Hi there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, a prize-winning author

gives us her take on what she says is an existential threat to humanity. We are getting hit by

ransomware attacks every day. We have adversaries embedding themselves in our gas pipelines, in our nuclear plants.

We've never been closer to that sort of cyber-induced Pearl Harbor or Cyber 9-11.

Cyber wars. Are these cyber vulnerabilities possible to confront Business Daily from the BBC.

So I started covering cybersecurity 10 years ago, and what you hear all the time is the world is about to fall down.

But it's all coming from companies that want to sell you their mousetraps,

you know, the latest cybersecurity, antivirus product, or intrusion detection system. It took me really

the process of the book to come around to much of the same conclusions. We've never been closer to that sort of cyber-induced

calamitous attack. A daunting conclusion there from Nicole Pearl Roth. She is the New York Times

Cybersecurity reporter who, the last several years, has been writing this book a kind of summary

of her professional life. It's called

This is How They Tell Me the World Ends. It's a pessimistic but compelling take on the Western

world's state of preparedness, or lack of it, for a major cyber attack from foreign powers.

It's won her 2021's Financial Times-McKinsey Business Book of the Year award.

When I spoke to her, she began by telling me why she sees the world's current predicament

as a direct result of America's own intrusions into cyber espionage during the early years of

the Internet.

The US government was really one of the first to start exploiting these systems.

And really where this era actually began is in 2010.

That was the year that the first cyber weapon, a tool called Stuxnet, got out.

Stuxnet was an effort by the Americans with the Israelis to get rid of or stop Iran's uranium enrichment

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