“In the United States, though, convenience was everything; it still is. We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society. There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web. We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control. And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.”
―
Nicole Perlroth
This is How They Tell Me The World Ends
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Zero-day exploits, passwords, airgap systems, multi-factor authentication, attacks on the grid, spies, a market for cyber weapons… the arms race all over again.
The book induces a breathlessness, an anxiety that you do not let overwhelm you because you know we are all screwed. Because you know that some things have already bolted out the door, the likely outcome already set in motion many years ago, when the world was a more naive place. This is a sobering read, and my helpless self proceeded to pat my password manager, change some old passwords, and set up multi-factor authentication for more accounts.
Highly recommended.