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

by Nicole Perlroth

we must stop introducing glaring bugs into our code. Part of the problem is the economy still rewards the first to market. Whoever gets their widget to market with the most features before the competition wins. But speed has always been the natural enemy of good security design. Our current model penalizes products with the most secure, fully vetted software. And yet, the “move fast and break things” mantra Mark Zuckerberg pushed in Facebook’s earliest days has failed us time and time again. The annual cost from cyber losses now eclipses those from terrorism. In 2018, terrorist attacks cost the global economy $33 billion, a decrease of thirty-eight percent from the previous year. That same year, a study by RAND Corporation from more than 550 sources—the most comprehensive data analysis of its kind—concluded global losses from cyberattacks were likely on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. And that was the conservative estimate. Individual data sets predicted annual cyber losses of more than two trillion dollars.