This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

THIS IS HOW THEY TELL ME THE WORLD ENDS
Nicole Perlroth
Bloomsbury

REVIEWED BY TRUDIE BATEMAN

This door-stopper on the cyber-weapons arms race by The New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth would, on the face of it, seem an onerous task to a reader not over-familiar with the issues of cyber-security but it turns out to be quite the page-turner.

Perlroth is not writing, necessarily for the tech savvy amongst us but rather this is a klaxon call to us all, that we appear to be hurtling towards some kind of catastrophic nation-state hacking debacle. A future in which nefarious agents turn the power off, open the floodgates on a dam or meddle in an election. If it comes as a surprise that all of this has already been achieved, albeit with varying degrees of success, then perhaps this is a book you need to explore.

Perlroth herself, a kind of outsider to this closeted world, guides the reader through the early days of the internet and the evolution of Infosec (Information Security) while giving us some humorous insights into life as a female reporter on the cyber beat.

‘‘To any woman who has ever complained about the ratio of females to males in tech, I say: try going to a hacking conference... Most hackers I met were men who showed very little interest in anything beyond code. And jiujitsu. Hackers love jiujitsu.’’
Perlroth's tenacity to draw back the curtain even a little way on this secretive and highly technical field is admirable even when you get the feeling it takes years for the full story to be revealed.

Nevertheless, this contains plenty of juicy tales, the Stuxnet story, opens your eyes to what cyber-warfare can achieve. The image of centrifuges spinning out of control in Iran's nuclear facility entirely controlled by bits of malicious code should be enough to give us all nightmares, particularly as that code then ‘‘escapes’’ and spreads around the world.

Perlroth rightly paints Stuxnet as a point of no return for cyber warfare. It raised questions about what can be done in the name of ‘‘defence’’ and who will be to blame when these cyber-attack tools rebound back on ‘‘the good guys’’.

Perlroth makes a good case for the idea that nation-state enemies are now drawing their battle lines not on land or sea but rather in cyberspace. It gradually becomes apparent that an almighty war is occurring daily, fought in darkened rooms in Russia or within the secretive units of the NSA. Defences are breached, attack surfaces prodded and bugs planted in systems that can be remotely detonated. It is somewhat amazing that most of this plays out with barely a blip on the collective consciousness but perhaps speaks to the secretive nature of this world.

There is a lot of material here, some of it repetitious and not entirely jargon-free. I fear some readers will not stay the distance, however I urge patience. This book provides a rare glimpse into the nebulous corners of the hacking world and suggests that while the internet changed our lives for the better it could also be the instrument of our downfall.

Trudie Bateman is a former scientist and University of Otago student, now avid reader.