CYBER

Since the War on Terror kicked off, the military and spy industrial complex has boomed. That also includes a growth in the literal number of spies from agencies like the NSA and CIA, all serving tours, then often entering the private sector. Since then, we’ve seen how things like corporate espionage and the techniques multibillion dollar entities deploy in their interests, have seriously taken off...

It almost reads like a dystopian plot from a sci-fi novel, playing out in the not-so-distant future.  A major world government relies on a defective and cruel algorithm for debt collection, to extort money out of its most vulnerable citizens who were already on social assistance. Or to put it more succinctly: state-sponsored shakedowns via Artificial Intelligence, that ends up being so flawed...

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 w...

Content Warning: Descriptions of Sexually Explicit Acts Introducing VENT Documentaries from VICE UK: Young people from London, telling you the stories they care about. In this episode, Khalil grew up with homophobic parents, so he had to learn about being gay on his own. From making Sims characters have gay sex to signing up to online sexting forums, Khalil tells the sometimes hilarious,...

By the year 2000 people started believing, in the advent of widespread email culture, that the United States Postal Service was doomed. Conservatives and business types argued that it was a bloated institution. But it’s not. In fact, it’s a vital, robust network that is literally a failsafe in the doomsday plans of the federal government. These days, while people may not be sending many letters or...

Some people think they’re just a vestige of a bygone era, but they’re not. In fact, nuclear weapons remain the everlasting threat they were when we first introduced them to planet earth: An existential nightmare wherein we possess the ability to obliterate our own planet, many times over, with the push of a button. So this week we have friend of the show and Motherboard contributor Matthew Ga...

He’s a vigilante that goes by the alias Gamerdoc. He infiltrates secret online chatrooms to hunt down wrongdoing and the dishonest who prey upon and exploit the system. His target you might ask? The many cheating gamers out there who are using flawed code to be really good at titles like Valorant and Overwatch .here’s a huge underbelly of cheating gamers out there who trade and sell gaming ch...

The US has accused Russia and China of trying to hack research groups that are working on a coronavirus vaccine. Is that a bad thing? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai hosts this special episode of Cyber. He's joined by Joseph Cox, who reported on the Twitter hack that had the accounts of Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and Apple amongst others tweet out a cryptocurrency scam. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s a tale as old as our digital era: Tech enthusiasts wanting to repair their devices without the authorization of the company that makes them. Apple, for example, is notoriously awful at allowing users access to easy fixes of iPhones or Macbooks and instead offers expensive options with one of its “geniuses.” And like everything in our society, the current pandemic has exposed these right to re...

It’s straight out of a hacking thriller: drug dealers. Murderers. Extortionists. Traffickers. Hit men. All using an encrypted network to openly talk about their illicit trades, amassing millions in messages.  Then, like the magical hacks of a CSI cyber episode, the cops were in the network and went on the offensive. In one of his wildest stories to date, and that’s saying something, we have t...

It used to be that American hackers and the NSA were the unquestionable world’s best. Following the many revelations from the Snowden leaks, it became clear the U.S. government had not only violated the civil liberties of American citizens, but the NSA had done an excellent job hacking, well, everything. It hacked the phones of world leaders ( including key allies ) and made major geopolitical riv...

The US government is in a race with China to provide the world with 5G networks. Some call it the new arms race, as both Washington and Beijing go from country to country trying to negotiate for its companies to provide the future of the internet’s architecture. Part of that has been Trump himself slagging Huawei and undermining the Chinese company as national security risk: The allegation being t...

On CYBER this week, we’re talking about a novel that frightfully depicts a not-so-distant future where FBI agents work with robot partners and terrorists meet up inside video games. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Back in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street protests, a certain hacktivist collective truly came into its own. The years since Anonymous exploded in popularity and even became the constant pop culture reference point to all hacktivism or even, just hackers. But as we’ve discussed on the show, lately, it kind of seems to have disappeared. Until the latest Black Lives Matter protests seems to have k...

Well, it’s a hell of a time to be alive. After a brutalizing pandemic, fit with stay at home orders and government indecision, something else happened. The cold blooded murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by a white cop in Minneapolis has set off unprecedent protests demanding racial equality and an end to police violence against people of color. But instead of quelling these protests with ac...

If you’ve been listening to the news, chances are you’ve heard about it incessantly: contact tracing. But what is it exactly? And what are the surveillance and privacy issues surrounding it? Will yet another app that tracks your movements really be the key to ending the pandemic? Today we got Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchierai on the show to tell you everything you need to know ab...

Since the dawn of the Patriot Act, a sweeping surveillance bill enacted shortly after 9/11, it’s been both the bane of privacy hawks and the favourite tool of the Intelligence Community. But lately, the Senate, courtesy of Mitch McConnell, helped the IC by giving agencies like the FBI the power to warrantlessly search the browser history of American citizens. That’s terrifying and today we’ve...

On the show, we talk a lot about the state of Orwellian world we’ve found ourselves in: big data, corporate and governmental surveillance. You know, Big Brother. But where did it come from? What’s it’s historical context? To answer these questions, we have author and Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, Lawrence Cappello on the show who wrote a book called None of Your Damn Business:...

In 2017, amidst the backdrop of the Mueller investigation and Russian spy paranoia, the world learned, via a New York Times bombshell, that the Pentagon had a top secret UFO program. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, AATIP for short, had a $22 million dollar black budget and looked into an aerial threat nobody could understand: UFOs. The details were terrifying, US fighter jet...

Back in 2013, between the many revelations on mass surveillance abuses by the NSA coming from the trove of Snowden leaks, Americans also learned agents at the signals intelligence agency were snooping on their love interests. Dubbed LOVEINT (a play on ‘Love-Intelligence,’ apparently), a number of agents around the world were caught spying on their love interests using the godlike spy tools of the...

The DNC hack. It was a tale of espionage and intrigue. But behind closed doors, Russian intelligence knew just how to play the media in a liberal democracy. And that is a tale as old as time. Thomas Rid, a world renowned academic on national security and intelligence, wrote a new book called Active Measures tracing secret history psychological warfare over a century. On this week’s episode we have...

The mechanics of voting really hasn’t changed since the dawn of democracy. People line up, mark a ballot for their candidate and then leave. But in today’s pandemic, the lines for the Wisconsin primary illustrated the legitimate dangers of having thousands of people line up with one another to vote. Likewise, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo delayed his state’s primaries from April to June for the s...

Hi Cyber listeners! Friendly podcast producer Ricardo here with a new bonus podcast from the Vice Audio team. The Distance features short, first-person stories from all over the world about how the pandemic is changing the way we live. We're sharing the "DJ set" episode on our feed for y'all, but you can click here for more ! Javi streams a two hour tropical set from his living room in Madrid. Che...

It was implicated in the hacking and spying of activists in Mexico. It may have helped the Saudis kill and behead Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now, it’s inserting itself into the pandemic news as if it needed more bad press. NSO Group, the infamous Israeli spyware company with links to intelligence agencies, developed software tracking coronavirus-infected citizens. But, as our Moth...