Computers and science fiction – an essay - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 354

down. The signals on Amtrak's New York to Washington line have failed,
precipitating a head-on collision. Air traffic control at LAX has collapsed. A
bomb has exploded at an army base in Texas. And so forth …
The game resumes a couple of days later. Things have gone from bad to
worse. The power's down in four northeastern states, Denver's water supply
has dried up, the US ambassador to Ethiopia has been kidnapped, and
terrorists have hijacked an American Airlines 747 en route from Rome …
When suddenly, the satellites over North America all go blind.… 35

The threat of cyberwarfare has now become an all-too-real possibility with the
advent of almost undetectable rootkits and the rise of botnets. With the crea-
tion of the Stuxnet worm, capable of subverting commercial industrial control
systems, an attack on critical infrastructure such as that envisaged by Carlin
has become more likely.
One of the world experts on rootkits, Mark Russinovich, has written a novel
called Zero Day about a large-scale cyberterrorist attack. The damage caused by
the fictional attack is summarized as follows:

• We estimate that 800,000 computers were struck and suffered signifi-•

cant damage of one kind or another.
To date, 23 deaths have been directly attributed to the various viruses. •

• Three nuclear power plants shut down and took more than one month

to come back online.
The air traffic control system crashed in 11 airports, the largest of which

•

was Chicago-O'Hare. No incidents occurred.
The Navy lost contact with its ballistic missile submarine fleet for eight •

days. Emergency measures in place prevented any accident.
The electric power grid in the Pacific Northwest was shut down for •

three days.
We estimate a loss of $4 billion in the private sector and an additional

•

$1 billion in government loss. 36

One of the truly scary features of the novel is that it shows that it does not take
a rogue nation to launch a very damaging cyberattack against our fragile cyber-
infrastructure. Only a small team of terrorists is needed to launch viruses that
can spread across the Internet and cause major damage and death. Russinovich
describes the threat of such viruses graphically:

The viruses were always there, permanent, relentless. They never tired,
never became frustrated, required no fresh direction. As they pressed their
electronic nose to the security wall of each computer, they probed for that
little mistake written into a program that allowed them to gain entry,
undetected, undeflected by firewalls or antivirus programs.
These worms descended to the depths of the computer, burrowing down
and existing like a living parasite, planting themselves within the operating
system. They were designed to resist detection. To mask themselves further,
they worked slowly at replicating clones, sending out new versions of
themselves to seek new computers at an all but undetectable rate. They were
a cancer on the Internet and on every computer they entered. They grew,
spreading their electronic web into every space they could find. This was the