On Thursday, December 28, at 8:30 pm in the Utah town of Riverdale, the city police began investigating what they believed was a kidnapping. 17-year-old foreign exchange student Kai Zhuang was missing, and according to Riverdale Police Chief Casey Warren , Zhuang was believed to be “forcefully taken” from his home, and “being held against his will.” The evidence leaned in police’s favor. That night, Zhuang’s parents in China reportedly received a photo of Zhuang in distress. They’d also received...
Jan 15, 2024•19 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Hackers want to know everything about you: Your credit card number, your ID and passport info, and now, your DNA. On October 1 2023, on a hacking website called BreachForums, a group of cybercriminals claimed that they had stolen—and would soon sell— individual profiles for users of the genetic testing company 23andMe . 23andMe offers direct-to-consumer genetic testing kits that provide customers with different types of information, including potential indicators of health risks along with repor...
Jan 01, 2024•38 min•Season 5Ep. 1
It talks, it squawks, it even blocks! The stocking-stuffer on every hobby hacker’s wish list this year is the Flipper Zero. “Talk” across low-frequency radio to surreptitiously change TV channels, emulate garage door openers, or even pop open your friend’s Tesla charging port without their knowing! “Squawk” with the Flipper Zero’s mascot and user-interface tour guide, a “cyber-dolphin” who can “read” the minds of office key fobs and insecure hotel entry cards. And, introducing in 2023, block iPh...
Dec 18, 2023•36 min•Season 4Ep. 25
Like the grade-school dweeb who reminds their teacher to assign tonight’s homework, or the power-tripping homeowner who threatens every neighbor with an HOA citation, the ransomware group ALPHV can now add itself to a shameful roster of pathetic, little tattle-tales. In November, the ransomware gang ALPHV, which also goes by the name Black Cat, notified the US Securities and Exchange Commission about the Costa Mesa-based software company MeridianLink, alleging that the company had failed to noti...
Dec 04, 2023•36 min•Season 4Ep. 24
A worrying trend is cropping up amongst Americans, particularly within Generation Z—they're spying on each other more. Whether reading someone's DMs, rifling through a partner's text messages, or even rummaging through the bags and belongings of someone else, Americans enjoy keeping tabs on one another, especially when they're in a relationship. According to recent research from Malwarebytes , a shocking 49% of Gen Zers agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “Being able to track my spouse...
Nov 06, 2023•46 min•Season 4Ep. 23
In September, the Las Vegas casino and hotel operator MGM Resorts became a trending topic on social media... but for all the wrong reasons. A TikTok user posted a video taken from inside the casino floor of the MGM Grand—the company's flagship hotel complex near the southern end of the Las Vegas strip—that didn't involve the whirring of slot machines or the sirens and buzzers of sweepstake earnings, but, instead, row after row of digital gambling machines with blank, non-functional screens. That...
Oct 23, 2023•40 min•Season 4Ep. 22
What are you most worried about online? And what are you doing to stay safe? Depending on who you are, those could be very different answers, but for teenagers and members of Generation Z, the internet isn't so scary because of traditional threats like malware and viruses. Instead, the internet is scary because of what it can expose. To Gen Z, a feared internet is one that is vindictive and cruel—an internet that reveals private information that Gen Z fears could harm their relationships with fa...
Oct 09, 2023•48 min•Season 4Ep. 21
When you think of the modern tools that most invade your privacy, what do you picture? There's the obvious answers, like social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram. There's email and "everything" platforms like Google that can track your locations, your contacts, and, of course, your search history. There's even the modern web itself, rife with third-party cookies that track your browsing activity across websites so your information can be bundled together into an ad-friendly profil...
Sep 25, 2023•44 min•Season 4Ep. 20
In 2022, Malwarebytes investigated the blurry, shifting idea of “identity” on the internet , and how online identities are not only shaped by the people behind them, but also inherited by the internet’s youngest users, children. Children have always inherited some of their identities from their parents—consider that two of the largest indicators for political and religious affiliation in the US are, no surprise, the political and religious affiliations of someone’s parents—but the transfer of on...
Sep 11, 2023•37 min•Season 4Ep. 19
Becky Holmes is a big deal online. Hugh Jackman has invited her to dinner . Prince William has told her she has "such a beautiful name." Once, Ricky Gervais simply needed her photos ("I want you to take a snap of yourself and then send it to me on here...Send it to me on here!" he messaged on Twitter ), and even Tom Cruise slipped into her DMs (though he was a tad boring, twice asking about her health and more often showing a core misunderstanding of grammar). Becky has played it cool, mostly, b...
Aug 28, 2023•52 min•Season 4Ep. 18
"Freedom" is a big word, and for many parents today, it's a word that includes location tracking. Across America, parents are snapping up Apple AirTags, the inexpensive location tracking devices that can help owners find lost luggage, misplaced keys, and—increasingly so—roving toddlers setting out on mini-adventures. The parental fear right now, according to The Washington Post technology reporter Heather Kelly, is that "anybody who can walk, therefore can walk away." Parents wanting to know wha...
Aug 13, 2023•38 min•Season 4Ep. 17
Earlier this month, a group of hackers was spotted using a set of malicious tools—that originally gained popularity with online video game cheaters—to hide their Windows-based malware from being detected. Sounds unique, right? Frustratingly, it isn't, as the specific security loophole that was abused by the hackers has been around for years, and Microsoft's response, or lack thereof, is actually a telling illustration of the competing security environments within Windows and macOS. Even more per...
Jul 31, 2023•40 min•Season 4Ep. 16
The language of a data breach, no matter what company gets hit, is largely the same. There's the stolen data—be it email addresses, credit card numbers, or even medical records. There are the users—unsuspecting, everyday people who, through no fault of their own, mistakenly put their trust into a company, platform, or service to keep their information safe. And there are, of course, the criminals. Some operate in groups. Some act alone. Some steal data as a means of extortion. Others steal it as...
Jul 17, 2023•39 min•Season 4Ep. 15
In the United States, when the police want to conduct a search on a suspected criminal, they must first obtain a search warrant. It is one of the foundational rights given to US persons under the Constitution, and a concept that has helped create the very idea of a right to privacy at home and online. But sometimes, individualized warrants are never issued, never asked for, never really needed, depending on which government agency is conducting the surveillance, and for what reason. Every year, ...
Jul 03, 2023•43 min•Season 4Ep. 14
When you think about the word "cyberthreat," what first comes to mind? Is it ransomware? Is it spyware? Maybe it's any collection of the infamous viruses, worms, Trojans, and botnets that have crippled countless companies throughout modern history. In the future, though, what many businesses might first think of is something new: Disinformation. Back in 2021, in speaking about threats to businesses, the former director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs, told...
Jun 19, 2023•42 min•Season 4Ep. 13
In May, a lawyer who was defending their client in a lawsuit against Columbia's biggest airline, Avianca, submitted a legal filing before a court in Manhattan, New York, that listed several previous cases as support for their main argument to continue the lawsuit. But when the court reviewed the lawyer's citations, it found something curious: Several were entirely fabricated . The lawyer in question had gotten the help of another attorney who, in scrounging around for legal precedent to cite, ut...
Jun 05, 2023•44 min•Season 4Ep. 12
On January 1, 2023, the Internet in Louisiana looked a little different than the Internet in Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas—its next-door state neighbors. And on May 1, the Internet in Utah looked quite different, depending on where you looked, than the Internet in Arizona, or Idaho, or Nevada, or California or Oregon or Washington or, really, much of the rest of the United States. The changes are, ostensibly, over pornography. In Louisiana, today, visitors to the online porn site PornHub are ...
May 22, 2023•48 min•Season 4Ep. 11
Ransomware is becoming bespoke, and that could mean trouble for businesses and law enforcement investigators. It wasn't always like this. For a few years now, ransomware operators have congregated around a relatively new model of crime called "Ransomware-as-a-Service." In the Ransomware-as-a-Service model, or RaaS model, ransomware itself is not delivered to victims by the same criminals that make the ransomware. Instead, it is used almost "on loan" by criminal groups called "affiliates" who car...
May 08, 2023•51 min•Season 4Ep. 10
In January, a mental health nonprofit admitted that it had used Artificial Intelligence to help talk to people in distress. Prompted first by a user's longing for personal improvement—and the difficulties involved in that journey—the AI tool generated a reply, which, with human intervention, could be sent verbatim in a chat box, or edited and fine-tuned to better fit the situation. The AI said: “I hear you. You’re trying to become a better person and it’s not easy. It’s hard to make changes in o...
Apr 24, 2023•41 min•Season 4Ep. 9
The list of people and organizations that are hungry for your location data—collected so routinely and packaged so conveniently that it can easily reveal where you live, where you work, where you shop, pray, eat, and relax—includes many of the usual suspects. Advertisers, obviously, want to send targeted ads to you and they believe those ads have a better success rate if they're sent to, say, someone who spends their time at a fast-food drive-through on the way home from the office, as opposed t...
Apr 10, 2023•47 min•Season 4Ep. 8
How many passwords do you have? If you're at all like our Lock and Code host David Ruiz, that number hovers around 200. But the important follow up question is: How many of those passwords can you actually remember on your own? Prior studies suggest a number that sounds nearly embarrassing—probably around six. After decades of requiring it, it turns out that the password has problems, the biggest of which is that when users are forced to create a password for every online account, they resort to...
Mar 27, 2023•38 min•Season 4Ep. 7
Becky Holmes knows how to throw a romance scammer off script—simply bring up cannibalism. In January, Holmes shared on Twitter that an account with the name "Thomas Smith" had started up a random chat with her that sounded an awful lot like the beginnins stages of a romance scam. But rather than instantly ignoring and blocking the advances—as Holmes recommends everyone do in these types of situations—she first had a little fun. "I was hoping that you'd let me eat a small part of you when we meet...
Mar 13, 2023•48 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Government threats to end-to-end encryption—the technology that secures your messages and shared photos and videos—have been around for decades, but the most recent threats to this technology are unique in how they intersect with a broader, sometimes-global effort to control information on the Internet. Take two efforts in the European Union and the United Kingdom. New proposals there would require companies to scan any content that their users share with one another for Child Sexual Abuse Mater...
Feb 27, 2023•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 5
In November of last year, the AI research and development lab OpenAI revealed its latest, most advanced language project: A tool called ChatGPT. ChatGPT is so much more than "just" a chatbot. As users have shown with repeated testing and prodding, ChatGPT seems to "understand" things. It can give you recipes that account for whatever dietary restrictions you have. It can deliver basic essays about moments in history. It can—and has been—used to cheat by university students who are giving a new m...
Feb 13, 2023•45 min•Season 4Ep. 4
In 2020, a photo of a woman sitting on a toilet—her shorts pulled half-way down her thighs—was shared on Facebook, and it was shared by someone whose job it was to look at that photo and, by labeling the objects in it, help train an artificial intelligence system for a vacuum. Bizarre? Yes. Unique? No. In December, MIT Technology Review investigated the data collection and sharing practices of the company iRobot , the developer of the popular self-automated Roomba vacuums. In their reporting, MI...
Jan 30, 2023•46 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Last month, the TikTok user TracketPacer posted a video online called “ Network Engineering Facts to Impress No One at Zero Parties .” TracketPacer regularly posts fun, educational content about how the Internet operates. The account is run by a network engineer named Lexie Cooper, who has worked in a network operations center, or NOC, and who’s earned her Cisco Certified Network Associate certificate, or CCNA. In the video, Cooper told listeners about the first spam email being sent over Arpane...
Jan 16, 2023•54 min•Season 4Ep. 2
When did technology last excite you? If Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is to be believed, your own excitement ended, simply had to end, after turning 35 years old. Decades ago, at first writing privately and later having those private writings published after his death, Adams had come up with "a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies." They were simple and short: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a ...
Jan 01, 2023•43 min•Season 4Ep. 1
On June 7, 2021, the US Department of Justice announced a breakthrough : Less than one month after the oil and gas pipeline company Colonial Pipeline had paid its ransomware attackers roughly $4.4 million in bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key that would help the company get its systems back up and running, the government had in turn found where many of those bitcoins had gone, clawing back a remarkable $2.3 million from the cybercriminals. In cybercrime, this isn't supposed to happen—or at...
Dec 19, 2022•48 min•Ep. 26
Decades ago, patching was, to lean into a corny joke, a bit patchy. In the late 90s, the Microsoft operating system (OS) Windows 98 had a supportive piece of software that would find security patches for the OS so that users could then download those patches and deploy them to their computers. That software was simply called Windows Update. But Windows Update had two big problems. One, it had to be installed by a user—if a user was unaware of Windows Update, then they were also likely unaware of...
Dec 05, 2022•42 min•Season 3Ep. 25
A cyberattack is not the same thing as malware—in fact, malware itself is typically the last stage of an attack, the punctuation mark that closes out months of work from cybercriminals who have infiltrated a company, learned about its systems and controls, and slowly spread across its network through various tools, some of which are installed on a device entirely by default. The goal of cybersecurity, though, isn't to recover after an attack, it's to stop an attack before it happens. On today's ...
Nov 21, 2022•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 24
