Malicious Life

Weev, Part 2

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, long time critics of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, followed Weev's trial - but did not get involved. For the appeal, however, the

Weev, Part 1

Much like Aaron Swartz did, Andrew "weev" Auernheimer fought against the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law both men belived to be dangerous and unjust. But unlike Swart

Cuckoo Spear [B-Side]

APT-10 is a Chinese nation-state threat actor that in recent years has been targeting Japanese IT & Instrastructure organizations using a sophisticated backdoor malware k

The Man Who Went To War With Anonymous - And Lost

Aaron Barr was en-signals intelligence officer specializing in analytics. As part of HBGary Federal, he came up with a plan to unmask the key leaders of Anonymous, the in

What Can Organizations Learn from "Grim Beeper"? [B-Side]

On 17 and 18 of September 2024, thousands of pagers and hand held radio devices used by Hezbollah, exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria, killing at least 42 t

The Fappening/Celebgate

Could thousands of people keep a secret? Common sense says no—secrets spread, and people talk. But for over a decade, from 2006 to 2017, a website managed to stay under l

Operation Snow White, Part 2

Scientology spies were trained in all covert operations techniques: surveillance, recruiting agents, infiltrating enemy lines, and blackmail. However, a suspicious librar

Operation Snow White, Part 1

In 1963, the FDA raided the headquaters of a budding new and esoteric religion - The Church of Scientology. In response to this and similar incidents to come, the church'

Caught in the Crossfire: Infighting and Treason in Russia’s Cyber World

On Dec. 5, 2016, two senior Russian Intelligence officers and two civilians were arrested and accused of treason. A few weeks later, when Western journalists were finally

SNAP Fraud: Getting Rich by Stealing from the Poor

SNAP - better known as food stamps - goes back to the Great Depression. ,The physical stamps were replaced with EBT cards in the 1990s, but since these cards are without

The Hollywood Con Queen, Part 2

Nicole Kotsianas, an investigator with K2 Intelligence, made it her personal mission to hunt down the Hollywood Con Queen, who crulley tormented her victioms and shattere

The Hollywood Con Queen, Part 1

In 2015, two aspiring script writers flew to Indonesia to meet with executives of a large Chinese film corporation. It was a trap: the Hollywood Con Queen not only coned

The Doomed Queen’s Secret Ciphers

In the pre-internet era, encryption was a matter of life and death, and the motives behind these ciphers were varied and complex. Discover how George Lasry, a modern code

Why Did People Write Viruses In The 80s & 90s?

Why did people write malware in the pre-internet days? Back then, there was no way to make money by writing malware. So why write them in the first place? The lack of a f

Section 230: The Law that Makes Social Media Great, and Terrible

Section 230 is the pivotal law that has enabled the rise of social media -while sparking heated debates over its implications. In this episode, we're charting the history

What Happened at Uber?

In 2016, Joe Sullivan, former CISO of Facebook, was at the peak of his career. As Uber's new CISO, he and his team had just successfully prevented data from a recent brea

The Nigerian Prince

In this episode of ML, we're exploring the history of the well-known Nigerian Prince scam, also known as 419 or advanced fee scam, from its roots in a Parisian prison dur

Unmasking Secrets: The Rise of Open-Source Intelligence

Dive into the world of open-source intelligence (OSINT) in this episode, where we uncover how ordinary citizens use publicly available data to unravel some of the most co

The Source Code of Malicious Life

A few weeks ago we had a listener’s meetup in New York, and as part of that meetup, I gave a talk in which I discussed how Malicious Life came to be - a story that goes b

The Y2K Bug, Part 2

In the waning years of the 20th century, amid growing anxieties about the turn of the millennium, one man, Robert Bemer, observed the unfolding drama from his remote home