Worm, Mark Bowden
Worm, Mark Bowden
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Worm
The First Digital World War

Author: Mark Bowden

Narrator: Christopher Lane

Unabridged: 6 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 10/14/2011

Synopsis

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.

About Mark Bowden

Mark Bowden is the author of seven books, including Black Hawk Down, Bringing the Heat, Killing Pablo, and Guests of the Ayatollah. He reported at The Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. He lives in the Philadelphia area.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Will on January 04, 2023

There is a war being waged in the world today. Not one of the many you read about in newspapers (or newsfeeds) or the ones you see on your televisions and computer screens. This war is going on while we sleep, eat our breakfasts and go about our business, in our cities and suburbs, in the homes of o......more

Goodreads review by Mark on March 02, 2019

overall i think the author did a reasonable job in recounting the story of conficker. i question whether he was the right person to tell the story. he also presents this strange emphasis on “us vs them” in terms of how the average person understands computers and the internet vs how experts understa......more

Goodreads review by Mal on April 06, 2017

The True Story of How Hackers Almost Brought Down the Internet -- and Still Could It’s out there. Waiting. Chances are, you’ve never heard of it. Nobody knows who controls it, or why. No one knows what it will do. But its destructive capacity is terrifying. Welcome to the world of cyberwar! And, no,......more

Goodreads review by Birq on May 22, 2012

I'm a pretty technical guy, having been in the IT industry for a couple decades, so I was expecting that this book would talk down to me a bit. I get it, it has to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and in this case, it is the literate-but-not-computer-expert crowd. It turns out it was written......more

Goodreads review by Jakub on November 25, 2012

The story of a hunt for a malevolent hacker is a well-worn genre. The first and best book of this sort was Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" which came out in the early 1990s. Clifford Stoll was the man who discovered and tracked down one of the first cyber-espionage attacks on the US; his book wa......more

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