (160 bits) for IPv4, or 40 bytes (320 bits) for IPv6.

A team of people are trying to keep in contact with each other whilst they're in (a) a high-security data centre, which is (b) underground.

They're trying to use Bluetooth headsets, some undefined type of personal radios which are "all patched in to the same frequency to hear each other's transmissions", and they notice that "their cell phones had been working sporadically ever since they got here."

Later we are told that the building has two foot thick concrete walls, and also has shielding to protect the equipment it houses from Electro-Magnetic Interference.

So, no great surprise that radio, of any type or frequency, does not work well there, in fact I think it's stretching credulity to suggest that it can work at all.

Someone sends out a series of emails. These contain "an imbedded [sic] malware program."

The interesting thing about this malware is that "nothing needed to be opened; the email didn't even need to be viewed. It just needed to find the inboxes and slip past their spam filters."

So, the recipients are apparently using email clients which will execute the content of an email which has not been opened or viewed, but is just sitting in the inbox. That sounds even worse than Microsoft Outlook.

The author clearly does know, in some detail, the correct and original meaning of the word "hacker", and goes to some lengths to explain it, but still manages to fall into using the term in its television- and tabloid-news corrupted form, about people trying to break in to computer systems. It's a pity really, and in some ways seems worse than just not knowing the difference and using the modern techno-criminal version of the word throughout the book.

The author uses this curious term, apparently to mean "continuously".

If it were "365/24" then it could clearly mean 365 days (in a year) at 24 hours (per day), which makes some sort of sense - "every hour for a year".

If it were "24/7" then it could mean 24 hours (per day) for 7 days (in a week), which also makes some sort of sense - "every hour for a week".

But "365/24/7" can only be "every hour for 7 years", which is meaningless. What significance does 7 years have?

Some odd words and phrases have passed by the proof-reader:

• "Psuedocode"
• "The rabbit who thinks he's a wolf always faces a grim end."
  • Is that some phrase I've never heard of (and Google doesn't admit to either), or is the author just putting wods together to try to create new proverbs?
• "His mind was a gelatinous mold of free-flowing garbage."
  • No comment.
• "With baited breath, James watched the man."
  • Hm, what do you bait breath with (and what are you trying to catch)? I think "bated" was the word being looked for here.
• "All those worms wrecking their havoc."
  • Can you wreck havoc any more than havoc is already wrecked? Maybe "wreaking" would fit better in the sentence.
• The terms "server" and "rack" appear to be used the wrong way round, or sometimes interchangeably.
  • "Row upon rows of high-density servers, which topped out just above head height, were tightly organised."
  • "Each of those servers - 'racks' - housed a dozen thin server blades."
• The blade servers are also remarkably big and heavy:
  • "Thing was less than a foot wide; about a foot and a half deep, and a little more than an inch in height. It weighed about twelve pounds…"
• "The desk … was probably as pricey as a sport's car."
  • An interesting place to put a greengrocer's apostrophe.
• A wealthy person has "six 55 inch plasma screens" in his office.
  • For a story with a copyright date of 2011, plasma screens seem like a quaint method of room heating.
• "he was looking at a guy that had every intention on killing him."
  • You have intentions of doing things, not on.
• Some cars are kept hidden. "They'd tucked them out sight, parking near the barn."
  • I'd like to add an "of" to that sentence.

In chapters 61 and 62, the power is being turned off in a data centre, by turning off a series of circuit breakers.

The final steps are reached and the person doing this closes the last series of breakers, then closes the last series of relays.

I've never seen a circuit breaker or relay which you turn off by closing it.

After the entire power in the data centre has been shut down, the servers are no longer running, the air conditioning is off, and only emergency lighting is still running on self-contained battery power, the person who shut it all down is somehow still able to use a laptop computer to access a wireless network (what powers the access point? Where does the network switch it's connected to get power from?) to view infra-red sensors around the building (where are they getting any power from?) and also to access the Internet (what's powering the switches, routers and firewalls in this place?).

In another part of the story, some people are hiding underneath a house (between the ground and the underside of the ground-floor flooring, which apparently is a plausible construction technique) which then gets set on fire, and they manage to escape from. When they arrive (in a vehicle) at another building, the children have somehow managed to have their cat with them.

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