Darknet Diaries

In 2014 the Puerto Rico Lottery was mysteriously losing money. Listen to this never before told story about what happened and who did it. Sponsors Support for this show comes from IT Pro TV. Get 65 hours of free training by visiting ITPro.tv/darknet. And use promo code DARKNET. Support for this show comes from Linode. Linode supplies you with virtual servers. Visit linode.com/darknet and get a spe...

The NSO Group creates a spyware called Pegasus which gives someone access to the data on a mobile phone. They sell this spyware to government agencies around the world. How is it used and what kind of company is the NSO Group? Thanks to John Scott-Railton and Citizen Lab for investigating this and sharing their research. Sponsors Support for this show comes from Detectify. Try their web vulnerabil...

Igor works as a private investigator in NYC. He’s often sitting in cars keeping a distant eye on someone with binoculars. Or following someone through the busy streets of New York. In this episode we hear about a time when Igor was on a case but sensed that something wasn’t right. Sponsors Support for this show comes from Exabeam. Exabeam lets security teams see what traditional tools can’t, with...

Zero day brokers are people who make or sell malware that’s sold to people who will use that malware to exploit people. It’s a strange and mysterious world that not many people know a lot about.  Nicole Perlroth , who is a cybersecurity reporter for the NY Times, dove in head first which resulted in her writing a whole book on it. Affiliate link for book:  This is How They Tell Me The World Ends (...

What if someone wanted to own your Instagram account? Not just control it, but make it totally theirs. This episode tells the story of how someone tried to steal an Instagram account from someone. Sponsors Support for this show comes from  Linode . Linode supplies you with virtual servers. Visit  linode.com/darknet  and get a special offer. Support for this show comes from  Blinkist . They offer t...

Nicole Beckwith  wears a lot of hats. She’s a programmer, incident responder, but also a cop and a task force officer with the Secret Service. In this episode she tells a story which involves all of these roles. https://twitter.com/NicoleBeckwith Sponsors Support for this show comes from IT Pro TV. Get 65 hours of free training by visiting  ITPro.tv/darknet . And use promo code DARKNET. Support fo...

Jon  and  Brian  are penetration testers who both worked at a place called  RedTeam Security . They’re paid to break into buildings and hack into networks to test the security of those buildings. In this episode they bring us a story of how they prepare and execute a mission like this. But even with all the preparation, something still goes terribly wrong. Sponsors Support for this show comes from...

Chris Davis  has been stopping IT security threats for decades. He’s currently running the company  Hyas  that he started. In this episode he tells a few tales of some threats that he helped stop. Sponsors Support for this show comes from  Exabeam . Exabeam lets security teams see what traditional tools can’t, with automated threat detection and triage, complete visibility across the entire IT env...

Kik is a wildly popular chat app. Their website says that 1 in 3 American teenagers use Kik. But something dark is brewing on Kik.

The Pirate Bay is a website, a search engine, which has an index of torrent files. A lot of copyrighted material is listed on the site, but the site doesn’t store any of the copyrighted material. It just points the user to where you can download it from. So for a while The Pirate Bay has been the largest places you can find pirated movies, music, games, and apps. But this site first came up 2003....

What happens when an unauthorized intruder gets into the network of a major bank? Amélie Koran aka  w ebjedi  was there for one of these intrusions and tells us the story of what happened. You can find more talks from Amélie at her website  webjedi.net . Sponsors Support for this show comes from IT Pro TV. Get 65 hours of free training by visiting  ITPro.tv/darknet . And use promo code DARKNET25....

Meet  Jenny Radcliffe , the People Hacker. She’s a social engineer and physical penetration tester. Which means she gets paid to break into buildings and test their security. In this episode she tells us a few stories of some penetration testing jobs she’s done. Sponsors Support for this show comes from  Blinkist . They offer thousands of condensed non-fiction books, so you can get through books i...

The threat research team at Cybereason uncovered an interesting piece of malware. Studied it and tracked it. Which lead them to believe they were dealing with a threat actor known as Molerats.  Sponsors This episode is sponsored by  Cybereason . Cybereason reverses the attacker’s advantage and puts the power back in your hands. Their future-ready attack platform gives defenders the wisdom to uncov...

Victor  looks for vulnerabilities on the web and reports them responsibly. This is the story about discloser number 5780. Listen to episodes 86, and 87 before this one to be caught up on the story leading up to this. Sponsors This podcast is sponsored by  Navisite . Accelerate IT transformation to respond to new demands, lower costs and prepare for whatever comes next. Visit  Navisite.com/go . Thi...

In 2016 the LinkedIn breach data became available to the public. What the Guild of the Grumpy Old Hackers did with it then is quite the story. Listen to  Victor ,  Edwin , and  Mattijs  tell their story. Sponsors Support for this show comes from  Blinkist . They offer thousands of condensed non-fiction books, so you can get through books in about 15 minutes. Check out  Blinkist.com/DARKNET  to sta...

In 2012, LinkedIn was the target of a data breach. A hacker got in and stole millions of user details. Username and password hashes were then sold to people willing to buy. This episode goes over the story of what happened. For a good password manager, check out LastPass . Sponsors Support for this episode comes from  Quadrant Information Security . If you need a team of around the clock analysts...

This is the story of  Cam Harrison , aka “kilobit” and his rise and fall as a prominent carder. Sponsors Support for this show comes from IT Pro TV. Get 65 hours of free training by visiting  ITPro.tv/darknet . And use promo code DARKNET25. Support for this episode comes from  Oracle for Startups . Oracle for Startups delivers enterprise cloud at a startup price tag, with free cloud credits and 70...

How bad is it if you post your boarding pass on Instagram? Our guest,  “Alex”  decides to figure this out for themself and has quite a story about what happened. You can read more from “Alex” on their blog  https://mango.pdf.zone . We also hear from  TProphet  who’s here to give us some travel hacks to save tons on airfare when we start traveling again. You can learn more about TProphet’s travel h...

In this episode we interview two NSA Cryptologists,  Marcus J. Carey  and  Jeff Man . We hear their story of how they got into the NSA and what they did while there. To hear more stories from Jeff tune into  Paul’s Security Weekly  where Jeff is a regular co-host and shares a lot of stories and insights. Marcus has written several books on security. They are  Tribe of Hackers ,  Tribe of Hackers B...

The  Zero Day Initiative  runs a hacker contest called  Pwn2Own . The contest calls the best hackers in the world to demonstrate they can hack into software that should be secure. Like browsers, phones, and even cars. A lot of vulnerabilities are discovered from this event which means vendors must fix them. Whoever can demonstrate the most vulnerabilities will be crowned the “Master of Pwn”. Thank...

This is the story of a darknet marketplace vendor we’ll name V. V tells his story of how he first became a buyer, then transitioned into seller. This episode talks about drugs. Listener discretion is advised. If you want to contact V his email is at https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/81. Sponsors Support for this show comes from IT Pro TV. Get 65 hours of free training by visiting  ITPro.tv/darkne...

In this episode we hear a story from a social engineer who’s job it is to get people to do things they don’t want to do. Why? For profit. Sponsors Support for this episode comes from  SentinelOne  which can protect and assistwith ransomeware attacks. On top of that, SentinelOne offers threat hunting, visibility, and remote administration tools to manage and protect any IoT devices connected to you...

What do you do when you find yourself the target of a massive hacking campaign, and you are getting thousands of phishing emails and someone following you in your car. You might turn to Citizen Lab who has the ability to research who is behind this and help bring the hackers to justice. Our guests this episodes are Adam Hulcoop and John Scott-Railton of  Citizen Lab . This episode also has an inte...

Nerdcore music is music for nerds. In this episode we hear from some of the musicians who make Nerdcore music. This episode features guests  ytcracker ,  Ohm-I , and  Dual Core . Content warning : This episode has explicit lyrics. Music For a playlist of music used in this episode visit darknetdiaries.com/episode/78 . Sponsors Support for this show comes from IT Pro TV. Get 65 hours of free traini...

In February 2018, during the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang South Korea, a cyber attack struck, wiping out a lot of the Olympic’s digital infrastructure. Teams rushed to get things back up, but it was bad. Malware had repeatedly wiped the domain controllers rendering a lot of the network unusable. Who would do such a thing? We will talk with  Andy Greenberg  to discuss Olympic Destroyer, a chapter...