Malicious Life
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Malicious Life
Malicious Life by Cybereason tells the unknown stories of the history of cybersecurity, with comments and reflections by real hackers, security experts, journalists, and politicians.
Жаңы эпизоддор
265 эпизодWeev, Part 2
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, long time critics of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, followed Weev's trial - but did not get involved. For the a...
Weev, Part 1
Much like Aaron Swartz did, Andrew "weev" Auernheimer fought against the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law both men belived to be dangerous and unju...
Cuckoo Spear [B-Side]
APT-10 is a Chinese nation-state threat actor that in recent years has been targeting Japanese IT & Instrastructure organizations using a sophisticate...
The Man Who Went To War With Anonymous - And Lost
Aaron Barr was en-signals intelligence officer specializing in analytics. As part of HBGary Federal, he came up with a plan to unmask the key leaders...
What Can Organizations Learn from "Grim Beeper"? [B-Side]
On 17 and 18 of September 2024, thousands of pagers and hand held radio devices used by Hezbollah, exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria, k...
The Fappening/Celebgate
Could thousands of people keep a secret? Common sense says no—secrets spread, and people talk. But for over a decade, from 2006 to 2017, a website man...
Operation Snow White, Part 2
Scientology spies were trained in all covert operations techniques: surveillance, recruiting agents, infiltrating enemy lines, and blackmail. However,...
Operation Snow White, Part 1
In 1963, the FDA raided the headquaters of a budding new and esoteric religion - The Church of Scientology. In response to this and similar incidents...
Caught in the Crossfire: Infighting and Treason in Russia’s Cyber World
On Dec. 5, 2016, two senior Russian Intelligence officers and two civilians were arrested and accused of treason. A few weeks later, when Western jour...
SNAP Fraud: Getting Rich by Stealing from the Poor
SNAP - better known as food stamps - goes back to the Great Depression. ,The physical stamps were replaced with EBT cards in the 1990s, but since thes...
The Hollywood Con Queen, Part 2
Nicole Kotsianas, an investigator with K2 Intelligence, made it her personal mission to hunt down the Hollywood Con Queen, who crulley tormented her v...
The Hollywood Con Queen, Part 1
In 2015, two aspiring script writers flew to Indonesia to meet with executives of a large Chinese film corporation. It was a trap: the Hollywood Con Q...
The Doomed Queen’s Secret Ciphers
In the pre-internet era, encryption was a matter of life and death, and the motives behind these ciphers were varied and complex. Discover how George...
Why Did People Write Viruses In The 80s & 90s?
Why did people write malware in the pre-internet days? Back then, there was no way to make money by writing malware. So why write them in the first pl...
Section 230: The Law that Makes Social Media Great, and Terrible
Section 230 is the pivotal law that has enabled the rise of social media -while sparking heated debates over its implications. In this episode, we're...
What Happened at Uber?
In 2016, Joe Sullivan, former CISO of Facebook, was at the peak of his career. As Uber's new CISO, he and his team had just successfully prevented dat...
The Nigerian Prince
In this episode of ML, we're exploring the history of the well-known Nigerian Prince scam, also known as 419 or advanced fee scam, from its roots in a...
Unmasking Secrets: The Rise of Open-Source Intelligence
Dive into the world of open-source intelligence (OSINT) in this episode, where we uncover how ordinary citizens use publicly available data to unravel...
The Source Code of Malicious Life
A few weeks ago we had a listener’s meetup in New York, and as part of that meetup, I gave a talk in which I discussed how Malicious Life came to be -...
The Y2K Bug, Part 2
In the waning years of the 20th century, amid growing anxieties about the turn of the millennium, one man, Robert Bemer, observed the unfolding drama...
The Y2K Bug, Part 1
In the 1950s and 60s - even leading into the 1990s - the cost of storage was so high, that using a 2-digit field for dates in a software instead of 4-...
Can You Bomb a Hacker?
The 2008 Russo-Georgian War marked a turning point: the first time cyberattacks were used alongside traditional warfare. But what happens when the att...
Kevin Mitnick, Part 2
In 1991, Kevin Mitnick was bouncing back from what was probably the lowest point of his life. He began to rebuild his life: he started working out and...
Kevin Mitnick, Part 1
For Kevin Mitnick - perhaps the greatest social engineer who ever lived - hacking was an obsession: even though it ruined his marriage, landed him in...
SIM Registration: Security, or Surveillance?
Right now, hundreds of thousands of people in the southern African country of Namibia are faced with a choice. At the end of next month, their phone s...
The Mariposa Botnet
In 2008, The 12 million PCs strong Mariposa Botnet infected almost half of Furture 100 companey - but the three men who ran it were basiclly script ki...
The Real Story of Citibank’s $10M Hack
Valdimir Levin is often presented as "the first online bank robber," and appeares on many lists of the "Top 10 Greatest Hackers." But a few veteran Ru...
How to Hack Into Satellites
About a year ago, six academics from Ruhr University Bochum and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security set out to survey engineers and d...
Moonlight Maze
When investigators discovered in 1996 that US military networks were being extensively hacked, they didn't realize they were witnessing the birth of w...
Volt Typhoon
In August 2021, a port in Houston, Texas, was attacked. Over the following months, a series of attacks occurred in various locations, reminiscent of a...
Is NSO Evil? Part 2
By the time Forbidden Stories published its “Pegasus Project” in 2021, NSO was already knee deep in what was probably the worst PR disaster ever suffe...
Is NSO Evil? Part 1
NSO Group, creator of the infamous Pegasus spyware, is widely regarded as a vile, immoral company: a sort of 21st century soldier of fortune, a mercen...
Should You Pay Ransomware Attackers? A Game Theory Approach
The FBI explicitly advises companies against paying ransomware attackers - but itself payed 4.4 million dollars worth of Bitcoin after the Colonial Pi...
Silent Firewalls: The Underrepresentation of Women in Cyber
In the vast landscape of STEM, women constitute a mere 28% of the workforce. Yet, when we zoom into the realm of cybersecurity, the number dwindles ev...
Operation Kudo
In 1981, during the G7 Summit in Quebec, French president Francois Mitterand handen President Raegan a top secret collection of documents, called "Far...
Can We Stop the AI Cyber Threat?
Much of the cybersecurity software in use today utilizes AI, especially things like spam filters and network traffic monitors. But will all those tool...
Is Generative AI Dangerous?
Every so often, the entire landscape of cybersecurity shifts, all at once: The latest seismic shift in the field occurred just last year. So in this e...
Why aren't there more bug bounty programs?
On the face of it, there's an obvious economic incentive for both vendors and security researchers to collaborate on disclosing vulnerabilities safely...
The Voynich Manuscript
The constant battle between those who wish to encrypt data and those who wish to break these ciphers has made modern encryption schemes extremely powe...
Roman Seleznev: Did the Punishment Fit the Crime?
In 2019, Roman Seleznev, a 34 years-old Russian national, was sentenced to 27 years in prison: A sentence that’d make any criminal quiver. Seleznev's...