Nicole Perlroth led cybersecurity journalism at The New York Times for more than a decade, where her investigations rooted out thousands of cyberattacks, helped compel the first U.S. hacking charges against the Chinese military, the blacklisting of Israel’s NSO Group, and earned several journalism awards. Her New York Times bestseller,... Read more
Nicole Perlroth led cybersecurity journalism at The New York Times for more than a decade, where her investigations rooted out thousands of cyberattacks, helped compel the first U.S. hacking charges against the Chinese military, the blacklisting of Israel’s NSO Group, and earned several journalism awards.
Her New York Times bestseller, THIS IS HOW THEY TELL ME THE WORLD ENDS, about the global cyber arms race, won the FT-McKinsey “Business Book of the Year Award,” the Arthur Ross “Foreign Policy Book of the Year” prize, was inducted into the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame and was optioned for television and documentary film. Her 2025 podcast, TO CATCH A THIEF, which chartsChina’s rise to cyber supremacy, rose to become a Top 20 podcast on Apple, Spotify and Audible, and is now in development for Season 2.
In 2021, Perlroth left the Times to join Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee (CISAC) and served on the Council on Foreign Relations’ Cyber Task Force to develop a new cyber-forward foreign policy framework.
In 2023, she founded Silver Buckshot Ventures, a cyber moonshot fund backing the next generation of cybersecurity innovators. The fund targets solutions to both entrenched vulnerabilities like phishing and unpatched software, as well as the emerging threats of an AI-driven era — from deepfake-enabled social engineering to AI-operated ransomware and large-scale model exploitation. Through Silver Buckshot, she is channeling her journalism and policy experience into investing in the technologies that will define digital resilience for decades to come.
Perlroth has been widely cited beyond the New York Times in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, Wired, Forbes, CNN, PBS, NPR, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, HBO’s “Realtime with Bill Maher,” NBC’s “Meet The Press,” “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “Dan Rather’s America,” Axios, CNBC, Lawfare, and The Times’ “The Daily” and “ON” podcasts, VOX’s “Pivot” podcast, among others.
She has delivered keynotes and speeches at Blackhat, the Business Roundtable, the State Department, the World Bank, the Munich Security Conference, RSA, the World Affairs Council, the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development, at In-Q-Tel, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation Defense Policy Advisors, the ISC2 Security Congress, the CISO Summit and other events.
She is a regular guest lecturer at Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is herself a graduate of Princeton (B.A.) and Stanford (M.A.).