This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

WINNER OF THE FT & McKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021The instant New York Times bestsellerA Financial Times and The Times Book of the Year'A terrifying exposé' The Times'Part John le Carré . . . Spellbinding' New YorkerWe plug in anything we can to the internet. We can control our entire lives, economy and grid via a remote web control. But over the past decade, as this transformation took place, we never paused to think that we were also creating the world’s largest attack surface. And that the same nation that maintains the greatest cyber advantage on earth could also be among its most vulnerable.Filled with spies, hackers, arms dealers and a few unsung heroes, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is an astonishing and gripping feat of journalism. Drawing on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, Nicole Perlroth lifts the curtain on a market in shadow, revealing the urgent threat faced by us all if we cannot bring the global cyber arms race to heel.

An intricately detailed, deeply sourced and reported history of the origins and growth of the [cyberweapons] market and the global cyberweapons arms race it has sparked . . . This is no bloodless, just-the-facts chronicle. Written in the hot, propulsive prose of a spy thriller, Perlroth’s book sets out from the start to scare us out of our complacency . . . Perlroth comes at the reader hard, like an angry Cassandra who has spent the last seven years of her life unmasking the signs of our impending doom – only to be ignored again and again . . . A strong, data-driven case for action, Perlroth is a longtime cybersecurity reporter for the New York Times, and her book makes a kind of Hollywood entrance . . . Perlroth’s storytelling is part John le Carré and more parts Michael Crichton – ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ meets ‘The Andromeda Strain’. Because she’s writing about a boys’ club, there’s also a lot of ‘Fight Club’ in this book . . . And, because she tells the story of the zero-day market through the story of her investigation, it’s got a Frances McDormand ‘Fargo’ quality, too . . . Spellbinding, When the weaknesses of a system can be bought and sold, the results can be calamitous, as This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends shows . . . Engaging and troubling . . . This secretive market is difficult to penetrate, but Perlroth has dug deeper than most and chronicles her efforts wittily, A terrifying exposé of the black market in software bugs . . . Perlroth’s insider accounts provide texture and context that was often missing from news coverage at the time. Storytelling skills honed in her work as a New York Times reporter specialising in cybersecurity make them scarier, particularly because of the collateral damage . . . Yet the thrust of her commendably thorough and determined research is not the damage done, but the market in mayhem that underpins it . . . Perlroth does an admirable job in stripping away the jargon, A stemwinder of a tale of how frightening cyber weapons have been turned on their maker, and the implications for the world when everyone and anyone can now decimate everyone else with a click of a mouse . . . Perlroth takes a complex subject that has been cloaked in opaque techspeak and makes it dead real for the rest of us. You will not look at your mobile phone, your search engine, even your networked thermostat the same way again

Nicole Perlroth spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity, digital espionage and sabotage reporter for the New York Times. She lectures at Stanford University and regularly delivers keynote addresses and speeches. She is currently serving as an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). She also joined the Council on Foreign Relations’ Cybersecurity Task Force. Perlroth lives with her family in the Bay Area.