This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

Overview

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award * Bronze Medal, Arthur Ross Book Award (Council on Foreign Relations)

“Part John le Carré and more parts Michael Crichton . . . spellbinding.” The New Yorker

"Written in the hot, propulsive prose of a spy thriller" (The New York Times), the untold story of the cyberweapons market—the most secretive, government-backed market on earth—and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare.

Zero day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break into your devices and move around undetected. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to silently spy on your iPhone, dismantle the safety controls at a chemical plant, alter an election, and shut down the electric grid (just ask Ukraine).

For decades, under cover of classification levels and non-disclosure agreements, the United States government became the world’s dominant hoarder of zero days. U.S. government agents paid top dollar—first thousands, and later millions of dollars— to hackers willing to sell their lock-picking code and their silence.

Then the United States lost control of its hoard and the market.

Now those zero days are in the hands of hostile nations and mercenaries who do not care if your vote goes missing, your clean water is contaminated, or our nuclear plants melt down.

Filled with spies, hackers, arms dealers, and a few unsung heroes, written like a thriller and a reference, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is an astonishing feat of journalism. Based on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, The New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth lifts the curtain on a market in shadow, revealing the urgent threat faced by us all if we cannot bring the global cyber arms race to heel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635576054
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	02/09/2021
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Nicole Perlroth is an award-winning cybersecurity journalist for The New York Times, where her work has been optioned for both film and television. She is a regular lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a graduate of Princeton University and Stanford University. She lives with her family in the Bay Area, but increasingly prefers life off the grid in their cabin in the woods.

Table of Contents

Authors Note xiii

Prologue xv

Part I Mission Impossible

1 Closet of Secrets 3

2 The Fucking Salmon 13

Part II The Capitalists

3 The Cowboy 21

4 The First Broker 41

5 Zero-Day Charlie 53

Part III The Spies

6 Project Gunman 69

7 The Godfather 78

8 The Omnivore 102

9 The Rubicon 117

10 The Factory 132

Part IV The Mercenaries

11 The Kurd 149

12 Dirty Business 165

13 Guns for Hire 177

Part V The Resistance

14 Aurora 193

15 Bounty Hunters 214

16 Going Dark 233

Part VI The Twister

17 Cyber Gauchos 253

18 Perfect Storm 267

19 The Grid 283

Part VII Boomerang

20 The Russians Are Coming 301

21 The Shadow Brokers 320

22 The Attacks 333

23 The Backyard 346

Epilogue 387

Acknowledgments 407

Notes 411

Index 473

Editorial Reviews

11/23/2020

New York Times cybersecurity reporter Perlroth debuts with a colorful rundown of threats to the world’s digital infrastructure. She pays particular attention to “zero-days,” a term for “a software or hardware flaw for which there is no existing patch.” Though she notes their rarity (98% of cyberattacks do not involve zero-days or malware), Perlroth argues that the destructive capacity of cyberweapons like Stuxnet, a code comprising seven zero-day exploits that was used by the U.S. and Israel to disable uranium centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear plant, makes them an existential threat. She details the underground market for cyberweapons, where hackers can earn millions of dollars by finding a flaw in commonly used technologies such as Microsoft Windows, and explains how the U.S. lost its global monopoly on zero-day exploits in 2016, when a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released a trove of NSA hacking tools. Perlroth’s searing account of the role American hubris played in creating the zero-day market hits the mark, but she leaves many technical details about cyberweapons unexplained, and stuffs the book with superfluous details about getting her sources to spill. This breathless account raises alarms but adds little of substance to the debate over cyberweapons. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

A stemwinder of a tale of how frightening cyber weapons have been turned on their maker, the U.S., and the implications for the world when everyone and anyone can now decimate everyone else with a click of a mouse. Perlroth takes a complex subject that has been cloaked in opaque techspeak and makes it dead real for the rest of us, introducing us to a cast of odd and bracing characters you could not make up. You will not look at your mobile phone, your search engine, even your thermostat the same way again." - Kara Swisher, co-founder of Recode and New York Times Opinion Writer

“Reads like a modern-day John le Carré novel, with terrifying tales of espionage and cyber warfare that will keep you up at night, both unable to stop reading, and terrified for what the future holds.” —Nick Bilton, author of AMERICAN KINGPIN, Special Correspondent, Vanity Fair

From the Publisher

2020-12-15
A New York Times cybersecurity writer delivers a sobering account of a thoroughly hacked and cyberattacked world.

Perlroth opens with the 2017 attack of Ukraine’s infrastructure on the part of Russian hackers who, employed directly by Vladimir Putin, had only two rules to follow: They couldn’t attack inside Russia, and “when the Kremlin calls in a favor, you do whatever it asks.” Apart from that, they were free to do as they pleased, and they detonated cyberbombs across the neighboring nation, bringing the power grid down, closing supply chains, and crashing computers, phones, and ATMs. As Perlroth writes, they attacked with poorly guarded tools developed by the American intelligence community. In the end, Russia could have done far worse “with the access it had and the American weapons at its disposal.” But there are other players with the same tools, including Iran and China, who have the wherewithal to wreak greater havoc on the infrastructure of a thoroughly unprepared America. Some of Perlroth’s interlocutors are rightfully paranoid while others are open in defying demands to make private information available to government agencies through back doors into those very tools—a recipe for a police state. One old-school hacker whom the author interviewed in Buenos Aires lamented a change of culture. “We were sharing exploits as a game,” he tells her. “Now the next generation is hoarding them for a profit.” Perlroth suggests that these latter-day hackers are capable of great evil against vulnerable nations—the U.S. foremost among the list of prime targets, not least because America is so addicted to technology. “There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web,” writes the author. “We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.”

A powerful case for strong cybersecurity policy that reduces vulnerabilities while respecting civil rights.

Kirkus Reviews