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389 episodes - English - Latest episode: 7 days ago - ★★★★★ - 92 ratingsThe 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.
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Episodes
123. Mic Drop: China seeks a Great Leap Forward in cyber
April 19, 2024 07:00 - 13 minutesChinese hackers are stepping up their game, according to Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations for Britain’s MI6. He says they are taking on a new swagger in cyberspace and borrowing things from a familiar playbook: a Russian one.
122. The UK-US unmasked a giant Chinese cyber operation but forgot one thing: to tell many of its victims
April 16, 2024 07:00 - 28 minutesThe US and UK made a splashy coordinated announcement last month about a years-long cyber espionage campaign by Chinese state-backed hackers. The US indicted seven, the UK leveled sanctions. They just neglected to do one thing --- let some of the victims know.
121. Mic Drop: A unusual peek inside a North Korean malware lab
April 12, 2024 07:00 - 10 minutesNorth Korea has a unique way of testing malware — they are less concerned about getting it right than getting it out… a kind of “smash-and-grab” approach to cyber attacks. Sentinel One’s Tom Hegel explains.
120. North Korea’s ScarCruft gang is behind some very crafty phishin’ campaigns
April 09, 2024 07:00 - 28 minutesNorth Korea may be best known for the Lazarus group’s epic cryptocurrency heists. But there’s another special unit of state-backed hackers who have a different specialty: spying on journalists, dissidents, and cybersecurity experts. We look at the ScarCruft gang and their very crafty phishing campaigns.
119. Mic Drop: Could an analysis of sound help save the jaguar in Costa Rica?
April 05, 2024 07:00 - 15 minutesEveryone is talking about the power of AI 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.
118. AI and the Holy Grail of conservation: Real-time monitoring
April 02, 2024 07:00 - 31 minutesCornell University’s Elephant Listening Project has been trying to get real-time monitoring of the Central African Republic’s forest elephants for years. FruitPunch AI and a roster of other AI researchers are closer than ever to making that a reality.
117. Mic Drop: The Big Chill: Nigeria, Binance battle likely to add to economic crisis
March 29, 2024 07:00 - 12 minutesMatthew Page from the London-based think tank Chatham House pulls back to look at the potential economic fallout between Nigerian government and Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
116. Detained execs, a bold escape, and tax evasion charges: Nigeria takes aim at Binance
March 26, 2024 07:00 - 29 minutesThis week, Nigeria charged Binance and two of its executives with tax evasion in the latest twist in a month-long dispute between the cryptocurrency giant and the Nigerian government. Nigeria detained Binance’s regional manager and a former US federal agent for nearly a month after they flew to Abuja at the end of February to meet with officials there. Now, one executive has slipped away and the other has become a pawn.
116. Detained execs, a bold escape, and tax evasion charges, Nigeria takes aim at Binance
March 26, 2024 07:00 - 32 minutesThis week, Nigeria charged Binance and two of its executives with tax evasion in the latest twist in a month-long dispute between the crypto currency giant and the Nigerian government. Nigeria detained Binance’s regional manager and a former US federal agent for nearly a month after they flew to Abuja at the end of February to meet with officials there. Now one executive has slipped away and the other has become a pawn.
115. Mic Drop: Hear ye, Hear ye, the Hacker’s Court is in session
March 22, 2024 07:00 - 14 minutesWe talk to Analyst1 senior researcher Jon DiMaggio about how hackers settle their disputes – think People’s Court without all the robes.
114. Exclusive: LockBit ransomware leader says, ‘I felt like I was being hunted’ but they ‘can’t stop me’
March 19, 2024 07:00 - 27 minutesWe speak with the leader of one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service gangs the world has ever known — LockBit. Just weeks after Operation Cronos, a global police action against the group, LockBitSupp tells us about the takedown, his attempt to rebuild, and his plans for the future.
113. Exclusive: Embattled LockBit leader: ‘Now I want to create even more noise’
March 15, 2024 07:00 - 11 minutesOur interview of the week: LockBitSupp says his ransomware platform isn’t dead yet.
112. Inside the i-Soon papers and China’s secret world of hackers-for-hire
March 12, 2024 07:00 - 27 minutesNewly leaked files from a private Chinese hackers-for-hire company provide a fresh look into China’s “cyber industrial complex” – and it appears to be bigger and more mature than observers had previously imagined.
111. Mic Drop: Arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis on North Korea’s new BFF in Moscow
March 08, 2024 08:00 - 15 minutesOur interview of the week — a one-on-one with arms control policy expert, Jeffrey Lewis.
110. North Korean Missiles in Ukraine and Kim Jong-un’s new swagger
March 05, 2024 08:00 - 27 minutesWe talk to a team of open source analysts and weapons inspectors who have pieced together how Pyongyang avoided sanctions to get Russia missiles it needs for the battle in Ukraine and look at why Kim Jung-un is feeling he’s got his groove back.
109. Mic Drop: FBI Director Wray on the latest wave of nation-state cyber threats
March 01, 2024 08:00 - 14 minutesOur interview of the week — a rare one-on-one with FBI Director Christopher Wray.
108. Exclusive: FBI Director Wray talks takedown operations, nation-state hackers, and growing threats in cyberspace
February 27, 2024 08:00 - 26 minutesFBI Director Chris Wray sat down for a rare interview with Click Here to talk about Operation Dying Ember, the uptick in nation-state hacking, and how just about everyone is now in hackers’ crosshairs.
107. SPECIAL FEATURE: ‘In the cockpit with AI’ from In Machines We Trust
February 20, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesAn episode from ‘In Machines We Trust’ from MIT Technology Review. How we train fighter pilots—both real and artificial—is undergoing a series of rapid changes. In order for these systems to be useful we need to trust them, but figuring out just how, when and why remains a massive challenge. Jennifer Strong reports on how AI is being used to teach human pilots to perform some of the most dangerous and difficult maneuvers in aerial combat.
106. Facial recognition software could help solve America’s missing person problem. Why hasn’t it?
February 13, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesSome 600,000 people are reported missing in the U.S. every year. Thousands of bodies lie unclaimed and unidentified in American morgues. Facial recognition software could put a name to these faces, so why hasn’t it?
105. Jordan’s wave of spyware infections
February 06, 2024 08:00 - 31 minutesA 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.
104. Generative AI: Is it creative or just copying the rest of us?
January 30, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesToday’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.
103. Dr. Dolittle never spoke whale, AI just might
January 23, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesSome 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.
102. Cyber Av3ngers and their unlikely targets
January 16, 2024 08:00 - 27 minutesWe 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.
101. Bug bounties with Chinese characteristics
January 09, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesVulnerabilities and exploits are the building blocks of hacking. We look at how China is flipping the script on how the world thinks about both.
100. The 2023 cyber year in review
January 02, 2024 08:00 - 24 minutesIn 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.
99. Meet the hackers
December 26, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesHackers 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.
98. Lessons from the world's first hybrid war
December 19, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesUkraine 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?
97. Policing Morality? There’s an app for that.
December 12, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesWe 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.
96. The art of decoding dictators
December 05, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesDictators use bombast and bullying as a kind of malevolent calling card. Meet the people who have found surprising and creative ways around that.
95. Reality Bytes: the URL-IRL crash
November 28, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesThree 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.
94. They’re just hackers, living off the land
November 21, 2023 08:00 - 26 minutesThere’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.
93. Tech that allows ordinary people to make peace with wartime
November 14, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesIf 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.
92. Israel, Gaza and all the light you cannot see
November 07, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesWe 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.
91. Bucha wants to be known for something else: Justice.
October 31, 2023 07:00 - 33 minutesBucha, 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.
90. Saving Ukraine’s cultural heritage with a click
October 24, 2023 07:00 - 34 minutesWhen 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.
89. Exclusive: Ukraine says joint mission with U.S. derailed Moscow’s cyber attacks
October 17, 2023 07:00 - 27 minutesWe 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.
88. Exclusive: Inside Ukraine’s secret drone factories
October 10, 2023 07:00 - 30 minutesWe 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.
87. SPECIAL FEATURE: ‘How AI Will Turbocharge Misinformation’ from Humans vs. Machines
October 03, 2023 07:00 - 30 minutesAn 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.
86. What will Moscow do with the Wagner Group now?
September 26, 2023 07:00 - 30 minutesThe 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?
85. What Wagner Group learned from ISIS
September 19, 2023 07:00 - 31 minutesBack 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.
84. Dutch police, cyber booby traps and a dark market takedown for the ages
September 12, 2023 07:00 - 31 minutesLed 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.
83. “Ding-dong ditch” on steroids
September 05, 2023 07:01 - 32 minutesRemember 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.
82. The Clop gang’s in love with a special kind of bug
August 29, 2023 07:01 - 27 minutesBack 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.
81. Ilya Sachkov v. the Kremlin
August 22, 2023 07:00 - 32 minutesIlya 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.
80. Meet ChatGPT’s evil twin
August 15, 2023 07:00 - 27 minutesWave “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.
79. One woman’s Orwellian experience with disinformation
August 08, 2023 07:00 - 29 minutesWe 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.
78. Trouble in the cloud
August 01, 2023 07:01 - 21 minutesPutting 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.
77. SPECIAL FEATURE: ‘The internet is at the bottom of the sea’ from Things That Go Boom
July 25, 2023 07:01 - 43 minutesThis 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.
76. The Mexican army’s love affair with spyware
July 18, 2023 07:03 - 28 minutesSince 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.
75. SPECIAL FEATURE: 'Life, death and AI' from Endless Thread
July 11, 2023 07:00 - 36 minutesFrom 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.