This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

The potential of cyberwar - where countries turn off another country's electricity in the middle of winter, attack the internet infrastructure of hospitals to render those hospitals dysfunctional in the middle of a pandemic, break into voter registration and election count system to mess with foreign election data - is very real. All of this has already happened. Yet somehow it still feels distant, like the plot of a thriller movie. It fits in well with the threats of the [b:New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future 36696533 New Dark Age Technology and the End of the Future James Bridle https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1512132962l/36696533.SY75.jpg 58496642]: systems that are so complex that we've lost oversight. And it's not the layers of technology that are complex, it's the politics tangled up with it. A lot of this underground war of cyber criminals and cyber mercenaries is enabled and funded by governments - the US, Russia, China, Iran being the biggest players. They exploit vulnerabilities in internet software (so-called “zero-days” - called for the fact that you only learn about the vulnerability on the day it is already exploited, day zero), that they use for spy operations instead of alerting the software companies to its existence. Often they even pressure the software companies to NOT FIX THE BUG, in order to be able to keep on using it. Perlroth's book is a wakeup call for the general public. Alerting everyone not just to update their software with the latest security patches and to smarten up about phishing emails, but also to be aware that governments are putting our crucial infrastructure - our power grid, our health system, our elections - on the line, if they keep on insisting on playing the spy game. Reads like a thriller.