[ExI] Why Hackers Aren’t Afraid of Us

[John Grigg]

 "Yet in this arms race, the United States has often been its own worst
enemy. Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its
highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of
the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and
shot right back at us. That’s what happened with the WannaCry ransomware
attack by North Korea last year, which used some of the sophisticated tools
the N.S.A. had developed. No wonder the agency has refused to admit that
the weapons were made in America: It raised the game of its attackers. "

"Nuclear weapons are still the ultimate currency of national power, as the
meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore last week
showed. But they cannot be used without causing the end of human
civilization — or at least of a regime. So it’s no surprise that hackers
working for North Korea, Iran’s mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and
the People’s Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great
advantage of cyberweapons is that they are the *opposite* of a nuke: hard
to detect, easy to deny and increasingly finely targeted. And therefore,
extraordinarily hard to deter. "


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/sunday-review/why-hackers-arent-afraid-of-us.html
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