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

by Nicole Perlroth

Starting in 2016, the U.S. National Security Agency’s own cyber arsenal—the sole reason the United States maintained its offensive advantage in cyberspace—was dribbled out online by a mysterious group whose identity remains unknown to this day. Over a period of nine months a cryptic hacker—or hackers; we still don’t know who the NSA’s torturers are—calling itself the Shadow Brokers started trickling out NSA hacking tools and code for any nation-state, cybercriminal, or terrorist to pick up and use in their own cyber crusades. The Shadow Brokers’ leaks made headlines, but like most news between 2016 and 2017, the news did not stick in the American consciousness for long. The public’s understanding of what was transpiring was—to put it mildly—a mismatch to the gravity of the situation, and to the impact those leaks would soon have on the NSA, on our allies, and on some of America’s biggest corporations and smallest towns and cities. The Shadow Brokers leaks were the world’s first glimpse of the most powerful and invisible cyber arsenal on earth. What these cryptic hackers had exposed was the largest government program you have never heard of, a cyberweapons and espionage operation so highly classified that for decades it was kept off the books completely, hidden from the public via shell companies, mercenaries, black budgets, nondisclosure agreements, and, in the early days, giant duffel bags of cash.