Can computer hackers get inside your mind?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This message comes from the podcast 5 Miles From Home. When a high school student disappears from a small Nevada town, a story of betrayal and shocking confessions emerges. Hosted by Dateline's Keith Morrison. Search 5 Miles From Home to follow now. This is Planet Money from NPR.
What invisible conflict exists between the U.S. and Iran?
On Friday, if all goes according to plan, representatives from the U.S. and Iran will meet in Geneva to sign another 60-day ceasefire agreement. But the two sides still have not come to an agreement on what's been at the heart of this war and decades of conflict, Iran's development of nuclear weapons.
Right. This conflict has been on again, off again for years. And while the most recent iteration has been very violent with bombs and blockades, there is a whole other almost entirely invisible war that the U.S. and allies have been waging with Iran using cyber espionage or more accurately, cyber sabotage, you know, computer viruses, malware. Recently, we heard a story about a piece of malware that might have been used in this invisible war that was diabolically cunning. Because it exploited weaknesses in computers, yes, but also maybe in the human psyche. The more I think about it, the more I think, this must have driven people insane. But, It also might have saved the world from nuclear destruction.
We heard about this hack from someone whose job it is to identify computer hacks that could be a threat to all of us.
What's your name? What do you do? My name is Juan Andres Guerrero Saade, which is why everybody calls me Jags.
J-A-G-S, JAGS. His initials are shorter and cooler.
Yeah, actually, he is a pretty cool guy. He's got a faux hawk, sleeves of tattoos. He was on track to go get a PhD in philosophy, but now?
I'm a security researcher, what I think would be the simplest term. I think some folks would say cyber paleontologist.
cyber paleontologist, like he digs for the remnants of cyber attacks. Jags works for a cybersecurity company called Sentinel-1. It helps big companies like Samsung and the Golden State Warriors and the government protect their computers and networks.
Hacking is a whole industry. And defending against hacks is this whole other industry. Jags just so happens to have the raddest job of all, which is dusting off old malware files buried deep on servers and reverse engineering how hackers got into systems in the first place and what they did when they got there. So he can figure out how to defend against similar attacks in the future.
And Jags is kind of a big deal. There are actually a couple of pieces in the International Spy Museum in D.C. based on his cyber paleontology work.
This is a little crude, but in the Jurassic Park movie, which paleontologist are you?
As long as you don't immediately default to Jeff Goldblum.
I was going to go Jeff Goldblum. But I think that he is like a chaos theory mathematician.
Which I think fits the bill, right? What the hell do I actually know about paleontology? Right.
What is the significance of cyber sabotage in modern warfare?
We met up with Jags because we wanted to get a peek into the invisible war. Because Jags has made a stunning discovery of a highly specialized, highly sophisticated cyber weapon.
Often these weapons don't even get detected. If they do, it's not usually until years later when someone like Jags comes across an old fragment and tries to reconstruct what top secret mission the weapon was designed to carry out.
For Jags, the fragment he found wasn't even a piece of code. It was just six words. It came from a leaked list of malware from the NSA.
Yeah, the list came from this tool the NSA had. meant to help NSA operators, while they were hacking into some computer in enemy territory, figure out whether some other hacker was already there. And if so, whether they were friends or foes.
Essentially, it'll run all these checks and it's gonna give the operators, it's gonna give a list of instructions of saying, hey, look, suspicious thing here. We don't know what that is. Known malware, pull back. Like little warning signs.
And this was a budding cyber paleontologist's dream. Each piece of malware on that list had the potential to teach you so much about how the world's top hackers were getting the job done.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:22
2
What invisible conflict exists between the U.S. and Iran?
0:22–3:22
3
What is the significance of cyber sabotage in modern warfare?
3:22–6:18
4
Who is Juan Andres Guerrero Saade and what does he do?
6:18–14:32
5
What is the mysterious malware known as Fast16?
14:32–22:32
6
How did Fast16 potentially interfere with nuclear calculations?
22:32–31:09