2016–2021 literary phishing thefts

Between 2016 and 2021, multiple prepublication manuscripts were stolen via a phishing scheme that investigators believed were conducted by an industry insider or insiders. In 2022, the FBI arrested Filippo Bernardini, a 29-year-old Italian citizen living in London and working for Simon & Schuster.

Background

Piracy in the publishing industry can have a negative impact on profits and royalties, and some industry professionals take extreme precautions with highly-anticipated releases. Translators for some books in The Da Vinci Code series were reported by Vulture to have been "required to work in a basement with security guards clocking trips to the bathroom".

Phishing attempts

In 2016, individuals involved in the publishing industry as authors, editors, agents, and publishers reported successful attempts to coerce authors into emailing unpublished manuscripts to email addresses impersonating publishing professionals known to those authors. The attempts were made by emailing from a domain name that resembled a legitimate one; the domain names were created using "common phishing techniques" such as using the letters "rn" to mimic the look of the letter "m" in an organizational name such as Macmillan, instead spelling it Macrnillan. The emails ostensibly came from other publishing industry professionals who worked closely with the target on the manuscript in question. In 2020, a cybersecurity firm found that the thief or thieves had registered over 300 domain names, and that their own security measures were amateurish. Some of the domains may have been paid for with stolen credit cards, according to Vulture.

Many of the phishing attempts involved approaching multiple people involved in a particular book's release; in the case of The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, the phisher, impersonating the book's Italian translator, emailed the book's publisher and the author's agent within minutes of each other.