The name Mark Russinovich should be familiar to anyone in the IT industry. He’s the co-founder of Winternals (which operated the Sysinternals website), now owned by Microsoft. Mark is a co-author of the Windows Internals books, and the creator of such tools as Process Explorer, Autoruns and Process Monitor, which are just a small subset of the Sysinternals tools arsenal, which is being used daily by programmers, IT and computer forensics experts around the world.
I first heard about Zero Day: A Novel in a Mysteries of Memory Management (part 1) talk Mark gave at PDC 2010, and was immediately intrigued with the premise - a cyber-terrorism thriller that provides an in-depth look into an unsettling scenario of a coordinated, world-wide cyber-attack. What made this particular take on the subject most appealing to me, is the author’s in-depth knowledge of computer threats - from viruses to malware, I was expecting a technically accurate, realistic read, and that’s exactly what I got!
Zero Day is Mark Russinovich’s debut novel, well-written in such way that appeals both to computer experts and novices. Mark does a great job balancing the technical explanations in such way that they do not bore more tech savvy readers, and do not to overwhelm others. Combined with a fast-paced action, Zero Day is a perfect page turner for anyone!
Some spoilers ahead!
Zero Day begins with series of seemingly unrelated events - an airplane suddenly loses control over the Atlantic, wrongful prescription of medicine causes numerous deaths in various hospitals, an assembly line robot suddenly begins spinning out of control. While this is going on, an ex-CIA analyst, now computer security expert, Jeff Aiken, is hired by a firm to discover the cause of the crash of their entire computer system, and loss of financial data. Together with his partner, a woman who works at the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) in the US-CERT, they begin to discover the connection between those events, and the link to a Russian hacker, whose online handle, Superphreak, is encoded within the viruses and rootkits they discover. These events seem to increase as the date moves closer to September 11, which makes Jeff suspect that Arab terrorists might be behind it all.