In the nightmare, sirens caterwaul as ambulances career down ice-slicked, car-crashed streets whose traffic lights flash all three colors at once (they’ve been hacked by North Korea) during a climate-catastrophic blizzard, bringing pandemic patients to hospitals without water or electricity—pitch-black, all vaccinations and medications spoiled (the power grid has been hacked by Iran)—racing past apartment buildings where people are freezing to death in their beds, families huddled together under quilts, while, outside the darkened, besieged halls of government, men wearing fur hats and Kevlar vests (social media has been hacked by Russia), flashlights strapped to their rifles, chant, “Q is true! Q is true!”
“SOMEONE SHOULD DO SOMETHING,” reads the T-shirt worn by one of Nicole Perlroth’s sources, a hacker from New Zealand, in “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race” (Bloomsbury). Someone should. But who? And do what? And about which of the Biblical plagues facing humankind? Perlroth is a longtime cybersecurity reporter for the Times, and her book makes a kind of Hollywood entrance, arriving when the end of the world is nigh, at least in the nightmare that, every night, gains on the day.
Perlroth is interested in one particular plague—governments using hacking as a weapon of war—but her book raises the question of whether that’s the root of a lot of other evils. For seven years, Perlroth investigated the market in “zero-days” (pronounced “oh-days”); her book is the story of that chase, and telling that story, which gets pretty technical, requires a good bit of decoding. “A zero-day is a software or hardware flaw for which there is no existing patch,” she explains. Ze ..
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