The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime

Written by Renee Dudley and 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Oct 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781250859358

Renee Dudley

Renee Dudley is a technology reporter at ProPublica. Previously, as an investigative reporter at Reuters, she was named a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work uncovering systematic cheating on college admissions tests. She started her career at daily newspapers in South Carolina and New England, and has won numerous journalism honors, including the Eugene S. Pulliam First Amendment Award.

Reviews for The Ransomware Hunting Team

[Natalia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Amazing story that sheds light on one of the most fascinating recent developments in cybercrime and organizations trying to fight it. I think everyone must read this to raise awareness and ability to defend themselves and their businesses against cyberattacks, which are getting more and more sophisticated and devastating. Very good narrator, speaks clearly, and has pleasant male voice. The author did a good job popularizing the subject and avoiding boring the readers with technical details or hard to understand math and computer science concepts. Subtracted one star because, as other reviewers noted, the book is unnecessarily long, padded with irrelevant and boring details of the personal lives of its many side characters, which I thought was a waste of reader's time.

[English speaking · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent !
Very well read.
Very interesting and informative. Thank goodness these unsung heros exsist.