‘Zero Days’ is a New York Times Critics’ Pick

Review: ‘Zero Days’ Examines Cyberwarfare’s Potential Online Apocalypse

The New York Times – July 7, 2016

By Steven Holden

Technology: With every seemingly miraculous advance comes the potential for its catastrophic misuse. If you’re inclined toward paranoia, Alex Gibney’s sobering documentary “Zero Days” about the spread of malware, exposes a whole arena of potential terror and calamitous destruction surrounded in secrecy.

We all know that our digital connectedness has a dark side. But online bullying and pornography, for example, are the least of it. The nightmare of push-button nuclear annihilation that has haunted us since the invention of the atomic bomb now has a parallel in the looming specter of large-scale cyberwarfare.

The agent of doomsday explored in the film isn’t an exploding object but the manipulation of computer code to destroy the infrastructure of nation-states by gaining control of nuclear plants, disabling power grids and wreaking chaos by, in effect, shutting down the world. Read more.