CYBER

This is Ophir Harpaz, a security researcher at Guardicore. Her first hack was to reverse engineer the classic Windows game Minesweeper. Her goal was to force the program to put flags on all squares with mines—as soon as the board shows up. That essentially makes it incredibly easy to beat the game. That exercise changed her life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we're doing things a little differently. VICE's 2030 Fellow Samir Ferdowsi spoke with Setareh Soroush, The Women's Rights Director for Middle East Matter's, a community of online activists aiming to bring untold stories and news from the region across borders and in front of Western audiences. We sat down with Soroush to find out how the organization works, and what being a Middle...

It’s an old story with a new twist. A top administrator of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops resigned after someone leaked information about their private life. Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill left his post after a Catholic oriented Substack accused him of being a frequent user of Grindr. Simple on the surface, but our obsession with the sex live’s of the clergy is masking something darker. How, e...

If you’ve tried catching an Uber recently you may have noticed that prices and wait times are worse than they’ve ever been. Rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft didn’t fare well during the pandemic and now that restrictions are easing, drivers just aren’t coming back. Motherboard Staff Writer Edward Ongweso Jr spent some time talking to Uber drivers to find out what’s going on. He’s here to tell...

Fascists love to perfect a look . Hugo Boss’ Nazi Uniforms, the striking headquarters of the Italian Fascist party, and the sleek presentation of Islamic State’s Dabiq all have one thing in common—they’re visually striking. So too with today’s extremists. Neo-Nazis from Atomwaffen Division to the Order of the 9 Angles have a certain aesthetic flair. And that’s largely down to a few influential art...

A heat dome in the Western part of the continent reached 117 degrees. A town in British Columbia burned to the ground, and temperatures in Europe are shattering records. Climate change is here and it’s killing us. But it’s not just the heat. It’s the humidity. That’s why scientists are studying “wet bulb conditions”— or temperatures at which humans spontaneously die. What, exactly, are “wet bulb”...

More than 1,800 years ago, Marcus Aurelius wrote, “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.” If you’ve ever thought the same before logging into social media, you aren’t alone. In addition to being Emperor of Rome, Aurelius is one of the founders of Stoicism—an ancient philosophy that’s recen...

Andrew Tierney, better known online as Cybergibbons, earned his reputation hacking things like thermostats, home alarms, and other hardware like cryptocurrency wallets.  So it makes a lot of sense that his first ever hack back in the 90s was to take control of his high school’s heating system from his bedroom. Here's the story of Andrew's first hack. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privac...

Imagine you’re at work, it’s a long day and you lean back in your chair only to hear a chime and a disembodied voice. The voice fills the room and it tells you to stop leaning and get back to work. There’s a sense that someone is always watching and ready to reprimand you for the slightest infraction. That’s the promise of Live Eye—a CCTV camera system which, for a monthly fee, will monitor a stor...

Just as Amazon founder and richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, announced that he was going into space via his private rocket company and news broke that he pays shockingly little on his income taxes, New York state is set to pass a groundbreaking antitrust law that will challenge the labor practices of the tech giant.  At the same time, Motherboard reporter Lauren Gurley broke the news of y...

It’s basically the FBI’s greatest fantasy come to life: Owning an operating an encrypted communications company exclusively used by some of the world’s most hardened and organized criminals. “Anom” the subscription based network operated by the feds, was used as the ultimate spy tool that gave an almost godlike view of organized crime to FBI agents who watched users discuss murder, drug deals, and...

The Central Intelligence Agency. Since its inception during the Cold War days it’s taken on the mystique as the silent hand of the US government. It’s been entwined in controversies ranging from the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War, to Watergate and most recently, it’s role in the universally condemned torture of detainees during the decadeslong War On Terror. But then in 2014, something hap...

Before he even knew he wanted to be a hacker, Haroon Meer figured out “on a whim” that he could mess with all the high school computers by just changing one single character in a configuration file. With this newly acquired power, Haroon pranked his best friend using a quote from a classic Jean-Claude Van Damme 1980s movie. He also made his clueless computer science teacher really mad. Hosted...

The many Mexican cartels of the last few decades have developed into what the US government sees as a not only criminal but a geopolitical enemy, joining the ranks of the Taliban, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Russian hackers. This means the full force of American surveillance has been aimed at groups like Los Zetas, or the Sinaloa Cartel once-led by the infamous El Chapo. But when it comes to hackers and c...

So another band of hackers struck again: a criminal gang known as ‘DarkSide’ unleashed a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline , which shut down an integral line that supplies the East Coast with oil and gas. While the cyberattack itself didn’t physically knock out the pipeline with a string of code, the resulting attack majorly disrupted a critical piece of US infrastructure: Fuel. Whil...

An ‘avalanche of cardboard’ is completely overwhelming card grading companies as collectors try to cash in on Pokemon’s resurgent popularity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For years, Apple has claimed its devices are the most secure in the world, poo-pooing PC and Android devices for being as clean as a public swimming pool. But just this week, Motherboard’s very own Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reported on what is being described as one of the biggest security flaws of Apple products exploited by hackers ever, and it could have affected you. He’s on the latest epi...

It’s easily one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, owned and operated by Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook empire. But more recently WhatsApp has come under some serious scrutiny for some very specific privacy concerns by experts and journalists alike. Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai is on the show this week to tell us more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mor...

Since Capitol Hill everybody has become pretty intimately familiar with how radical and violent the far-right truly is. Online it exists in cesspools like the encrypted app Telegram, or Gab, a Twitter knockoff popular among extremists and Maga types alike. And one thing many forms of far-right have in common is their hatred porn and the name-brand of porn, PornHub. Our Motherboard reporter Sam Col...

What if we told you that your phone could be hacked 16$ and all of the texts that were meant for you, were rerouted to someone else with nefarious designs on your most personal exchanges? It’s a real thing and it happened to Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox who is on the show to explain how a simple hack, costing nothing at all, could happen to you. In fact, we were recording another interview and...

Katie Moussouris is now a recognizable name in the cybersecurity industry. She is one of the pioneers in the world of bug bounties after starting Microsoft’s program. But before she became a famous hacker, Moussouris started like many others: hacking video games. Here’s the story of her first hack. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a re-run of an episode originally released on July 18th, 2019 A Silicon Valley company with a history of CIA funding , a suite of highly sought after intelligence software tools , and a gallivanting billionaire founder with connections to the Trump Administration is set to become one of the biggest IPOs in recent memory . Yet many outside of the infosec world don’t even know its name or th...

He’s been a Hollywood superstar for what feels like, well, forever. Top Gun, Mission Impossible, hey even that weird Hitler assassination movie where he doesn’t speak German or even fake an accent. Tom Cruise is everywhere was in everything and most recently made headlines for being deep faked. And this was just any Deep Fake, this was the creepiest most realistic Deep Fake, probably ever. For mor...

Wanna hear a story that involves automatic license plate reader technology, AI-powered cameras that detect the movements of cars across the United States, cops, and well, Burger King? Well today on the show we have Motherboard reporter of all-things-surveillance, Joseph Cox, on to tell us about Flock: a little-known company that’s hawking smart-surveillance cameras that are quietly creeping indivi...

It is arguably America’s favourite fast-food restaurant. Home of the Big-Mac, McNuggets and that creepy clown that used to haunt my dreams. McDonald’s is classic Americana that has spread all over the world. But lately, a Motherboard exclusive shows, Ronald’s house of burgers allegedly used private spies to surveil it’s workers. For the latest on this, we have our very own Lorenzo Francheschi-Bicc...