CYBER

Let’s be real: most people watch it and it’s about as fundamental to Internet culture as Google itself: Porn. And nowadays, that means Pornhub, the massive shadow YouTube for porn that accumulates millions of clicks daily. Recently, Pornhub made headlines when a New York Times expose showed the site hosts thousands of illegal videos, which forced the site to take down all unverified content and va...

It’s one of my favorite cyber topics in the books: the cyber arms race and the increasing weaponization of the internet and how that plays into the world of geopolitics. Of course that means spies, hackers, dealers and journalists alike. That’s why today we have New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth to talk about her new book: This is How They Tell Me The World Ends . Hosted on Aca...

Years before he became the world’s most well known MacOS hacker, Patrick Wardle was a high school nerd curious about hacking. His first hack was figuring out that he could program his fancy calculator and hide a backdoor in it that could help him with his calculus tests. His teacher never caught him, and he actually learned how to solve calculus equations by programming his calculator. “So I’...

It’s safe to say that video games are now an essential part of our culture. Globally it’s already dwarfing other classic industries. Even the U.S. military, by far the most powerful war-machine in human history, uses video games to recruit the generation soldier. On the show today is VICE News Correspondent Dexter Thomas who is hosting the new VICEtv series. RESET: The Unauthorized Guide to Video...

It’s a mixture of Internet trolling, Reddit threads, the fall of capitalism as we know it, and that movie Big Short. If like me you have but a cursory understanding of the stock market and you continually see mention of this GameStop fiasco making headlines the world over. That’s right: A failing video game store has been turned into a multibillion dollar company, by day-trading cartels who l...

Well folks, whether you were #resistance or MAGA, he’s arrived. The 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden. What’s he going to do about Russian hackers? Big Tech? Disinformation? Facebook? The NSA, the CIA? All that and more on this week’s episode with Motherboard EIC Jason Keobler. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Parler. Gab. The President being suspended from almost every mainstream social media entity and finally prevented from engaging in his favorite addiction: Tweeting. Besides the horned Qanon shaman and the disgusting violence on Capitol Hill last week, it has been a hell of a week for social media. Motherboard EIC Jason Koebler and I break it all down for you on today’s episode. Hosted on Acast. Se...

As President Trump exits office in a hail of conspiracy and baseless allegations about a fraudulent election, the time has come for us to discuss the much vaunted QAnon, led by a shadowy online figure known as “Q.” The verifiably absurd, online conspiracy theory that has ruined lives and families, has seduced millions and even helped propel members of congress into seats. And it just inspired a vi...

Let’s be honest, I know history types keep saying that like the year 536 was way worse than 2020, but I do not care. 2020 was unadulterated trash by almost every metric available. In the cyber world it was also a year that helped advance insidious surveillance tools, the proliferation of disinformation, and more Russian hackers. Jason Koebler, Motherboard EIC, is on the show for the last time...

This week we have a very special guest on the show: All-star sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, a fellow Canadian, and someone who has written about the dystopian near future with stunning accuracy. His latest novel, Attack Surface, tells the tale of a counterterrorism agent and the terrifying power of the surveillance state. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every pro hacker started somewhere. In this interview series, hackers and security researchers tell their origin stories.  For the first episode, we spoke to former government hacker Emily Crose, who now works for a critical infrastructure security startup. Here's Emily's first hack, in her own words."  " My first hack happened in high school when I was playing around with Back Orifice 2...

Who ya gonna call when you are one of the greatest, multibillion dollar cybersecurity firms in the world, known for investigating breaches into governments and major corporations, when you’re hacked? Well in the case of Fireeye, known for being staffed by ex-intelligence and doing the forensics on massive hacks, they came out and responsibly disclosed that it had been breached. It’s big news in th...

Founded in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant that went on to become the first detective in the history of Chicago, the Pinkerton Detective Agency became synonymous in American life with conspiracy theories and violent clandestine activities—and with good reason. Though Pinkerton himself was one of the Union’s first spymasters during the Civil War and foiled an assassination plot on Pre...

In the second and final episode in a series for CYBER on neo-Nazi terror group the Base, we dive into its origins: The online brainchild of its leader Rinaldo Nazzaro, an ex-Pentagon contractor with alleged links to the Kremlin (which he denies) who began his project for “race war” as a WordPress site that evolved into a secretive, encrypted chat group, then into paramilitary training in the fall...

For us, the story of the Base all began in the spring of 2018 when we spotted the Twitter profile picture of a shadowy neo-Nazi who went by the alias ‘Norman Spear.’ The photo was eye catching: He looked severe, with a strong brow and a bushy beard, and tweeted about guerilla warfare and the tactics of insurgency.  At the time, Spear also had the attention of some serious operators in the dom...

The last time Phineas Fisher agreed to an interview with Motherboard,  they made us recreate the whole thing with a puppet .  This time around, Phineas Fisher—one of the world’s most wanted hackers—wanted to make a statement on CYBER to deny he’s an agent of the Kremlin. Phineas Fisher is the hacker’s hacker that nobody knows. In fact, nobody even knows if they are just one person,...

What is going on? Why is it going on? Is this actually real? Disinformation in the election was always going to be a thing, and well, it was. Today on Cyber, Ben Makuch and Jason Koebler discuss the state of play and why we're here, Iranian hackers, and mass conspiracies on twitter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is Antifa even a thing? Ahead of an election positioned as “us” versus “them,” the specter of “Antifa” has become an easy boogeyman to either accept or reject out of hand. VICE News takes a serious look at what it is and what it is not. VICE News Correspondent Alzo Slade reports from across the country. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You know, if you haven’t heard, in the last few years there’s been a lot of discussion around America’s problems with systemic white supremacism and well, white nationalists. Everybody remembers that day in Charlottesville and the problems with the far-right we’ve seen since. Especially during this 2020 election season. In her new book Culture Warlords , journalist Talia Lavin goes undercover to e...

Vince Ramos wanted Phantom Secure to be the Uber of privacy-focused, luxury-branded phones—flood the market with devices, and sort out the law later. Then the FBI investigated him. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we talk to Jek, a physical penetration tester whose job is to infiltrate offices, data centers, store stockrooms, and other supposedly "secure" locations and either steal information or install a tool so that other hackers can exfiltrate data. She relies on the most reliable vulnerability of all: human weakness. Jek tells host Ben Makuch how she does it, some of her most memorable opera...

In this age of social collapse and modern plague it’s easy to forget that the 2016 Presidential Election was a clusterfuck of gargantuan proportions. Never before (then) had an election campaign for the highest office in the country become not only a drama, but a media spectacle with a shocking finale. Russian spies. Secret payoffs. Wikileaks. Guccifer 2.0 . War in Ukraine. Election interference....

Audio deepfakes are getting more convincing than ever. To test this out, we’ve replaced our host Ben Makuch with a robotic clone of himself. Sponsored by NeXt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A thriller about a Silicon Valley pioneer who joins forces with a Special Agent to stop the A.I. he created from destroying humanity. Starting October 6th, NEXT airs every Tuesday at 9/8c on FOX. On this episode of Cyber, in partnership with FOX, we sit down with the show’s creator Manny Coto to talk about the inspiration for this thriller A.I. Coto’s history as a horror and science fiction w...

It’s been a pretty bad PR year for the world’s most popular ride-share app… And unsurprisingly it has poured money into good news stories, to kick up warm fuzzy feelings about a company that has been found, time and again, to not care very much about its drivers. Enter a CNBC paid partnership story about an UberEats driver who is about to make 100k a year. The American Dream, right? Not so, says M...