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What it argues
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is Nicole Perlroth's investigation into the global market for zero-day exploits — previously unknown software vulnerabilities that can be used to compromise systems before the vendor knows they exist and before any patch is available. Perlroth, who covered cybersecurity for The New York Times for a decade, spent years interviewing vulnerability brokers, intelligence officials, hackers, and government contractors to map an ecosystem that operates largely in secret and has become one of the most consequential and least understood corners of national security.
The book opens with Stuxnet, the U.S.-Israeli cyberweapon that destroyed Iranian centrifuges at Natanz around 2010 and was the first known instance of a digital weapon causing significant physical damage to industrial infrastructure. Stuxnet required multiple zero-days to deploy, and its discovery — by accident, when it escaped onto the open internet — revealed to the world that state-level cyberweapons had already reached a level of sophistication that most had assumed was years away.
What it gets right
- 1.
Zero-day exploits are unknown software vulnerabilities that can be bought and sold before the vendor has any chance to patch them. A functioning market for these vulnerabilities now operates globally.
- 2.
Stuxnet was the first known cyberweapon to cause physical infrastructure damage, and its escape onto the open internet demonstrated that offensive cyberweapons cannot be reliably contained.
- 3.
The U.S. government built the world's most capable offensive cyber program and also created the market that now supplies adversaries with comparable tools. The two facts are not unrelated.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Nicole Perlroth spent more than a decade as a cybersecurity reporter for The New York Times, covering data breaches, state-sponsored hacking, and the intersection of technology and national security. She reported on major hacks including the Sony breach, the OPM hack, and Stuxnet, and developed sources across intelligence agencies, private security firms, and the hacker community. This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, published in 2021, was a New York Times bestseller. She has since worked as a cybersecurity advisor and consultant.
