I'm Andy Greenberg and you're listening to Storybound.

I'm going to read a chapter of my book Sandworm, a new era of cyber war and the hunt for

the Kremlin's most dangerous hackers.

My book, Sandworm, is about a group of Russian hackers known as Sandworm that carried out what I would say is the first

full-blown cyber war to have ever taken place. And that cyber war kind of climaxed in an attack

called Natpetia, unleashed in Ukraine in 2017, that spread to the rest of the world and ultimately

cost $10 billion in global damage.

But leading up to that attack, Sandworm also carried out two cyber attacks on Ukraine's

power grid that caused blackouts. And the second of those attacks, which was targeting

the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, was designed not just to turn off the power, but actually

to cause physical destruction to electrical equipment in a transmission station north of the capital.

So the chapter of the book that I'm about to read is actually kind of a flashback. It's a bit of

historical context about the sort of technical underpinning for that sort of destructive

attack on power grid equipment.

And it's about a cyber attack experiment that was carried out not by the Russian government,

but by our own.

Welcome to Storybound, presented by Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate.

I'm your host, Jude Brewer.

In just one moment, you'll hear Andy Greenberg read an excerpt from his novel Sandworm,

accompanied with an original score by Daniel Frank Huizen.

After that, we'll have a riveting discussion with Andy about cyber warfare and the process of researching Sandworm.

This searching sandworm. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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