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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Apps have made our life so convenient haven’t they? With the push of a button you can order Postmates, book an Airbnb, or even call an Uber. But what happens when the apps stop taking your calls? What happens when they shut you out completely?
It’s happening more and more. In a bid to increase user safety, companies like Airbnb and Uber are turning to third parties to run background checks for them. A lot of it is automated and the background checkers make a lot of mistakes. So what happens if you’ve been a five star guest on Airbnb but a decades old run in with the cops suddenly makes you a pariah?
Not much, it turns out.
On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard senior editor Samantha Cole comes on to talk about Inflection, the company running background checks for Uber, Airbnb and DraftKings.
Stories discussed in this episode:
Banished for an Unleashed Dog: Airbnb Bans Bewilder Guests and Hosts
‘Consumers Get Screwed’: Airbnb’s and Uber’s Background-Check Company Keeps Getting Sued
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Do you ever feel like you’re being played? Like the people who run the world have got you on a treadmill that’s feeding you just enough rewards to keep going. Gold stars on your attendance sheet at elementary school. Apps that encourage you to run by pretending you’re fleeing zombies. Bosses that keep track of everyone’s progress in a public spreadsheet, pitting employees against each other.
As video games have gotten more popular, the world of flesh and blood has adopted some of its aspects. Not all of them are good. Gamification is here, all around us, and the powers that be are using it to keep us in line.
On this episode of Cyber ex-neuroscientist, current game developer, and best-selling author Adrian Hon talks about gamification with us. His newest book is You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All.
Stories discussed in this episode:
What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Sign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.
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Hacks are increasing but the hackers are not necessarily getting more sophisticated. What do Twitter, Twilio, and Uber all have in common? They were all hacked by, in part, a conversation. In all three cases, the hack was helped along by social engineering. Someone contacted an employee of the company and tricked them into giving up the keys to the company. It doesn’t matter how fancy your 2FA system is if an employee is just gonna give up their SMS codes to some rando on the phone.
But worry not. There are ways to protect yourself and your company against such attacks. With me today to work through it all is Rachel Tobac. Tobac is a hacker and the CEO of SocialProof Security, a company that aims to get your organization politely paranoid.
She also, coincidentally, just published a really amazing video that dramatizes a lot about what we’re going to talk about today. You can find it on Twitter @racheltobac.
Stories discussed in this episode:
The Uber Hack Shows Push Notification 2FA Has a Downside: It’s Too Annoying
How a Third-Party SMS Service Was Used to Take Over Signal Accounts
Hackers Convinced Twitter Employee to Help Them Hijack Accounts
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Sign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.
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Chess. Chess. Chess. You, the audience, quite literally asked for it. It’s the scandal that just won’t quit. On September 4 at a live Chess Tournament in St. Louis, chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen lost in a massive upset to young chess wiz Hans Niemann. This was not supposed to happen and almost immediately accusations and revelations about cheating have gotten wilder, involving AI driven cheating engines and buttplugs.
Throughout it all, Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler has kept pushing the story, watching every moment, and now he’s got a big scoop.
Stories discussed on this episode:
‘I Can’t Believe It’: Magnus Carlsen Resigns After One Move in Chess Rematch With Hans Niemann
Magnus Carlsen Finally Speaks on Chess Cheating Scandal, Sows Even More Chaos
Magnus Carlsen: Hans Niemann ‘Has Cheated More—and More Recently—Than He Has Publicly Admitted’
Chess Grandmaster Maxim Dlugy Admitted to Cheating on Chess.com, Emails Show
Did Hans Neimann Cheat at Chess With a Sex Toy? This Coder Is Attempting to Find Out.
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Sign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.
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AI art has gotten wildly popular over the past year. Programs like Midjourney and Dall-E are generating incredible images and incredible controversy. But these programs don’t exist in a vacuum. AI’s require billions of images to learn how and what to draw. Where are they getting those pictures? They’re hoovering them up on the internet. A place full of child porn, ISIS execution videos, and non-consensual adult images. With AI it’s all garbage in, garbage out. So who controls this data and is there anything we can do about it?
On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard writer Chloe Xiang walks us through the ins and outs of the AI trained on ISIS execution images.
Stories discussed in this episode:
ISIS Executions and Non-Consensual Porn Are Powering AI Art
Amazon Driver Fired for Posting Photo of Customer’s Dildo to Reddit
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Sign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
You ever feel like somebody’s watching you? Well, on the internet, it’s often true. Every move you make on the internet generates reams of data that ISPs and data brokers sell on to on to a ton of people who may want to take a look. It’s a big business. One we don’t often see the inside of.
One of the companies buying up all that data is Team Cymru who watches over all of it with a tool it calls Augury. Who buys Augury? We’ve just learned a lot of agencies within the federal government. Cyber Command, the Army, the Navy, are all using Augury to paw through internet traffic. But what, exactly, are they looking for? And what can they even see?
Stories discussed on this episode:
Revealed: US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Sign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.
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Groups on Telegram that used to primarily be interested in taking over people’s phones and online accounts have changed tactics. Now, they’re selling violence. And to cap off the week, a hacker we don’t know much about was able to steal the credentials of an Uber employee and access the company's back end.
On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard staff writers Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Joseph Cox walk us through the latest in the world of cybersecurity.
Stories discussed on this episode:
Firebombs and Shootings: The Rise of IRL Harassment and Violence as a Service
LAPSUS$: How a Sloppy Extortion Gang Became One of the Most Prolific Hacking Groups
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Sign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week on Cyber we’re going deep into recent stories of unidentified flying objects and Chess. The Pentagon has gotten big into investigating what it calls unidentified aerial phenomenon and a chess champion has been accused of cheating but the exact phenomenon he’s accused of remains unidentified.
With me today to walk through all of this is Motherboard’s lovely editor-in-chief Jason Koebler.
Stories discussed in this episode:
Congress Admits UFOs Not ‘Man-Made,’ Says ‘Threats’ Increasing ‘Exponentially’
Was This Viral UFO Photo a Hoax Generated By an AI?
Navy Says All UFO Videos Classified, Releasing Them ‘Will Harm National Security’
The Chess World Is Absolutely Losing It Over Cheating Allegations After Massive Upset
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Today on Cyber we’ve got a special presentation: We’re talking about Motherboard’s science fiction short story collection Terraform one last time. This week’s episode is a recording of a live roundtable discussion with Cory Doctorow and Geoff Manaugh—both of whom have short stories in the collection—and Terraform editors Claire L. Evans and Brian Merchant.
Want to learn the secret history of the Luddites? Find out if corporations can be bought off? Learn what it’s like to work with Netflix? Well, stay tuned.
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It seems like the Earth’s billionaires are desperate to escape the planet. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are looking to outer space. Mark Zuckerberg is looking to the inner space of virtual reality. So many billionaires are buying up land and luxury survival bunkers in New Zealand that it’s hard to keep track.
Do they know something we don’t? Or do they just have the money to act on fears they themselves were instrumental in creating?
Here today to help me answer that question is Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff is a media theorist and author. His newest book is out on September 6. It’s called Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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