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.
The Russian-speaking cyber gang, FIN7, has fooled red team hackers into doing their dirty work by masquerading as legitimate cybersecurity companies just looking for talent. Silent Push’s Zach Edwards talks about the scam.
Investigators have been chasing the Russian-speaking cyber gang for years — and they’ve stayed just one step ahead. Threat researcher Zach Edwards lays out why bringing gangs like this to justice has always been so hard.
Afghanistan’s Taliban leadership may have smashed TVs in the 1990s, but these days their embracing slickly-produced videos and social media influencers to try to rehab their image abroad. Afghan anthropologist Omar Sharifi unpacks whether its working.
Technology has changed the way countries wage war, and today, we look at an app in Afghanistan that wanted to change the way people on the ground experienced it.
New legislation is seeking to designate some ransomware attacks as acts of terror. Former FBI agent John Riggi talks about the proposal and how it might change the battle against ransomware gangs.
Sky Lakes Medical Center in south central Oregon never imagined it could be on the receiving end of a ransomware attack. Then Ryuk put them in the crosshairs.
Just a stone’s throw from the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, the National Cryptologic Museum displays dozens of rarely seen code breaking machines that, quite literally, changed the course of history. We take a tour and chat with the museum’s affable director, Vince Houghton.
For years now, the Internet has trafficked in things that are more mean than fun. Disinformation, online bullying, and a general malaise are all over social media. We talk to former Stanford Internet Observatory Research Director Renee Diresta about her new book “Invisible Rulers” and ask why, ahead of the DNC Convention, the Dems’ new unbearable lightness has gone so viral.
We talk with Unit 221B’s Allison Nixon about young cybercriminals, radicalization, and the search for self in the virtual world.
This isn’t your typical hacker tale. The one about boy meets computer, boy loves computer, boy weaponizes computer to commit crimes. This is about what comes after that.
The latest on disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News — and why the Dominion Voting Machine settlement doesn’t necessarily help her case.
A new wave of piano scams is targeting the weakest link on the internet: humans.
Today, we’re talking to TJ Nelson at Recorded Future in a bid to understand how the CrowdStrike outage caused millions of computers around the world to fade to black.
In a recent conversation on WAMU’s 1A news magazine, Click Here host Dina Temple-Raston discusses the latest developments in the case of former IRS investigator Tigran Gambaryan. He now works for the cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. Nigerian prosecutors have charged Gambaryan, a middle manager at the company, for what they say are his employer’s transgressions. He’s been held in Nigeria since February.
In an ancore episode of Click Here's Mic Drop, we speak with the leader of one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service gangs the world has ever known — LockBit. We spoke to him weeks after Operation Cronos, a global police action against the group.
The hack on Change Healthcare left hundreds, if not thousands, of providers without the ability to obtain insurance approval or payment for everything from prescriptions to surgeries, and it shed new light on a part of the health care system that is often overlooked. Dan Weissmann, the host of An Arm and a Leg podcast , speaks with reporters Brittany Trang of STAT News and Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect about the hack and what it is telling us about antitrust concerns in the health care...
Chinese hackers are stepping up their game, according to Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations for Britain’s MI6. In an encore episode of Mic Drop, he says Chinese hackers are taking on a new swagger in cyberspace and borrowing things from a familiar playbook: a Russian one.
In an encore episode, we report on 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.
Before Nigerian authorities detained two mid-level Binance executives back in February, they were telling anyone who would listen that the cryptocurrency platform was manipulating the value of its currency, the naira. It turns out the more likely culprit is more than a decade of economic mismanagement, as we explore in an encore episode of Mic Drop.
In the latest season of Understood from CBC, Mumbai-based journalist Salimah Shivji examines how Modi went from being barred from the US, to becoming one of the most powerful men in the world. About Understood: Know more, now. From the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, to the rise of Pornhub, Understood is an anthology podcast that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. Over a handful of episodes, each season unfolds as a s...
From an encore episode of Mic Drop. Everyone is talking about the power of Al in conservation, but a professor at Arizona State University has found an even simpler, more elegant solution — and all you have to do is listen.
In an encore episode, we look at the tension between AI and the work of humans from which it learns. Media companies like the New York Times and a roster of authors and artists have sued some of the makers of these generative AI models to try to get an answer to a very fundamental question: What do human creators own?
Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has been working with young people not just to show them how to sort fact from fiction, but to give them a reason to believe that truth can still empower the weak and hold the guilty accountable.
Antibot4Navalny is a small but mighty group of anonymous researchers calling out Russian disinformation — and punching way above their weight.
Omny Miranda Martone has been working with a handful of Washington lawmakers for more than a year on legislation that would put an end to the impunity of deepfake abuse. The bill, known as the Defiance Act, is being fast-tracked through Congress with a rare procedure known as “hotlining” and it may land on the president’s desk as early as this fall.
After years of shouting into the wind about deepfakes and deepfake porn, we take a look at some possible solutions that offer not just deterrence but accountability. Plus, something we rarely see these days: bipartisan agreement on a bill in Congress.
The GhostSec hacktivist group used to be known for its cyberattacks against terrorist groups like ISIS. Then, last year, the group took an unexpected turn — it created GhostLocker and began launching ransomware attacks. We talk to the group’s leader about their work with cybercriminal gangs and why we should believe him when he says all that is now in the past.
Infostealers commit close to the perfect crime. They sneak into your computer, grab your logins, passwords, and anything of value, and then delete themselves on the way out — victims don’t even know they’ve been robbed. We talk to the alleged co-founder of the Meduza infostealer and to some of the people intent on stopping this kind of attack.
As Russian forces zero in on Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, drones are among the weapons that are coming to the rescue. We went to a secret drone academy where Ukraine is training its drone operators to help fend off the Russians while Ukraine awaits new arms from the U.S.
A hacktivist group called the Belarusian Cyber Partisans rocked Belarus when it hacked into government servers and released secret police files and government wiretaps – the kinds of hacks we’re used to seeing by nation-states. They represent the changing face of hacktivism. Some hacktivists are becoming more professional, while others are falling prey to darker forces.
