Daniel Golden

How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates

The Price of Admission

Renee Dudley

The Improbable Adventures of the Misfits Who Are Trying to Save the World from Cybercrime--One Hack at a Time

Ransomware Hunting Team

An eye-opening critique of American higher education exposes the corrupt and elitist admissions practices at many of America's top colleges that favor the children of the wealthy and powerful over more qualified students.

How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges--and who Gets Left Outside the Gates

A real-life technological thriller about a band of eccentric misfits taking on the biggest cybersecurity threats of our time. "What Michael Lewis did for baseball in Moneyball, Dudley and Golden do brilliantly for the world of ransomware and hackers. Cinematic, big in scope, and meticulously reported, this book is impossible to put down." —Doug Stanton, New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers Scattered across the world, an elite team of code crackers is working tirelessly to thwart the defining cyber scourge of our time. You’ve probably never heard of them. But if you work for a school, a business, a hospital, or a municipal government, or simply cherish your digital data, you may be painfully familiar with the team’s sworn enemy: ransomware. Again and again, an unlikely band of misfits, mostly self-taught and often struggling to make ends meet, have outwitted the underworld of hackers who lock computer networks and demand huge payments in return for the keys. The Ransomware Hunting Team traces the adventures of these unassuming heroes and how they have used their skills to save millions of ransomware victims from paying billions of dollars to criminals. Working tirelessly from bedrooms and back offices, and refusing payment, they’ve rescued those whom the often hapless FBI has been unwilling or unable to help. Foremost among them is Michael Gillespie, a cancer survivor and cat lover who got his start cracking ransomware while working at a Nerds on Call store in the town of Normal, Illinois. Other teammates include the brilliant, reclusive Fabian Wosar, a high school dropout from Germany who enjoys bantering with the attackers he foils, and his protégé, the British computer science prodigy Sarah White. Together, they have established themselves as the most effective force against an escalating global threat. This book follows them as they put their health, personal relationships, and financial security on the line to navigate the technological and moral challenges of combating digital hostage taking. Urgent, uplifting, and entertaining, Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden’s The Ransomware Hunting Team is a real-life technological thriller that illuminates a dangerous new era of cybercrime.

A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime

The Ransomware Hunting Team

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Daniel Golden exposes how academia has become the center of foreign and domestic espionage—and why that is troubling news for our nation's security. Grounded in extensive research and reporting, Spy Schools reveals how academia has emerged as a frontline in the global spy game. In a knowledge-based economy, universities are repositories of valuable information and research, where brilliant minds of all nationalities mingle freely with few questions asked. Intelligence agencies have always recruited bright undergraduates, but now, in an era when espionage increasingly requires specialized scientific or technological expertise, they’re wooing higher-level academics—not just as analysts, but also for clandestine operations. Golden uncovers unbelievable campus activity—from the CIA placing agents undercover in Harvard Kennedy School classes and staging academic conferences to persuade Iranian nuclear scientists to defect, to a Chinese graduate student at Duke University stealing research for an invisibility cloak, and a tiny liberal arts college in Marietta, Ohio, exchanging faculty with China’s most notorious spy school. He shows how relentlessly and ruthlessly this practice has permeated our culture, not just inside the US, but internationally as well. Golden, acclaimed author of The Price of Admission, blows the lid off this secret culture of espionage and its consequences at home and abroad.

Daniel Golden

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