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

by Nicole Perlroth

The Israelis, I learned from sources, had hacked into Kaspersky’s systems and discovered the firm was using its antivirus software’s access to computers all over the world, to search for and pull back Top Secret documents. The Israelis shared screenshots taken inside Kaspersky’s systems with their American counterparts, proving as much. And now it appeared that Kaspersky’s software may have stolen Top Secret NSA documents from an employee’s home computer. It was a dizzying story of spies hacking spies hacking spies, but by then, nothing surprised me anymore. After our story published in the Times, Kaspersky claimed an internal investigation determined that the firm’s antivirus software had simply been doing its job: searching for a particular string of malware that contained the word “secret” in the code. It was an admission that Kaspersky’s software had taken Top Secret data off an NSA employee’s computer, but Kaspersky said it destroyed the NSA’s data as soon as it realized what, exactly, had been caught in its dragnet.