Operation Sandworm
The Hunt for the Kremlin's Elite Cyber Army
Published on 3. July 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
384 pages
978-1-80096-313-9 (ISBN)
Description
*This book is published in the US as Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers. The text is unchanged for this edition, except for the addition of a new foreword.*
'With the nuance of a reporter and the pace of a thriller writer, Andy Greenberg gives us a glimpse of the cyberwars of the future while at the same time placing his story in the long arc of Russian and Ukrainian history.' -Anne Applebaum, bestselling author of Twilight of Democracy
'A chilling account of a Kremlin-led cyberattack, a new front in global conflict" -Financial Times
The true story of the most devastating act of cyberwarfare in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it.
In 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world's largest businesses. At the attack's epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion dollars in damage - the largest, most destructive cyberattack the world had ever seen.
This is the true story of the hunt to unmask Sandworm: the group of hackers behind the attacks working in service of Russia's military intelligence agency. Following the years-long, globe-spanning work of the detectives tracking them, Operation Sandworm also exposes the larger story of a new global arms race, and the geopolitical chaos it is unleashing on the world. A narrative full of twists and turns, it captures a chilling new reality: in a war without borders, all of us live on the frontline.
'With the nuance of a reporter and the pace of a thriller writer, Andy Greenberg gives us a glimpse of the cyberwars of the future while at the same time placing his story in the long arc of Russian and Ukrainian history.' -Anne Applebaum, bestselling author of Twilight of Democracy
'A chilling account of a Kremlin-led cyberattack, a new front in global conflict" -Financial Times
The true story of the most devastating act of cyberwarfare in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it.
In 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world's largest businesses. At the attack's epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion dollars in damage - the largest, most destructive cyberattack the world had ever seen.
This is the true story of the hunt to unmask Sandworm: the group of hackers behind the attacks working in service of Russia's military intelligence agency. Following the years-long, globe-spanning work of the detectives tracking them, Operation Sandworm also exposes the larger story of a new global arms race, and the geopolitical chaos it is unleashing on the world. A narrative full of twists and turns, it captures a chilling new reality: in a war without borders, all of us live on the frontline.
Reviews / Votes
Sandworm is a sobering examination of an underreported story: The menace Russian hackers pose to the critical infrastructure of the West. With the nuance of a reporter and the pace of a thriller writer, Andy Greenberg gives us a glimpse of the cyberwars of the future while at the same time placing his story in the long arc of Russian and Ukrainian history. * Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Red Famine * An important front-line view of the changing cyberthreats that are shaping our world, their creators, and the professionals who try to protect us. * Nature * As Russia has attacked, Greenberg has not been far behind, reporting on these incursions in Wired while searching for their perpetrators. Like the best true-crime writing, his narrative is both perversely entertaining and terrifying. * New York Review of Books * Immensely readable...A hair-raising, cautionary tale about the burgeoning, post-Stuxnet world of state-sponsored hackers...Greenberg lays out in chilling detail how future wars will be waged in cyberspace and makes the case that we have done little, as of yet, to prevent it. * Washington Post * A chilling account of a Kremlin-led cyber attack, a new front in global conflict. * Financial Times * Shocking...The book reads like a novel. * Washington Independent Review of Books * Andy Greenberg's Sandworm has achieved what I thought was no longer possible: it scares me. Sandworm is the story of the Russian GRU hacking team that has evolved in a few short years into the most methodical, persistent, and destructive intelligence agency cyber warriors. After reading Sandworm you will not doubt those superlatives. * Forbes * A terrifying and infuriating look at a future in which cyberwar hawks and cyberwar deniers join forces to literally threaten our ability to continue civilization. Sandworm shows how, in our leaders' focus on maintaining digital weapons to attack our enemies, they've left our own critical infrastructure defenseless. * Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother and Radicalized *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Octopus Publishing Group
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 127 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
264 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80096-313-9 (9781800963139)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2025
Monoray
€0.99
Available for download
Person
Andy Greenberg is a senior writer for Wired magazine. He's written about hackers, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy for more than fifteen years, and is the author of three books: Tracers in the Dark, Sandworm, and This Machine Kills Secrets. Tracers in the Dark and Sandworm, along with excerpts of the books published in Wired, have won several honors including two Gerald Loeb awards for distinguished business and financial reporting. This Machine Kills Secrets was named by The Verge as one of the top ten greatest tech books of all time. Greenberg lives in Brooklyn with his wife, documentary filmmaker Malika Zouhali-Worrall.