This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

"This is a heavy book, it’s one of the bigger ones on the list. Her take is that we have ignored what’s going on behind the scenes in the world of cybersecurity . She takes on the question of the dark web, where a lot of really devious and dark stuff is happening in an arms race between cybercriminals, hackers and spies for national governments. They’re fighting to infiltrate different essential computer systems and exploiting vulnerabilities that exist in cyberspace. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The whole premise is that we’re on the precipice of catastrophe as far as the cyberweapons arms race is concerned. One particularly worrying part of it is that US security officials have essentially been rewarding cybercriminals for finding vulnerabilities in computer systems that they can use against their opponents. That obviously then creates a market for these vulnerabilities that could be used by unscrupulous hackers in the community to break through our defences. It’s a frightening book. Perlroth doesn’t pull any punches, and I don’t think I’m misrepresenting the judges when I say that they were all bug-eyed with fear after reading it. It’s a big, jolting call to the world to wake up to something that might turn into disaster. Yes, she’s another journalist. There’s a predominance of journalists on our shortlist, going back a few years. It’s partly because journalists are trained to tell a story. This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is a pretty good one, if a gloomy one. That is an occasional criticism. I tend not to worry about comments about the shortlist because, by that stage, it’s the judges who have chosen the books and our judging panel is pretty diverse. It includes people who are and have been very prominent in business and it probably includes all shades of politics . If the judges decide from the longlist that they don’t want books that paint a more positive picture of business, there’s not much I can do about that. It’s a comment worth reflecting on, though, every year. It comes down to the fact that it’s quite hard to find a book that brings a positive view of business that doesn’t then fall over into boosterism. We’re often looking at books by CEOs, a genre that is 99% poor and less than compelling. That’s partly because chief executives rarely admit that they have failed and if they’ve succeeded, they’re usually talking up their own successes. There are a few exceptions. Ed Catmull’s book about Pixar, Creativity, Inc . , from a few years back, is still one I recommend. I think Net Positive , the longlisted book that I mentioned by Paul Polman and Andrew Winston, is one that does cast business as being in a position to lead positive change. So books like this do make it to the longlist, but sometimes they get left on the shelf at the point where the shortlist is chosen. Yes. The other thing is it has to be a good story. Sometimes we do have to stay our hand a little with books on scandals and make sure we’re also considering and longlisting books that explain how business is done. For example, I would say The World for Sale is not necessarily an anti-business book. It’s a book that actually tells us how quite a lot of people are doing business, albeit in the very extreme world of commodities trading."