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Name: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
Rating: 4.7 (181 reviews)
Author: Nicole Perlroth

Nicole Perlroth

The Cyberweapons Arms Race

4.7 (181 ratings)

34 mins

Brief summary

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth is a gripping exposé on the multi-billion dollar cyber weapons industry. Through interviews with insiders, Perlroth shows how governments and corporations enable this industry to thrive while leaving everyone vulnerable to devastating cyber attacks.

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Digital Transformation The Internet

Table of Contents

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
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What’s in it for me? Find out just how much of an impending threat cyber weapons are.

On December 23, 2015 – just before Christmas celebrations were about to start – Russia shut off the electricity and heat across western Ukraine. Ever since Ukraine had won its independence in 2014, Russia had been retaliating by unleashing a digital assault on Ukraine's government and media agencies, and now they were proving just how effective those attacks had been.

Russian hackers had embedded themselves in networks that controlled Ukraine’s infrastructure, and to prove that they still had control over the nation, they turned the power off for six hours in the dead of winter. For good measure, they did it again a year later, blacking out the city of Kiev.

Never before had a nation crossed this line and hijacked another country’s grid. But the reality of the situation is that this attack wasn’t something that just happened out of the blue. For years there’d been an escalating arms race going on around the world. Only this time it wasn’t rockets and ballistic weapons; it was lines of digital code that allow almost any device that uses a computer chip to be hacked.

This is the story of how we got to this point, and how increasingly vulnerable we’re making ourselves by connecting more and more things to an internet that’s anything but secure.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

what a zero-day is and why they’re so important;
how tax-payer money is used to pay hackers for new surveillance tools; and
how the NSA’s best hacking tools were released to the public.

Ground Zero-Days

The author began covering the cybersecurity beat for the New York Times in 2010. By 2013, she was already feeling the side-effects of the job. She’d uncovered stories of Chinese hackers getting inside everything from printers to thermostats, and trying to steal intellectual property that ranged from military planes to the formula for Coca-Cola. Iranian hackers had already brought down the network for the Saudi oil company Aramco, wiped its data, and destroyed 30,000 computers while leaving an image of a burning American flag on every screen.

So, after just a few years reporting on the topic, anything with a plug was beginning to look suspicious. As a much-needed escape from the internet, the author booked a weeklong tour through Kenya. But her African vacation was cut short when Edward Snowden decided to give the world a peek into the dark recesses of America’s National Security Agency, or NSA.

In his position as an NSA contractor, Snowden leaked thousands of highly classified NSA documents. These documents revealed that America’s premier spy agency was – surprise – pretty good at spying. In fact, its tools and capabilities were better than most.

The bigger surprise was that many people believed that digital encryption was still keeping networks and information safe. Snowden’s leak blew that line of thinking wide open. It was clear that the NSA had found a myriad of ways to hack around encryption.

In some cases, the NSA was paying companies to give it backdoor access to their data, but, in other cases, the backdoors came from what are known as zero-days. Now, a zero-day is essentially a flaw in a piece of hardware or software that, when exploited, allows someone undetected access. This means the flaw hasn’t been made public, so there’ve been zero days for the company to come up with a patch. For example, if you surf the web using Microsoft Explorer, a zero-day flaw for that web browser could allow someone to invisibly hack into your browser, steal your passwords, credit card information, or emails – and even download your data or record your keystrokes.

The Snowden leaks showed that the NSA had accumulated a good number of zero-days that provided it with access to all of the most widely-used apps, social-media platforms, phones, computers, and operating systems. When this news got out, some people assumed that companies like Apple and Microsoft were in cahoots with the NSA. But this wasn’t the case. These companies were livid when they learned that the NSA knew about these zero-days and didn’t let them fix the flaws.

Perhaps even more worrisome is the fact that the NSA didn’t always find and develop these zero-days itself. It bought them, with taxpayer money, from hackers around the world. As we’ll see in the next blink, the marketplace for zero-days is a morally dubious gray zone that has only gotten darker in recent years.

The First Rule of the Zero-Day Market

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?

Money vs. Morals

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.

Going Public

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.

An Impossible Mission

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.

A Booming Stockpile

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.

Install Now!

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.

Cyberweapon Diplomacy

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.

The Keys to the Kingdom

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.

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What is This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends about?

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends (2021) takes a deep dive into the ongoing global cyberweapons arms race. It explains how the unregulated market for destructive weapons began, how nations are buying and using these weapons, and why they represent a threat to our immediate future.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends Review

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends (2021) is a captivating exploration of the world of cybersecurity. Here's why this book is worth reading:

With its meticulously researched revelations about the vulnerability of our digital infrastructure, it offers a chilling wake-up call about our increasingly interconnected world.
Through in-depth interviews and firsthand accounts, the book sheds light on the shadowy world of hackers, making it a thrilling and eye-opening read.
By exposing the grave consequences of cyberattacks, the book emphasizes the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures, making it both informative and thought-provoking.

Best quote from This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

. . . the NSAs expansive [zero-day] catalog meant that they could break into and spy on devices when they were offline, or even turned off.

—Nicole Perlroth

Who should read This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends?

Anyone who uses a computer or smartphone
Security- and privacy-minded people
Taxpayers curious about how their money is spent

About the Author

Nicole Perlroth is a ten-year veteran of the cybersecurity beat, covering the subject as a reporter for the New York Times. She covered the landmark cases involving North Korean attacks on Hollywood, Russian attacks on nuclear power plants, and Iranian attacks on gas companies. This is her first book.

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