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

by Nicole Perlroth

In the first hours of the campaign, researchers believed that the attack was from ransomware known as Petya—a reference to the James Bond film GoldenEye, in which top-secret Soviet satellites armed with nuclear warheads, one nicknamed Petya, the other Mischa, prepare to trigger a nuclear electromagnetic pulse to take out power worldwide. But it did not take long before researchers could see the attack was vastly more sophisticated than that of Petya. It used not one but two stolen NSA tools—EternalBlue and another called EternalRomance—to spread. And it had baked in yet another formidable exploit, MimiKatz, a password-stealing tool developed by a French researcher five years earlier as a proof-of-concept exploit, to crawl as deep into victims’ networks as it could.