"''Softwar - La Guerre Douce"'' (in English "''Sotfwar, the soft war''") is a
technothriller novel by
Thierry Breton
Thierry Breton (; born 15 January 1955) is a French business executive, politician, writer and the current Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union.
Breton was vice-chairman and CEO of Groupe Bull (1996–1997), chairman and CEO o ...
and
Denis Baldwin-Beneich published 1984 in French and translated in 10 languages. The English version was published in 1986. The story is about the use of
computer viruses and tampered hardware for spying and sabotage by both US and Russian governments. This international bestseller made a larger non-technical public aware of IT security challenges and was therefore referred to in introductory books on that subject,.
[{{Cite book, url=https://archive.org/details/hightechnologycr00kova_0/page/273, title=High-technology-crime investigator's handbook : working in the global information environment, last=Kovacich, Gerald L., date=2000, publisher=Butterworth-Heinemann, others=Boni, William C., isbn=075067086X, location=Boston, page]
273
oclc=41090895
Plot summary
The main characters of the novel are Bredan and Ioulia. Bredan is an American professor at the
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
in the field of Information Technology, who was hired by the NSA, in the book the "''National Software Agency".'' Ioulia is a Russian software engineer who happened to be his student in the 80's.
The story starts with France selling to the USSR a meteorological
Cray-1 system and the related software. At the occasion of an inspection for export control, NSA agents implement a secret software bomb. The system later breaks down on the exact day of an official visit of the Russian authorities, but mysteriously works again the day after without any repair. Ioulia and her assistant discover that some additional software instructions set the computer out of order when it processes some specific meteorological data related to the
Saint-Thomas Island in the
US Virgin Islands
The United States Virgin Islands,. Also called the ''American Virgin Islands'' and the ''U.S. Virgin Islands''. officially the Virgin Islands of the United States, are a group of Caribbean islands and an unincorporated and organized territory ...
.
When Ioulia later inspects a second computing system imported from the West, she identifies that there are several abnormalities. Not on the American computer this time, but on the peripheral computers which are of Russian origin. She finds out that all the Russian computers happened to be physically tampered with the installation of an additional processing unit made of a
Zilog Z80
The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples were ...
microprocessor and two
ROMs. When this unit detects the code word "VENIK" at a specific address of the computer's
random access memory, it erases everything and blocks the computer.
Ioulia finally understand that the goal of the additional component is to allow the central government to shut down any activity (transports, power plants, industry, ...) that is controlled by the Russian computers in the remote regions, in order to serve as a mean to pressure the local government in case of political or military troubles.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who's not yet president, sends Ioulia to
Geneva
, neighboring_municipalities= Carouge, Chêne-Bougeries, Cologny, Lancy, Grand-Saconnex, Pregny-Chambésy, Vernier, Veyrier
, website = https://www.geneve.ch/
Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevr ...
to publicly condemn the American software bomb at an international summit. Brendan, her ex-lover and professor is instructed to discourage her making these revelations. When both meet, Ioulia tells Brendan about her discovery and asks him to disclose the Russian undertaking to the press, so to force her government to withdraw their control system.
See also
*
Cyberwarfare
*
Cybersecurity
Computer security, cybersecurity (cyber security), or information technology security (IT security) is the protection of computer systems and networks from attack by malicious actors that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, t ...
References
This article was translated from the French Wikipedia article
Softwar.
French-language novels