This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
The Cyberweapons Arms Race
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4.5 • 125 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
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
A must-read book!!
I loved how the author presented the evolution of cyber warfare. Since a journalist writes it, she can convey the importance of cybersecurity in lay terms. It also gives us a glimpse at how cybersecurity has become a business where people want to make money, even when it means providing powerful tools to authoritarian countries. As a result, the US seems to have lost its technological advantage. It is a scary reality!
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.