Click Here (Recorded Future News)

Bucha, a bedroom community just outside of Kyiv, is best known for enduring Russia’s atrocities during a month-long occupation in the Spring of 2022. Now the citizens of Bucha don’t want revenge, they want justice.

We talk to Nick Percoco, Kraken’s chief security officer, about joining forces with a popular YouTube scambaiter.

For years, North Korea was known for making such a perfect counterfeit hundred-dollar note, the Treasury Department had to change how it printed them. Now, North Korea is all about crypto – and it has been cooking up all kinds of crazy schemes in order to get the Big Score. Plus, we hear from a two-time North Korean defector.

The Conti ransomware group appeared to be on ropes earlier this year when its internal chat logs went public –revealing the inner workings of a hacking cartel. Then, the gang surprised everyone by launching a cyber attack against Costa Rica aimed at overthrowing its government. Plus, what happens when a company actually wants to talk about being the target of a ransomware attack - how much will they say?

A volunteer army made up of thousands of IT professionals from around the world is seeking to fight Russia in cyberspace. We talk to some of its members and discover new limits to Russia’s hacking efforts.

Thousands of satellites watch the world from above. We offer a mystery story about an infamous North Korean video, a team of very observant researchers, and a search for the truth.

An encore performance of one of our most popular episodes. Five years ago, a Mississippi woman named Latice Fisher was charged with murdering her stillborn child. The evidence against her: a controversial 400-year-old test and the search history on her cellphone.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman explains how we – in a few short years – went from a controversial phone call between an American president and Ukrainian leader to the largest territorial aggression in Europe since WWII. Plus, Ukraine’s all volunteer IT Army.

SHOW NOTES:

Here, Right Matters

The Day After Russia Attacks

America Must Do More to Help Ukraine Fight Russia

An episode from the ‘CSAIL Alliances Podcast’ from MIT CSAIL Alliances. Host Kara Miller talks with MIT robotics researcher and professor Daniela Rus about how we can use a new generation of robots to help humankind. Rus is the co-author of the new book, "The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots."

We talk to a team of open source analysts and weapons inspectors who have pieced together how Pyongyang avoided sanctions to get Russia missiles it needs for the battle in Ukraine and look at why Kim Jung-un is feeling he’s got his groove back.

In a year that could bring a perfect storm of disinformation, meet Doppelgänger, a Russian-backed group seeking not just to shake up the world’s elections, but its institutions too.

Just a stone’s throw from the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, the National Cryptologic Museum displays dozens of rarely seen code breaking machines that, quite literally, changed the course of history. We take a tour and chat with the museum’s affable director, Vince Houghton.

Last August, the Darknet Diaries host Jack Rhysider did a story about the NSO Group’s most famous product — Pegasus — a surveillance program which has the ability to turn just about anyone’s phone into a pocket spy.

The most surprising thing about the Russian invasion of Ukraine – aside from the invasion itself – is how small a role cyber operations have played to this point. That’s likely to change. Plus the administration’s unusual weapon against misinformation campaigns: declassifying intelligence. 

SHOW NOTES:

Russia appears to deploy digital defenses after DDoS attacks

Biden: U.S. ‘prepared to respond’ to Russian cyberattacks as invasion of Ukraine continues

Russia or Ukraine: Hacking groups take sides

NetBlocks tracking internet disruptions

Chinese hackers are stepping up their game, according to Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations for Britain’s MI6. In an encore episode of Mic Drop, he says Chinese hackers are taking on a new swagger in cyberspace and borrowing things from a familiar playbook: a Russian one.

NASA has off-loaded much of the space program onto the private sector. Companies are building space suits and moon buggies and lunar landers. We tell the story of a scrappy little lander — and how earthlings had to hack it to save it.

We traveled to Ukraine last month to learn more about a hunt forward operation Cybercom and cyber operators from Ukraine secretly launched before the war. This is the first time the Ukrainian side of the story has been revealed publicly.

North Korea may be best known for the Lazarus group’s epic cryptocurrency heists. But there’s another special unit of state-backed hackers who have a different specialty: spying on journalists, dissidents, and cybersecurity experts. We look at the ScarCruft gang and their very crafty phishing campaigns.

Chinese hackers are stepping up their game, according to Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations for Britain’s MI6. He says they are taking on a new swagger in cyberspace and borrowing things from a familiar playbook: a Russian one.

An episode from “Exile” from the Leo Baeck Institute and Antica Productions. At the height of his fame, a shirtless, barefooted Albert Einstein escapes the bustle of Berlin for a simpler life. The best thinkers of the time gather at his beloved summer house in Caputh to laze by the water, swap ideas, and gossip. There, he can escape the pressures of global fame, but his summer haven can’t keep him safe from the growing Nazi threat rising in Germany.

As Russian forces zero in on Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, drones are among the weapons that are coming to the rescue. We went to a secret drone academy where Ukraine is training its drone operators to help fend off the Russians while Ukraine awaits new arms from the U.S.

What makes a hacker tick? That’s what we wanted to find out when we reached out to Bassterlord, a 27-year-old hacker in Ukraine who joined some of the most infamous hacking crews of our time. Researcher Jon DiMaggio of Analyst1 has released a report about him, and he gave Click Here an exclusive first look. Then, we spoke to Bassterlord ourselves.

If you want to know how Ukrainians are coping with the war, look at the Ukraine apps in the app store. From an air raid alert built in the first week of the invasion to a map that helps work-from-homers find electricity, technology is helping Ukraine find some sense of normalcy in wartime.

Sky Lakes Medical Center in south central Oregon never imagined it could be on the receiving end of a ransomware attack. Then Ryuk put them in the crosshairs.

At a time when Vladimir Putin is attempting to redraw the Iron Curtain, we take a trip back to the Soviet Union circa 1985 when four American musicians smuggled messages in and out of the Soviet Union — with music. Plus, DefCon’s answer to those alien transmissions.

At a time when an errant spy balloon has raised new questions about President Xi Jinping’s absolute control over all things Chinese, we take a look at how his regime quelled last year’s Covid protests and how an arsenal of digital weapons helped tighten his grip on power. Plus, facial recognition’s latest nemesis: knitwear.

Two decades after Arab militias first torched villages and killed hundreds of thousands of people in West Darfur, violence has returned to the region. We tell the story of one group of researchers who use open source intelligence, algorithms and satellite imagery in a bid to quell the violence in Sudan.

A hacktivist group called the Belarusian Cyber Partisans rocked Belarus when it hacked into government servers and released secret police files and government wiretaps – the kinds of hacks we’re used to seeing by nation-states. They represent the changing face of hacktivism. Some hacktivists are becoming more professional, while others are falling prey to darker forces.

Putting your data in the cloud used to be seen as the gold standard of information security. Why have your small IT team protect your data when the experts at Microsoft or Google or AWS can do it instead? And then in May, Chinese hackers broke into the Microsoft cloud, exposing not just a flaw in the code, but a glitch in company’s business model as well.

Genshin Impact put the Chinese video gaming industry on the map. But while the game has delighted players, it begs the question: Can China’s Communist Party and a massively popular video game peacefully co-exist? Plus, we hit the ground at this year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco.

This month, the FBI added Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev to their Most Wanted hacker list for his alleged role in a number of ransomware attacks against U.S. targets. In a rare interview shortly after the FBI announcement, he talked about the new designation and what he wants to do next.

A Los Angeles tech entrepreneur reveals for the first time the role he played in bringing one of the world’s deadliest hackers to justice. And the founder of Craigslist talks about his effort to build a cyber civil defense force.

The latest on disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News — and why the Dominion Voting Machine settlement doesn’t necessarily help her case.

In the latest season of Understood from CBC, Mumbai-based journalist Salimah Shivji examines how Modi went from being barred from the US, to becoming one of the most powerful men in the world. 

About Understood: Know more, now. From the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, to the rise of Pornhub, Understood is an anthology podcast that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. Over a handful of episodes, each season unfolds as a story, hosted by a well-connected reporter, and rooted in journalism you can trust. Driven by insight and fueled by curiosity…The stories of our time: Understood. More episodes of Understood are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/fsa0lPa_

From “The Underworld” podcast, a conversation about casino towns, gangster owners, and a new twist on scamming operations. Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy took a trip along the Mekong River and revealed new details about southeast Asia’s latest scourge: cyber slaves.

ADDITIONAL READING: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3195932/laos-criminal-casino-empire-chinese-gangsters

This week, Nigeria charged Binance and two of its executives with tax evasion in the latest twist in a month-long dispute between the cryptocurrency giant and the Nigerian government. Nigeria detained Binance’s regional manager and a former US federal agent for nearly a month after they flew to Abuja at the end of February to meet with officials there. Now, one executive has slipped away and the other has become a pawn.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has been working with young people not just to show them how to sort fact from fiction, but to give them a reason to believe that truth can still empower the weak and hold the guilty accountable.

Back in April, cybersecurity officials discovered the notorious “Industroyer” malware in the Ukrainian electrical grid. It might have been the scariest infrastructure hack since malware destroyed centrifuges at an Iranian uranium enrichment plant in 2010 – were it not for a TGIF miracle. Plus, a visit with the IT Army of Ukraine and a different kind of information operation.

Everyone is talking about the power of AI in conservation, but a professor at Arizona State University has found an even simpler, more elegant solution – and all you have to do is listen.

Police departments across the country are testing generative AI and large language model software to see if they can cut down on the time officers spend writing reports. But AI seems to have this way of always surprising us, and the benefits it brings to police may have nothing to do with time.

We travel to Ukraine to look at its grassroots defense industry and take you into its secret drone factories where entrepreneurs are able to put innovative weapons into the hands of soldiers at the front in a matter of weeks, not months.

Vice Society burst on the ransomware scene in early 2021, attacking a roster of government offices, hospitals and, notoriously, schools. But cybersecurity experts say the group isn't your typical ransomware operation: they're some of cyber crime's biggest posers, using old exploits on easy targets to give the illusion of greatness.

An encore performance of one of our favorite episodes about LAPSUS$, a cyber extortion gang that convinced the world its low-tech hacking operations were really high-impact heists. Plus, we hear how two high school computer geeks almost brought down IBM’s computer center in Manhattan.

It seems like we hear about new cyberattacks almost every day. 

The targets used to be just big companies and government agencies. Now they are focused on you. 

Every Tuesday, former NPR investigations correspondent Dina Temple-Raston dives deep into the world of cyber and intelligence. You’ll hear stories about everything from ransomware to misinformation to the people shaping the cyber world, from hacking masterminds to the people who try to stop them. 

Click Here. Produced by The Record Media

(November 12, 2024)

A week before the election, we sat down with Ret. General Paul Nakasone and he talked about North Korea, Russian hackers, his life after the NSA and why he hasn’t ruled out taking another government job.

More from our interview: https://therecord.media/nakasone-click-here-interview-north-korea-exploding-pagers-government-job

In an ancore episode of Click Here's Mic Drop, we speak with the leader of one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service gangs the world has ever known — LockBit. We spoke to him weeks after Operation Cronos, a global police action against the group.

TikTok took down Esma Memtimin’s posts for allegedly violating the platform’s community rules even though her videos were about stickers and current events. A recent study from Rutgers University suggests Memtimin isn’t alone — when researchers compared TikTok’s content with other similar platforms there is a mysterious dearth of posts about subjects Beijing considers hot button issues.

Hydra was a darknet superstore. It started out as an online illegal drug site and morphed into a billion-dollar business with codes of conduct, customer support, and legal and medical services. It had started offering money laundering services when German authorities finally shut it down in April. Now people are asking: who or what will replace it?

We talk to Analyst1 senior researcher Jon DiMaggio about how hackers settle their disputes – think People’s Court without all the robes.

We re-visit our conversation with Analyst1 senior researcher Jon DiMaggio about how hackers settle their disputes – think People’s Court without all the robes.

Young people who have been making millions hacking mobile phones — known as SIM swappers — have found a new way to intimidate and harass their rivals. They call it “violence-as-a-service” or “IRL jobs,” and it includes a Telegram channel where they can order brickings, firebombings, and even shootings in the real world.

Five years ago, a Mississippi woman named Latice Fisher was charged with murdering her stillborn child. The evidence against her: a controversial 400-year-old test and the search history on her cellphone. We explain how in a post-Roe world, pattern data will be an even greater threat. Plus, the DOJ tweaks its use of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

We speak with the leader of one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service gangs the world has ever known — LockBit. Just weeks after Operation Cronos, a global police action against the group, LockBitSupp tells us about the takedown, his attempt to rebuild, and his plans for the future.

Six months after demonstrators took to the streets of Iran hoping to end its draconian hijab laws and push for a change in the leadership, the protests have moved online — into a quiet civil disobedience campaign that leadership is finding hard to control.

In a rare interview, Click Here catches up with former NSA contractor Reality Winner. Back in 2017, she leaked a five-page classified document to journalists that showed how Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 elections. She went to prison for it and talks at length about why she did what she did and how it so spectacularly backfired. And a chat with the head of the internet watchdog, Netblocks.

The talk of DEF CON 2022 was the handiwork of a white hat hacker named Sick Codes. On stage, he demonstrated how he broke the digital locks of a John Deere tractor. He did it with such ease, it made people start to wonder: just how hack-able is the world’s agriculture sector?

An encore performance of the Click Here pilot episode on REvil and how it landed on a new business model. It happened in an unlikely place: Texas.

Technology has changed the way countries wage war, and today, we look at an app in Afghanistan that wanted to change the way people on the ground experienced it.

After years of shouting into the wind about deepfakes and deepfake porn, we take a look at some possible solutions that offer not just deterrence but accountability. Plus, something we rarely see these days: bipartisan agreement on a bill in Congress.

“Shoot The Messenger” from Exile Content Studio and PRX looks at what happened to the murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The first weapon used against him was digital - a sophisticated spyware called Pegasus.

Ron Deibert founded The Citizen Lab, a high-tech human rights watchdog at the University of Toronto. He's concerned the Internet could unleash our darkest angels. Now, he has an even bigger worry: spyware. It's become so normalized even democratic nations are using it as high-tech oppo research. Plus, a pause in open source mapping in Ukraine.

Dictators use bombast and bullying as a kind of malevolent calling card. Meet the people who have found surprising and creative ways around that.

Our interview of the week — a one-on-one with arms control policy expert, Jeffrey Lewis.

Ukraine is the world’s first truly hybrid war, and the battle is raging on two fronts --- on the ground and in cyberspace. What does the conflict mean for the future of war?

A report published last week by Access Now revealed that since 2019 nearly three dozen journalists, human rights officials and political activists in Jordan have had their phones infected with spyware. The documentation of the widespread use of NSO’s Pegasus spyware in the Kingdom isn’t just rattling civil society, but raising new questions about how to stop its proliferation.

The GhostSec hacktivist group used to be known for its cyberattacks against terrorist groups like ISIS. Then, last year, the group took an unexpected turn — it created GhostLocker and began launching ransomware attacks. We talk to the group’s leader about their work with cybercriminal gangs and why we should believe him when he says all that is now in the past.

Omny Miranda Martone has been working with a handful of Washington lawmakers for more than a year on legislation that would put an end to the impunity of deepfake abuse. The bill, known as the Defiance Act, is being fast-tracked through Congress with a rare procedure known as “hotlining” and it may land on the president’s desk as early as this fall.

While the world was taking selfies against the colorful backdrop of solar storm auroras this past spring, officials at the Space Watch Center in Colorado Springs were searching for something more nefarious.

As the wrangling continues over classified documents former President Trump took to his Florida home, we take a second look at the case of Reality Winner, the NSA contractor who served time in prison for passing a classified document to a reporter. We had a rare interview with her in February.

Tech entrepreneurs and developers are fleeing Putin’s Russia in droves. Meet three members of the exodus: a young successful entrepreneur… a corporate manager… and a high-school computer whiz who can’t wait to leave. Plus, DHS’ Rob Silvers on how ransomware ends.

Afghanistan’s Taliban leadership may have smashed TVs in the 1990s, but these days their embracing slickly-produced videos and social media influencers to try to rehab their image abroad. Afghan anthropologist Omar Sharifi unpacks whether its working.

This week, Axon, the company that developed the Taser, is hosting a conference in Las Vegas called TaserCon. The event is billed as an opportunity to talk about law enforcement and public safety. Axon is expected to use the occasion to reintroduce a controversial plan: to put the company’s gun-equipped drones in police departments and schools to prevent mass shootings. And, cybercriminals’ new best friend: ChatGPT.

Cornell University’s Elephant Listening Project has been trying to get real-time monitoring of the Central African Republic’s forest elephants for years. FruitPunch AI and a roster of other AI researchers are closer than ever to making that a reality.

The town whose name has become synonymous with Russian atrocities in Ukraine is rushing to digitize information about the dead --- not just to identify them and give families closure --- but to hold Russians accountable for the wanton brutality in Bucha. Plus, scandal in the elite chess world.

At a time when Vladimir Putin is attempting to redraw the Iron Curtain, we revisit an earlier episode in which we take a trip back to the Soviet Union circa 1985 when four American musicians smuggled messages in and out of the Soviet Union — with music.

The Iraqi government has unveiled an app that helps ordinary citizens report “indecent” content online. Since its introduction, the Ballegh app has received some 144,000 reports. And the Iraqi app isn’t the only one: A roster of similar morality apps have popped up across the region, raising new questions about the future of free speech in the Middle East.

US adversaries are on a propaganda offensive around the world. Earlier this month, the Council on Foreign Relations in DC convened a discussion about the changing landscape of disinformation campaigns with James Rubin, special envoy at the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, Jon Bateman from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. CLICK HERE moderated the conversation, and here are some highlights.

We look at the use of digital tools that have imposed an authoritarian version of morality on the masses, and the creative, inspiring way ordinary people have learned to respond.

In a wide-ranging conversation on the fringes of this month’s RSA Conference, we sat down with Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Presidential Intelligence Advisory Board member Gilman Louie. We talked about the Chinese cyber threat, the growth of superpower competition, and the importance of bringing high-tech manufacturing back to America.

How a new cyber extortion team called LAPSUS$ managed to convince the world that it had turned low-tech hacking operations into high impact heists. And two high-schoolers who tinkered with a punch card and almost brought down the IBM computer center in Manhattan.

Hackers and cybercriminals may not be so different from the rest of us after all. We talk to three real life hackers from an early dark market entrepreneur to an accidental recruit to the latest addition to the FBI’s most wanted list.

The Russian private army known as the Wagner Group is trying to persuade young men to join the fight in Ukraine. Their online recruitment efforts don’t just hint at the future of modern warfare: they’re a callback to an earlier time, when a group called ISIS lured young men to fight in Syria.

Ilya Sachkov co-founded the cybersecurity company Group-IB to make the world safe from Russian-speaking cybercriminals. Then he asked Russian authorities to help round them up, and things went spectacularly wrong.

Noura Al-Jizawi thought she’d left the repression of the Assad regime behind her when she left Syria with her sister. Instead she became the target of an online subversion campaign. Plus, we meet the founder of a retro computer museum in Mariupol, Ukraine.

Carine Kanimba’s father may be one of the most famous Rwandans on earth – Paul Rusesabagina. He was the manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines, and he sheltered more than 1,200 Rwandans during the 1994 genocide. Now his daughter is at the center of a Capitol Hill inquiry into the proliferation of commercial spyware, a particular program called Pegasus, and the future of the company that created it.

A new report has published classified documents and internal memos that make clear the Mexican Army bought Pegasus spyware and systematically deployed it against journalists and activists in Mexico. R3D, a Mexican digital rights group, and University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, also found evidence of a formerly unknown military intelligence unit whose sole focus appears to be secret surveillance and deployment of spyware. Some of the sensitive material published in the report came from a massive hack into the Ministry of Defense by the hacktivist group Guacamaya last year. Click Here was part of a small group of journalists given early access to their findings.

In a special Valentine’s Day episode, we look at the evolution of romance scams. They aren’t just about bilking lonely people out of their life savings anymore – scammers have diversified, and they’re making victims accomplices in a roster of cyber crimes from email scams and check fraud to money laundering.

A story about satellites, electronic warfare, and a team of American techies who MacGyver-ed a way to keep the power flowing in Ukraine.

We sit down one-on-one with Retired General Paul Nakasone, the man who dreamed up the US response to the latest iteration of foreign election chicanery. He explains why he’s so confident the 2024 vote will be safe and secure.

We go back to an episode we did earlier this year about a gang of SIM swappers who are behind something called violence-as-a-service. Doxing or defacing websites, they told us, just doesn’t send enough of a message. So, they are throwing molotov cocktails or slashing tires of their rivals instead. Trouble is – it is getting more popular and commonplace and is bound to affect the rest of us.

Our interview of the week: LockBitSupp says his ransomware platform isn’t dead yet.

In an interview, LockbitSupp, head of the Lockbit cybercrime operation, told us that the U.S., U.K. and Australia have the wrong guy — he’s not Dmitry Khoroshev, the 31-year-old Russian national they’ve charged with hacking. What’s more, he says more attacks are coming.

Recently, a lot of smart people who work on space problems gathered at the Value of Space Summit in Colorado Springs and talked to us about the things that keep them up at night. At the top of their list? Earthlings hacking satellites and speeding bits of space junk.

For years now, the Internet has trafficked in things that are more mean than fun. Disinformation, online bullying, and a general malaise are all over social media. We talk to former Stanford Internet Observatory Research Director Renee Diresta about her new book “Invisible Rulers” and ask why, ahead of the DNC Convention, the Dems’ new unbearable lightness has gone so viral.

China’s influence campaigns look different from Russia’s. Instead of Moscow’s firehose of falsehoods, the Chinese tend to change the subject by inundating social media hashtags with content. And, Click Here has learned, their premier disinformation gang appears to be honing its skills on, among others, Florida Senator Marco Rubio. First in 2022, and then again just last month.

When North Korea hacked Alejandro Caceres, he expected the U.S. government to rush to his defense. When they just shrugged, he took matters into his own hands.

In an encore episode, we look at the tension between AI and the work of humans from which it learns. Media companies like the New York Times and a roster of authors and artists have sued some of the makers of these generative AI models to try to get an answer to a very fundamental question: What do human creators own?

When cryptocurrency burst on the scene in 2008, it was touted as anonymous — a boon to cyber criminals all over the world. Then a few mathematicians and some federal agents proved otherwise, in a way so big it birthed an industry. With a tip of the hat to Andy Greenberg’s new book “Tracers in the Dark,” we talk to them about how they did it.

Three stories about technologies that started out doing one thing, and ended up doing quite another — from online tractors, to tasers in schools, to cellphone hackers who take their online battles into the real world.

In a recent conversation on WAMU’s nationally syndicated news show 1A, Click Here’s Dina Temple-Raston looks back on cyber in 2023 and discusses what we might expect in the year ahead.