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.
A report published last week by Access Now revealed that since 2019 nearly three dozen journalists, human rights officials and political activists in Jordan have had their phones infected with spyware. The documentation of the widespread use of NSO’s Pegasus spyware in the Kingdom isn’t just rattling civil society, but raising new questions about how to stop its proliferation.
Today’s generative AI knows how to write, compose music, and even create works of art. But it learned to do all these things by training on data made by human creators, without asking their permission. Now independent artists and giant media companies are fighting back and -- if they prevail -- it could fundamentally change the human-AI relationship.
Some data scientists and acoustic biologists have joined forces to see if artificial intelligence can ferret meaning out of non-human language. And one of their early subjects is a perennial favorite: humpback whales.
We take a look at the part of the Israel-Hamas war that is harder to see – the battle raging in cyberspace. Hacktivists are joining forces with Iran-backed operators to target victims with gossamer connections to Israel.
Vulnerabilities and exploits are the building blocks of hacking. We look at how China is flipping the script on how the world thinks about both.
In a recent conversation on WAMU’s nationally syndicated news show 1A, Click Here’s Dina Temple-Raston looks back on cyber in 2023 and discusses what we might expect in the year ahead.
Hackers and cybercriminals may not be so different from the rest of us after all. We talk to three real life hackers from an early dark market entrepreneur to an accidental recruit to the latest addition to the FBI’s most wanted list.
Ukraine is the world’s first truly hybrid war, and the battle is raging on two fronts --- on the ground and in cyberspace. What does the conflict mean for the future of war?
We look at the use of digital tools that have imposed an authoritarian version of morality on the masses, and the creative, inspiring way ordinary people have learned to respond.
Dictators use bombast and bullying as a kind of malevolent calling card. Meet the people who have found surprising and creative ways around that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
