Nicole Perlroth
Former New York Times security reporter who wrote the book on the global trade in zero-days.
Perlroth covered cybersecurity for the New York Times for a decade from 2011, a stretch that took in the Snowden leaks, the Sony hack and the Shadow Brokers. Her book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends (2021) follows the market for zero-day exploits from the first brokers in the 1990s to governments paying millions for an iPhone chain.
The thesis is uncomfortable: by buying vulnerabilities instead of reporting them, the US built a market that other states then shopped in. The book won the Financial Times business book of the year award in 2021. It pairs well with Kim Zetter, who did the same for Stuxnet.