Privacy Please S6, E250 - Digital Fallout: The Day the World Stood Still
It started with a few flickering screens in a Danish office. Within minutes, a digital plague had paralyzed global trade, leaving the world's largest shipping company powerless and its massive vessels adrift. But this attack wasn't for ransom—it was for pure destruction. In the premiere of Digital Fallout, we uncover the story of a geopolitical cyber weapon that escaped its cage and the unbelievable, accidental miracle that saved a global empire from permanent deletion. This is the story of how our physical world hangs by a fragile digital thread.
Show Notes: Sources
Our story today was built on the foundation of incredible investigative journalism from reporters who covered this event extensively. For listeners who want to dive deeper into the story of the NotPetya attack, these are the primary sources we recommend:
- "The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History," an article by Andy Greenberg for WIRED magazine, forms the core of the public narrative regarding Maersk's experience.
- The book "Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers" by Andy Greenberg provides deep context on the attackers and the geopolitical landscape.
- Financial and logistical impact reporting from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters was published in the weeks and months following the June 2017 attack.
- Public statements and quarterly financial reports from A.P. Møller-Maersk detailing the incident's operational and financial costs.