Stay ConnectedHacking. Hackers. Disinformation campaigns. Encryption. The Cyber. This stuff gets complicated really fast, but Motherboard spends its time embedded in the infosec world so you don’t have to. Host Matthew Gault talks every week to Motherboard reporters about the stories they’re breaking and to the industry’s most famous hackers and researchers about the biggest news in cybersecurity.
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It’s the classic story of a corporate giant swallowing up a darling startup into its ranks and destroying its core business.
Originally a spawn of the Alphabet company—Google’s parent umbrella—Chronicle was a cybersecurity startup considered by many to be a game changer: it was going to leverage machine learning and Alphabet’s endless supply of malware samples and technical data via Google, and fuse it into an over the counter product that infosec units in companies all over the world could use to make the Internet better for everyone.
It seemed, to many, this was a cybersecurity company that wasn’t hawking snakeoil, but a real, helpful product. And part of its allure was that Chronicle would not join its corporate overlord outright, but instead remain independent of Google.
Then it was announced they were going to join Google and everyone jumped ship. Now, as one employee put it, “Chronicle is dead.” In other words, one of the cybersecurity industry's most promising startups is falling apart after one of the most profitable companies in the world took it over.
This week we have Lorenzo Francheschi Bichierrai on the show to tell us about the internal struggles of Chronicle.
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The tale started with an encrypted phone company, Morroccan gangsters, the Scottish mafia, and a blogger. It ended with an assassination outside of a sex club in Amsterdam.
Last week, Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox broke the news that MPC—a Scottish company that hawked special encrypted phones that could evade police surveillance—had been connected to the murder of crime blogger Martin Kok. Kok was a former criminal himself who had previously served a jail sentence for two murders.
Kok’s crime blogging had gotten him on the wrong side of the Gillespie brothers, two Scots who are still operating a highly sophisticated drug and gun running operation connected to South American cartels, as well as Morroccan gangster associates. They allegedly hatched a successful plan to kill him in December 2016.
On this week’s episode of CYBER, Cox goes into detail about how this criminal syndicate carried out Kok's murder, and what it means for crime in 2019 when the mafia isn’t buying encrypted phones, but making them for itself.
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The U.S. military prides itself on being one of the most powerful militaries on the face of the earth. The best trained, the best equipped with the latest wartech, the most mobile, with a power projection around the world. It’s why, sadly, as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism—which tracks U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Somalia—maintains that the American military has killed as many as over 12,000 people in targeted strikes since 2004. Of those numbers, close to 1,800 are civilians and up to nearly 400 of that number, are kids.
There’s even been consideration on whether or not the U.S. military could have at on point taken on the entire world in the kinetic reality of ground, air, and sea war.
But in 2019, the American war machine doesn’t simply need soldiers,helicopters, or F-22s. It needs hackers to infiltrate secure networks, to spy, or disrupt critical infrastructure of an enemy during any given military operation.
In order to professionalize and certify its importance within the military, the Department of Defense officially elevated “Cyber Command” as its cyberspace force in 2018 to do just that, giving it the distinction of being one of its eleven “unified combatant commands.”
In other words, USCYBERCOM (as its known for short) joins other permanent forces that are designated across DoD with a broad mandate during times of peace and war. For example, the special forces has its own Special Forces Command, while AFRICOM looks after African centric military operations.
According to its mission statement, USCYBERCOM first defends DoD assets, then it’s responsible for “providing support to combatant commanders for execution of their missions around the world, and strengthening our nation's ability to withstand and respond to cyber attack.”
Already there are media reports showing USCYBERCOM coordinating hacking operations against ISIS with the help of the NSA and carrying out a top secret “strike” on Iranian government propaganda wings in response to Tehran’s attacks on a Saudi oil field.
On this week’s CYBER we’ve got Dave Weinstein, a former member of USCYBERCOM and the now CSO of cybersecurity firm Claroty, to give us the inside tract on how this new American cyber army functions.
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The operators of a site called Girls Do Porn have been indicted on charges of sex trafficking. Meanwhile, 22 women have sued the company, saying they were coerced into doing porn. How did the company get away with it for so long?
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Neo-Nazi terrorists are taking a page from ISIS' playbook and carrying out calculated, horrific, mass casualty attacks all over the world to shock and scare of the public.
And they’re taking another tip from the infamous terrorist group: using internet savvy and encrypted networks to spread propaganda, recruit new members, and ultimately orchestrate terrorism. They have even used famous jihadist images of Osama bin Laden in their propaganda and glorify ISIS videos.
After a spate of high-profile deplatforming campaigns on more mainstream social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, the far-right retreated to the more covert corners of the internet, taking up on platforms like Minds. Recently, and similarly to ISIS, neo-Nazis have begun using Telegram for everything from shitposting to coordinating terrorist activities.
On this week’s CYBER we’ve got VICE News reporter Tess Owen to talk about her scoop on neo-Nazi terror and its relationship to Telegram.
Follow Ben on Twitter.
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The last few months have been decidedly horrible for rideshare apps Uber and Lyft, which were once the darlings of Wall Street investors who contributed billions of dollars in venture capital to help them disrupt an entire industry.
Now, there’s trouble on the horizon.
Lyft has been sued for sexual assault by at least 26 passengers in recent months. One driver was allowed to continue operating on the platform after a truly horrifying incident: He and several other men allegedly took a passenger intended for Crown Heights to a park in New Jersey, where they violently assaulted her. Another driver was permitted by Lyft to continue giving over 700 rides after severely beating one of his passengers, stomping his head into the ground.
Lyft users are alleging a robotic and inefficient complaint system shows Uber’s biggest rival cares more about profits than the safety of its clients.
Then, there’s Lyft rival Uber, which has been posting major losses after the biggest IPO of 2019.
Now. the question is: are rideshares unsafe and unfit for our current world? On today’s episode of CYBER, new Motherboard reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley tells us all about how Lyft and Uber have a lot to answer for.
Follow Ben and Lauren on Twitter.
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Catch the rat. Find the mole. It’s the classic scenario of a spy thriller.
Recently, a top spy in the Five Eyes collective—the secretive espionage and intel sharing alliance between agencies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, New Zealand and Australia—was caught trying to sell top secret information.
An FBI investigation of Phantom Secure, the encrypted cell phone provider which sold devices to Mexican cartels, uncovered a secret Canadian mole who allegedly offered its CEO Vincent Ramos intel on the investigations surrounding his company.
Without knowing the anonymous leaker, the Canadian feds began the slow process of paring down the list of who the potential mole could be. This led them to a top cybersecurity expert and head of an intelligence unit that had access to not only Canadian spycraft, but to international intelligence shared between the top secret collective.
James Ortis, the alleged mole, had his hands on things like heavily guarded NOC lists (“Non-Official-Cover" spies, or double agents in the employ of intelligence agencies), international terrorism investigations, the clandestine surveillance records of cartels, and much more.
The leak is so unprecedented for Canada, the usually cagey RCMP, the country’s federal policing agency, issued an uncharacteristically forthright statement following Ortis’ arrest.
“The charges against a senior employee of the RCMP for alleged criminality under the Criminal Code and the Security of Information Act have shaken many people throughout the RCMP, particularly in Federal Policing,” it said. “While these allegations, if proven true, are extremely unsettling, Canadians and our law enforcement partners can trust that our priority continues to be the integrity of the investigations and the safety and security of the public we serve.”
Just what else was leaked, and the fallout from Ortis’ alleged betrayal has yet to be determined, but a breach from the “insider threat”—an employee of a spy agency—is almost impossible to defend against. As it stands, it appears Ortis wasn’t doing this on ideological grounds, like say, a communist-sympathizing Westerner who might’ve sold to the KGB during the Cold War. Instead, it was for cash. That means the list of suitors for that type of intel could range from hostile foreign powers like Russia or China, to bikers and mafia outfits.
Ortis is charged with five criminal counts including the rarely used Canadian version of the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the leaking of secrets to a foreign power. He is awaiting trial in Canada. It’s believed his arrest is expected to be part of a global intelligence operation that will crackdown on a global, covert network of intel leakers.
To breakdown this monumental intelligence breach on CYBER, we have former Canadian spy Stephanie Carvin, who is a former CSIS (Canadian CIA) analyst turned academic at Carleton University and host of the Intrepid Podcast.
“You don't often hear...
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In just a few taps and clicks, the system, made by a private company, shows where a car has been seen throughout the U.S. Tipped by a private investigator source, Joseph Cox broke the news that a powerful system used by an industry including repossession agents and insurance companies tracks cars across the US. Armed with just a car's plate number, the tool—fed by a network of private cameras spread across the country—provides users a list of all the times that car has been spotted.
Follow Ben Makuch and Joseph Cox on Twitter.
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At the end of August, researchers at Google dropped a bombshell: they had discovered malicious websites that they said were indiscriminately spreading iPhone malware for years. At certain points the websites were even using zero day exploits; attacks that take advantage of vulnerabilities that Apple is not aware of.
Apple subsequently confirmed what various media reports found: that the malicious sites were particularly geared towards hacking Uighur muslims, many of whom live in Western China under intense surveillance from the government. Apple disputed some details from Google, such as the length of the campaign, but this is still likely the biggest iPhone hack we know about so far.
On this week's episode of CYBER, we talk to Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Joseph Cox about Google's research, and what it means for how governments deploy iPhone malware: it turns out, on a much larger scale than we previously thought.
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By most accounts, the war in Yemen is a brutal and lethal tragedy of the modern world that has claimed the lives of thousands of people.
With the backing of western military industrial power, the Saudi-led coalition has undertaken a relentless bombing campaign against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels that ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and his regime from the capital Sanaa in 2015.
Human rights watchers have accused the Saudis and its allies of war-crimes and a string of attacks against civilians. Just this last weekend the International Red Cross said the Saudis had killed over 100 people in a single strike on a detention center.
And as the kinetic war rolls out IRL, the Yemeni people have also been casualty to a silent war: one that’s online.
On this week’s episode we sit down with Winnona DeSombre, a threat intelligence researcher at RecordedFuture to talk about how cyberwarfare and espionage has been a serious feature in the war in Yemen.
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