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

by Nicole Perlroth

Below the quote was an emergency plan for cyberattacks. “Hour 0,” the notice read. “Notify White House Security Response. Hour 1: FBI and Secret Service reach out to victim. NSA searches intelligence for information. DHS coordinates national security response. End of Day: Send status message. If appropriate, this message will state that: ‘No further messages will be sent unless or until significant new information is obtained, which may take days or weeks.’ ” I’d always imagined the White House would have some advanced, real-time map of cyberattacks, denoted in red blips, sailing toward the White House from decoy servers around the globe, and a team of responders waiting to zap them in real time. Nope. When it came to defense, the nation with the most advanced hacking capabilities in the world was reduced to a printout, like the rest of us.