Nicole Perlroth
speaker
1,851 appearances
14 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 14 Jul
Nicole Perlroth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Across the world, people started ripping their computers out of the wall.
But in the UK, a little-known researcher did the opposite.
When the attack hit, Marcus had been tracking different malware strains.
Whatever this was, it was bigger than anything he'd tracked his entire career.
Very quickly, the attack was dubbed WannaCry after a tiny snippet researchers uncovered in the encrypted file names.
But this virus replicated like nothing the world had ever seen.
Whatever this was, whoever this was, they weren't infecting machines manually.
This was a self-replicating worm.
And as analysts started teasing the code apart, they discovered why.
These hackers had built their ransomware on top of a stolen Microsoft Windows exploit that had been leaked online one month earlier.
And this wasn't just any exploit.
This exploit belonged to the NSA, the U.S.
National Security Agency.
It was codenamed Eternal Blue, and someone, we still have no idea who, calling themselves the Shadow Brokers, had dumped it online a month earlier.
Eternal Blue was essentially a rocket, and North Korea used that rocket to spread its ransomware to 150 countries around the globe.
But like their typo before this, the attackers made careless mistakes.
They'd recycled their tools, including from the Sony hack.
They'd also failed to give their victims a decryption key.
So even if their victims paid their $300 ransom, they'd have almost no hope of actually retrieving their data.
But Marcus spotted another mistake, one that would bring the entire operation crashing to a halt.
Showing 781–800 of 1,851 · page 40 of 93
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