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83. “Ding-dong ditch” on steroids Sep 05, 2023

Show notes

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.

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82. The Clop gang’s in love with a special kind of bug Aug 29, 2023

Show notes

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.

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81. Ilya Sachkov v. the Kremlin Aug 22, 2023

Show notes

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.

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80. Meet ChatGPT’s evil twin Aug 15, 2023

Show notes

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.

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79. One woman’s Orwellian experience with disinformation Aug 08, 2023

Show notes

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.

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78. Trouble in the cloud Aug 01, 2023

Show notes

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.

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77. SPECIAL FEATURE: ‘The internet is at the bottom of the sea’ from Things That Go Boom Jul 25, 2023

Show notes

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.

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76. The Mexican army’s love affair with spyware Jul 18, 2023

Show notes

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.

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75. SPECIAL FEATURE: 'Life, death and AI' from Endless Thread Jul 11, 2023

Show notes

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.

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74. Reality Winner and the handling of secret documents Jul 04, 2023

Show notes

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.

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