Virus Bomb, A Novel, by D.Gregg Scott, reviewed

By Simon Cocking review of Virus Bomb, A Novel, by D.Gregg Scott

Real superheroes are ordinary people who step up when called. Jerry Barkley never worked for the government. An IT contractor from Minnesota, he knows nothing about international espionage. But now he’s on the front lines of the largest cyber-attack in history and nobody believes his warnings when Jerry discovers the attackers are gathering data to plan a series of bombings and a biological attack. To make things worse, the FBI suspects he’s the attacker.

Hundreds have already died in bombings and thousands more could die, first from Ebola and then potentially from war with the wrong enemy. Facing willful ignorance and a hostile law-enforcement bureaucracy, Jerry is forced to take action. If he doesn’t, who will? He must leave his keyboard comfort zone, armed with nothing but IT skills and quick wits, and go face-to-face with elite foreign agents and shut the attack down.

Virus Bomb reviewed

Sometimes you imagine it must be tough to write fiction, when the real world comes around and overtakes you. Greg Scott does allude to the running down of the CDC by a laissez-faire president. Who one earth though would have thought that the reality would be far far worse, with a capricious, barely interested, short attention span president currently actually in the White House.

Scott’s story is plausible and carefully sketched out, the question now, unintentionally is whether you want to read a fictional scenario when we have have a real world one playing out. Naturally Scott’s one is not like for like, and it does take us into its own particular scenario and series of plausible developments. If you want to be diverted by something that does not mention the C word at all then this does work.

Scott also has good subject knowledge and this has helped him in sketching out plausible IT hacks that could lead to serious and dangerous hacks. In this way you might learn good insights in terms of the IT security for your own business too.

You can see our interview with him here where we go into more details here.

He explained where he gets his inspiration from here

“Inspiration comes from all over. Some of the characters in Jerry Barkley’s world are composites of real life; others come from thinking about how somebody becomes the way they are.

But sometimes, it starts with something simple. We always talk about Alice and Bob in cybersecurity textbooks, and I remember wondering about why Alice wants to exchange encrypted messages with Bob. Where did Alice come from? Why Bob and not Charlie or Evan?

Sometimes, news events trigger ideas. News stories inspired Brian Cox in “Virus Bomb.” Sometimes events in my own life make their way into fiction. There’s a whole bunch of me inside Jerry Barkley, although he’s smarter than me – he gets the benefit of editing and new drafts; in the real world, we only get to live the first draft.”

More about the author Greg Scott is a veteran of the tumultuous IT industry. After surviving round after round of layoffs at Digital Equipment Corporation, a large computer company in its day, he branched out on his own in 1994 and started Scott Consulting. A larger firm bought Scott Consulting in 1999, just as the dot com bust devastated the IT Service industry. A glutton for punishment, he went out on my own again in late 1999 and started Infrasupport Corporation, this time with a laser focus on infrastructure and security. In late summer, 2015, after “Bullseye Breach” was published, he accepted a job offer with an enterprise software company.

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