Hello, true, welcome back to true spies listeners.

Welcome back to True Spies, Debrief.

Here on the debrief, we catch up with experts from the intelligence and espionage

community for a deeper look at the themes, events and insights that fascinate them,

taking you behind some of the world's most consequential, dangerous and outlandish missions.

Wired journalist Andy Greenberg has spent years reporting from the murky world of hackers, spies and cyber warriors.

His 2019 book Sandworm tells the true story of the Kremlin-backed cybercriminals that became

one of the most destructive hacking groups in history.

This week, True Spies producer Morgan Childs sits down with Andy to talk about the

Sandworm Group and what their campaigns reveal about the future of warfare itself.

Andy, thank you for being here to talk largely, although not entirely about your book, Sandworm,

which is stomach turning, if you'll permit the compliment.

Is that a compliment? I'll take it. If so.

I would use it as one in this case. No, it's stomach turning because it came out in 2019,

and it foreshadowed some of the most frightening stories that are still unfolding today.

And also because it's kind of a series of snapshots of a time when countries like the United States could have set a precedent for responding to cyber warfare,

but largely did not.

I guess before we get into that, I want to go back even further than 2019 to 2017 and ask you

to talk a little bit about a cover story that you wrote for the July issue of Wired that year.

And maybe to talk about the sort of unfortunate

synchronicity of events that happened just when that piece came out. Well, yeah, exactly.

That is the beginning of the story for me, or it was as I, you know, began to work on that

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