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

by Nicole Perlroth

The agency used EternalBlue for espionage. But they knew if the exploit ever got out, it could just as easily function as an intercontinental missile. If hackers in Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, or God knows where else swapped out the payload for one that could sabotage data or shut down systems on the other side, it could wreak total havoc. “We knew it could be a weapon of mass destruction,” one former TAO hacker told me. Some officials argued that the exploit was so dangerous that they should turn over the underlying zero-days to Microsoft. But the intelligence it produced was so critical, one former intelligence analyst told me, that turning it over was never seriously considered. Instead the NSA held on to EternalBlue for seven years—over a period that saw some of the most aggressive cyberattacks on American networks in history—and prayed it would never be found.