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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Cyberspace isn’t just for geeks,”
― 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

“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

“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

“Yes, they seemed to be Russian and almost certainly controlled by the Russian government. But I wanted more.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“They asked Russia for help.”
― 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

“After the revolution’s final, tragic bloodletting, Yanukovich could see that the violence had only steeled the movement against him. He fled to Russia. Putin, not one to let geopolitics turn against him, took a different approach: He promptly invaded.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Hutchins hadn’t found the malware’s command-and-control address. He’d found its kill switch. The domain he’d registered was a way to simply, instantly turn off WannaCry’s mayhem around the world. It was as if he had fired his proton torpedoes through the Death Star’s exhaust port and into its reactor core, blown it up, and saved the galaxy, but without understanding what he was doing or even noticing his action’s effects for four hours.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“One afternoon in February 2018, the Trump White House released an extremely short, straightforward statement: In June 2017, the Russian military launched the most destructive and costly cyber-attack in history. The attack, dubbed “NotPetya,” quickly spread worldwide, causing billions of dollars in damage across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It was part of the Kremlin’s ongoing effort to destabilize Ukraine and demonstrates ever more”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“the midst of that fog of confusion and misdirection, a leak to The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima cut through with an unequivocal statement. Her headline: “Russian Spies Hacked the Olympics and Tried to Make It Look Like North Korea Did It, U.S. Officials Say.” Again, the Post cited anonymous U.S. intelligence sources—two of them—who claimed that the GRU’s Main Center for Special Technology was behind the attack, the same hackers responsible for NotPetya. Olympic Destroyer, it seemed to follow, was the work of Sandworm, or at least its colleagues at the same agency.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“If they’d wished to, they could have carefully avoided the vast majority of collateral damage, instead coordinating a campaign of precision-guided missile strikes.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“But proving that the spies were working for the Russian government itself was far more difficult than proving they were merely located in Russia.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“He meant that Sandworm was Unit 74455 of the GRU.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“Russia? North Korea? China? The deeper forensic analysts looked, the further they seemed to be from a definitive conclusion.”
― Andy Greenberg, Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

“The Soviet regime manufactured a famine in Ukraine that would kill 3.9 million people, a tragedy of unimaginable scope that’s known today as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “hunger” and “extermination.” The”
― 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