Parts III, IV, and V of the book are aptly named ‘The Spies,’ ‘The Mercenaries,’ and ‘The Resistance’, and they chronicle the NSA’s never-ending quest to collect information about America’s enemies. Watters, owner of a cybersecurity firm, and ‘Jimmy Sabien,’ a cyber exploit broker, she pieces together the early days of a digital black market, where the United States’ intelligence agencies were the biggest customers. Sifting through thousands of documents in a small windowless closet, Perlroth learns of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) terrifying capabilities, a stockpile of zero-day vulnerabilities that offer cybercriminals “digital superpowers.” She sets out to find out how the NSA was able to accrue their arsenal, leading her to some of the pioneers in the cybersecurity industry. She then takes the reader back to July 2013 when The New York Times asked her to analyze the Snowden leaks along with colleagues from The Guardian.

At best, the devastating attacks left thousands of Ukrainians without power, while at their worst they shut down the country’s internet-connected services, changing their victims’ lives forever. Opening in Kyiv during the winter of 2019, Perlroth ‘s book recounts what years of constant Russian cyber-attacks have done to the country’s infrastructure and people. The prologue and Parts I and II set the stage and immediately pull the reader into the story. Perlroth breaks the book down into seven parts. An award-winning cybersecurity journalist with The New York Times, Perlroth meticulously outlines the history and future of our nation’s digital space leaving no stone unturned. Perlroth has traveled the world from Washington D.C., to Ukraine, Argentina, and beyond conducting interviews with the people at the leading edge of the technological arms race. Her firsthand accounts of interviews with cyber arms dealers, corporate security specialists, and even some of the nation’s top spies draw the reader into a seedy underworld of hackers and states exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities and waging war around the globe. Nicole Perlroth’s This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is a cautionary tale of cyber weapons, underground markets, state sanctioned cyber-attacks, and the West’s vulnerability in an increasingly interconnected digital world.

Draw your weapons book