Cyber Casts

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’m sure that in retrospect my calculus teacher would be stoked...or that’s what I tell myself,” Wardle said. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 Games. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 live on the Internet. Motherboard EIC Jason Koebler, who knows something about stocks, is on the show to explain more. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 violent occupation of our nation’s capitol hill. Marc-André Argentino, a PhD candidate at Concordia University who studies QAnon and someone who has become a leading voice on the extremist political movement, is on the show to talk Q. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 in 2020. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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 2000 or BO2K, the infamous remote access trojan made by the hacking group Cult of The Dead Cow. My first victim was, well, myself. This was an accidental self infection, that's the technical term" Crose said."I infected my own computer with BO2K, and it took me a while to figure out what had happened, but when I did figure it out, I got a chance to learn the software. It's not a thing that people will talk about certainly, but even professional developers these days just run the wrong thing in the wrong place and, oops, oopsie, doopsie," she said. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 the hacking world and with me today is Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox to breakdown what happened and why it matters. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 President Lincoln in 1861, he did what every ex-intelligence community type does after wars nowadays: Uses his government skills and contacts to profit in the private sector. In its early years the agency, something of a precursor to the infamous Blackwater mercenary outfit founded by Erik Prince that is linked to war crimes in Iraq, was at one time bigger than the U.S. Army and connected to outlandishly villainous plots that were in fact true. For example, Pinkerton agents were actually the private armies for the rich industrial titans of the Gilded Age, helping union bust and infiltrate workers groups. Even going

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 of 2018. But shortly after, VICE News broke the first story on the group and authorities began circling.Once that viral feature published, some members of the Base fled the group, while others regrouped online and in-real-life, more committed to creating a homegrown, American insurgency against the government than ever. Over the course of the winter and spring of 2019, the Base recovered, gaining momentum and new recruits from across the U.S. and abroad. Threatening propaganda images emerge of members in the middle of Central Park in New York City, other members in Georgia call for attacks on the electric grid a

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 domestic terror space: On Twitter he was followed by and following an assortment of well known, online, far-right militants. We saw members of Atomwaffen Division—a Nazi terror group that was already connected to murders and a chilling plot to bomb a nuclear power plant—and right-wing trolls alike, some of which were gaining the attentions of federal authorities that worried about another Oklahoma City bombing, all linked to Spear.Then Spear started tweeting about what was one of the most ambitious plots coming out of the American far-right movement to date: funneling all the disparate worlds of extremists, activists, an

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, or several people. All we know is Phineas Fisher has hacked, embarrassed, and exposed some of the world’s most powerful spyware companies that have connections to the FBI, the DEA, and dozens of other law enforcement and spy agencies all around the world. And Phineas Fisher has completely gotten away with it. Throughout these exploits, Motherboard'sLorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai has been one of the few reporters to make contact with the hacker several times. Recently, Phineas Fisher got in touch with him again, but this time to deny a recent allegation that he’s Russian intelligence operatio

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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 expose the underworld of online fascists, Nazis, and Trump trolls alike. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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 operations, and why other hackers think that what she does is "witchcraft." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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. All spelling (maybe?), the first chapter in the ending to the American Experiment?HBO has released a great new two-part documentary deep diving this entire, historical ordeal. Co-directed by film great Alex Gibney and Javier Botero, Agents of Chaos parses exactly what happened to America during what’s become the most insane election ever (at least so far). Botero is on the show this week to talk about the doc, the chaos of 2016 and what legacy it has left America. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.