About Mark Russinovich’s book “Zero Day: A Novel”

In the past, the review of new computer literature in addition to purely computer books was also one fiction. This was due to the fact that the author of this book is a well-known comrade in the computer world named Mark Russinovich , Microsoft Technical Fellow, founder of Sysinternals , author of several books, many articles on WinAPI and computer security, and indeed the famous guy in not such narrow circles.

During the time that has passed since that publication, I became better acquainted with Mark’s work, so now I can tell you more about his cyber thriller.



Let's try to draw a parallel between the work of the author of an art book, the director of the film and ... the programmer. After all, if you look from a certain point of view, you can see that the director of the film and author of the book simulate some reality in the same way as we model the subject area when designing a computer system. And the better we know the domain, the better our analytical abilities and the desire to create high-quality abstractions of this very area, the closer the resulting system will correspond to reality. The better it will work, the less glitches it will have and the less frustration the business users will have - experts in this subject area.
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The director, like the author of the book, models his fictional world, trying to emphasize important details from his point of view, abstracting from non-essential aspects. In most cases, this comes down to either simplifying certain abstractions or distorting reality, since the real work of a hacker will be just as uninteresting to a simple consumer as the doctor’s, special forces, or archaeologist’s days. We all know that there is no sound in outer space, and George Lucas knows about it, be sure, however, that it will be for Star Wars without the amazing sound effects of space battles. So some of these “errors” should be treated calmly. But besides this, there are more banal mistakes, when the director or the author, due to the lack of his own qualifications, distortions of reality become so significant that a knowledgeable specialist becomes either funny or incredibly sad.

Technically, the book “Zero Day: A Novel” stands apart due to the fact that the author himself is a world-renowned expert in the field of computer security, in a topic that is key in his book. As a result, Mark creates a fairly realistic model of the world from the point of view of a computer specialist, in which there are no overt technical blunders, and the shortcomings of his “abstraction” are encountered, they are associated more with its simplification, rather than with a misunderstanding of the work of a hacker or information security specialist. However, in this case another question remains open: if the book has no problems with the technical side, then how about the plot and the artistic component?
Let's imagine such a scenario: we take one of the books of Tom Clancy about Jack Ryan, halve it; we transfer the main character from the CIA analyst’s table (*) to the computer security department. We are changing the main theme of the book with drugs, an assassination attempt on a president or something like that, an unprecedented computer attack that could plunge a glorious North American country, along with the rest of the no less glorious Western world, into prolonged chaos. We leave fanatical Arabs; reckless but very smart Russians; bad Chechens; stupid leader; a couple of beautiful women (do not forget about the romantic relationship of the protagonist with at least one of them); we recall the tragedy of September 11, intervene in this regard Alcaida, led by Bin Laden himself; plentifully handle all this with computer jargon (**) and as a result we get a good cyber-thriller.

Of course, one should not expect anything supernatural from an artistic standpoint from this novel. In this book there are indeed several plot lines, each of which develops more or less independently, but the speed with which they come together is, nevertheless, too high; Yes, and the behavior of the characters often seems too implausible, and many plot twists - predictable. But I must say that most modern books suffer from such problems, the authors of which are not experts in computer security, so at the general level, the literary component of the book is not so prominent. And although this is the first experience of Mark in this field, we can safely say that his book is worth the time spent on it and will give pleasure to its reader.

Rating: 4 - I recommend.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - (*) Yes, Jack Ryan held many posts, ranging from CIA analyst to President of the United States. But let's imagine that we took from the shelf the book in which Jack held exactly the indicated position.
(**) There are a lot of computer terms in the book, and interesting historical facts. So, for example, when it comes to rootkits, Mark talks about the notorious case of detecting a rootkit from Sony. The author knows this as no one else, because it was he who in reality discovered him; but we must pay tribute, this fact is described in the third person and is not attributed to any of the heroes of the novel. In addition, the book contains hacker slang, of the form “I cn pass mesg myb. Wht do u wnt? ", Assembly code fragments and pieces of binaries.