The Blue Nowhere

I have just finished reading a computer-related novel from Jeffery Deaver, called The Blue Nowhere which i just borrowed from one of my colleagues last week. This novel was talking about sadistic hacker, code-named Phate, sets his sights on Silicon Valley and killing his targets. He infiltrates their computers, invades their lives, and lures them to their deaths. To Phate, each murder is like a big, challenging computer hack: every time he succeeds, he must challenge himself anew— by taking his methodology to a higher level, and aiming at bigger targets.

The good guy was Wyatt Gillette, Phate's ex-friend which was imprisoned for hacking. He was a great hackers, called Valleyman and along with Phate, he created what's called KOA (Knight of Access) and both of them are genius hackers, until someday he found out that Phate was becoming more and more dangerous. He finally report Phate to the police and they arrested Phate. This is the background why Phate had lost his humanity side. He thought what's left with him was his computer and also a new space, called Blue Nowhere (an alias for Cyberspace/Internet).

If you read this novel, you will be surprised by how cool the social engineering was done here. Phate used a high level social engineering method to lure his victim and to get close to them before he could stab his Ka-Rab knife into his victim's chest (for Phate, to kill his victim from a close range is more challenging rather than bombing a whole school). It's also tells us how dangerous social engineering could be if he/she has access to a powerful supercomputer which can be used to control most of things in your state (for example, he sabotage the traffic control, infiltrate FBI and give orders to arrest Wyatt Gillette, and many more).

One thing that confused me. I saw the translated version at the official site, but i don't see any Indonesian version on it, but i was reading the Indonesian version. Strange.

Well, if you have time and you really like to read a novel, mostly computer-related, try to read this novel. You will like it.