This is How They Tell Me the World Ends BY February 6, 2021 This is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race | Nicole Perlroth | Bloomsbury | February 2021. . SolarWinds and a Prelude to the End of the World At the end of 2020, the United States learned that nearly every branch of the federal government, many state and local governments, and countless companies—over 250 targets in total—had been hacked by Russian intelligence. Using the software update feature of a widely used network monitoring company, SolarWinds, Russian hackers burrowed into what were believed to be protected networks and sat there for at least a year, if not longer. Cleverly using U.S.-based servers, the Russians exploited the prohibition on spying inside the United States and also eluded the Department of Homeland Security. While that was alarming enough, it was also believed that early-warning sensors implanted in foreign networks by the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command did not raise the alarm.