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

by Nicole Perlroth

And then there was Nimda, an attack that slowed the internet to a crawl. Nimda took advantage of an unpatched Microsoft bug to infect everything in its reach—email, servers, hard drives—and then happily reinfected everything it had already hit. It had only taken twenty-two minutes for Nimda to become the worst cyberattack of its time. The tech-research firm Gartner warned Microsoft customers to “run, don’t walk, away” from Microsoft’s web server software. Nimda’s timing—just one week after 9/11—caused government officials to suspect cyberterrorists. A line in the code—“R.P. China”—pointed to China. Or had it been planted there to throw off responders? Why RPC and not PRC? Was it the work of a Chinese speaker who didn’t know English grammar conventions? Or terrorists planting a false flag? Nobody ever found out. But the mere suspicion that the attack had been the work of cyberterrorists made Microsoft’s security woes too alarming for the government to ignore.