This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
Nicole Perlroth
An unlikely book for me to spend much time with, but worth the read. Gives me some slight reassurance that I have taken steps years ago to protect my digital privacy with various tools.
However, that apparently does not mean a hell of a lot when you consider the "0-Day" hacks that are out there, which give governments and other malicious actors a "backdoor" into just about any system.
Mostly, I've only been concerned with banking and securing my privacy against theft and damage. Didn't know I should have also been concerned with the very real possibility of complete destruction. The bigger players such as Iran, Russia, North Korea and China get the most juicy storytelling. I mean, how would the average person in the United States feel if they knew Russian hacking groups have backdoors into nuclear power plants and can cause a meltdown? Sound crazy? Well, if it is true, the crazy part is that they can't get them out...
The most interesting parts to me were:
1. The history that companies such as Microsoft and Apple (and many more) have with hackers, in that the early response was to try and sue them into oblivion whenever one freely came forward to them with a hack that allowed access to their (and your systems) in an attempt to get them to fix the security hole. This eventually changed to a type of cooperation, when they realized it was not going to go away, but it was too late and a large underground market developed around these hacks. Why get sued by one of these companies for free when you can sell your hack for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars?
2. The NSA (and any other alphabet soup division of many countries) actively source, create, and buy these "0-Days" for their own use while keeping the companies (Apple and Microsoft are the big ones that really matter) in the dark, thereby exposing vast numbers of people, businesses, critical infrastructure, etc., etc. to damaging attacks that cost untold billions of dollars.
Your anti-virus software can't protect you against these types of hacks. That's the meaning of a "0-Day". Means nobody knows about it yet, except some bad dudes (governments included) who want to do harm.
The money involved is staggering. The losses to businesses from these hacks is literally in the billions of dollars and climbing rapidly.
For the lay population, it's a relatively unknown feature of having anything connected to the internet.
A pretty interesting read. Just another example of how we're probably (but not quite yet) completely fucked.
