With a name like CyberStorm, and the words "full scale cyber attack" on the back cover, I immediately had visions of the movie Live Free or Die Hard. That is, a hacker bent on revenge is slowly bringing down the Internet and the power grid. Enter Bruce Willis, who works with Justin Long and Kevin Smith to put a stop to the villains master plan, complete with over-the-top action sequences and the impossible physics of gravity defying stunts.
This is not that kind of story.
Well, it really is - but not told from the perspective of a Bruce Willis action-hero character. This story is told from the viewpoint of an ordinary man in New York City. A man who tries to survive this attack with his family and friends - with a major snowstorm occurring a the same time. I don't believe there have been many attempts to tell a story like this before, in a novel or in a movie (I haven't seen the film The Day After Tomorrow, but that might be close - though without the cyber attack). This was quite a different tale from anything I've read before.
Imagine the scenario.
First, your smart phone is no longer able to access the Internet consistently, and it gets slower. Next, you are unable to send/receive text messages or listen to voice mails. You can't reach your spouse on the phone, and their "errand" is taking way longer than you expected.
Then your internet connection on your laptop is slow and flaky, so you have no access to email and either limited or non-existent access to web pages, so you aren't getting any news of what is going on. Then you realize that you have now lost contact with your spouse for several hours and a major snowstorm has begun. Then the news starts reporting plane crashes, virus outbreaks, and there are rumors of non-US vehicles in US airspace. Of course, you can verify none of this - you can't tell what is happening outside due to the storm. All you have is the vague speculations being reported on CNN.
Then, things get even worse.
The power goes out. It briefly comes back, but then goes out for good. The storm becomes a blizzard. Now you are trapped in your Manhattan apartment with no heat, limited food, and no access to information aside from the vague, unverifiable reports you get from the radio.
The snow starts to accumulate to a depth of 1 - 2 feet and is not showing any sign of letting up. The temperature drops much lower than expected for the time of year. There is widespread panic, and nobody seems to know what is going on. As if things weren't bad enough, let's heap a little more misfortune on the characters - at the same time, you start to have family problems, leading to trust issues, adding an additional dimension to the survival challenge.
Would you be prepared if this unlikely scenario occurred tomorrow? And, to make matters worse, you live on Manhattan Island with millions of other people.
This story contains elements of The Walking Dead TV show. No, not the zombies! (Story idea: Zombie Cyber Apocalypse - words that have never been strung together before!) No, I'm referring to the drama of survival. Trying to survive in competition (mostly for resources like food, medicine, and heating fuel) with others who are also trying to survive - perhaps at the expense of others. In this case, people who live in your building, perhaps on the same floor, or on a different floor, and the people you might encounter on the street. Who do you trust? Who do you really know? Who can you count on when the chips are down?
This was a great read involving a new kind of war - Cyber War. A cyber attack that takes out the entire infrastructure of the United States. This is a horrifying concept.
One of the things I really liked about this story was that there were no John McClane hero-type characters. These are everyday, ordinary, fragile, people who are concerned about their family - just like those of us in the real world (I think this is one of the reasons that The Walking Dead is so popular - the characters aren't heroes, and they have real problems).
This story reminds me of a statement that was made in the James Cameron movie The Terminator. The character Kyle Reese states the following about who started the war in his future:
"Defense network computers. New...powerful...hooked into everything, trusted to run it all."
This was back in 1984. At least ten years ago, if not longer, a friend tried out a new oven that was Internet accessible. You could place it in refrigeration-mode, put a turkey inside, and leave it there. Hours later, you could connect to it via a web browser from your office and start the cooking process so that it would be ready when you got home. Within the last 5 years I have also seen commercials for applications that you can use from your smart phone to turn off the lights and lock doors to your house from a remote location.
So, if baby monitors with wireless cameras can be hacked, then why not these applications? If the entire power grid and defense network is Internet accessible, why couldn't that be hacked as well?
The Internet was originally designed back in the early 1990's - but not with security in mind. Security has evolved as a bunch of features added on top of the Internet structure for decades, but security issues continue to be found (Windows 10 just had a security vulnerability revealed recently by Google). Attaching critical systems to a network like this seems like a really bad idea.
I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to be on the edge of their seat while witnessing this terrifying world of speculative possibility. At the time of the writing of this review, Twitter and several other services were taken down by a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the Dyn DNS servers, which have apparently been probed for months to determine potential weaknesses.
It kind of makes you wonder - is CyberStorm just a work of fiction? Or could this nightmare scenario actually be played out someday?
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