Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap.

Today is Tuesday, February 16th.

Bitcoin is up above 50,000, power remains down in big parts of Texas, and we're focused on the cyber weapons arms race.

Last year, the U.S. government discovered it was the victim of the largest ever cyber security

breach in its history, whereby Russian hackers allegedly used a backdoor in the software

of a vendor called SolarWinds to access all sorts of sensitive information.

Subsequently, there have been allegations that Chinese hackers

also exploited a flaw in the SolarWind software, just exacerbating a national security emergency

whose depth continues to be investigated. What is known, though, is that the Solar Winds hack is

more about escalation than innovation. Cyber espionage, it's not new, and America

over the years has been as much the actor as the acted upon. Moreover, many of the hackers

involved aren't government employees or on government payrolls. They're independent contractors

who sell to governments, effectively creating a global black market for ways to access everything

from your email account to your city's power grid.

That's the subject matter explored by Nicole Perl Roth, a cybersecurity reporter for the New York

Times in her new book titled This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends.

And we are pleased today to be joined by Nicole.

So, Nicole, let's start here.

I called you a cybersecurity reporter, but from reading your book, I think that would get me some eye rolls from hackers. What should I really say you cover? I see cybersecurity, but everyone

else says Infosec, but I'm the Infosec reporter at the New York Times. But these days,

it's more about nation state espionage. So I added digital espionage to my title. Oh, I like that.

Digital espionage. All right. So your book obviously goes deep into geopolitics, et cetera,

...