The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

For a decade the executives of Facebook, Apple, and Google were convinced that the technology that made them billions of dollars would also hasten the spread of democracy around the world. Putin was out to disprove that thesis and show that he could use those same tools to break democracy and enhance his own power.

Investigators raced to figure out how the Russians had gotten inside. The answer was pretty shocking: The Russians had left USB drives littered around the parking and public areas of a US base in the Middle East. Someone picked one up, and when they put the drive in a laptop connected to SIPRNet, the Russians were inside. By the time Plunkett and her team made their discovery, the bug had spread to all of US Central Command and beyond and begun scooping up data, copying it, and sending it back to the Russians.

The science-fiction cyberwar scenario is here. That’s Nitro Zeus. But my concern, the reason I’m talking, is when you shut down a country’s power grid, it doesn’t just pop back up. It’s more like Humpty-Dumpty. And if all the king’s men can’t turn the lights back on, or filter the water for weeks, then lots of people die. And something we can do to others, they can do to us too. Is that something that we should keep quiet? Or should we talk about it? —An NSA employee, speaking through a composite character in Zero Days

In the twenty-first century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template. —Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, on Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy, 2013

Stalin would have been proud of the Internet Research Agency. It existed in plain sight and yet was not what it appeared. It was not an intelligence agency, yet it learned some of their skills. It was nothing fancy: a building, filled with young talent willing to spend twelve hours a day peddling pure fiction, some of it aimed at the Russian market, some aimed at Europe. The best talent was assigned to the American desk, stuffed with some of the agency’s highest-paid, most imaginative writers. Fake news didn’t come cheap.

Stalin used Soviet propaganda to recruit Americans, undermine capitalism, and sow fear and distrust. The Internet Research Agency did the same, but Facebook and other social media sites gave it reach Stalin could scarcely have imagined.

It is still unclear if the idea behind the IRA came from Prigozhin, Putin, or someone in between. But its creation marked a moment of profound transition in how the Internet could be put to use. For a decade it was regarded as a great force for democracy: as people of different cultures communicated, the best ideas would rise to the top and autocrats would be undercut. The IRA was based on the opposite thought: social media could just as easily incite disagreements, fray social bonds, and drive people apart. While the first great blush of attention garnered by the IRA would come because of its work surrounding the 2016 election, its real impact went deeper—in pulling at the threads that bound together a society that lived more and more of its daily life in the digital space. Its ultimate effect was mostly psychological. There was an added benefit: The Internet Research Agency could actually degrade social media’s organizational power through weaponizing it. The ease with which its “news writers” impersonated real Americans—or real Europeans, or anyone else—meant that over time, people would lose trust in the entire platform. For Putin, who looked at social media’s role in foment...

In its first headquarters, a blocky, four-story building in Saint Petersburg, at 55 Savushkina Street, the Agency’s dozens of twentysomethings learned to “troll” critics of Putin and journalists who delved too deeply into what the agency did. It didn’t take them long to perfect the art form. As Putin and his Chef had learned, it is easy to make a critic miserable in the Twitter age. And the Internet Research Agency performed the task well—growing to 80 employees with outsized influence online.

The use of Facebook events would evolve quickly. The following year the trolls recruited an actress to attend a rally for Trump in West Palm Beach dressed as Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform. She was paraded in a cage that was built by other Americans. They apparently didn’t know that they were being paid by Russians in Saint Petersburg.