Kim Zetter is a former staff writer at WIRED and author of the seminal cybersecurity book “Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon.” Her work has appeared in The New York Times, POLITICO, The Washington Post and regularly in her Substack newsletter, “Zero Day.” In this episode, Kim talks about her approach to reporting, what sparked her Stuxnet investigation and how the discovery of that malware fundamentally altered our global cybersecurity conversation.

Why you should listen:

* Hear from one of the most influential and knowledgeable journalists writing about cybersecurity today.
* Get her take on some of the biggest security stories of 2021 such as Colonial Pipeline and the Pegasus Project.
* Learn more about the key policy debates around election security and critical infrastructure protections.

Key Quotes:
* “Stuxnet really helped shine a light on industrial control systems as a target.”
* “We focus too much on the stuff that makes the headlines and completely ignore the innocuous things that you’re downloading onto your phone .... Those things are spying on you, as well.”
* “The Obama administration was the first administration to [make] cyber a priority, but they didn't really put critical infrastructure as a priority in the sense of using the government's weight to force security on critical infrastructure. We're actually only seeing that in this last year … in the wake of Colonial Pipeline.”
* “When we saw Russia trying to interfere in 2016, that woke up DHS that someone, somewhere needed to have some kind of influence over election officials.”

Links:

* www.synack.com

* https://zetter.substack.com/
* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/magazine/election-security-crisis-midterms.html