About the Author

Kim Zetter is an award-winning investigative journalist who has covered cybersecurity and national security for more than 15 years. She is the author of Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon — which tells the true tale of a covert operation conducted by the U.S., Israel and Dutch intelligence to unleash a destructive cyberattack against Iran's nuclear program.

You can find her on Twitter @KimZetter or on Mastodon @kimzetter@infosec.exchange

Zetter began her career covering security and privacy for WIRED, where she wrote for thirteen years, and more recently has been covering cybersecurity and national security as a freelance journalist for the New York Times Magazine, Politico, Washington Post, The Guardian, Motherboard/Vice, The Intercept, Yahoo News, and others. She was voted one of the top-ten security journalists in the country by security professionals and journalism peers and has broken numerous stories about NSA and FBI surveillance, nation-state espionage and cyber warfare, and election security. She’s considered one of the leading experts on election security and in 2018 authored a New York Times Magazine cover story on the topic.

In 2006, long before Edward Snowden leaked information about the NSA’s mass-spying efforts, she wrote about a secret room in an AT&T facility in Missouri being used by the NSA to siphon US internet traffic. She wrote a three-part investigative series on the hacking underground in 2007, which provided an inside look for the first time into online criminal carding forums through the eyes of a grifter who secretly worked undercover for the FBI. In 2010 she and a WIRED colleague broke the story about the arrest of Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, revealing the identity of the person who had leaked millions of classified US Army and State Department documents to WikiLeaks.

In 2016 and 2017 she broke stories about Russia’s sabotage of Ukraine's power grid and its use of that country as a testing ground for developing cyberattacks against critical infrastructure. In 2019 she and a colleague revealed how a Dutch mole helped the US and Israel get Stuxnet onto computers in Iran; she also wrote about how a Russian cybersecurity firm helped the NSA catch an employee who was stealing millions of classified documents from the spy agency. In 2020 she and colleagues broke the story of a secret presidential finding signed by President Trump, which gave the CIA new power to conduct offensive cyberattacks against adversaries.

She has appeared on radio and TV discussing various cybersecurity and national security topics. Radio appearances include Fresh Air with Terry Gross; All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan; Marketplace with Molly Wood, Throughline, On The Media with Brooke Gladstone. TV appearances have included Today Show, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, PBS Newshour, BBC.

You can contact her at zetter@substack.com; or to get information about contacting her through encrypted channels, send a DM to her @KimZetter.

Below are samples of some articles:

The Crisis of Election Security

Hackers Last Year Conducted a “Dry Run” of Solar Winds Breach

How a Russian Firm Helped Catch an Alleged NSA Data Thief

Burn After Reading: Snowden Documents Reveal Scope of Secrets Exposed to China in 2001 Spy Plane Incident

Is the NSA Spying on US Internet Traffic?

Inside the Cunning, Unprecedented Hack of Ukraine’s Power Grid

The Ukrainian Power Grid Was Hacked Again

The Man Who Made the Mistake of Trying to Help Wikileaks

How Close did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election?

How a Crypto Backdoor Pitted the Tech World Against the NSA

Long Before the Apple-FBI Battle, Lavabit Sounded a Warning