The Rise and Fall of Cyber Crime

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In the 1970s and particularly in the 1980s, Bulgaria was the Silicon Valley of the Eastern Bloc. And what you had all these basically young men who were underemployed. Do we know today who Dark Avenger is, slash was? So I do not. The person who did the most work understanding the mind of virus writers and got very close to Dark Avenger will not tell me because she believes she owes this person an anonymity as a research subject. After the podcast is over, I will tell you some communications I've gotten. But I don't know who it is. But I do speculate.

Modern computers are somewhat more secure against being hacked - either by an inanimate virus or a human interloper - than they used to be. But as our lives are increasingly intertwined with computers, the dangers that hacking poses are enormously greater. Why don't we just build unhackable computers? Scott Shapiro, who is a law professor and philosopher, explains why that's essentially impossible. On a philosophical level, computers rely on an essential equivalence between "data" and "code," which is vulnerable to exploitation. And on a psychological level, human beings will always be the weakest link in the chain of security.

Web page with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/05/29/238-scott-shapiro-on-the-technology-and-philosophy-of-hacking/

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Scott Shapiro received a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia. He is currently the Charles F Southmayd Prof of Law and Philosophy at Yale University. He is the Director of the Yale Center for Law and Philosophy and also Director of the Yale Cybersecurity Lab. He is the Co-Editor of Legal Theory, and Co-Editor for philosophy of Law at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His new book is Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks.

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