Nicole Perlroth
speaker
463 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 14 Sep
Nicole Perlroth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We'll be back in a minute.
When I first started covering Chinese cyber attacks against the New York Times, for instance, a decade ago, it was brazen, but it was fishing.
You know, it was loud, but it was successful.
You know, some people called them the most polite hackers in cyber because they'd almost announced their presence.
As we started outing some of these campaigns, they really went underground.
And I think really the up-leveling moment was when they started using their authoritarianism to their advantage.
They basically created a series of new laws that said, hey, if you find a vulnerability, you have to give the state right of first refusal.
And all these Chinese hackers that I used to see at the big hacking competitions that would show, you know, how to hack into a Tesla or an iPhone or Android stopped showing up on state's orders pretty much.
All that knowledge, all that skill started funneling directly to the state.
And we started seeing some really significant up-leveling and sophistication in some of these Chinese operations, like Salt Typhoon.
Chinese state operations.
Exactly.
And these are much harder to defend against.
We started seeing them come for security devices.
We started seeing them find zero days, vulnerabilities no one knew about, using those in the course of their operations.
And we're catching them in not only our back-end telecom infrastructure, but in these critical entities like water and power.
You know, we are locked in this very dangerous game of chicken.
And I wish that we had an entirely new generation of technological diplomats that could sit down with Xi and say, hey, you know, none of us want the world that we're crashing towards.
But I am close to people who've had similar conversations with China on hacking for years, on fentanyl, more recently on Volt Typhoon, these hacks of our critical infrastructure.
At one point, one of the people I interviewed last season when we were focused on China said,
Showing 221–240 of 463 · page 12 of 24
← Previous
Next →