‘Worm: The First Digital World War’
by Mark Bowden
Atlantic Monthly Press, 245 pp., $25
Mark Bowden is the kind of reporter capable of taking any subject, no matter how complex or far-flung, and nailing it — be it warfare in Somalia (“Black Hawk Down”), the hunt for a Colombian drug lord (“Killing Pablo”) or the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran (“Guests of the Ayatollah”). Professional football? He’s done it. Criminal folly in Philadelphia? Ditto.
With writing chops as formidable as his reporting, Bowden seems willing — eager, even — to take on any subject or challenge. In the world of nonfiction, Bowden is an ace, a writer with guts and gusto.
All of which is to say, if there’s a writer who could have made “Worm: The First Digital World War” work, Bowden’s that writer. The subject is complicated and the story is a moving target. It starts in the fall of 2008 with the discovery of Conficker, a computer worm of evil-genius workmanship, scary reach and the potential to cause all kinds of nastiness. It ends with — well, it doesn’t really end, at least not in any way that satisfies, and therein lies part of the problem.
Bowden takes us inside the fight to defeat Conficker, introducing us to a group of cybersecurity experts who come together to dissect the worm, anticipate its moves and devise counters.
The book does a terrific job of setting the groundwork, turning the highly technical into something comprehensible. Even a sentence like “The worm employed the Chinese Exploit to enter Port 445, taking advantage of the buffer overflow to write itself in as a Dynamic-Link Library (DLL) — the device Microsoft programmers crafted to enable computers to exchange data” begins to make sense. Sort of.
The book succeeds as a warning (the Internet is vulnerable, and that’s a very bad thing) and as political analysis, showing how disengaged the U.S. government has been in the face of this threat. Bowden makes malware come alive, tracing the history of viruses and worms while teasing out the cultural conflicts that threaten to make the Internet less about sharing and more about stealing — or worse.
But for all its merits, “Worm” has a peculiar feel to it, with dramatic flourishes that feel forced. Bowden likens the good guys to the X-Men, with occasional references to Batman, the Justice League of America, ninjas and Sam Spade. They are the White Hats, the übergeeks, the “warriors for civilization,” fighting a Digital World War.
These grand references come with a barrage of exclamation points, ellipses and italics, a kind of fireworks (“the Internet was … on fire!“) that seems determined to compensate for the fact that the good guys’ counterstrokes often take such undramatic form as buying up lots and lots of domain names. The effect borders on trivializing more than elevating, lending a cartoon quality to work that was, and is, admirable and principled.
The other problem with such buildup is the lack of payoff. The worst fears surrounding Conficker have yet to materialize. That’s good for us but not so good for the book. Superheroes need supervillains. Otherwise, you’ve got The X-Men vs. Spam.
Ken Armstrong: karmstrong@seattletimes.com
Ken Armstrong is a Seattle Times reporter and co-author of “Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity,” winner of the 2011 Edgar Award for best fact crime book.
Article source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2016551867_br23worm.html?syndication=rss
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