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

by Nicole Perlroth

At Merck, the pharma giant, factory floors stopped. The multinational law firm DLA Piper could not access a single email. The British consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser would be offline for weeks. So would subsidiaries of FedEx. Maersk, the world’s largest shipping operator, was paralyzed and would sustain hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. India’s largest container port was turning shipments away. In the United States, doctors at hospitals in rural Virginia and across Pennsylvania were locked out of patient records and prescription systems. NotPetya had even spread to the far reaches of Tasmania, where factory workers at the Cadbury’s chocolate factory in Hobart watched in horror as their machines froze up with the same ransom message flashing across computers all over the world. The attack even backfired on Moscow. Computers at Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, went down too.