This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends summary

The Snowden leaks offered a glimpse of what zero-days are capable of. But people familiar with cybersecurity and the hacking community were already well aware. The author knew that hackers earned a lot of money by selling zero-days and exploits to brokers and bidders. What she didn’t know was who those buyers were.

Months before Edward Snowden became a household name, the author was attending one of the world’s many hacker conventions. This one was in South Beach, Florida. After a while, she found herself sitting at a table with Ralph Langner, a German security specialist, and two Italian hackers. The author wanted to learn more about how the zero-day market worked, so she asked the two Italians to elaborate on their business practices. For instance, who do they typically sell to? Are there countries like Russia or Turkey that they might think twice about selling to?

Any market where details are hidden, where buyers and sellers can’t discuss things, is bound to be trouble. The zero-day market is no exception. For starters, since zero-day sales are private, sellers can’t estimate a fair price for their work. Sellers also don’t know how their zero-day will be used. And if sellers think they’ve been cheated or misled, there could be consequences. To further complicate things, buyers need to verify that a zero-day works before money changes hands. What prevents them from testing it, declining to buy, and then using it anyway?

On the other hand, buyers have to put a lot of trust in sellers as well. Who’s to say that a hacker won’t sell a zero-day to multiple countries around the world, even if that hacker has agreed not to? It’s not like these agencies are going to openly compare their inventory. As a result, the market relies on a ridiculous amount of trust. Sellers essentially promise not to talk about their activities, much as mobsters adhere to omertà, a code of silence. And everyone likes to think that buyers operate on a samurai code of Bushido, which dictates a morally upstanding way of life. These are very dangerous things to rely upon when dealing with information that erodes liberties and puts the safety of the world at risk.

Of course, some hackers do have a strong sense of right and wrong. Take Charlie Miller, for example. Miller worked at the NSA before stepping down for family reasons. But he never stopped dismantling code and finding new vulnerabilities. In fact, he once created a fake stock-market app for the iPhone that gave him access to every other app a person had installed. This proved to Apple that its screening process wasn’t so flawless after all, and earned Miller the nickname Zero-Day Charlie.

But that wasn’t his biggest discovery. He later uncovered a zero-day for the Linux operating system worth a lot of money. But when he went to try and sell it, he immediately discovered just how inefficient and unfair the market was. He couldn’t tell how much he should be asking, and he couldn’t be sure that a potential buyer wouldn’t just rip it off and not pay him.

For a long time, each country used different equipment. Russia had its hardware and software, the US had its, and never the twain shall meet. If something infected a Russian computer, the US didn’t have to worry about that infection crossing the globe and plaguing US computers.

Of course, those days are long gone. Now, everyone’s using the same type of hardware and software and we’re all connected by the same internet. So, anything that gets used on an adversary can easily turn around and bite the hand that released it.

In 2011, Langner gave a presentation at an annual TED conference. He provided a thorough and understandable description of Stuxnet, and explained the ramifications of what happened when this advanced cyberweapon found its way into the wild. His point was clear: there was nothing stopping a person from making a few adjustments and pointing Stuxnet at a chemical plant, a factory, or a power grid. This was serious.

The irony wasn’t lost on Langner: the US had used a dangerous cyberweapon to avert a conventional war; in the process, that weapon had become available to enemies of the US; and this had happened right at the dawn of a new, cyber-based era in warfare. Meanwhile, Iran was upset and looking for revenge. 

In mid-December 2009, Google’s information-security team noticed something was amiss. Alarms were being triggered throughout its network. Something was inside, ping-ponging wildly around the system. Usually, some malware might show up when a careless intern visited an online gambling site, but this was different. This intruder was looking for something.

It took weeks of round-the-clock work by a team of around 250 workers, but the intruder was eventually rooted out and shown to be of Chinese origin. Remarkably, China had hacked Google’s network and stolen its source code. More specifically, it was an operation pulled off by Legion Yankee, one of the most elite hacking groups that works under contract for the Chinese government. Information about satellite technology, missiles, aerospace, nuclear propulsion – elite Chinese hackers have broken in and stolen all of this and more. And now they’d gotten their hands on the backbone technology behind Google’s operations, likely in an effort to set up backdoors that would allow China to indefinitely monitor the Gmail accounts of political dissidents.

During the Obama administration, everything was being digitized. Smartphones became ubiquitous. With social media and cloud servers, people were dumping their entire lives onto the internet. And during this time, there were three main threats to US cybersecurity: Iran, China, and Russia.

In 2015, Obama tried to neutralize two of these threats. First, he struck a nuclear deal with Iran, and it seemed to work. Attacks from Iran largely stopped. The focus then shifted to Beijing. For years, Chinese hackers had been relentless, stealing intellectual property with abandon. They stole everything from the formulas for Benjamin Moore paints to the plans for F-35 fighter jets.

In August 2016, chaos reigned in the US. It was an election year and, by then, Russian hackers had already broken into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, as well as the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. They were releasing their stolen goods through Wikileaks. Then, more bad news arrived.

On Twitter, a group calling themselves the Shadow Brokers claimed to have found a collection of NSA cyberweapons, which it was now dumping onto the internet as a free-for-all. As one former NSA employee said, “These are the keys to the kingdom.” Things were getting bad, and they were going to get worse.