THIS IS HOW THEY TELL ME THE WORLD ENDS

New York Times award-winning cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth renders the complexities of viruses and encryption as a character-driven, can’t-put-it-down story.

New York Times award-winning cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth is an anomaly. Not just because she’s a woman reporting on a male-wonk-dominated world, but because she’s got the talent to render the complexities of viruses and encryption as a character-driven, can’t-put-it-down story.

In THIS IS HOW THEY TELL ME THE WORLD ENDS, Perlroth reports from her front-row seat covering the new digital arms race, a race between the world’s unrepentant bug hunters, dealers, stockpilers, and government agencies who are busy weaponizing the Internet, and the tortured souls trying—and for the most part failing—to stop them. This is a cat-mouse caper with heroes, villains, and even villains who jump sides to become heroes.

A Princeton and Stanford grad, Nicole Perlroth was the winner of the Top Cybersecurity Journalist Award in 2014 by the SANS Institute and was awarded the 2013 “Best in Business” prize by the Society of American Business Editors for her coverage of Chinese cyber-espionage and her in-depth writing about Chinese cyberattacks against The New York Times. She was the first to identify the Chinese military unit responsible for thousands of attacks on American companies, agencies, and universities, and also the first to break the story of the US National Security Agency’s efforts to crack encryption, a classified program known as “Bullrun.” The rights to her 2014 Times profile of security expert Brian Krebs have been optioned by Sony Pictures, with David Bloomfield, of Thank You For Smoking, attached. She’s based in San Francisco.