I cannot imagine the horror of being kidnapped by terrorists. The media seems to be full of instances of Americans or other westerners being snagged by the Taliban or other terrorist groups and executed. What these people must go through during those dark hours must be horrendous.

Few come away from it alive.

Dr. Dilip Joseph is one of the fortunate ones. In his book, Kidnapped By The Taliban, Joesph tells the story of his work in Afghanistan, bringing medical care and instruction to many of the smaller villages that need it. His work there has been ongoing, and effective.

But on one afternoon, in December of 2012, he was captured by Taliban forces, along with two colleagues. In his book, he tells the story of his capture and time as a hostage. He writes of his despair, of his hope of rescue, and of his unlikely opportunity to connect with his captors and show them the love of Christ.

While most of the book revolves around his capture and his time with the terrorists, the final chapters reveal that dozens of people had been working feverishly to ensure his rescue. SEAL Team Six, the team that infiltrated and killed Osama bin Laden, were instrumental in Joseph’s rescue.

Every once in a while, you come across some information that chills you to the bone, that causes your eyes to be opened to a new reality. That is exactly what happened to me as I read Countdown To Zero Day, by Kim Zetter.

When I picked up the book, I expected it to be something different than what it is. Looking back, I’m not really sure just what I expected, but it wasn’t what I found.

Countdown To Zero Day is the store of the world’s first digital weapon. This seemed far enough away from my reality to be sort of interesting, but not too close to home.

I was wrong.

Several years ago, a computer virus made the news, called Stuxnet. I vaguely remember hearing about it, but since it didn’t infect my computer, I thought nothing about it. But a team of people from Symantec tackled this virus, unpacking it to see what it was up to. What they found was frightening, and very real.

Stuxnet was a virus that targeted a specific system, running on specific hardware, performing specific actions. And once Stuxnet was decoded, it revealed that this virus was in fact a digital weapon designed to bring the Iranian nuclear weapons program to a crashing halt.

Stuxnet was the world’s first digital weapon, and it was designed almost perfectly. It seems it was only discovered by a random series of circumstances.

Once this was discovered, however, it led to more discoveries. The version that they found was a later version, and several previous versions existed. Whoever had created this digital masterpiece had invested a lot of effort and finances, and had created a cunning plan to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program.