The Ransomware Hunting Team

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

By: Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

Narrated by: BD Wong

A 2023 Audie Award winner!

"Ever careful in his pacing, BD Wong narrates this cybersecurity tale as if he's pitching the story for a movie."—AudioFile

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 Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2022 Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Best ransomware book. Informative and entertaining

Renee and Dan do a fantastic job explaining ransomware and showing the human aspect of this challenging topic.

Too Long and Meandering But Still Cool

Hard to keep track of who is who in this thing because it jumps around so much. Didn’t have the cleanest narrative but it’s super interesting. I would have liked to learn more about ransomware and the tech itself, and less the minutiae of every character’s background. BD Wong rocks so I could listen to him read the phone book.

Enlightening

It was an excellent peak behind the curtain of ransom wear, and those who combat it. Very informative, well written, I liked it.

very interesting but sort of repetitive.

the author makes the story a bit more interesting by giving the backgrounds of some of hunters but hearing how they broke one code sounds pretty much like how they broke the next code. it is a story everyone should hear though to know how pervasive cyber crime is and how vulnerable we all are.

Too much background info

So much detailed information about the people's families and background makes it quite boring. i was expecting more about tech and ransomware and the people involved. not their entire family history and pets name.