This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends Book Review

Hi! My name’s Zach and I currently work in a warehouse. In the very spare time I have I put all that energy into positioning myself for my first IT job. Cyberwarfare is on the rise and nation states are waging war on American infrastructure. Let’s start this review with the popular highlights:

Popular highlights:

Putin laid down only two rules for Russia’s hackers. First, no hacking inside the motherland. And second, when the Kremlin calls in a favor, you do whatever it asks. Otherwise hackers have full autonomy. And oh, how Putin loved them.

The crux of Putin’s foreign policy was to undercut the West’s grip on global affairs. With every hack and disinformation campaign, Putin’s digital army sought to tie Russia’s opponents up in their own politics and distract them from Putin’s real agenda: fracturing support for Western democracy and, ultimately, NATO

The former director of the NSA, Keith Alexander, famously called Chinese cyberespionage the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.” The Chinese were stealing every bit of American intellectual property worth stealing and handing it to their state-owned enterprises to imitate.

Starting in 2016, the U.S. National Security Agency’s own cyber arsenal — the sole reason the United States maintained its offensive advantage in cyberspace — was dribbled out online by a mysterious group whose identity remains unknown to this day. Over a period of nine months a cryptic hacker — or hackers; we still down’t know who the NSA’s torturers are — calling itself the Shadow Brokers started trickling out NSA hacking tools and code for any nation-state, cyber-criminal, or terrorist to pick up and use in their own cyber crusades.

“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed,” it read, “most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”

Zero-days

The book had a cool analogy about zero-days: they’re essentially like entering God mode in a video game. In another page, these were called “digital blood diamonds.” Overall, the book dived into zero-days as there’s multiple parties to deal with. People that find them want to sell at the highest price. It even went as far as attracting 13 year olds (like Matthew Murphy). Companies like iDefense attracted foreign hackers such as Argentine hacker Cesar Cerrudo. Government agencies which even included the Missile Defense Agency were interested in these.

One zero day hunter gave a lecture at Carnegie Mellon that he made a $50,000 sale to the US government.

On Stuxnet

I learned in this book that with Stuxnet, there’s a common misconception that there were four zero-days but in fact it’s actually seven. Langner is one of the first people to correctly call out the US and Israel for designing the weapon. In the coming months I will release a comprehensive post about Stuxnet and I will definitely reference this book.

Which country has the best hackers

Multiple experts have varying opinions on what ethnicity has the best hackers: some have stated post USSR countries, Israelis, and Argentines (apparently video games and other apps that are available in the US aren’t as accessible in Argentinia so Argentines had to look for backdoor ways to access them)

Miscellaneous Thoughts

• I learned about security researchers Dino Dai Zovi, Peter G. Neumann, and Alexander Sotirov. Nate Fick former US Marine and Thommas Lim of COSEINC.
• The Hack100 list compiled by Michiel Prins and Jobert Abma.
• Hack the Pentagon bounty program at the RSA security conference.
• Islamic State has its own hacking group.
• In several books I’ve read in the past 3 months I haven’t seen any mention of quantum computing. This is a bit discouraging because I argue quantum computing is the real tech arms race because once that technology is ready it will change IT security forever.