The world of publishers and literary agents is small. You know and trust each other. This trust has eroded over the past few years because a ghost was haunting the American book industry and its international business partners.
A mysterious actor emailed people he knew had access to unpublished books. He pretended to be a well-known person with whom one could have worked on the publication and sale of fresh fabrics. The font, the signature, the industry-standard abbreviations, everything was correct in the forged emails. You had to look very carefully to notice that a sender ended up with @ penguinrandornhouse.com instead of @ penguinrandomhouse.com, for example. He committed this identity theft for one purpose: to specifically ask about certain manuscripts.
Hundreds of people received such emails, sent manuscripts and never heard from again. So it is now in an indictment from the public prosecutor’s office in the Southern District of New York – because the specter has apparently been captured: The authorities accuse the Italian Filippo Bernardini of being behind the attacks. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is said to have worked for the London branch of the major American publisher Simon & Schuster. A colleague, then, as was often assumed, because he must have known his business well. The indictment does not answer the central question – namely what he wanted with all the manuscripts and what he did with them. What it was all about, this hacking attack on an entire industry.
It was rumored that there were criminal hackers in training
Apparently it wasn’t about money. Stolen manuscripts can be worth between a few thousand and several million euros, depending on the expected results of the auctions for advances and fees. Existences can depend on it because many in the industry work for their own account and initially bear the financial risk of book deals personally. The attacker also got his hands on titles for which the stolen publishers would have paid quite a bit to ensure their exclusivity; a Margaret Atwood manuscript, for example, is said to be among them, alongside those of numerous authors from the second and third series. But there were never any ransom demands. The manuscripts did not appear on the Internet either, as happened in 2014 with the script for Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight”. They were just gone.
The wildest speculations therefore blossomed over the years. “We thought it was the Russians,” a Swedish publisher told the new York Magazine, “but we’re the publishing industry. It’s not like we’re mining gold or making vaccines here.” Knowledge of relationships and processes in the industry indicated that the perpetrator came from within, but on the other hand, the attacks initially left no usable electronic traces. It was rumored that they might be training criminal hackers who had chosen the industry as an easy-to-crack training target.
According to the indictment, Bernardini also set up at least one so-called phishing page, which was confusingly similar to that of a New York literature scouting agency, in order to access the credentials of its employees. He is said to have had access to a database full of notes on planned titles. In this special branch of the literature industry, the world of literature scouts, many suspected the attacker. Scouts try to get information about unpublished books so that foreign publishers and film studios can seek the rights early on. They are, if you will, the spies of the literary world. The attacks sparked the imagination about this profession – and were therefore particularly threatening for the many independently working scouts.
Bernardini changed the industry: for a long time you never knew who was reading
But what advantage should Bernardini, a low employee of a large publishing house in rights distribution, have gained from getting all these unpublished literary texts? The deputy director of the New York FBI office Michael Driscoll seems to see him as a sad figure, a failed writer: “Mr. Bernardini is said to have stolen other people’s ideas, but he was not creative enough to get away with them,” he says. The case sounds similarly lively from the mouth of US prosecutor Damian Williams, who calls the uncovering of the case a “plot twist”.
Bernardini, however, has changed the industry. Since then, confidentiality agreements have also been concluded for smaller titles, contacts have been broken off and collaborations terminated. After all, you never knew whether the attacker was reading, maybe even sitting at the table. Whether Bernardini was working on behalf of someone what happened to the manuscripts remains unclear. He was released on Friday on $ 300,000 bail.