Book review: Worm

AS A writer, Mark Bowden scans the horizon then points to a distant danger the rest of the world cannot yet see.

Worm

Mark Bowden

Grove Press, £16.99

Stephen McGinty

In his first book, Black Hawk Down, he meticulously recreated a black day for the US military when an attempt to arrest a warlord in Mogadishu in 1993 went horrendously wrong. The urban firefight that was unleashed was a bitter taste of the bloody banquet that the US army would endure in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In time his new book, Worm, about the computer virus Conficker, may yet prove as prophetic. Unfortunately for the reader (but fortunately for everyone who uses the internet), the digital insurgents have not yet opened fire en masse .

Just as in Killing Pablo, in which Bowden took us behind the scenes of the search for the world’s most notorious drug baron, in Worm, he unscrews the backs of our computers and takes us on a guided tour of the internet where he reveals the chilling extent of its vulnerability. As he writes: “If you told people there was a dirty bomb in Times Square, they would get it immediately. But to grasp the threat posed by Conficker, you had to understand how the internet worked, how vital it had become to modern society, and how much damage someone could do with millions of computers all pulling at the same time on the same rope.”

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Bowden succeeds in explaining not only the threat posed by Conficker, but in characterising the band of computer experts who pitted themselves against the virus. The problem for any reader expecting an action-packed finale is their relative success, but anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of our digital age is advised to snap up a copy. In the early chapters, Bowden writes of “the Glaze”, the sheen of boredom that shimmers over civilians when tech-heads explained their actions. It it is to his credit that he avoids the Glaze altogether.

Mark Bowden is at the Aye Write! festival in Glasgow next Sunday