Mark Russinovich

Finally, after two attempts to read it in the previous 2 or 3 years, I finished it on the third attempt, not completing it twice was not the fault of the novel, just my bad luck, as when I reach about 1 third of it, I got two busy at work and left it long enough to decide to leave it even longer to be able to start it again from the beginning, I gave it 5 stars because it was a great novel, technically sound, excellent thrilling events with almost perfectly formulated story, and I said show more almost because there was only one point that I didn't like, the writer with all respect to him as I'm familiar of his work in information security field, he didn't have information about muslims and how terrorism threatens muslims as well as none muslims, but anyway it is expected.

Spoiler Alert
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In the story every muslim mentioned is evil, it reminded me of that period during the cold war, when every Russian was feared and considered evil. generalizing like this is not a good thing, a simple search would have revealed that terrorists have killed more muslims than Americans or none muslims.
And having some fanatics who wants to cripple the world for religious reasons and in the same time drink alcohol and have sex with hookers, this was just ridiculous, more research should have done on how this people think and act would have been better.
Also I don't believe a sophisticated hacker like the Russian hacker in the story, who stored every thing in an external drive, would leave it unencrypted, this just does not fit the profile of a notorious hacker.
but the overall good story and I loved how he cleverly build every character, I recommend reading it, it was fun to read something related to my filed of work. show less

Drawing on a distinguished career in the computer world that included being one of the top dogs at Microsoft, Mark Russinovich has turned his experience with cybersecurity into a save-the-world thriller. The novel’s premise of terrorists using computers and the Internet to stage the next great offensive against the western world is both plausible and frightening. And while Russinovich has a more thorough grasp of the methods by which such an attack is possible, he fails to deliver a show more convincing story. The first two-thirds of the book reads more like a technical position paper rather than a thriller. Russinovich spends virtually all of his time engaged in dialog discussing how all these bad things can actually happen. After a hundred pages of it, I just stopped paying attention to all of the minutia. It reads like the kinds of conversations I’m sure the computer geeks sit around and have every day after work. Russinovich even provides us conversations in “geekeese” to try and decipher.

“JA33: Thr ws 1 gy tlling anthr abt sllng packgs and triggrs. Gttng good $ fr t.
D007: Any nme we knw?
JA33: Superphreak. He’s hndlng t rtkits, slick bstrd.
D007: Gv me t site. I’ll put smn on it fulltm.”

I’m not sure what is more frightening – that people actually communicate like this or that Russinovich felt readers needed to be subjected to it. And when the action final began so very late in the novel, he used every over-the-top thriller cliché without any sense of realism or even common sense. I couldn’t help but laugh at how silly it all became. Even the supposed “twist” at the end fell flat. By then, I just couldn’t have cared less.

Ultimately, Zero Day takes a very real and very frightening modern day threat and turns it into something as boring as reading stereo instructions. The geeks might run the world and the Internet might be the death of us all, but after reading Zero Day, it appears nobody will give a damn when the end comes. show less

Who knew that technogeek Mark Russinovich could write such an engaging thriller. Our hero Jeff Aiken, hired by a law firm to find out why their entire system had crashed, even though they had taken all of the standard protective measures, comes across a dastardly plot to crash systems vital to our everyday lives, as well as the economic well-being of the world.

Russinovich, with his years of Windows background certainly has the chops to tackle this cyber-terrorism thriller. At first, I was a show more bit put off by the movement between plot and esoteric computer stuff, but in the end, I realized that he had to educate us as well as scare the crap out of us. We all need to be more aware of the dangers of computing, as well as the obvious benefits. All of you are reading this review on your computers- do you know how dangerous that can be? Especially interesting thought since the author is one of the world's leading experts on the Windows operating system.

I sincerely hope that this is not the only book from Russinovich. We deserve to hear more from him. show less

I really wanted to like this book. The author is a software engineer; I'm a software engineer. He wrote a thriller; I want to write a thriller. He got published; I want to get published. I'm going to work hard to make my first published fiction better than this, however.

This is not unreadable, but it's overwritten and not compelling. I found myself skimming through it at a dizzying pace because not much was happening and most of the words on the page were giving superfluous backstory and show more description. This is supposed to be a thriller, pared down and full of impending doom and action. The author tried to create a sense of the former by describing the consequences of some computer crashes and tacked on the latter toward the end when our deskbound heroes suddenly started surviving gunfights. And then there is the gratuitous PG-13 sex thrown in to spice things up. What is needed are some stakes that really drive the story and the characters, not just a series of scenes that would barely support a Lifetime movie of the week.

There might be an interesting story in here somewhere. And some interesting characters. An agent or editor needed to tell Mr. Russinovich to go back and write another couple of drafts and find them. show less