Safe Mode Podcast

In our final episode of the year, host Elias Groll sits down with reporters from CyberScoop, FedScoop and Defense Scoop to discuss the biggest stories of the year. Christian Vasquez and AJ Vicens join the show to talk through the biggest breaches of the year and how the cybersecurity landscape changed in 2023. Madison Alder and Rebecca Heilweil come on to discuss how the federal government responded to calls to regulate AI. Mickayla Easley and Brandi Vincent close out the episode by discussing how the U.S. military is changing how it operates in space and what the Pentagon is doing to get to the bottom of a string of UFO sightings.

It was WikiLeaks that pioneered the publishing and hosting of sensitive information, and while Julian Assange’s whistleblowing project has withered away, groups like Distributed Denial of Secrets are carrying on the work of trying to make public interest material more widely available — and to do so more responsibly. Emma Best is the founder of DDOS and she sits down with CyberScoop reporter AJ Vicens to discuss their work publishing and hosting leaked material. Reporter Christian Vasquez joins host Elias Groll to discuss his reporting on a concerning vulnerability affecting automotive fleet management systems and the uphill battle to patch the flaw.

To be a person in the world today is to have your data collected. Whether it’s your internet browsing history, your location history as you walk around with your phone in your pocket, or the purchases you make online, there’s few human activities today that aren’t in one way or another tracked. So what happens with all that data once it’s collected? Increasingly, it’s bundled with other data and sold as part of large data sets by firms in the data broker industry. Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, has done groundbreaking work to understand this industry, and he sits down with host Elias Groll to talk about how personal data is being bought and sold. CyberScoop reporter Christian Vasquez also joins the show to discuss Iranian attacks on U.S. water systems.

A growing industry exists today that provides governments with highly advanced tools to surveil their opponents. While this industry has become personified by Israel’s NSO Group, it in fact goes far beyond this one firm. The commercial spyware industry is growing rapidly, posing major human rights concerns and exposing dissidents, journalists and members of civil society to highly intrusive surveillance. Rasha Abdul Rahim leads Amnesty Tech, an organization that is on the front lines of documenting how spyware is being abused, and sits down with host Elias Groll to discuss her work. FedScoop reporter Rebecca Heilweil also joins the show to discuss how the U.S. government hopes its supercomputers can be put to work in the AI revolution.

Just as behavioral psychology revolutionized economics by integrating human behavior into the study of financial decisions — creating the field of behavioral economics — the study of cyberpsychology tries to put the human being at the center of conversations about cybersecurity. Dr. Mary Aiken is one of its foremost practitioners and also happens to be the inspiration for Patricia Arquette’s character in “CSI: Cyber.” She sits down with host Elias Groll to discuss the emerging discipline of cyberpsychology. DefenseScoop reporter Brandi Vincent also joins the show to discuss how the U.S. military is thinking about autonomy.

Russia’s cyberattacks against Ukraine’s electrical grid occupy a canonical place in the history of cyber warfare. By turning out the lights in Ukraine in 2016 and 2017, Russia demonstrated the reach of digital weapons. Now researchers have revealed that Moscow’s hackers struck the Ukrainian grid in 2022. CyberScoop reporters AJ Vicens and Christian Vasquez join the show to discuss the implications of the Russian attack on Ukrainian critical infrastructure and what it reveals about how the Kremlin is using its hacking corps to shape the conflict. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson also joins the show to discuss her efforts to keep elections safe, combat disinformation and the threat AI poses to American democracy.

President Joe Biden’s sprawling executive order on artificial intelligence has finally arrived. The sprawling document contains a long list of new requirements. Leading AI companies have to report training runs and the results of red team tests. A slew of agencies are tasked with developing new standards and rules to address AI risks. And a long list of reports have been commissioned. FedScoop reporter Rebecca Heilweil sits down with Elias Groll to discuss how the new order will reshape AI and how government uses it. Long Yee, a 20-year veteran of the CIA and a long-time North Korea watcher, also joins the show to discuss how Pyongyang uses its hacking corps as a tool of statecraft.

Over the past 15 years, Twitter — now X — has become pivotal to how we understand crises. From the Arab Spring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, now, the conflict between Israel and Hamas, X is the first platform to which many people turn to understand and report on rapidly unfolding events. Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform has fundamentally changed it, and anyone relying on X to understand the conflict between Israel and Hamas has encountered a very different platform, one dominated by a new generation of so-called open source intelligence analysts with very different conventions for verifying information than mainstream media outlets. Mike Caulfield, a research scientist leading rapid response efforts at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, joins the show to discuss his research on what he has dubbed a “new elite” of posters that are reaching huge audiences with a high volume of posts of raw conflict footage.

Distributed denial of service attacks are one of the great nuisances of online life today, but they can also have more serious impact on the internet, disrupting access to crucial services and information at critical moments. FBI Special Agent Elliott Peterson is one of the bureau’s most seasoned investigators of the networks responsible for launching the DDOS attacks and joins the show to discuss his work investigating these criminal networks. CyberScoop reporter Christian Vasquez also joins the show to discuss a recent setback for the Biden administration in upping the cybersecurity of the water industry.

Cybersecurity firms have pioneered the use of artificial intelligence in their products, but the latest generation of AI technology offers hope that a greater share of the work to secure computer systems could be automated. A new competition at the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency aims to jump start efforts to build open source AI tools to find and fix vulnerabilities. Program Manager Perri Adams leads that effort and joins Safe Mode to discuss how to encourage developers to build tools that anyone might use to secure computer systems.