Worm: The First Digital World War
Mark BowdenBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
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.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Veteran journalist Mark Bowden is best known for his battlefront bestsellers Black Hawk Down and Guests of the Ayatollah, but in Worm, he turns to a truly global war that might have already invaded your home. In late 2008, digital experts first became aware of Conficker, a devilishly intricate virus that infected as many as 12 million computers in 200 countries. Worm tracks the double-edged high-tech hunt to find the culprits and neutralize the virus they implanted, taking you inside the strange world cyber-crime fighters, which includes both professionals and good-guy amateurs. A riveting, scary read.
Peter W. Singer
The book is well-written and informative, capturing a key episode in a fast-moving field we all need to better understand.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Bestselling Black Hawk Down author Bowden follows a group of white-hat computer experts who came together to fight Conficker, malware that surfaced in late 2008 and appeared poised to take over millions of computers running Windows Operating System on April 1, 2009. Bowden shows how “The Cabal” struggled to stay ahead of the Conficker worm as it evolved in the course of four months into ever more threatening incarnations. The author takes readers behind the scenes, showing the security specialists’ increasing frenzy, not to mention occasional infighting, as they worked to defeat the worm. Along the way, the author lucidly explains how malware can take over computers as well as how the very openness of the Internet makes it vulnerable to attack. “If no one is ultimately responsible for the Internet, then how do you police and defend it?” he asks. But while Bowden presents the Cabal’s efforts to defeat Conficker as an epic good vs. evil battle, the actual stakes are never entirely clear. Even the computer researchers have no way of knowing whether Conficker will set off “Cybarmageddon,” or will amount to no more than an elaborate April Fool’s joke. (Oct.)Library Journal
Not those squishy things but something much more revolting: the Conficker computer worm first noticed in November 2008 that goes after the Microsoft Windows operating system. It's now said to control millions of government, business, and home computers worldwide. Bowden (Black Hawk Down) helps us worry about the consequences.Kirkus Reviews
From the author of Black Hawk Down, a different sort of blood-and-thunder heroism narrative, out on the frontiers of cybercrime.
Journalist Bowden (The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL, 2008, etc.) enthusiastically explains that world commerce faces serious threats from malware, especially "botnets," networked computers with a customized hidden infection that can be triggered by the malware programmer for any number of vicious effects. The largest such threat to date became known as Conficker when it surfaced abruptly in 2008. Much of Bowden's narrative documents the work of a disparate, volunteer group of early Internet pioneers, ex-hackers and driven cyber-security professionals who came together, mostly online, to form the Conficker Working Group or (its preferred name) The Cabal. Initially, the group felt confident in their collective, improvised efforts to minimize the worm's ability to infect individual computers and form a botnet; they were thus increasingly alarmed when Conficker was twice upgraded in sophistication by its mysterious programmers. Worse, their attempts to alert federal authorities were met with comical paranoia and ineptitude. Since Conficker functioned by randomly infecting large quantities of domain names, it was particularly difficult to counteract; yet, after much tension, the activation date for the botnet came and went to no apparent effect. Bowden notes that "the prospect of nothing happening...had actually become the prevailing theory of The Cabal itself." Still, Cabal members and Bowden both insist that the danger was not overstated. The author concludes that Conficker proves that "carefully tailored targeted attacks" are the wave of the future, using as an example the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iranian nuclear-production facilities. Bowden is a sharp, funny writer who can convey a complex narrative in crisp terms, but due to the subject matter, this remains an airy and less-engaging book than his best-known works.
A brief, punchy reminder of our high-tech vulnerabilities.