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

by Nicole Perlroth

In early 2019, I discovered that Boeing, General Electric Aviation, and T-Mobile had all been targeted. Within a year, China’s hit list had expanded to include as many telecom, manufacturing, health care, oil and gas, pharma, high tech, transportation, construction, petrochemical, travel, and utilities companies and universities as they could break into. Only this time, rather than brute-forcing their way into victims directly, China’s hackers were coming in through side doors, breaking into companies via the software employees use to work remotely. They’d abandoned malware commonly attributed to China and started encrypting their traffic. They cleaned up after themselves, erasing server logs and moving files to Dropbox rather than sucking them directly back to China’s command-and-control servers.