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Click Here

Recorded Future Newswww.recordedfuture.com

The podcast that tells true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. We take listeners into the world of cyber and intelligence without all the techie jargon. Every Tuesday and Friday, former NPR investigations correspondent Dina Temple-Raston and the team draw back the curtain on ransomware attacks, mysterious hackers, and the people who are trying to stop them.

Episodes

The TikTok ban, China, and national security

Click Here host Dina Temple-Raston speaks with 1A's Jenn White about the latest on the TikTok ban, what’s next in the possible sale of its American arm, and whether the app is really a threat to national security. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Mar 11, 202536 min

Mic Drop: Aidan Raney's secret mission.

Aidan Raney does threat analysis for Farnsworth Intelligence, a company he founded. When one of his clients got caught up in a North Korean IT worker scheme, Aidan set out on a little mission: to infiltrate one of these operations and understand how it worked. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Mar 07, 202513 min

Meet the “Kyles” — North Korea’s secret IT warriors

North Korea has a secret army of workers applying for remote IT jobs around the world. They collect paychecks, sometimes steal company data, and answer to a boss who isn’t at company headquarters, he’s sitting in Pyongyang. We hear about one named Kyle. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Mar 04, 202524 min

Ron Deibert: ‘We’re living in a Philip K. Dick novel.’

As his new book “Chasing Shadows” hits bookstores this month, Ron Deibert tells us about how he and his team of digital sleuths at The Citizen Lab have been holding purveyors of high-tech surveillance to account. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Feb 25, 202525 min

Mic Drop: Mark Zaid’s ‘red badge of courage’

Earlier this month, Mark Zaid heard that the Trump administration had revoked his security clearances. Mark, best known for being the go-to lawyer for whistleblowers in the intelligence community, now appears to be part of a growing list of people President Trump perceives as disloyal. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Feb 21, 202512 min

Could AI help ER doctors and medics make better decisions?

A mass shooting in Las Vegas a few years ago helped pave the way for a new DARPA program that is asking a very thorny question: Could doctors and medics make better life-and-death decisions with a little help from AI? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Feb 18, 202527 min

Mic Drop: The man behind a Binance exec’s Nigerian detention

Nigerian authorities detained a mid-level Binance executive named Tigran Gambaryan for eight months last year. Some observers say officials hoped to extract millions of dollars in fines from the company. Others maintain they just wanted to send a message. Matthew Page from Chatham House gives us some backstory. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Feb 14, 202513 min

The Company Man: Binance exec detained in Nigeria breaks his silence

Former IRS investigator Tigran Gambaryan went to Nigeria on a quick trip to sell Nigerian officials on the utility of cryptocurrencies. He ended up detained there for eight months. On today’s show, an exclusive interview with Tigran about his detention, and how he got out. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Feb 11, 202528 min

Mic Drop: The algorithm will see you now - AI and psychiatry

Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army brigadier general, has always had an open mind when it came to cutting-edge technology. Now he’s looking at AI to see if it can help doctors treat veterans struggling with mental health. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Feb 07, 202514 min

SPECIAL FEATURE: ‘With AIs Wide Open’ from IRL: Online Life is Real Life

An episode from IRL: Online Life is Real Life from Mozilla and PRX: Are today’s large language models too hot to handle? Bridget Todd, host of the IRL: Online Life is Real Life podcast, digs into the risks and rewards of open sourcing the tech that makes ChatGPT talk. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Feb 04, 202524 min

Mic Drop: Tracking a Ghost

Law enforcement agencies have been disrupting criminal gangs by intercepting their encrypted communications. Jamie O’Reilly of the cybersecurity company Dvuln talks about an Aussie effort to track Ghost. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jan 31, 202512 min

Knights of Old and a ransomware joust

For 150 years Knights of Old, a U.K. logistics company, survived everything from two world wars to Brexit. Then a ransomware group called Akira stormed the company's networks. In just a blink of an eye, everything changed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jan 28, 202525 min

Mic Drop: Australia’s attempt to keep kids off social media

Australia is trying to use age-gating to keep kids under 16 off social media. John Pane, at Electronic Frontiers Australia, is worried that kids won’t be the only people losing something. He says privacy as we know it is also in the crosshairs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jan 24, 202514 min

Australia takes aim at encrypted apps

Session, a little known encrypted messaging app out of Australia, thought it would help the world keep its communication private—and then a new law threatened their plans. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jan 21, 202530 min

Space Jam: What if adversaries hacked a dead satellite?

Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu used to worry about asteroids crashing into earth. Now, he’s turned his attention to an even more pressing problem – the weaponization of space debris — and officials say it may have already happened. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jan 14, 202524 min

Mic Drop: Russia’s unexpected wartime real estate boom

Russia’s military spending has propped up the economy, made some military families rich and set off a housing boom. But some worry the center will not hold. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jan 10, 202512 min

Tech workers return to Russia, not quite with love

We look at the strange and complicated journeys of Russian tech workers who left their country by the thousands when the war in Ukraine first began and now, begrudgingly, are returning home. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jan 07, 202526 min

Mic Drop: The demise of ransomware and the rise of crypto

2024 was a banner year for cybercriminal takedowns. Recorded Future analyst Alexander Leslie talks about how ransomware has had to adapt and what the Trump administration’s vow to take cryptocurrency mainstream will mean for the cyber criminals in 2025. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jan 03, 202514 min

196. 2024: A year of living more dangerously in cyberspace.

In a recent conversation on WAMU’s nationally syndicated 1A news show, Click Here’s Dina Temple-Raston speaks with 1A’s host Jenn White about China and Russia’s increasingly aggressive cyberattacks, and in the second half of the show, White speaks with human rights advocate Bill Browder about what the world needs to do for Ukraine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Dec 31, 202442 min

195. Mic Drop: A return to the NSA's Cryptologic Museum - a spycatcher's dream

Just a stone's throw from the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, the National Cryptologic Museum displays dozens of rarely seen codebreaking machines that, quite literally, changed the course of history. We revisit our tour and chat with the museum's director, Vince Houghton. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Dec 27, 202412 min

194. A return to the musicians who came in from the cold

At a time when Vladimir Putin is attempting to redraw the Iron Curtain, we revisit an earlier episode in which we take a trip back to the Soviet Union circa 1985 when four American musicians smuggled messages in and out of the Soviet Union — with music. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Dec 24, 202422 min

192. Return to the leak that unmasked China’s hackers-for-hire

Recently, the US sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity company and one of its employees who compromised tens of thousands of firewalls worldwide, with potentially deadly consequences. All of this could sound a little familiar to regular listeners. Earlier this year, CLICK HERE reported on a huge leak of internal documents from a private cybersecurity company that pulled back the curtain on the secret world of China’s hacker-for-hire network. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Dec 17, 202423 min

191. SPECIAL FEATURE: ‘(Ai)ding Cybercrime’ from SHIFT

An episode of ‘SHIFT’ from PRX : AI is being integrated into our technologies at warp speed, but we are only starting to consider how it could be weaponized in the future. The SHIFT podcast talks to Lee Klarich, the chief product officer at Palo Alto Networks, about how AI is both helping and hurting cybersecurity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Dec 13, 202413 min

190. Return to the curious case of the disappearing TikTok videos

TikTok took down Esma Memtimin’s posts for allegedly violating the platform’s community rules, even though her videos were about little more than stickers and some current events. Just days after TikTok’s Chinese parent company asked a federal court to put a temporary hold on a law that would require ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban in this country, we go back to an episode we did this fall about a mysterious dearth of TikTok posts about subjects Beijing doesn’t like. Learn about your ad ...

Dec 10, 202427 min

189. Mic Drop: Return to Wazawaka

We return to an earlier interview we had with Wazawaka, a Russian hacker who, in late 2023, was added to the FBI’s Cyber Most Wanted List. Russian authorities allegedly jailed him late last week — though we saw he was back online a short time later. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Dec 06, 202419 min

188. SPECIAL FEATURE: ‘The Right-Wing Plan for Trump-Friendly Spies’ from In the Room with Peter Bergen

An episode from In the Room with Peter Bergen . Longtime national security analyst Peter Bergen looks at what President-elect Trump’s return to the White House will likely mean for intelligence gathering as we know it – and whether the conservative Project 2025 will turn out to be the new intelligence gathering playbook. This story was originally released before the November election. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Dec 03, 202443 min

187. Mic Drop: Crypto and the man: Prof. Lamont Black on Donald Trump’s federal bitcoin reserve

Crypto was envisioned as the ultimate democratic currency, the thing that allowed you to buy things without “the man.” But, now the president-elect’s newfound interest means “the man" may be adding bitcoin to the federal reserve. We ask DePaul University professor and former Fed economist Lamont Black what will the digital currency do now? More from our interview: https://therecord.media/trump-cryptocurrency-reserve-depaul-lamont-black Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...

Nov 29, 202418 min