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.
Dictators use bombast and bullying as a kind of malevolent calling card. Meet the people who have found surprising and creative ways around that. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Three stories about technologies that started out doing one thing, and ended up doing quite another — from online tractors, to tasers in schools, to cellphone hackers who take their online battles into the real world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
There’s a specific kind of cyber attack targeting big industrial systems that is coming back into fashion: it’s called a ‘living off the land’ attack. What makes it particularly scary is that unlike traditional attacks in which bad actors break into a system and plant malicious code, in living off the land attacks, there’s nothing to find — bad actors leverage what’s already in the network. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
If you want to know how Ukrainians are coping with the war, look at the Ukraine apps in the app store. From an air raid alert built in the first week of the invasion to a map that helps work-from-homers find electricity, technology is helping Ukraine find some sense of normalcy in wartime. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
We talk to two ordinary people who decided to tackle two extraordinary problems: identifying the thousands who went missing in Israel in the days after the October 7th attacks, and one man’s leap of faith to get internet and cellphone service into Gaza. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Bucha, a bedroom community just outside of Kyiv, is best known for enduring Russia’s atrocities during a month-long occupation in the Spring of 2022. Now the citizens of Bucha don’t want revenge, they want justice. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
When a Russian bomb damaged a beloved library in the Ukrainian town of Chernihiv, locals feared that it would be lost forever. Then a cutting-edge technology came to the rescue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
We traveled to Ukraine last month to learn more about a hunt forward operation Cybercom and cyber operators from Ukraine secretly launched before the war. This is the first time the Ukrainian side of the story has been revealed publicly. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
We travel to Ukraine to look at its grassroots defense industry and take you into its secret drone factories where entrepreneurs are able to put innovative weapons into the hands of soldiers at the front in a matter of weeks, not months. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
An episode from “Humans vs. Machines” from Aventine Research Institute and Pineapple Street Studios. Misinformation has influenced elections, ruined reputations and fundamentally changed society’s relationship with the truth. Now, large language models like ChatGPT have the potential to create and spread misinformation at a scale we’ve never seen before. As technology improves, the question won’t be, ‘What we can believe in?’ but whether we’ll be able to believe in anything at all. Learn about y...
The Russian private army known as the Wagner Group has been tied not just to atrocities in Ukraine but to operations in Africa that helped Russia extend its reach. The looming question for Moscow: what do we do with Wagner now? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Back in August, the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in a fiery plane crash. So we decided to revisit an episode we did a few months ago about the Wagner group and how it recruits. It turns out they tore a page from the ISIS playbook. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Led by a motley crew of old-school cops and cyber whiz-kids, a Dutch police unit takes control of one of the dark web's most notorious drug markets and make history. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Remember ding-dong ditch? You and your friends rang a doorbell and then ran away? These days the prank of choice among the young cyber set is something called swatting: calling the police with a hoax report that sends them rushing – guns drawn – to some address and unsuspecting victim. After years of writing it off as childish mischief, legislators, law enforcement and tech companies are finally trying to address it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
Back in May, a Russian-speaking cyber gang named Clop broke into MOVEit, a little-known file transfer program. They managed to steal data from some 60 million people (and counting). While the scale of the attack was impressive, what really raised eyebrows was how they did it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Ilya Sachkov co-founded the cybersecurity company Group-IB to make the world safe from Russian-speaking cybercriminals. Then he asked Russian authorities to help round them up, and things went spectacularly wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Wave “goodbye” to those pesky emails from Nigerian princes and say “hello” to the latest generation of AI enabled email scamming. It’s smarter, faster and, by the way, looks like it’s coming from your boss. The only thing that might stop them? AI itself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
We look at an American disinformation campaign that makes clear online abuse directed at women goes far beyond a couple of mean tweets. And, an update on a Syrian activist who was on the receiving end of a misinformation crisis of her own. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Putting your data in the cloud used to be seen as the gold standard of information security. Why have your small IT team protect your data when the experts at Microsoft or Google or AWS can do it instead? And then in May, Chinese hackers broke into the Microsoft cloud, exposing not just a flaw in the code, but a glitch in company’s business model as well. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
This week, we share an episode from PRX and Inkstick Media’s “Things that Go Boom” podcast about the thousands of miles of fiber optic cable lying at the bottom of the sea. Some 95 percent of the world’s electronic data is traveling through them and cables are taking centerstage in the high-stakes competition between the U.S. and China. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Since our story on spyware in Mexico aired back in March, researchers have discovered a roster of Pegasus spyware infections on the phones of local journalists, activists, and even officials within the Mexican president’s inner circle. This week, we return to our deep dive on the use of spyware in Mexico and the revelation that the army created a secret military intelligence unit dedicated to its use. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
From WBUR's “Endless Thread" podcast, a story on a growing segment of artificial intelligence: immortalizing the dead through predictive AI text and how bots can help us understand grief. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
We revisit a sit-down interview we had with NSA contractor Reality Winner shortly after she spent 4 years in prison for passing a single classified document to a reporter. Given all the focus on classified documents and the way they’ve been handled in recent weeks, it seemed a good time to take another look at what happened to Reality. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
Two decades after Arab militias first torched villages and killed hundreds of thousands of people in West Darfur, violence has returned to the region. We tell the story of one group of researchers who use open source intelligence, algorithms and satellite imagery in a bid to quell the violence in Sudan. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
We go behind the scenes of U.S. Cyber Command’s Hunt Forward Operation in Ukraine. We interviewed half a dozen American cyber warriors who were on the ground in Kyiv, and they provide new details about the effort to defend Ukrainian networks against Russian cyber attacks in the weeks before the war. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
As Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive begins, we revisit a story we did last winter about some unusual Ukrainian women training to become part of the nation’s Army of Drones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
The Russian private army known as the Wagner Group is trying to persuade young men to join the fight in Ukraine. Their online recruitment efforts don’t just hint at the future of modern warfare: they’re a callback to an earlier time, when a group called ISIS lured young men to fight in Syria. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
This month, the FBI added Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev to their Most Wanted hacker list for his alleged role in a number of ransomware attacks against U.S. targets. In a rare interview shortly after the FBI announcement, he talked about the new designation and what he wants to do next. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
From “The Underworld” podcast, a conversation about casino towns, gangster owners, and a new twist on scamming operations. Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy took a trip along the Mekong River and revealed new details about southeast Asia’s latest scourge: cyber slaves. ADDITIONAL READING: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3195932/laos-criminal-casino-empire-chinese-gangsters Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices...
When the FBI and Justice Department took down a collective of cybercriminals known as Hive earlier this year, it targeted a group that made a name for itself, in part, by holding hospital and healthcare systems for ransom during the pandemic. What made the group so effective was its own twist on WeWork-style collaboratives… and it led to their demise. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
