‘Zero Days’ Documentary Exposes A Looming Threat Of The Digital Age

When most of us think about computer hacking, we picture Julian Assange leaking government secrets or a shadowy, bad-shave crook in some former Soviet republic hoovering up credit card info from a chain store. But while folks like these do stir up all manner of trouble, a much deeper danger lies elsewhere.

That danger is the theme of Zero Days, a chilling new film by Alex Gibney, who sometimes seems to turn out documentaries as quickly as tweets. This latest one may be his finest and most important, for it doesn’t merely tell an exciting story about using a computer virus to wage black ops against Iran. Filled with juicy historical tidbits, it keeps expanding its frame of reference to reveal one of the looming, but invisible threats of the digital age.

Gibney begins in 2010 in Belarus, where a computer security guy comes across a highly infectious new kind of malware — dubbed Stuxnet — that is dazzling in its complexity. Soon, computer whizzes, journalists and even our Department of Homeland Security are working overtime to understand this self-replicating virus that takes over every PC it touches.