"''Softwar - La Guerre Douce"'' (in English "''Sotfwar, the soft war''") is a

technothriller A techno-thriller or technothriller is a hybrid genre drawing from science fiction, thrillers, spy fiction, action, and war novels. They include a disproportionate amount (relative to other genres) of technical details on their subject matter (ty ...

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 Denis may refer to: People * Saint Denis of Paris, 3rd-century Christian martyr and first bishop of Paris * Denis the Areopagite, Biblical figure * Denis, son of Ampud (died 1236), baron in the Kingdom of Hungary * Denis the Carthusian (1402–14 ...

published 1984 in French and translated in 10 languages. The English version was published in 1986. The story is about the use of

computer virus A computer virus is a type of computer program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own code. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected" with a compu ...

es 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 ...

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 computing, 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 wor ...

microprocessor and two ROMs. When this unit detects the code word "VENIK" at a specific address of the computer's

random access memory Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the s ...

, 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 Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Situ ...

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.

References

This article was translated from the French Wikipedia article

Softwar "''Softwar - La Guerre Douce"'' (in English "''Sotfwar, the soft war''") is a technothriller novel by Thierry Breton and Denis Baldwin-Beneich published 1984 in French and translated in 10 languages. The English version was published in 1986. Th ...

. French-language novels

Plot summary

See also

References