Episodes
In an ancore episode of Click Here's Mic Drop, we speak with the leader of one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service gangs the world has ever known — LockBit. We spoke to him weeks after Operation Cronos, a global police action against the group.
Published 07/26/24
Published 07/26/24
The hack on Change Healthcare left hundreds, if not thousands, of providers without the ability to obtain insurance approval or payment for everything from prescriptions to surgeries, and it shed new light on a part of the health care system that is often overlooked. Dan Weissmann, the host of An Arm and a Leg podcast, speaks with reporters Brittany Trang of STAT News and Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect about the hack and what it is telling us about antitrust concerns in the health...
Published 07/23/24
Chinese hackers are stepping up their game, according to Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations for Britain’s MI6. In an encore episode of Mic Drop, he says Chinese hackers are taking on a new swagger in cyberspace and borrowing things from a familiar playbook: a Russian one.
Published 07/19/24
In an encore episode, we report on 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.
Published 07/16/24
Before Nigerian authorities detained two mid-level Binance executives back in February, they were telling anyone who would listen that the cryptocurrency platform was manipulating the value of its currency, the naira. It turns out the more likely culprit is more than a decade of economic mismanagement, as we explore in an encore episode of Mic Drop.
Published 07/12/24
In the latest season of Understood from CBC, Mumbai-based journalist Salimah Shivji examines how Modi went from being barred from the US, to becoming one of the most powerful men in the world.  About Understood: Know more, now. From the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, to the rise of Pornhub, Understood is an anthology podcast that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. Over a handful of episodes, each season unfolds...
Published 07/09/24
From an encore episode of Mic Drop. Everyone is talking about the power of Al 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.
Published 07/05/24
In an encore episode, we look at the tension between AI and the work of humans from which it learns. Media companies like the New York Times and a roster of authors and artists have sued some of the makers of these generative AI models to try to get an answer to a very fundamental question: What do human creators own?
Published 07/02/24
Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has been working with young people not just to show them how to sort fact from fiction, but to give them a reason to believe that truth can still empower the weak and hold the guilty accountable.
Published 06/28/24
Antibot4Navalny is a small but mighty group of anonymous researchers calling out Russian disinformation — and punching way above their weight.
Published 06/25/24
Omny Miranda Martone has been working with a handful of Washington lawmakers for more than a year on legislation that would put an end to the impunity of deepfake abuse. The bill, known as the Defiance Act, is being fast-tracked through Congress with a rare procedure known as “hotlining” and it may land on the president’s desk as early as this fall.
Published 06/21/24
After years of shouting into the wind about deepfakes and deepfake porn, we take a look at some possible solutions that offer not just deterrence but accountability. Plus, something we rarely see these days: bipartisan agreement on a bill in Congress.
Published 06/18/24
The GhostSec hacktivist group used to be known for its cyberattacks against terrorist groups like ISIS. Then, last year, the group took an unexpected turn — it created GhostLocker and began launching ransomware attacks. We talk to the group’s leader about their work with cybercriminal gangs and why we should believe him when he says all that is now in the past.
Published 06/14/24
Infostealers commit close to the perfect crime. They sneak into your computer, grab your logins, passwords, and anything of value, and then delete themselves on the way out — victims don’t even know they’ve been robbed. We talk to the alleged co-founder of the Meduza infostealer and to some of the people intent on stopping this kind of attack.
Published 06/11/24
As Russian forces zero in on Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, drones are among the weapons that are coming to the rescue. We went to a secret drone academy where Ukraine is training its drone operators to help fend off the Russians while Ukraine awaits new arms from the U.S.
Published 06/07/24
A hacktivist group called the Belarusian Cyber Partisans rocked Belarus when it hacked into government servers and released secret police files and government wiretaps – the kinds of hacks we’re used to seeing by nation-states. They represent the changing face of hacktivism. Some hacktivists are becoming more professional, while others are falling prey to darker forces.
Published 06/04/24
Oren Etzioni used to be one of those AI optimists. Now, not so much. In fact, he’s so worried about AI-manipulated content, he created a non-profit, TrueMedia.org, to help ordinary people sort AI fact from fiction.
Published 05/31/24
US adversaries are on a propaganda offensive around the world. Earlier this month, the Council on Foreign Relations in DC convened a discussion about the changing landscape of disinformation campaigns with James Rubin, special envoy at the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, Jon Bateman from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. CLICK HERE moderated the conversation, and here are some highlights.
Published 05/28/24
When the Hoover Institution’s director of war gaming, Jackie Schneider, started organizing war simulations more than a decade ago, she assumed that participants would respond to cyber attacks the same way they responded to traditional weapons of war – but it turns out that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Published 05/24/24
When North Korea hacked Alejandro Caceres, he expected the U.S. government to rush to his defense. When they just shrugged, he took matters into his own hands.
Published 05/21/24
On the battlefields of Ukraine, Russia has become very adapt at electronic warfare — both jamming GPS satellites and spoofing satellite signals. We explain how it works and its ripple effects beyond the front lines.
Published 05/17/24
A story about satellites, electronic warfare, and a team of American techies who MacGyver-ed a way to keep the power flowing in Ukraine.
Published 05/14/24
In an interview, LockbitSupp, head of the Lockbit cybercrime operation, told us that the U.S., U.K. and Australia have the wrong guy — he’s not Dmitry Khoroshev, the 31-year-old Russian national they’ve charged with hacking. What’s more, he says more attacks are coming.
Published 05/10/24
In a year that could bring a perfect storm of disinformation, meet Doppelgänger, a Russian-backed group seeking not just to shake up the world’s elections, but its institutions too.
Published 05/07/24