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

by Nicole Perlroth

As of this writing, Iran’s hackers were pushing deeper into U.S. critical infrastructure and the companies that control the American grid. And showed no signs of leaving anytime soon. It is Iran’s way of saying, “We’re sitting here with a gun to your head,”

Meanwhile a new zero-day broker has quietly surfaced online and started outbidding everyone else on the market. The broker calls itself Crowdfense, and I have learned it works exclusively for the Emiratis and their closest ally, the Saudis.

On Election Day, Cyber Command took the IRA’s servers offline and kept them there for several days, while election officials certified the vote. We may never know what, if anything, the Russians had planned for that day, but the 2018 midterms proceeded relatively unscathed.

it. Palm Beach County—the same county that decided the 2000 election—hid the fact that in the weeks leading up to 2016 its election offices were taken out by ransomware.

hackers. A raft of election security bills faced a one-man roadblock in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell made clear that he would not advance any election security bill, no matter how bipartisan. Even measures deemed critical by election integrity experts—paper trails for every ballot and rigorous post-election audits, bills that blocked voting machines from reaching out to the web and required campaigns to report foreign outreach—died on McConnell’s desk.

U.S. intelligence officials warned lawmakers and the White House, one month later, that Russian hackers and trolls were once again working overtime to elect Trump. Trump erupted at the briefings. Not because Russia was interfering in America’s democracy. The president was upset intelligence officials had shared their findings with Democrats.

With each new campaign, it got harder to pinpoint where exactly American-made disinformation ended and Russia’s active measures began. We had become Putin’s “useful idiots.” And so long as Americans were tangled up in our own infighting, Putin could maneuver the world unchecked.

Steve Bannon, the president’s far-right-hand man, later called for Wray—and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert—to be beheaded as a warning to federal workers who dared question the president’s propaganda. We had all spent the past four years worried what our foreign adversaries were planning. But as the election neared, it was clear that the real interference was coming from within.

The shift to mail-in voting also meant that, barring a landslide, the election would not be called in one night but would be slow-rolled over several days, weeks even, forming an ever-widening attack surface.

escalating digital cold war between Washington and Moscow. The attacks were highly classified, but then national security advisor John Bolton started dropping public hints.

Pentagon officials’ only hesitation about our going public, we learned, was that Trump had not been briefed on the grid attacks in detail. In part, this was because Cyber Command’s new authorities didn’t require his knowledge or approval. But that was just the cover story. In reality, officials were hesitant to brief Trump for fear that he might countermand the attacks or discuss them with Russian officials, as he had done two years earlier,

Trump went ballistic. He took to his favorite medium, Twitter, to demand that we immediately release our sources, and to accuse us of “a virtual act of treason.”

To his eternal credit, our publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, came to our swift defense, writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that the president had crossed a “dangerous line.”

out safely. The episode made clear, Walsh would later write, “that journalists can’t rely on the United States government to have our back as it once did.” In other words, our invisible armor was gone. It vanished the day Trump was inaugurated.

the analogy to Pearl Harbor is a deeply flawed one. America didn’t see that attack coming; we’ve seen the cyber equivalent coming for a decade. What we are experiencing instead is not one attack but a plague, invisible to the naked eye, that ripples across our country at an extraordinary rate, reaching ever deeper into our infrastructure, our democracy, our elections, our freedom, our privacy, and our psyche, with no end in sight. American computers are attacked every thirty-nine seconds.

“It’s death by a thousand hacks.