Book Review: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends By Nicole Perloth
Tune in to the History Channel and you may find a show covering the collapse of ancient civilizations, or perhaps projections of how modern society could fall. Shifting weather patterns, plagues, massive wars, nuclear holocausts — many threats have or could destabilize societies. So how might our world end? Ask journalist Nicole Perlroth and she'll list cyber threats among the chief risks.
Selected as the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, Perlroth's This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends takes a deep dive into cybersecurity, or InfoSec (information security) as industry insiders like to call it. Fortunately, the end of civilization is not nigh, and despite the evocative title, Perloth's approach is grounded, perhaps dire but also offering hopeful silver linings.
Yet potential InfoSec attacks perpetrated by rival governments or rogue criminal groups can't be ignored. Perlroth cites zero-days as an especially grave risk, calling them digital superpowers. A zero-day is a software or hardware flaw that's completely unpatched and generally unknown. Zero-days offer relatively easy backdoor access into software and hardware systems, often allowing hackers to wreak havoc.
And it's not just foreign spies and criminal groups trying to find zero-day exploits. American intelligence agencies also hunt for them and will even pay hackers vast sums to not just discover exploits, but also keep them secret. This way, they can later use them.
Fortunately, while InfoSec threats remain grave, progress is being made, albeit slowly. For example, in the past, if a hacker benignly shared an exploit with a major company (i.e. Google) they might get threatened with legal action. Now? Many companies offer financial rewards for uncovering weaknesses and sharing them through the appropriate channels, protecting the company while programmers patch the vulnerabilities.
Still, Perlroth warns, risks continue to mount with the world essentially locked in a cyber arms race.