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

by Nicole Perlroth

Back in 2011, a whistleblower tipped off the Pentagon that its security software was riddled with Russian backdoors. The Pentagon had paid Computer Sciences Corporation—the same megacontractor that now owns VRL—$613 million to secure its systems. CSC, in turn, subcontracted the actual coding to a Massachusetts outfit called NetCracker Technology, which farmed it out to programmers in Moscow. Why? Greed. The Russians were willing to work for a third of the cost that U.S. programmers had quoted. As a result, the Pentagon’s security software was basically a Russian Trojan horse, inviting in the very adversary the Pentagon had paid hundreds of millions of dollars to keep out.