Zero Day: A Novel by Mark Russinovich, Howard Schmidt Read Free Book Online Page A

IT people.” She forced herself to remain steady. She’d need a clear head to unravel this disaster.
    “Of course.” As they walked back through hallways toward the computer room, Winfield asked, “Why would anyone do something like this?”
    “I have no idea.”

8
    MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
    DMITROSVSKY ADMINISTRATIVE DISTRICT
    MONDAY, AUGUST 14
    11:07 P.M.
    A cold drizzle streaked the cracked window. It was already fall in Moscow. It seemed to Vladimir Koskov as if summer had been the briefest illusion. He reached out and pressed the aging tape back against the pane, but it rolled away almost immediately. He could feel the cold air leaching through the glass onto his hand.
    Vladimir sighed, then picked up the butt of his unfiltered Turkish cigarette and used it to light another. He inhaled deeply, then coughed as he jabbed out the old cigarette and laid the fresh one on the edge of the ashtray.
    The small apartment was typical of those built during Soviet days. Of shoddy construction, rushed to completion to meet an arbitrary deadline, it was small, less than five hundred square feet, one room with a cramped kitchenette in one corner, and a bathroom with a shower. The tiny kitchen table, with room for just two, the bed, and his computers all but filled the remaining space. A path was kept clear to his workstation, with three keyboards for three computers he’d built himself and which he never turned off. He could roll his wheelchair to the refrigerator, and to the doorway of the bathroom to empty his bladder sack if Ivana was at work or shopping.
    This was twenty-nine-year-old Vladimir’s world. At one time the confinement, the limits of his physical existence, had nearly driven him insane. On the brink of life-ending despair he’d discovered a universe, one he could access without ever leaving this room. His portals were there on the desk and at his keyboards, on his screens, where he was the same as everyone else. It was liberating. Empowering. He had thought at one time to be an engineer, but his sudden awakening as a cripple had forced on him a fresh evaluation of life expectations. Instead, he’d taken his computer skills and morphed them into a kind of expertise that had saved him.
    The new Russia was brimming with opportunity, but few ways to make any money if you were not a prostitute, mobster, or drug dealer. If it had not been for Ivana, none of this would have been possible. She’d worked one job after another, never complaining. Sometimes he found her endless self-sacrifice to be all but unbearable.
    Vladimir tapped the keys and returned to the Web site he’d been browsing. He spent twenty minutes scrolling through the various forums, examining the code posted there. Little of it was fresh or unknown to him. On occasion he’d see something that caught his attention, code he thought he could use, something new and creative. But on examination it was usually rubbish, or pointless.
    Code was the essence of any computer, and of the Internet, which was simply a connection of millions of computers. Code was the machination behind the curtain that made everything else work. Code turned keystrokes into words in word processing, code made images, code produced color, code created hyperlinks.
    Everything on a computer screen came from code. Those who could write code at a sophisticated level were creators; a handful were, in their way, godlike, for what they wrote produced marvelous manifestations.
    But there was code, and there was code. Like a child painting a tiger by the numbers, some hackers, as code writers were generally called, did little more than follow the lines created by others. These script kiddies copied and pasted this from here, added a little of that from there, and counted themselves lucky when it actually produced something that worked.
    Code generated in such a way looked as childish to the skilled hacker as that child’s colored picture of a tiger. Other bits were repeatedly written,