Malicious Life

Weev, Part 2

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, long time critics of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, followed Weev's trial - but did not get involved. For t...

Weev, Part 1

27 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Much like Aaron Swartz did, Andrew "weev" Auernheimer fought against the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law both men belived to be dangerous ...

Cuckoo Spear [B-Side]

20 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

APT-10 is a Chinese nation-state threat actor that in recent years has been targeting Japanese IT & Instrastructure organizations using a sophisti...

The Man Who Went To War With Anonymous - And Lost

13 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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]

05 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

29 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 m...

Operation Snow White, Part 2

15 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Scientology spies were trained in all covert operations techniques: surveillance, recruiting agents, infiltrating enemy lines, and blackmail. However,...

Operation Snow White, Part 1

01 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

17 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

03 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

20 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

07 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

23 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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?

09 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

25 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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&#39...

What Happened at Uber?

11 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

The Nigerian Prince

28 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Unmasking Secrets: The Rise of Open-Source Intelligence

14 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

30 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

The Y2K Bug, Part 2

16 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

31 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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?

19 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The 2008 Russo-Georgian War marked a turning point: the first time cyberattacks were used alongside traditional warfare. But what h...

Kevin Mitnick, Part 2

04 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

19 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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?

05 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

22 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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

09 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Valdimir Levin is often presented as "the first online bank robber," and appeares on many lists of the "Top 10 Greatest Hackers." But ...

How to Hack Into Satellites

27 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

About a year ago, six academics from Ruhr University Bochum and the CISPA  Helmholtz Center for Information Security set out to survey engineers and ...

Moonlight Maze

11 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

When investigators discovered in 1996 that US military networks were being extensively hacked, they didn't realize they were witnessing the birth ...

Volt Typhoon

28 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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

13 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 s...

Is NSO Evil? Part 1

30 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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

17 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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

02 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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

20 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In 1981, during the G7 Summit in Quebec, French president Francois Mitterand handen President Raegan a top secret collection of documents, called &#34...

Can We Stop the AI Cyber Threat?

04 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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?

22 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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?

08 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On the face of it, there's an obvious economic incentive for both vendors and security researchers to collaborate on disclosing vulnerabilities sa...

The Voynich Manuscript

25 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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?

10 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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&...

Sony BMG's Rootkit Fiasco

27 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

"We made a mistake and Sony paid a terrible price.” A terrible price indeed: an arrogant and ill-advised decision to include a rootkit in its mu...

Ad Fraud, Part 2

09 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the last episode of our show, we heard the story of Methbot: an army of hundreds of thousands of bots, programmatically viewing thousands of advert...

Ad Fraud, Part 1

30 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Right now, a man named Aleksandr Zhukov is sitting in jail for one of the most financially ruinous schemes ever invented for the internet. Zhukov is g...

The Economics Of Cybersecurity

15 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The numbers can’t be any clearer: a DDoS attack costs less than a hundred dollars, while the price tag for mitigating it might reach tens if not hun...

The Reason You Don’t Have Data Privacy

01 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We’ve all experienced the creepiness of modern data trafficking, but that kind of daily annoyance is the surface of a much bigger issue: Big Tech co...

How Entire Countries Can Lose the Internet

17 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Disruptions to the world’s internet cables happen more often than you think: Whether it be ship anchors or animals or saboteurs, cut a few wires in ...

Olympic Destroyer

03 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the midst of 35,000 exhilarated spectators eagerly chanting the time-honored countdown to kick off the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, a sinister...

The Lawerence Berkeley Hack, Part 2

20 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Oמ May 23rd, 1989, Karl Koch - a 23 years old West German hacker who worked for the KGB -  took a drive, from which he would never return: Nine days...

The Lawerence Berkeley Hack, Part 1

08 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Four decades ago, three quarters would’ve gone a lot further than they do today. With that kind of loose change you could’ve picked up some milk f...

Russian Propaganda, Explained [ML B-Side]

28 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

You may have heard of the cyber operations performed by Russia. You definitely heard about the missiles being fired by Russia at Ukraine - but how abo...

Operation Ivy Bells

20 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the early 1970's, US intelligance pointed at the possibility that the Russians have laid an underwater communication cable between two importan...

Why Do NFTs Disappear? [ML BSide]

13 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when an NFT marketplace goes under, and disappears? You would imagine that the users’ NFTs are perfectly safe: after all, the blockchai...

The (Other) Problem with NFTs

06 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Physical artworks in museums are usually well-guarded - but digital artworks are something else entirely: in 2021 alone, scammers successfully stole 1...

SIM Swapping Follow Up [ML B-Side]

30 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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You Should Be Afraid of SIM Swaps

23 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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FBI vs. REvil [ML BSide]

16 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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Cyberbunker, Part 2

10 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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Cyberbunker, Part 1

02 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Cyberbunker, Part 1Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

How Netflix Learned Cloud Security

26 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Fred Cohen: The Godfather of Computer Viruses [ML B-Side]

19 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Thamar Reservoir

13 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Thamar Gindin is an Israeli scholar whose research focuses on the Persian language. For the past seven years (at least) Thamar has been a target for a...

The Problem With Kernel-Mode Anti-Cheat Software

06 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Norse Corp.: How To NOT build a cybersecurity startup

27 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Jailbreaking Tractors [ML BSide]

20 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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The Russian Business Network

13 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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What can Chess grandmasters teach us about Cyber? [ML BSide]

07 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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LabMD Vs. The FTC

31 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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What Would Happen if CBS Got Hacked? [ML BSide]

24 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Hacking Stock Markets, Part 2

18 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Vishing: Voice Scams [ML BSide]

10 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Hacking Stock Markets, Part 1

04 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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What’s it's Like to Fight LulzSec [ML B-Side]

27 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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"King Kimble": Kim DotCom

18 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The US government says that Kim Schmitz, better know as Kim DotCom, is the leader of a file sharing crime ring. He sees himself as a an internet freed...

Hacking Multi-Factor Authentication

13 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is usually considered a better solution for authentication than just using passwords. But Roger Grimes, a veteran se...

Hacking Language Models

05 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Language models are everywhere today: they run in the background of Google Translate and other translation tools; they help operate voice assistants l...

Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) [ML BSide]

31 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Leo Kuvayev– The Czar of Spammers

22 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Criminals, particularly cyber criminals, aren’t “good” people; in most cases, they do have their own personal boundaries. Every once in a while,...

"A CISO's Nightmare": Israel Baron on Railway Secuirty

14 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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“Designed by criminals, for criminals”: Operation Trojan Shield

08 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Andrew Ginter: A 40-Years-Old Backdoor [ML-BSide]

01 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Silk Road, The Amazon of Drugs - Part 2

21 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Kurtis Minder: Ransomware Negotiations [ML BSide]

18 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Silk Road: The Amazon of drugs, Part 1

11 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Jacob Goldstein: The Future of BitCoin [ML BSide]

04 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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The “Cypherpunks” Who Invented Private Digital Money

22 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Malicious LIVE: Celebrating 5 Years of Malicious Life

19 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Hackers vs. Spies: The Stratfor Leaks, Pt. 2

14 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Hackers vs. Spies: The Stratfor Leaks, Pt. 1

07 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Catching A Cybercriminal [ML B-Side]

30 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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What The LinkedIn Hack Taught Us About Storing Passwords

24 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Operation CuckooBees [ML B-Side]

17 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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How to Russia-Proof Your Democracy [ML BSide]

09 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Op. Sundevil And The Birth of the EFF

02 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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MITRE Attack Flow [ML B-Sides]

24 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Aaron Swartz

19 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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The Russia-Ukraine Cyberwar [ML B-Side]

10 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Chris Roberts: Hackers on a Plane

05 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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DIE - A New Paragidm for Cyber Security [ML B-Side]

28 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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Cyber PTSD

22 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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How Resilient Is Our Banking System?

16 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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