CYBER

If you’re at all plugged into the global news cycle, you’ll know the U.S. assassinated Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and leader of the secretive Quds Force.Since that night, experts have been wondering what the blowback from Tehran will be. Naturally, in the age of cyberwarfare, people are getting pretty worried about the threat of Iranian hackers, who, if you were to believe some newscasts, are practically hiding in your modem.There are some real and some overblown threats from Iranian hackers now facing the U.S. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that it was logging increased cyberattacks emanating from the Iranian regime on American networks.But how worried should we be?On this week’s CYBER we have Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox who is already tracking alleged Iranian hackers defacing American websites, to discuss what Tehran’s hackers are actually capable of hacking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's CYBER we're re-upping our longform interview of none other than Mr. Edward Snowden, a person who might've affected the infosec world more than any singular human over the last decade. We'll be back next week with a fresh new episode for our 2020 season. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It occurred to us at Motherboard that for this final episode of CYBER in the 2010s we could recount the year in stories that we’ve done. The real scoops, traffic hogs, and think pieces. But then again, this is the decade that changed infosec. This was the decade that made hackers critical players on the world stage, our personal digital information sacred, and our political systems fixed into some strange, social media hellscape. Since its founding in 2009, Motherboard has seen it all with you.So on this episode of CYBER, our dear editor-in-chief Jason Koebler and host Ben Makuch will take you through from the beginning of the decade to its end: from Guy Fawkes masks, strings of weaponized code to your brain being manipulated by a Facebook ad. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Imagine installing security cameras in your house to protect your family. Then one day those cameras start talking to you. Trolling you, in fact.After last week when the news broke that Amazon’s super sketchy security camera company Ring, had its products compromised, Motherboard got even more scoop: There’s a livestream-podcast over a Discord channel where hackers take over people's Ring cameras and use their speakers to troll its owners in the comfort of their own homes.Then Motherboard tested the security of Ring and found, well, Ring accounts are lacking basic security measures.On this week’s CYBER we have our reporter Joseph Cox, who broke the stories, to tell us more.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we talk to Adam Minter, author of “Secondhand,” about the end-of-life supply chain for our cell phones, computers, and all the other stuff we keep in our houses. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Researchers learned that telecom companies are implementing the successor to SMS in vulnerable ways, making everyone’s text messages unsafe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's episode we introduce the newly named "Cypher" part of the show where we round up the tech stories of the week that we think you need to know. On deck we discuss infamous hacker Phineas Fisher and an actual investigation called: "Who farted?"We'll be off next week for Thanksgiving, because Ben is going back to Canadia. Good luck eating too much, everyone! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Some of the most fascinating hacks are the types that don’t just pwn a shady malware company, the trade secrets of America or embarass the Democratic National Committee, but the kinds that target water systems, nuclear power plants and the oil and gas sector.Critical infrastructure hacking was brought into the public psyche by former Secretary of State and CIA director, Leon Panetta, in a much taunted 2012 speech where he warns of a coming “Cyber Pearl Harbour.” On this week’s CYBER we have Selena Larson, a former CNN reporter and cyber threat intelligence analyst working over at Dragos which is a leading cybersecurity company that specializes in critical infrastructure security, to tell us what we should be realistically worried about and if she believes Panetta’s speech has any merit in 2019. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s the classic story of a corporate giant swallowing up a darling startup into its ranks and destroying its core business.Originally a spawn of the Alphabet company—Google’s parent umbrella—Chronicle was a cybersecurity startup considered by many to be a game changer: it was going to leverage machine learning and Alphabet’s endless supply of malware samples and technical data via Google, and fuse it into an over the counter product that infosec units in companies all over the world could use to make the Internet better for everyone. It seemed, to many, this was a cybersecurity company that wasn’t hawking snakeoil, but a real, helpful product. And part of its allure was that Chronicle would not join its corporate overlord outright, but instead remain independent of Google.Then it was announced they were going to join Google and everyone jumped ship. Now, as one employee put it, “Chronicle is dead.” In other words, one of the cybersecurity industry's most promising startups is falling apart after one of the most profitable companies in the world took it over. This week we have Lorenzo Francheschi Bichierrai on the show to tell us about the internal struggles of Chronicle. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The tale started with an encrypted phone company, Morroccan gangsters, the Scottish mafia, and a blogger. It ended with an assassination outside of a sex club in Amsterdam.Last week, Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox broke the news that MPC—a Scottish company that hawked special encrypted phones that could evade police surveillance—had been connected to the murder of crime blogger Martin Kok. Kok was a former criminal himself who had previously served a jail sentence for two murders.Kok’s crime blogging had gotten him on the wrong side of the Gillespie brothers, two Scots who are still operating a highly sophisticated drug and gun running operation connected to South American cartels, as well as Morroccan gangster associates. They allegedly hatched a successful plan to kill him in December 2016.On this week’s episode of CYBER, Cox goes into detail about how this criminal syndicate carried out Kok's murder, and what it means for crime in 2019 when the mafia isn’t buying encrypted phones, but making them for itself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.