Nicole Perlroth spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity, digital espionage and sabotage reporter for The New York Times. Her investigations rooted out Russian hacks of nuclear plants, airports, elections, and petrochemical plants; North Korea’s cyberattack against movie studios, banks and hospitals; Iranian attacks on oil companies, banks, critical infrastructure, and presidential campaigns; and thousands of Chinese cyberattacks against America’s critical infrastructure and businesses, including a months-long hack of The Times. Her investigation and ensuing outing of hacking divisions within China’s People’s Liberation Army helped compel the first United States hacking charges against members of the Chinese military, and earned her the prestigious “Best in Business Award” from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Her investigation, with Azam Ahmed, of the use of commercial spyware in Mexico was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
She is also the author of the New York Times bestselling book “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends,” about the global cyber arms race, which won the 2021 McKinsey and Financial Times’ Business Book of the Year Award and has been translated into nine languages. The book and several of her Times articles have been optioned for television.
Ms. Perlroth has been widely cited and published, beyond The Times, in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, Wired Magazine, Forbes Magazine, CNN, PBS, NPR, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Christian Science Monitor, C-SPAN, NBC’s “Meet The Press,” MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “Dan Rather’s America,” Axios, CBS, CNBC, USA Today, Recorded Futures, and Lawfare, The Times’ “The Daily” and “Sway” podcasts, as well as VOX’s “Pivot” podcast, among others.
Nicole Perlroth has delivered keynotes and speeches for TED, the United States State Department, the World Bank, the Munich Security Conference, RSA, Council on Foreign Relations, the World Affairs Council, Washington D.C. Metropolitan Club, the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development, How To Academy, In-Q-Tel, Track ii Diplomacy, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation Defense Policy Advisors, Hack the Capitol, the Center for European Policy Analysis and the CIOSExchange, an invite-only gathering of Fortune 50 Chief Information Officers.
She has lectured at Stanford University, including the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she co-authored a case study on the hack of Home Depot. She has also lectured at Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard Kennedy School, Hult International Business School, The Fletcher School at Tufts University, the Naval War College, Fordham Law, the University of California, Berkeley, John Hopkins Medical School, Cornell University Medical School and was selected as the inaugural “Journalist in Residence” for the University of Texas Strauss Center’s Journalism and World Affairs program and the Jeanette Pontacq Investigative Journalism Fellow.
Before joining the Times, Ms. Perlroth worked as a deputy editor at Forbes Magazine, an analyst at the Corporate Executive Board, a subsidiary of Gartner, and worked for the late Senator Ted Kennedy. She serves on the board of the Searle Scholars Program, which offers grants to support independent biomedical sciences and chemistry research of exceptional young faculty. Among its Scholars were Dr. Jennifer Doudna, of the University of California, Berkeley, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her groundbreaking work developing the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors. Dr. Doudna is the second Searle Scholar to win the Nobel Prize.
Ms. Perlroth is a graduate of Princeton University (B.A.), Stanford University (M.A.) and the mother to a very active three-year-old boy. She lives in the Bay Area.