Kim Zetter

Zetter tells the story of Stuxnet, a remarkable piece of malware intended to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. The narrative is both technical and political, and Zetter fuses both stories into a compelling whole.

The technical bits read like a hacker's detective story, as computer security professionals piece together clues about what the virus does and why. I found Zetter's discussion quite easy to follow, despite Stuxnet's Byzantine structure and objectives.

The political reporting is also show more thorough and enlightening. I remember watching and reading news reports drawing contradictory conclusions about Iran's nuclear capabilities. Zetter's details provide a context for all of those mixed signals.

Altogether, it's an accessible account of a complicated subject in a complicated context. Recommended. show less

Countdown to Zero Day is the story of the discovery and decoding of "the world's first digital weapon," Stuxnet. Personally I think that subtitle is a little hyperbolic, but subtitles need to be, to sell copies. Stuxnet was used to infect and disable machinery used in Iran's nuclear enrichment program.

This book is like a fantastic beach read for a certain kind of computer geek. And I mean that as a compliment (it's also sort of a contradiction: what self-respecting computer geek hangs out on show more a beach?).

Zetter spins a fast-paced, exciting story that has all the elements of a great thriller -- plus the added appeal of being true. It's the best cyber-crime tale I've read since Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. She also makes the "cyber" part of the story (an admittedly pretty large part of this) very accessible to people who aren't compulsive techies, though I suspect one would have to have some interest in computers and coding for the book to be interesting at all. Zetter wisely squirrels many of the gorier details away in extensive footnotes, keeping the main narrative swift and deadly.

It even has compelling characters.

The only thing that keeps this from being completely top shelf for me is ... wait for it ... it's about security holes in the Windows operating system which, ultimately, is kind of like talking about peanuts in peanut butter. show less

This is the story of the first and so far only digital weapon to be used. Stuxnet played havoc with centrifuges used by Iran to refine uranium for its nuclear program, a program many feared was intended to produce nuclear weapons. The story is far more complex and convoluted than you may have read in the news, and it raises profound questions about government policy and the future of warfare. Kim Zetter, Wired's award-winning journalism, takes us down the rabbit hole to explore what is show more known--and what is not--about the development, use, and future of cyberweaponry.

I'm tempted to give this book five stars, but some parts of it may be too heavy for some readers. I don't fault Zetter for this. It's the subject matter. She does a great job of explaining without dumbing down the material, but for all that my wife wasn't able to get past the first couple chapters. So be forewarned, some of it may overtax you. But if you can persist through to the end, you'll be astonished by the revelations and receive a great deal to think about. show less

In the acknowledgments Zetter writes of the difficulty of "Combining a narrative structure with complex technical details and a political-historical context that was as convoluted as the code, while still offering a compelling read and doing justice to the intense labor that researchers invested in their analysis of the code" -- which pretty much sums up her achievement. Inevitably some sections are less exciting than others, and in an ideal world all of those different strands might have show more been more closely integrated, but overall this book should serve as a model for serious popular non-fiction.

It was clearly deeply researched, and you can tell from both the main text and the footnotes how much effort and thought Zetter (as well, of course, as the experts she cites) put into piecing together the story and unravelling various small and large mysteries. The book is fairly dense with detail but still (mostly) flows as a compelling story, which is quite a balancing act. The technical explanations are very well done: Zetter doesn't assume a knowledgable reader, and of course she can't go right down to textbook-level detail, but she rejects the easy out of relying on fake explanation and meaningless metaphor -- as far as I can tell, her descriptions of how the malware works are about as accurate and detailed as is compatible with accessibility and ease of reading. show less