I first saw this at Audible – it looked good  and sounded good so it went on my Wish List there (now almost 300 books).  Then a friend in a reading group recommended it and it sounded right up my alley. I finished my current read and downloaded.  Yay!   

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
by Nicole Perlroth 
2021 / 493 pages
Read by Allyson Ryan 18h 31m
Rating: 9.5  / politics-government
(Read and listened)

It gets “good” right away – or at least I found myself absorbed.  And before long I downloaded the Kindle version to read along with the book in case I missed a good line or wanted to see how something was spelled.  Or if I wanted to do a search for some person, place, thing to remind myself (there are lots of characters).  

This is the information gathered by Nicole Perlroth as she did her New York Times job of Cyber Security Correspondent (Information Security and Info-Sec.) She interviewed hundreds of people. 

The material is organized by the type of job the people involved do and chapters are titled Capitalists, Spies, Mercenaries, Resistance, Twister (I don’t know) and Boomerang.  Overall there’s a certain chronological flow to it but Perlroth doesn’t stick to that,  she goes about her topics naturally.

 
Basically, hackers find bugs of one sort or another and either exploit them directly or they sell them, this information, to the makers of the computers or application to fix. Or they sell them on the underground for other hackers to exploit or resell.  It’s big business these days – very big business. The first section of the book is about hackers of Apple, Microsoft, Google and so on.  

Then she goes on to develop the topics of crime and international crime and governments and law and no order with the big cyber attacks and ransomware stuff of today.  She ends with how this “system” is dangerous and we should each do what we can but it really looks like disaster is coming. 

It gets intense and kind of scary.  I decided it was time I updated my computer so I spent about 10 hours fiddling with that but it got done and I’ve vowed to be prompter about it.  

One of the best reviewers – (the bottom one below) says it’s not as serioulsy scary as Perlroth seems to portray it – she can be misleading

Some reviews: 
 Lori Stroud: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/03/691058267/reuters-investigation-finds-uae-employed-former-nsa-hackers-as-spies

Book talk: https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/02/23/this-is-how-they-tell-me-world-ends-cyberweapons-arms-race-event-7550

Reviews: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/books/review/this-is-how-they-tell-me-the-world-ends-nicole-perlroth.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/09/cybersecurity-202-this-is-how-they-tell-me-world-ends-sheds-new-light-global-cyberweapons-arms-race/

Really good review – professional opinion: https://dale-peterson.com/2021/04/13/book-review-this-is-how-they-tell-me-the-world-ends-by-nicole-perlroth/