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An episode from “Humans vs. Machines” from Aventine Research Institute and Pineapple Street Studios. Misinformation has influenced elections, ruined reputations and fundamentally changed society’s relationship with the truth. Now, large language models like ChatGPT have the potential to create and spread misinformation at a scale we’ve never seen before. As technology improves, the question won’t...

The Russian private army known as the Wagner Group has been tied not just to atrocities in Ukraine but to operations in Africa that helped Russia extend its reach. The looming question for Moscow: what do we do with Wagner now? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Back in August, the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in a fiery plane crash. So we decided to revisit an episode we did a few months ago about the Wagner group and how it recruits. It turns out they tore a page from the ISIS playbook. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Led by a motley crew of old-school cops and cyber whiz-kids, a Dutch police unit takes control of one of the dark web's most notorious drug markets and make history. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Remember ding-dong ditch? You and your friends rang a doorbell and then ran away? These days the prank of choice among the young cyber set is something called swatting: calling the police with a hoax report that sends them rushing – guns drawn – to some address and unsuspecting victim. After years of writing it off as childish mischief, legislators, law enforcement and tech companies are finally t...

Back in May, a Russian-speaking cyber gang named Clop broke into MOVEit, a little-known file transfer program. They managed to steal data from some 60 million people (and counting). While the scale of the attack was impressive, what really raised eyebrows was how they did it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Ilya Sachkov co-founded the cybersecurity company Group-IB to make the world safe from Russian-speaking cybercriminals. Then he asked Russian authorities to help round them up, and things went spectacularly wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Wave “goodbye” to those pesky emails from Nigerian princes and say “hello” to the latest generation of AI enabled email scamming. It’s smarter, faster and, by the way, looks like it’s coming from your boss. The only thing that might stop them? AI itself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We look at an American disinformation campaign that makes clear online abuse directed at women goes far beyond a couple of mean tweets. And, an update on a Syrian activist who was on the receiving end of a misinformation crisis of her own. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Putting your data in the cloud used to be seen as the gold standard of information security. Why have your small IT team protect your data when the experts at Microsoft or Google or AWS can do it instead? And then in May, Chinese hackers broke into the Microsoft cloud, exposing not just a flaw in the code, but a glitch in company’s business model as well. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx....

This week, we share an episode from PRX and Inkstick Media’s “Things that Go Boom” podcast about the thousands of miles of fiber optic cable lying at the bottom of the sea. Some 95 percent of the world’s electronic data is traveling through them and cables are taking centerstage in the high-stakes competition between the U.S. and China. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Since our story on spyware in Mexico aired back in March, researchers have discovered a roster of Pegasus spyware infections on the phones of local journalists, activists, and even officials within the Mexican president’s inner circle. This week, we return to our deep dive on the use of spyware in Mexico and the revelation that the army created a secret military intelligence unit dedicated to its...

From WBUR's “Endless Thread" podcast, a story on a growing segment of artificial intelligence: immortalizing the dead through predictive AI text and how bots can help us understand grief. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We revisit a sit-down interview we had with NSA contractor Reality Winner shortly after she spent 4 years in prison for passing a single classified document to a reporter. Given all the focus on classified documents and the way they’ve been handled in recent weeks, it seemed a good time to take another look at what happened to Reality. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two decades after Arab militias first torched villages and killed hundreds of thousands of people in West Darfur, violence has returned to the region. We tell the story of one group of researchers who use open source intelligence, algorithms and satellite imagery in a bid to quell the violence in Sudan. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We go behind the scenes of U.S. Cyber Command’s Hunt Forward Operation in Ukraine. We interviewed half a dozen American cyber warriors who were on the ground in Kyiv, and they provide new details about the effort to defend Ukrainian networks against Russian cyber attacks in the weeks before the war. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive begins, we revisit a story we did last winter about some unusual Ukrainian women training to become part of the nation’s Army of Drones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Russian private army known as the Wagner Group is trying to persuade young men to join the fight in Ukraine. Their online recruitment efforts don’t just hint at the future of modern warfare: they’re a callback to an earlier time, when a group called ISIS lured young men to fight in Syria. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This month, the FBI added Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev to their Most Wanted hacker list for his alleged role in a number of ransomware attacks against U.S. targets. In a rare interview shortly after the FBI announcement, he talked about the new designation and what he wants to do next. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

From “The Underworld” podcast, a conversation about casino towns, gangster owners, and a new twist on scamming operations. Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy took a trip along the Mekong River and revealed new details about southeast Asia’s latest scourge: cyber slaves. ADDITIONAL READING:  https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3195932/laos-criminal-casino-empire-ch...

When the FBI and Justice Department took down a collective of cybercriminals known as Hive earlier this year, it targeted a group that made a name for itself, in part, by holding hospital and healthcare systems for ransom during the pandemic. What made the group so effective was its own twist on WeWork-style collaboratives… and it led to their demise. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/...

The Department of Justice says last month’s effort to bring down the Genesis Marketplace represents a departure from traditional law enforcement actions. ‘Operation Cookie Monster' wasn’t about nabbing masterminds. It was about making it harder for JV hackers to enter the world of cybercrime. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Iraqi government has unveiled an app that helps ordinary citizens report “indecent” content online. Since its introduction, the Ballegh app has received some 144,000 reports. And the Iraqi app isn’t the only one: A roster of similar morality apps have popped up across the region, raising new questions about the future of free speech in the Middle East. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx...

What makes a hacker tick? That’s what we wanted to find out when we reached out to Bassterlord, a 27-year-old hacker in Ukraine who joined some of the most infamous hacking crews of our time. Researcher Jon DiMaggio of Analyst1 has released a report about him, and he gave Click Here an exclusive first look. Then, we spoke to Bassterlord ourselves. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-c...

We go behind the scenes of the new book by WIRED’s Andy Greenberg, "Tracers in the Dark." It explains how a handful of entrepreneurs and investigators demystified cryptocurrency tracking. Recently, we spoke with Andy and some crypto tracers onstage at the Links 2023 conference in New York City. Plus, North Korea’s ingenious effort to launder its stolen crypto.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetai...