This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

“It’s amazing what people let you do when you’re wearing a hard hat,” one former CIA officer told me.

‘Only we have backdoors that we can use,’ without realizing that these were backdoors that every nation in the world wanted too.”

Mandiant’s clients could spend millions of dollars on the latest and greatest in newfangled firewalls and antivirus software, but security was only as good as the weakest link. And usually the weakest link was a human who clicked on a simple phishing email or message containing something nasty.

Foreshadowing...

That March, Fancy Bear’s Russian hackers had sent John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, a fake Google alert, declaring that he had to change his Gmail password. Podesta had forwarded the email to the DNC’s IT staff for vetting, and in what would become the most tragic typo in American election history, a campaign aide wrote back, “This is a legitimate email.” He had intended to type “illegitimate,” but the damage was done.

The worst kind of typo