AUTHOR: Mark Bowden
STARTED: February 10, 2014
FINISHED: March 25, 2014
PAGES: 288
GENRE: Non-Fiction
FIRST SENTENCE: The new worm in Phil Porras's digital petri dish was announced in the usual way: a line of small black type against a white backdrop on one of his three computer screens, displaying just the barest of descriptors - time of arrival... server type... point of origin... nineteen columns in all.
SUMMARY: [From BN] Worm: The First Digital World War tells the story of the Conficker worm,
a potentially devastating piece of malware that has baffled experts and
infected more than twelve million computers worldwide. When Conficker was unleashed in
November 2008, cybersecurity experts did not know what to make of it.
Exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Windows, it grew at an
astonishingly rapid rate, infecting millions of computers around the
world within weeks. Once the worm infiltrated one system it was able to
link it with others to form a single network under illicit outside
control known as a “botnet.” This botnet was soon capable of
overpowering any of the vital computer networks that control banking,
telephones, energy flow, air traffic, health-care information — even the
Internet itself. Was it a platform for criminal profit or a weapon
controlled by a foreign power or dissident organization? Surprisingly, the U.S. government
was only vaguely aware of the threat that Conficker posed, and the task
of mounting resistance to the worm fell to a disparate but gifted group
of geeks, Internet entrepreneurs, and computer programmers. But when
Conficker’s controllers became aware that their creation was
encountering resistance, they began refining the worm’s code to make it
more difficult to trace and more powerful, testing the Cabal lock’s
unity and resolve. Will the Cabal lock down the worm before it is too
late? Game on.
THOUGHTS: Mark Bowden will, in all likelihood, always be my favorite non-fiction author. All of his books manage to capture the story in a way that makes them highly readable. That said, this was my least favorite of his books. Worm was all build up and no pay-off.
Unlike his other books which tend to move like fiction, Worm was very chronological. There was a very this, then this, then this pacing to it. While Bowden did expand on side-stories when necessary, this book felt a bit one-dimensional. All of the steps on discovering and handling conficker led to a big ole (spoiler) flop. The worm itself was DOA and I think this fact did not help the book. By the end, I wanted a pay-off to all the name and fact learning. Instead I got, "So.. yeah. It's out there, just toodling it's thumbs." Le sigh.
All in all, not a bad book, just a sophomoric effort from on my favorites. At least he got be to read about a topic I would otherwise ignore.
RATING: 6/10 [Good]
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