Andy Greenberg > Quotes

“It’s clear where the world is going. We’re entering a world where every thermostat, every electrical heater, every air conditioner, every power plant, every medical device, every hospital, every traffic light, every automobile will be connected to the Internet. Think about what it will mean for the world when those devices are the subject of attack.” Then he made his pitch. “The world needs a new, digital Geneva Convention.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“If you want to play well, you can’t afford to hate your opponent.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Since September eleventh, the government’s rhetoric has been that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,” says Jones with just a hint of righteous anger in his voice. “I say if those are the rules of the game, play them across the board. Show us what goes on.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“The HSI agent wasn’t caught in the Welcome to Video dragnet because IRS agents had violated his privacy. He was caught, the judges concluded, because he had mistakenly believed his Bitcoin transactions to have ever been private in the first place.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“As the Berkeley researcher Nick Weaver had warned, and as cryptocurrency users around the world were finally learning, “The blockchain is forever.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“Americans ignored Ukraine’s escalating cyberwar in the face of repeated warnings that the attacks there would soon spread to the rest of the world. Then, very suddenly, exactly that scenario played out, at an immense cost.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“We don’t yet know the names of the architects who will build the next upgrade to the secret-killing machine. But we’ll know them by their work.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“Vietnam had never been a true civil war. It was a war of conquest, initiated and perpetuated for more than two decades by the United States, fueled by presidential secrecy and lies. It was no catastrophic accident. As Ellsberg wrote, it was simply “a crime.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“It’s clear where the world is going. We’re entering a world where every thermostat, every electrical heater, every air conditioner, every power plant, every medical device, every hospital, every traffic light, every automobile will be connected to the Internet. Think about what it will mean for the world when those devices are the subject of attack.” Then he made his pitch. “The world needs a new, digital Geneva Convention. It needs new rules of the road,” Smith said, intoning the words slowly for emphasis. “What we need is an approach that governments will adopt that says they will not attack civilians in times of peace, they will not attack hospitals, they will not attack the electrical grid, they will not attack the political processes of other countries.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“The site’s handling of cryptocurrency seemed to be designed by someone who still held the antiquated belief that Bitcoin was magically untraceable—when, in fact, the opposite was often true.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“Distributed across the world, and in a far more concentrated sense for Ukraine itself, NotPetya was the “electronic Pearl Harbor” that John Hamre had first warned of in 1997.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Even the crowded movie theater trick, it turns out, breaks down when the robber is carrying a large enough sack of loot and the cops are watching every exit.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“Those branching and converging money flows, he thought, looked familiar: They struck Gambaryan as the typical, contrived complexity of someone splitting up and reassembling their illicit funds in the hopes of throwing an auditor off their trail.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“For a moment, Gambaryan and Der-Yeghiayan sat on the phone in silence. Gambaryan had just, for the very first time in a U.S. criminal investigation, traced cryptocurrency payments to prove someone’s guilt. “Oh, shit,” Gambaryan remembers thinking. “We broke Bitcoin.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“The question is not for whom the bell tolls,” Yushchenko warned. “The bell tolls for us all. This is a threat to every country in the world.” ■”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“But not all of NotPetya’s costs could be measured in dollars. Another of its collateral victims was a little-known company called Nuance, focused on speech-recognition software. Nuance’s code was used in the first version of the iPhone’s Siri, for instance, and the voice command system in Ford cars. By 2017, however, much of Nuance’s business came from a vast array of institutions that relied on its technology in matters of life and death: hospitals.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Russia will never accept Ukraine being a sovereign and independent country,” he told me. “Twenty-five years since the Soviet collapse, Russia is still sick with this imperialistic syndrome.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Even the revelation that Sandworm was a fully equipped infrastructure-hacking team with ties to Russia and global attack ambitions never received the attention Hultquist thought it deserved.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“But by the beginning of 2018, they were adding up to something remarkable: A single agency within the Russian government was responsible for at least three of the most brazen hacking milestones in history, all in just the past three years. The GRU, it now seemed, had masterminded the first-ever hacker-induced blackouts, the plot to interfere in a U.S. presidential election, and the most destructive cyberweapon ever released. A larger question now began to loom in my mind: Who are the GRU?”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Hutchins’s role as the hero of the WannaCry story would be complicated just three months later, when he was arrested by the FBI after attending the DEF CON hacker conference. Hutchins was charged with computer fraud and abuse related to his alleged creation and sale of banking malware years earlier. In July 2019, however, a judge sentenced him to no jail time, in part due to his WannaCry work.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Cyberattacks on nonmilitary, physical infrastructure, Lee believed, were a class of weapon that ought to be considered, along with cluster bombs and biological weapons, simply too dangerous and uncontrollable for any ethical nation to wield.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“The inherent geography of this domain is that everything plays to the offense.” Nearly a decade later, Hayden’s cynical words still ring true—even if he was off by a few hundred miles. On the internet, we are all Ukraine. In a dimension of conflict without borders, we all live on the front line. And if we fail to heed the borderland’s warnings, we may all share its fate.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“When I spoke to former president Yushchenko on the phone later that year, he argued that Russia’s tactics, online and off, have one single aim: “to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, to make its government look incompetent and vulnerable.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“It is simply good military practice. War is war. It sounds simple, but many Americans seem to believe that there should be a gentlemen’s code, that war should be fought by soldiers in remote battlefields. Americans believe that war should be sterile, because it has never hit their home soil since the Civil War of 130 years ago, and even then, only in the south-eastern part of the country. Russia has been rampaged for centuries by every would-be world conqueror. Millions of Russians have died on their homeland during wars. This is a feeling Americans do not know. The only way you get an enemy to submit is by bringing the war to its people.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Gronager broke down the times when the burglars’ coins were manually moved out of the wallets that held the stolen Mt. Gox funds, plotting the money movements across a twenty-four-hour cycle. All of them seemed to fall from morning to night in a certain time zone, one that lay a couple of hours east of Greenwich mean time and nowhere near the waking hours of the average person in Japan, where Mark Karpelès lived.”
― Andy Greenberg, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

“With all their variation in goals and means, OpenLeaks, IMMI, BalkanLeaks, GlobaLeaks, and even Jones’s OpenWatch smartphone apps are all stepchildren of a movement that stretches back to the cypherpunks two decades earlier and the Pentagon Papers two decades before that. And with its greatest successes in just the last few of those forty years, its work is only starting.”
― Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information

“Even so, Oh still smoldered when he thought back to the night of the opening ceremony. “For me, the Olympics are about peace. It still makes me furious that without any clear purpose, someone hacked this event,” he told me months later. “If we hadn’t solved it, it would have been a huge black mark on these games of peace. I can only hope that the international community can figure out a way that this will never happen again.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“But the largest of those blind spots, perhaps, can be found in the West’s attitude to Ukraine and silence in the face of the cyberwar afflicting it. For a decade, the United States had treated Russian cyberattacks on its neighbors—Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine, above all—as a “distant” problem. The Obama administration had watched since 2015 as Ukraine became a helpless victim and a nation-sized laboratory for Russia’s cruelest hacking techniques. It allowed those hackers to cross one red line after another, including not one but two unprecedented blackout attacks.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Sandworm’s hackers were stealthy, professional saboteurs. Fancy Bear, by contrast, seemed to be shameless, profane propagandists. And now, in the service of Vladimir Putin, they were tasked with helping Donald Trump to win the presidency.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“With those four sentences displayed on a page of the White House website, the U.S. government had finally, publicly acknowledged Russia’s cyberwar in Ukraine. That acknowledgment had come nearly three and a half years after the siege had begun and almost eight months after it exploded out to the rest of the world.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers