THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 55
Cyberattacks make headlines and then vanish, but once the weapons are unleashed everyone remains at risk.
BOOKS
ZERO DAY
Hacking the whole world.
BYJILL LEPORE
ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHAN DJOB NKONDO
I
n the nightmare, sirens caterwaul as
ambulances career down ice-slicked,
car-crashed streets whose traffic lights
flash all three colors at once (they’ve been
hacked by North Korea) during a climate-
catastrophic blizzard, bringing pandemic
patients to hospitals without water or
electricity—pitch-black, all vaccinations
and medications spoiled (the power grid
has been hacked by Iran)—racing past
apartment buildings where people are
freezing to death in their beds, families
huddled together under quilts, while,
outside the darkened, besieged halls of
government, men wearing fur hats and
Kevlar vests (social media has been
hacked by Russia), flashlights strapped
to their rifles, chant, “Q is true! Q is true!”
“SOMEONE SHOULD DO SOME-
THING,” reads the T-shirt worn by one
of Nicole Perlroth’s sources, a hacker from
New Zealand, in “This Is How They Tell
Me the World Ends: The Cyberweap-
ons Arms Race” (Bloomsbury). Some-
one should. But who? And do what? And
about which of the Biblical plagues fac-
ing humankind? Perlroth is a longtime
THE CRITICS
