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

by Nicole Perlroth

That December 2014, as American officials were consumed with China, Iran, and the Russians’ increasing incursions into Ukraine’s election systems and its grid, North Korean hackers popped out of nowhere and struck Sony Pictures in an Aramco/Sands–style attack that destroyed 70 percent of Sony’s computers and reduced employees to pen and paper for months. North Korean hackers targeted the Sony studio as revenge for a ridiculously bad James Franco–Seth Rogen film, The Interview, in which Franco and Rogen’s characters assassinate North Korea’s Dear Leader, Kim Jong-un. The North Koreans, like the Iranians before them, had wiped the data, leaked employees’ Social Security numbers, and, in an escalation from previous attacks, dumped executives’ embarrassing emails online.