Nicole Perlroth: Reporting on the Market for Cyberweapons

When Nicole Perlroth took over the cybersecurity beat at the New York Times, she'd been writing about venture capitalists. Within two years Chinese spies were inside her own newsroom and she was reading documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Over the next decade she chased the strangest market in the world: the one where governments and brokers pay small fortunes for software flaws nobody else knows about. Her 2021 book on that trade became a bestseller and the Financial Times and McKinsey's business book of the year.

Then she walked away from journalism altogether, and the people she used to cover started hiring her.

Nicole Perlroth at a Glance

• A Princeton graduate (class of 2004) with a master's degree from Stanford, Perlroth covered venture capital and start-ups at Forbes, where she also edited the Midas List of top investors.
• She'd been reporting on cyberattacks since 2010, and at the New York Times she led cybersecurity coverage for more than a decade.
• In early 2013 she was embedded with the paper's own security team as it hunted Chinese hackers inside the Times' network.
• In September 2013 she co-wrote, with ProPublica and The Guardian, the revelation that the NSA had secretly undermined much of the encryption protecting the internet.
• Her book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends (Bloomsbury, February 2021) exposed the global market for zero-day exploits and won the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year award.
• She left journalism in 2021, was named to CISA's new Cybersecurity Advisory Committee that December and became a venture partner at Ballistic Ventures.
• In 2025 Rubrik made her its "Chief Cyber Raconteur" and host of the podcast To Catch a Thief, which won a Tribeca X Award in June 2026.

The Life of Nicole Perlroth

Perlroth's Road to the Beat

Nicole Perlroth graduated from Princeton in 2004 and later earned a master's degree at Stanford. Her first big job in journalism had nothing to do with hackers: at Forbes she covered venture capital and start-ups and edited the magazine's Midas List, its annual ranking of the world's top tech investors. Her Forbes bio at the time read simply: "I cover venture capital, start-ups and edit the Forbes Midas List."

But the hacks kept coming. "I'd been reporting on cyberattacks since 2010," she later told the Committee to Protect Journalists, "and it seemed like each attack got a little bit worse than the last."

When she moved to the New York Times, that beat became her whole job, and she'd lead the paper's cybersecurity coverage for more than a decade.

Spies in the Newsroom

Her education in the subject came fast and close to home. In early 2013 the Times revealed that Chinese hackers had spent months inside its network, and Perlroth was embedded with the paper's security team as it worked to throw them out.

What stuck with her was the ending. She watched FBI agents collect evidence and then simply disappear, with no follow-up and no explanation. It was, she's said, her formative introduction to the field.

The Snowden Files

That September she was part of a team that broke one of the biggest stories of the Snowden leaks. Working with ProPublica's Jeff Larson and a team at The Guardian, Perlroth and her Times colleague Scott Shane revealed that the NSA, through a program called Bullrun, had broken or bypassed much of the encryption protecting email, web searches and phone calls, using supercomputers, court orders and quiet partnerships with technology companies to weaken security standards.

The agency had spent billions on the effort. For a reporter who'd just watched Chinese hackers walk through her own newsroom, it was a lesson in how little the word "secure" meant.

The Market for Zero-Days

The thread Perlroth kept pulling led to zero-days: flaws in software that the vendor doesn't know about and therefore can't patch. Governments want them for spying and sabotage, brokers sell them, and the prices are kept as secret as the flaws themselves.

She tracked the trade from Silicon Valley to the "internet mercenaries" who, as a 2019 Times investigation she co-wrote put it, do battle for authoritarian governments.

"When you talk about this trade, you reveal the moral dilemma that is inherent," she told Stanford's business school. Her own role, she's said, is simpler: "I describe my job as a translator. We need a lot more translators."

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

The book arrived on February 9, 2021: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race, published by Bloomsbury. Its argument, which she took to Amanpour & Company that spring, was that by stockpiling flaws for its own espionage the US government had left its citizens and critical infrastructure exposed, and that the SolarWinds breach showed the bill coming due.

The book became a New York Times bestseller, was named the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year in December 2021 and took the bronze medal in the Council on Foreign Relations' 2022 Arthur Ross Book Award. It's since been inducted into the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame and optioned for film and television.

She spent that spring on the circuit, talking zero-days with John Markoff at Powell's Books and with Stanford's Andrew Grotto, and her Amanpour interview has drawn more than 120,000 views on YouTube.

Leaving the Newsroom

Perlroth left journalism in 2021. On December 1 of that year CISA named her, listed simply as "Cybersecurity Journalist," to the 23-member Cybersecurity Advisory Committee it was standing up to advise the agency.

She also crossed to the other side of the table, becoming a venture partner at Ballistic Ventures, a firm that backs cybersecurity start-ups, and managing director of its Silver Buckshot cyber mission fund. She lectures regularly at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Perlroth Today

In March 2025 the data security company Rubrik gave her a title no newsroom ever would: Chief Cyber Raconteur. The job came with a microphone. To Catch a Thief, her podcast documentary about China's rise to cyber dominance, won a Tribeca X Award for best audio in June 2026, the same month a new season turned to North Korea.

She hasn't stopped sounding alarms either. In May 2025 she and Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia warned that China had almost doubled its aggression in cyberspace while organizations slept.

She lives with her family in the Bay Area, though by her own account she increasingly prefers an off-grid cabin in the woods.

Nicole Perlroth: The Translator

Perlroth's gift was never that she could read an exploit. It was that she could explain, to a reader who'd never heard of a zero-day, why a government hoarding them is a problem for everyone.

That's the work of a translator, and she's still doing it, for investors, policymakers and a podcast audience instead of a newspaper.

The world hasn't ended yet. She'd like to keep it that way.