Nicole Perlroth > Quotes

“In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Putin laid down only two rules for Russia’s hackers. First, no hacking inside the motherland. And second, when the Kremlin calls in a favor, you do whatever it asks. Otherwise, hackers had full autonomy. And oh, how Putin loved them.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking … the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“The crux of Putin’s foreign policy was to undercut the West’s grip on global affairs. With every hack and disinformation campaign, Putin’s digital army sought to tie Russia’s opponents up in their own politics and distract them from Putin’s real agenda: fracturing support for Western democracy and, ultimately, NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—the only thing holding Putin in check.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Our elections. they cannot be conducted online. Period.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Three years after the United States and the Israelis reached across Iran’s borders and destroyed its centrifuges, Iran launched a retaliatory attack, the most destructive cyberattack the world had seen to date. On August 15, 2012, Iranian hackers hit Saudi Aramco, the world’s richest oil company—a company worth more than five Apples on paper—with malware that demolished thirty thousand of its computers, wiped its data, and replaced it all with the image of the burning American flag. All the money in the world had not kept Iranian hackers from getting into Aramco’s systems. Iran’s hackers had waited until the eve of Islam’s holiest night of the year—“The Night of Power,” when Saudis were home celebrating the revelation of the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad, to flip a kill switch and detonate malware that not only destroyed Aramco’s computers, data, and access to email and internet but upended the global market for hard drives. It could have been worse. As investigators from CrowdStrike, McAfee, Aramco, and others pored through the Iranians’ crumbs, they discovered that the hackers had tried to cross the Rubicon between Aramco’s business systems and its production systems. In that sense, they failed.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“The Shadow Brokers leak was by far the most damaging in U.S. intelligence history. If Snowden leaked the PowerPoint bullet points, the Shadow Brokers handed our enemies the actual bullets: the code.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Organizations can’t stop the world from changing. The best they can do is adapt. The smart ones change before they have to. The lucky ones manage to scramble and adjust, when push comes to shove. The rest are losers, and they become history.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“And yet here we were, entrusting our entire digital lives—passwords, texts, love letters, banking records, health records, credit cards, sources, and deepest thoughts—to this mystery box, whose inner circuitry most of us would never vet, run by code written in a language most of us will never fully understand.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos. Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“What had saved Ukraine is precisely what made the United States the most vulnerable nation on earth. Ukraine wasn’t fully automated. In the race to plug everything into the internet, the country was far behind. The tsunami known as the Internet of Things, which had consumed Americans for the better part of the past decade, had still not washed up in Ukraine. The nation’s nuclear stations, hospitals, chemical plants, oil refineries, gas and oil pipelines, factories, farms, cities, cars, traffic lights, homes, thermostats, lightbulbs, refrigerators, stoves, baby monitors, pacemakers, and insulin pumps were not yet “web-enabled.” In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Finding a zero day is a little like entering God mode in a video game. Once hackers have figured out the commands or written the code to exploit it, they can scamper through the world's computer networks undetected until the day the underlying flaw is discovered. Zero day exploitation is the most direct application of the cliche 'knowledge is power if you know how to use it.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a gun over there Telling me I got to beware I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound, Everybody look what’s going down —BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“The Kremlin had cleverly timed the attack to Ukraine’s Constitution Day in 2017—the equivalent of our Fourth of July—to send an ominous reminder to Ukrainians. They could celebrate their independence all they wished, but Mother Russia would never let them out of its grip.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“iDefense’s competitive prospects weren’t looking so hot either. The day Watters showed up at iDefense, its closest competitor, a start-up called SecurityFocus, was scooped up by Symantec, the security giant, for $75 million in cash. Like iDefense, SecurityFocus offered clients an early cyber threat alert system, in the form of a hacker mailing list called BugTraq.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“On the screen was a quote attributed to Nathaniel Borenstein, who I vaguely recalled as one of two men who invented the email attachment, the invention so many nation-states now used to deliver their spyware. “The most likely way for the world to be destroyed,” it read, “most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“this was the age of acceleration. Everything that was analog was being digitized. Everything that was digitized was being stored. And everything that was stored was being analyzed, opening up entirely new dimensions for surveillance and attack.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Perhaps, very soon, we will learn that Iranian and Russian trolls are bouncing the president’s messages around social media echo chambers. But even if they are, they are getting drowned out by real Americans. If the goal of Putin’s 2016 interference was to sow chaos and undermine democracy, then what is now playing out is beyond his wildest dreams.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Contemporary technology cannot provide a secure system in an open environment.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“There was an arrogance to the NSA’s work, Neumann told me. By inserting backdoors into any piece of technology it could get its hands on, the NSA assumed—to the country’s detriment—that all the flaws it was uncovering in global computer systems would not be discovered by someone else. “They were dumbing everything down so they could break it. They thought, ‘Only we have backdoors that we can use,’ without realizing that these were backdoors that every nation in the world wanted too.” “It’s”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“In the United States, government hackers and spies hoarded zero-days for the sake of espionage, or in the event they might need to do what the Pentagon calls D5—“deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive, or destroy”—an adversary’s critical infrastructure in the event of war one day.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Nicole,” he said, loudly for the others to hear. “These men are young. They have no idea what they are doing. All they care about is money. They have no interest in learning how their tools will be used, or how badly this will end.” Then, shifting his gaze back to Luigi, he said, “But go ahead. Tell us. Tell us about your fucking salmon.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“It had taken nine years for one CIA operative to secretly photograph twenty-five thousand pages of classified Soviet and Polish military documents at the height of the Cold War. Suddenly a well-placed implant could siphon terabytes upon terabytes of intelligence booty in hours, in some cases minutes. “You begin to understand both the opportunity and the challenge,” Gosler told me, when you stop to consider that one terabyte is equivalent to a thirty-one-mile-high stack of paper, each sheet packed with single-spaced data.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Also, as many, many men on Twitter regularly point out to me, nobody in cybersecurity actually uses “cyber” anymore. It’s “information security,” or preferably “infosec.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“So will they only sell their exploits to good Western governments?” He repeated my words back to me. “Good Western governments?” I slumped so low in my seat, I was sure my head wasn’t even showing. The words were even more humiliating coming out of an Argentine’s mouth.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“After the first series of Citizen Labs reports and articles came out in 2012, Hacking Team had apparently paused to take stock of some of its customers. The firm had ended its support for Russia in 2014 because, a spokesman said, “the Putin government evolved from one considered friendly to the West to a more hostile regime.” Apparently, Putin’s raid on Crimea pushed Russia into a different customer category—never mind that for years, Russian journalists and activists had disappeared under Putin’s watch. As for Sudan, Hacking Team cut its contract in 2014 “because of concerns about the country’s ability to use the system in accordance with Hacking Team’s contract.” This after hundreds of thousands of Sudanese were already dead and millions more displaced.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“And yet, instead of a multilateral, or even bilateral, treaty, the United States went the other way. At the very moment Smith was wrapping up his speech in Geneva that November 9, 2017, the Pentagon’s hackers—unbeknownst to the commander-in-chief—were busy laying trapdoors and logic bombs in the Russian grid.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed,” it read, “most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Demonstrators from the Heart of Texas group confronted pro-Muslim protesters across the street in a terrifying real-world standoff that Russia’s digital puppeteers were coordinating from five thousand miles away. Even the Russian trolls back in St. Petersburg couldn’t believe the Americans were so gullible.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“We will never build resilience to cyberattacks—or foreign disinformation campaigns, for that matter—without good policy and nationwide awareness of cyber threats. We should make cybersecurity and media literacy a core part of American curriculum. Too many cyberattacks rely on vulnerable American systems, running on software that is not up-to-date or which has not been patched. This is, in large part, an education problem. The same goes for information warfare. Americans are being coopted by disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories because Americans lack the tools to spot influence operations, foreign and domestic, in real time.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race