The enemy WITHIN

It’s a Silence Of The Lambs for the internet age – criminals striking from inside a PC. And the truth is even scarier than Stav Sherez’s fiction

It’s a terrifying new world,’ says Stav Sherez with a shudder. ‘The genie is out of the bottle, and we can’t put it back.’ Any decent crime thriller will aim to have you double-locking the front door before diving into bed at night, but Sherez’s brilliant novel, The Intrusions, inspires new levels of fear and paranoia. It pitches readers into the horrifying world of ‘ratting’, ‘trolling’ and ‘slaving’, where the forces of evil arrive via your laptop rather than through your bathroom window. Little wonder The Intrusions is making waves. In July, the book, the third in a series featuring Sherez’s flawed police protagonists Jack Carrigan and Geneva Miller, won the coveted Theakston’s Old Peculier crime novel of the year. And Ian Rankin has described it as ‘a Silence Of

The Lambs for the internet age’.

The plot centres around a practice known as ‘ratting’. By sending out targeted spam emails containing a coded virus, a criminal takes control of his victim’s computer remotely. Once inside the PC, they can ambush programmes and delete files. Worse, they can hijack the webcam to spy on their prey. Having recorded their victim’s most intimate moments, they post the footage on the dark web. In the case of The

Intrusions, such an attack has fatal consequences.

Thank goodness this is fiction, you think. Not so fast. ‘It’s all true,’ says Sherez, 48. ‘It scared me more than any research I’ve ever done. I’ve researched the Holocaust and child soldiers in Africa, but this is so much more current. I finished the book in 2016, and people had already been arrested, charged and imprisoned for ratting. It’s the idea of the peeping Tom or stalker, but it’s far more frightening when they’re inside your computer.’

Did his research involve delving into the dark web, the internet’s sprawling, anonymous and often lawless underbelly? ‘Not personally – I was worried about losing everything on my computer! I have friends who write non-fiction about that stuff, and they use a separate computer to go on the dark web.’

Sherez has been hailed for ‘moving the genre forward’ – but pushing the boundaries of crime fiction was not his initial intention. ‘I started writing the book as much more of a straight serial-killer thriller, and it wasn’t working,’ he says. ‘I realised that none of what I’d described would be happening now. It would all be done by computers.

‘I went back and rewrote the first 100 pages. Carrigan and Miller have realised that the way you catch paedophiles, or terrorists, is through internet tracking, data processing, chain linking. Technology has given me and other writers a whole new set of tools that weren’t available to James Ellroy or Agatha Christie.’

The idea of hijacking the web for nefarious purposes could hardly be more timely, too. ‘You realise that this is undermining democracy on a major level. In a way, the freedom of the internet has become a shackle. We can’t fight it, we’ll just have to learn to handle it as best we can. It’s hard to create legislation that stops the malefactors but allows everyone else to have an open and free internet. It’s always that balancing act. The law will have to do it bit by bit, through trial and error.’

Sherez says that the system is currently struggling to cope. ‘I asked a policeman a couple of years ago if their work really was changing. He said, “Absolutely.”

‘They’re finding it very hard to adapt, and are having to recruit younger, more computer-literate people.’

As for Sherez, he’s learned to be cautious of technology. ‘I’ve never owned a mobile phone because it’s too much of an intrusion. If you’re constantly buzzed with information, you’re less likely to want to talk with someone.’ Or, indeed, read a book.

n The Intrusions is out now in paperback, published by Faber & Faber, priced €11.20.

‘It scared me more than any research I’ve ever done – even on the Holocaust’