This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
(Bloomsbury, $30)
Nicole Perlroth’s first book is “scarier than the scariest sci-fi movie,” said Glenn Altschuler in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Though we’ve been told before that our water, electrical, and other critical systems are vulnerable to cyberattack, Perlroth has flipped on the flashing red lights with a “stunningly detailed” book that “tells the untold story of what may well be the clearest and most present danger facing the world.” The New York Times reporter focuses on the booming global market for backdoor access to crucial software. The U.S., which initially was the main customer for such hacks, lost control of the market in the 2010s—and even had its secret stockpile of such digital picklocks cleaned out by unknown hackers in 2017. The market for such digital weapons is now a free-for-all, Perlroth reports, and the attacks they enable are mounting.
“Taxpayers and citizens will be rightly fuming at all this,” said Edward Lucas in The Times (U.K.). Perlroth’s main argument is that the U.S. National Security Agency made us all less safe when its spending fueled the rise of the huge gray market in weaponized clandestine hacks, known in the trade as “zero days.” The results have been episodes like the “devastating” U.S.-Israeli cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and Russia’s temporary destruction of Ukraine’s electricity grid, stories that are more frightening here because of the collateral damage Perlroth reveals. And the threat is wide