Nicole Perlroth is a 🏷️#journalist, 🏷️#author, and 🏷️#investor whose career sits at the intersection of national security and cybersecurity. She spent over a decade as the lead cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter at 📝The New York Times, where her investigations exposed Chinese military hacking units, Russian intrusions into critical infrastructure, and the global zero-day exploit market. Her work contributed to the first U.S. hacking charges against members of China's People's Liberation Army and earned her the Society of American Business Editors and Writers' Best in Business Award. She also co-authored a Stanford GSB case study on the Home Depot breach and holds degrees from Princeton University and Stanford University.
In 2021 she left journalism to work directly on cyber policy, serving as an advisor to CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under the Department of Homeland Security) and joining Ballistic Ventures as a venture partner. She subsequently founded Silver Buckshot Ventures, a cyber-focused mission fund, and in 2025 joined Rubrik as Chief Cyber Raconteur, producing the nine-part investigative podcast series To Catch a Thief: China's Rise to Cyber Supremacy. Her New York Times bestselling book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends (2021), an account of the global cyber arms race, won the FT McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and has been translated into nine languages.
Nicole came into view through research into cybersecurity journalists covering AI and zero-day exploitation — specifically her Out of Band podcast episode with Anthropic's Nicholas Carlini. She represents a rare hybrid: deep investigative credibility, policy access, and active capital deployment in the space.