It's hard to have confidence in the author's assessment of security on the Internet when he knows so little of the technology. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is said to be a system whereby a group of computers share a single address. That's not a VPN (which is a system of network management, and possibly encryption): it's a description of NAT (Network Address Translation). True, a VPN can, and fairly often does, use NAT in its operations, but the carelessness is concerning. This may seem to be pedantic, but it leads to other errors. For example, Glenny asserts that running a VPN is very difficult, but that encryption is easy, since encryption software is available on the Internet. While it is true that the software is available, that availability is only part of the battle. As I keep pointing out to my students, for effective protection with encryption you need to agree on what key to use, and doing that negotiation is a non-trivial task. Yes, there is asymmetric encryption, but that requires a public key infrastructure (PKI) which is an enormously difficult proposition to get right. Of the two, I'd rather run a VPN any day. It is, therefore, not particularly surprising that the author finds that the best way to describe the capabilities of one group of carders was to compare them to the fictional "hacking" crew from "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." The activities in the novel are not impossible, but the ability to perform them on demand is highly unlikely. This lack of background colours his ability to ascertain what is possible or not (in the technical areas), and what is likely (out of what he has been told). Sticking strictly with media reports and indictment documents, Glenny does a good job, and those parts of the book are interesting and enjoyable. The author does let his taste for mystery get the better of him: even the straight reportage parts of the book are often confusing in terms of who did what, and who actually is what.