My book signing Saturday at Book Soup in West Hollywood drew a great crowd of friends and fans. What a treat it was to be on such hallowed ground on the Sunset Strip, appearing just days after Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson and a few days before Girls’ creator Lena Dunham.

God of the Internet‘s plot seemed ever so timely as well, with hackers having launched an effective attack on a portion of the internet’s backbone the day before, rendering Twitter and PayPal and many other sites unreachable for large parts of the day. The large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack used every day devices like baby monitors and security cameras to flood servers with a firehose of traffic making it impossible for regular users to get to the site. The Mirai botnet used in the Oct. 21 hack is not unlike the fictional one I created for the hackers in God of the Internet, and yet another reminder of the need for basic security measures like changing administrative passwords from generics like “password” or “abc123.”

My huge thanks to everyone for coming out, with a special nod to Book Soup staff, Kim from LA for promoting the event, and Brad White of ICANN for being the smoothest emcee. Your support means the world to me.

Photos/Susanica Tam info@susanica.com