myAIPMCyberattacks made headlines, and then vanished. In 2008, Russia got into a network at the Pentagon; hackers broke into the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain; the next year, North Korea compromised the Web sites of everything from the Treasury Department to the New York Stock Exchange. In 2010, a computer worm called Stuxnet, created by the U.S. and Israel in an operation approved by George W. Bush and continued by Obama, was discovered to have devastated Iran’s nuclear program. Perlroth, who started covering cybersecurity for the Times a year later, is arguing that, if you build a worm like that, it’s eventually going to come back and eat you. When the worm escaped, Joe Biden, then the Vice-President, suspected Israel of hastening the program, and breaking it. “Sonofabitch,” he allegedly said. “It’s got to be the Israelis.” It infected a hundred countries and tens of thousands of machines before it was stopped. “Somebody just used a new weapon, and this weapon will not be put back in the box,” Michael Hayden, a former N.S.A. director, said. That somebody was the United States. It had built a boomerang.
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