Mark Bowden has established himself as a
high caliber non-fiction writer with numerous articles and book titles that
include Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo. This work has earned him
many awards including being a finalist for the National Book Award for Black Hawk Down and the Philadelphia
inquirer says, “When Mark Bowden writes, smart readers pay attention…” With
this reputation I realized that I was going to be in for an interesting read
when I picked up Worm: The First Digital
World War. But I hadn’t realized just how interesting it was going to be.
I chomped through this book in a day and
my dishes remained unwashed. I couldn’t stop because this is an eye-opening
look into the war that has been raging under our fingertips without the world
at large knowing about it. The war is cybercrime. The end goal? Making your
computer a zombie that has been enslaved to a botmaster that will employ your
computer to send spam. Or steal your personal information and bank codes. Or
use the combined might of your computer and the thousands of others under his
control to cripple and/or destroy a network of computers that runs a company,
corporation, governmental agency, or even a military organization.
That’s a lot of possibilities.
All of these scenarios are possible because
of our modern day infrastructure that relies so heavily on digital devices to
keep our lives running smoothly and the Internet that connects them all. With
enough digital power behind him, in the form of a large botnet under his
command, a skilled botmaster could wreak all of that havoc. In fact, there are
two even more heinous acts a botmaster could do with his horde of zombies. The
first is to crash the vital infrastructure of a country so that its people
would be without power, water, phones, ecommerce, or traffic control. The loss
of life and property from such an attack would be devastating, but if someone
had a large enough botnet they could crash the big kahuna of the globe. The
Internet.
If the Internet went down, the vital
infrastructure for every modern country would come to a grinding halt.
To do this, it would take a botnet that’s
millions of zombies strong. The likelihood of such a botnet being formed was
very slim considering most botnets reach a cap of several hundred thousand. Unfortunately
in December of 2008, a worm, or self-propagating program that creates botnets,
called Conficker came onto the digital scene. In one month Conficker zombified
over a million computers, evading the efforts of the entire computer security
world, and by the end of March 2009 had infected over 8 million computers.
The rapid spread of Conficker got the
immediate attention of a small group of elite members of the cyber community.
Initially their efforts against Conficker was their individual and piecemeal,
but eventually their work brought them together into a working group dubbed
‘The Cabal’. This group then works to trace the origins of the worm, limit the massive
damage the worm could cause, and seize the attention of The US Government
before the botmaster decided to become a multibillionaire through spam and
cyber theft, or bring the global community to its knees.
To relate this account to a general audience,
Worm details the inner workings of
computer software, malware, and the Internet with highly understandable
descriptions and examples. Then to add a human element to this otherwise
cerebral battle, Worm also relates
the varied and memorable individual stories of The Cabal’s members before
dealing with Conficker.
If you want to get the details of how
this story unfolds, I would highly recommend purchasing a copy of Worm: The First Digital World War.
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