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.
