This is the 122nd article in Bears Doing Big Things, a weekly column celebrating the stories of notable M-A alumni.
“I spent over a decade investigating and writing about cybersecurity, and now I’m focused on making concrete changes within it,” Nicole Perlroth said. Perlroth was the longtime lead cybersecurity reporter for The New York Times, where she covered technology, digital espionage, and major cybersecurity attacks worldwide. Now, Perlroth works to change how the cybersecurity industry responds to threats through her writing, podcast, and advocacy.
Perlroth grew up in Portola Valley. At just nine years old, her older brother passed away from a cardio myopathy on the M-A basketball court. “He was already in college at Yale and came back and was playing a pick-up game with his best friend from M-A,” she said. “He just dropped dead. It was such a horrible thing.”
Following his death, Perlroth was determined to attend M-A despite district lines, seeing the school as a way to honor his memory. “I had a closer and more intimate connection to M-A, so I did a district transfer,” she explained.
At M-A, Perlroth competed on the swim team and the girls’ water polo team. She also enjoyed all her English classes, specifically AP Literature with Liane Strub. “She was really a great teacher and helped my writing skills,” Perlroth said.
“I had a lot of friends at different schools because most of my Portola Valley friends spread out, so I kind of fanned out and spent time with friends at different schools,” she added.
Perlroth also highlighted M-A’s uniquely diverse campus. “I would say it was my last true experience with diversity. Even after, I’d get on a subway with a lot of diverse people or go to public places but once I went to Princeton and took the jobs that I did, it ended up being a pretty elite track,” she said.
“I actually credit that to being successful. You can drop me into any room with anyone from any background. They might not speak my language that well, we might look completely different, we might be of completely different socioeconomic levels, but I know how to be friends with everyone,” Perlroth added. “I think that’s really an undersold part of M-A.”
Following M-A, Perlorth attended Princeton University, beginning with a rocky start. “I was a total fish out of water when I got there,” she said. “I was this girl from California. I had a windbreaker as a winter coat. Most of the kids were from boarding school and knew East Coast culture.”
Initially, Perlroth considered transferring, though her father encouraged her to stay for the first year before making a decision. “I remember thinking I just have to stick it out for a few more months, so I may as well make the most of it while I’m here,” she said. “I started making friends and having fun. It was a hard transition, but I managed it and stayed.”
Perlroth was not required to choose a major until her junior year, but after 9/11 occurred the year before, she honed her focus to international affairs. “My sister was living in New York and was running downtown when the towers fell,” she said. “It just felt so close. It was really in our face, and that changed everything.”
At the same time, Perlroth took a class at Princeton called The Osama Bin Laden Phenomenon, and was inspired by the course’s exploration of geopolitics and the Middle East. The experience led her to major in politics and what Princeton called Near Eastern Studies. “[The class] was about Bin Laden but all also about Islamic fundamentalism and the dynamics in the Middle East,” she said. “It was very interesting.”
After graduating from Princeton, Perlroth faced an uncertain path, unsure if she wanted to follow the traditional routes many of her peers were taking. “Most of the people in my class went onto 3 different jobs: investment banking and they’re all in private equity now, consultants and they are now in high level banks, and the third group went to law school,” she explained.
Instead, Perlroth went on to work on Capitol Hill for the late Senator Ted Kennedy in his foreign policy office. “They were having the 9/11 congressional hearings and my job was to go to the hearings, take notes, come back, type up my notes, and give a memo to Senator Kennedy. He would then make comments on it like ‘great memo,’” she said.
However, the position was unpaid and tied to the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. “If John Kerry had won, I might have had a paid job with the democratic party, but the opportunity didn’t happen,” she said.
Shortly after her time working on the Hill, Perlorth became a paralegal and later worked as a consultant for a year. “I needed a paycheck and healthcare benefits, so that was mainly why I took those jobs,” she explained.
Perlroth then moved to New York City and acquired a job with COACH in their marketing department. “It was honestly pretty terrible,” she said. “I had this idea of marketing being glamorous and fancy, but it really wasn’t. I wasn’t making enough money to justify being that miserable.”
“After that, I really questioned what I wanted to do and asked myself, ‘What am I good at?’” she said. “I realized it was writing. I had always been a good writer, and I really loved writing. I liked the intellectual stimulation and being in the moment and being vulnerable.”
In response, Perlroth enrolled in an adult continuing studies class at New York University taught by John Crudele—a business columnist for the New York Post—a step that ultimately set her on the path toward journalism.
“He told me, ‘You know you’re a really good writer, you should think about being a journalist,’” she said. “There was a story about rats and cockroach problems in West Village restaurants, and he told me to cover it. I searched in the New York Department of Health to find the grossest reports, then went to one of them.”
When she arrived, Perlorth found security cameras showing the health inspector assigned to the restaurant had passed out drunk during the inspection. “I went back to John Crudele saying, ‘There’s a story about health inspectors,’ and he said, ‘You have no idea how good this is,’” Perlroth said. “I learned how to write an article in 30 minutes and then my name was on the byline of a front-page article in the Sunday’s Post.”
“The story launched a whole investigation into the corruption at the Department of Health,” she said. “I went out and got every New York Post newspaper I could find to take to my tiny apartment, and I was like, ‘If this is journalism, count me in. I get to investigate corruption and change things, and there’s a city-wide investigation because of me—this is amazing.’”
Passionate about her new journalistic calling, Perlroth returned to school at Stanford University to earn her Master of Arts in Journalism. The program was a small cohort, taught by recently retired journalists, offering an intimate and hands-on approach to the field. There, she took a course at Stanford’s business school focused on bioethics, which explored moral dilemmas behind corporate decision-making. The class exposed Perlroth to the ethical gray areas of business, shaping her interest in investigating corporate power.
“Everyone in my graduate program wanted to be a political journalist or a sports reporter,” she said. “I realized, this is kind of my shortcut to being a business journalist.”
Shortly after her time at Stanford, Perlorth worked as a staff reporter and later deputy editor at Forbes Media in their business sector. In this role, she covered venture capital, highlighted successful startup stories, and reported on influential business leaders. “At a time when Facebook was successful, and things like Uber were starting, it was really influential,” she said.
Perlroth then became a cybersecurity reporter for The New York Times, a role she held for 11 years. “I got a call from a New York Times editor who said, ‘We’re interested in you for this job, but we’re not sure you’re going to want it,’” she said. “And I said, ‘Well, how bad could it be?’ And he’s like, ‘It’s cybersecurity.’”
Initially hesitant, Perlroth worried the beat would be overly technical and uninteresting. “I thought I’d just go to the interviews and tell them in person I’m not the right candidate to cover cybersecurity,” she said.
Over two days, Perlroth met with over ten reporters and editors, often focusing on less technical details and asking more personal, human-centered questions. “I remember asking the former food critic what their exercise routine was,” she said.
“The last question the managing editor asked me was if I considered myself a better writer or reporter, and I answered writer. They told me everyone thought I was a better reporter because I’d managed to get personal details out of everyone who interviewed me,” she said. The next day, Perlroth was hired.
“I walked into the job during a huge increase in cyber attacks and stayed all the way through a major supply chain attack called Solarwinds, which compromised thousands of government agencies,” she said. “In between, I covered the most consequential cyber attacks in history. I was there for all of it.”
While working at The New York Times, Perlroth investigated major cyber incidents, including
Russian hacking of nuclear power plants and North Korea’s cyberattacks on Sony. Notably, she led the coverage on the Chinese government’s hack of The Times in the early 2010s. “Right after I was hired, we were hacked by the Chinese military. I was basically able to watch it all happen, and I convinced The Times to let me write that story,” Perlroth said.
Perlroth also investigated hacking divisions within China’s People’s Liberation Army, work that led to the United States’ first hacking-related charges against members of the Chinese military. Her reporting on commercial spyware in Mexico was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
“About halfway into my Times coverage, I decided to write a book. My work was so intimidating, the world needed someone to grab them by the hand and walk them through this world in simpler terms,” she said. “I thought ‘let me right this for someone like my mom to understand,’ but it turns out that most members of Congress and people who sit on major boards also have my mom’s level of technical understanding.”
In 2021, Perlroth’s book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends was published. The book outlines the rapid rise of cyberweapons across the globe and the consequences of digital insecurity. She also discusses many well-known cyberattacks like Stuxnet. Perlroth’s book aims to explain cybersecurity in human terms, showing how these digital threats affect everyday people.
“This was the very first time someone was really speaking on what is a highly technical, very urgent topic,” Perlroth added.
Perlroth worked on This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends for seven years during her job at The Times, writing it on “nights and weekends.” The book became a New York Times bestseller, won the 2021 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, was optioned for television, and has been translated into nine languages. “It got a lot of positive feedback from around the world, and that was really rewarding,” Perlroth said.
Perlroth left The Times in 2021 to work directly on cybersecurity policy and solutions. “It was kind of hard to focus on journalism at this point. When you think about the problem for so long, you start wanting more. If someone called me and said ‘Hey, do you want to help solve the problem?’ it would feel really weird to say no,” she said. “So, I learned how to solve it.”
Perlroth served as an advisor to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) under the Department of Homeland Security, which focuses on defending the nation’s infrastructure from cyber threats. In this role, she worked to help prepare companies for large-scale cyberattacks and coordinated responses between the government and private sector. “I helped try to get companies’ heels up for potential cyber retaliation against U.S. companies,” she said. “It was a really critical moment in history and really cool to see from the inside out.”
Perlroth is also a venture partner at Ballistic Ventures, a venture capitalist firm solely focused on investing in and supporting cybersecurity innovations and startups. “I support internet companies and ask questions about where the future is going,” she explained. “We have a lot of questions, and a long way to go.”
Along with her work in venture capital, Perlroth also works in cybersecurity education. She has delivered keynote speeches to companies around the world, is a guest lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and recently taught a MasterClass with Paul Nakasone, former Chief of the Central Security Service, and Chris Krebs, former U.S. Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, called “Cyberwarefare: The Front Line Is You.”
Perlroth also hosts a podcast, “To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy,” which discusses China’s growing cyber power and its impact on global security. “I’m really trying to inform the public as much as I can,” she said. “Most people are very unaware of cybersecurity.”
“I really like the power to prioritize what is mission critical,” she said. “I’ve covered a lot of land in my work, but I still have more to do.”
“To bring it all back, when you’re nine, and your best friend who is your older brother passes away, you get a very raw lesson that life is really short and you have to make it count for something. That every minute is precious. That nobody knows how much time they have and that I want to be a part of something mission-oriented,” she said. “It’s kind of this full circle thing. It makes you realize what’s really important.”
“The track less traveled is usually the most important one. I tell my friends this all the time: if you’re not on a steep end of something—if you’re just coasting—you’re not really doing much. The only thing I’m afraid of is that I drop dead on a basketball court and I did nothing,” Perlroth added.
Outside of her busy career, Perlroth has two kids and currently lives in Portola Valley, right where it all began.
Perlroth’s advice to a current M-A student: “Stick your head up every once in a while and take a look around. Make sure you’re going in the right direction for you and doing what’s right for you, not just what everyone else is doing.”
“You can go for something that’s not necessarily going to make you that much money, but if you’re successful at it and it’s right for you, then apply yourself, and you’ll figure out the money piece of it later,” she added.
Perlroth’s advice to someone interested in becoming a journalist or involved in cybersecurity: “Only take it on if it’s right for you. You have to really want it. AI is going to change the field, but there is always a need for very tenacious people who know how to relay what’s happening out there. The best story I did AI couldn’t have done.”
At Perlroth’s request, her graduation year has been left out.
