This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
The Cyberweapons Arms Race
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4.5 • 116 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
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)
"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 nondisclosure 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, Nicole Perlroth lifts the curtain on a market in shadow, revealing the urgent threat faced by us all if we cannot bring the global cyberarms race to heel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Deeply Unsettling
Necessary read to understand cyber warfare, information assurance, and the dangers of NOT downloading those iOS software updates!
In a world where we are once again talking about the threat of nuclear annihilation, don’t forget cyberattacks are just as capable of ending the world.
The most important book I’ve read in years
This not fiction. This is truly frightening. Our interconnection via the Internet may well be our undoing. The evidence of data exploits being created around the world is overwhelming. “Just one mistake” could set it all off: election results, power grid control, banking systems, hospitals and emergency services, entire sections of the country and world’s infrastructure could, and have been threatened or destroyed. If you extrapolate all this - and the book ends in early 2021 - to upcoming elections and beyond, and to relations with other countries (think Iran, China, Russia) it is hard to believe that we are not in for cataclysmic events caused by disruption to computers systems upon which the world increasingly relies. And the indictment, in this book, of our national leaders in recent years, shows how politics and public sentiment have been manipulated, and threaten us all. Fascinating, powerful and exceedingly well written and documented.
Must read
Excellent and well researched. Good for lay people who need their hand held to understand the complex nature of vulnerability exploitation. As a student of information security this book has blazed a trail for me. If you needed some direction to decide what side of the tracks you need to be on this work will help.
I encourage anyone interested in national security, intelligence, counterintelligence, and politics to inform yourself on the nature of the battlefield of the future that is ALREADY here. I also strongly encourage lawmakers who wish to seriously solve the cyberwarfare dilemma in a time of escalation with Americas adversaries, to take a serious look at the issues clearly laid out in this book. We are alot closer to midnight than we think (personal opinion).
It's time to recognize that accountability is only useful when you have a properly functioning system that was mismanaged. We as a nation dont even have the most rudimentary understanding of what that system should even look like! When you calculate how much money warfare costs for our adversaries. The cost of paying hackers to find invisible doors to code around our firewalls is chump change. We foolishly, hurriedly connected everything we could to the internet with millions of software programs that have dozens of exploitable zero days each.
To solve the problem, It's not how much money you have. It's how many hackers you can find to fend off the bad guys. America will need alot of good ethical hackers and a solid game plan to work our way out of this massive security oversight and screwup... I may just be a Jarhead but national security is in my blood. I believe this country minus a few unsung heroes is practically flying blind. I'm glad I bought this book.