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

by Nicole Perlroth

It wasn’t just Heartbleed. Daniel was still picking up after Snowden. North Korea had struck Sony Pictures on his watch. “I have Kim Jong-un to thank for the fact I didn’t spend Christmas with my family,” he told me. It was his phone that rang at 3:00 A.M. when Iranians breached the (wrong) Bowman Dam. It was Daniel who ran point on China’s recent hack of OPM. And now, right below our feet, a Russian hacking unit—a division of the old KGB now known as the SVR—was winding its way through computers at the State Department, the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and, though neither of us knew it at the time, the Democratic National Committee. “It never stops,” Daniel told me. “We’re doing this stuff on the fly. I’m a history buff. But on this there is no precedent.”