Cyber Casts

Hello out there in cyber land. It’s striketober in America.From the John Deere factory floor to the cereal crunching halls of Kellogg's, workers are telling management they’ve had enough. It’s labor unrest the U.S. hasn’t seen in my lifetime.Thankfully today I’m joined by Motherboard Senior Staff writer and expert on all things labor, Lauren Kaori Gurley.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On October 6, a massive leak of Twitch data revealed how much cash its biggest streamers made. The leak isn’t the first time Twitch’s security has been called into question and as the fallout from the leak spiraled, Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai went looking for an older story, the story of Urgent Pizza. This week on Cyber, Lorenzo tells us the story of the biggest hack in Twitch history. In 2014 unskilled hackers walked right into Twitch’s code and made off with everything. It was right after Amazon had paid nearly $1 billion for the company. Later, Lorenzo breaks down everything Activision is doing to prevent cheating in Call of Duty. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When America withdrew from Afghanistan it left people behind. Interpreters, aid workers, allies, and even some U.S. citizens remained in the country as the Taliban took over. Since the official U.S. military exit, dozens of groups have sprung up to try to help people safely flee the country. Not all of them are competent, but most of them are asking for money.Vice Motherboard features editor Tim Marchman and senior Staff Writer Anna Merlan looked into this for a piece titled The Anti-Trafficking Movement Is Pivoting to Afghanistan. Marchman is here today to talk with us about the weird world of online led anti-trafficking groups and how they’ve latched onto Afghanistan as their newest cause. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On Cyber this week we bring you an episode from the podcast Darknet Diaries by Jack Rhysider. In 2016, America went to war against ISIS at the head of an international coalition. The U.S. sent ships, soldiers, and material to the Middle East to fight off the Islamic State. It also sent cyber warriors to combat ISIS online. This is the story of Operation Glowing Symphony, an inside look at how the U.S. hacked the Islamic State and how the future of war is completely online. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

An anonymous poster on 4Chan published 135 gigabytes of what appears to be internal data stolen from Twitch, including exactly how much money the platform’s biggest streamers make on Twitch. On Wednesday, the poster published a link to a torrent of 135 GB, calling it "an extremely poggers leak" which allegedly includes source code for all Twitch clients for different operating systems, an unreleased Steam competitor, and internal tools that Twitch's security team uses.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Syniverse, a company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide. Plus! Facebook is extremely down. What's going on? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you’re on Facebook then there’s a company you’ve probably never heard of that makes it bearable. Accenture. The little-known consulting firm is one of the biggest companies in the booming market of content moderation. But you’ll probably never hear its name come out of the lips of Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg.When it comes to the world’s largest social media site, you either love it or you hate it. But chances are you don’t want to see a video of a dog skinned alive while you’re checking in on people from high school. That’s where Accenture comes in. AI gets rid of a lot, but sometimes a human has to make a call. The psychic cost of that work is devastating but it’s worth a lot of money to Facebook.Here to help us understand the bizarrely secret world of Facebook’s content moderation is Mike Issac of The New York Times. Isaac is a best-selling author who just co-wrote a story about all this titled The Silent Partner Cleaning Up Facebook for $500 Million a Year. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and o

Amazon's new robot called Astro is designed to track the behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties, according to leaked internal development documents and video recordings of Astro software development meetings obtained by Motherboard. The system's person recognition system is heavily flawed, according to two sources who worked on the project.The documents, which largely use Astro's internal codename "Vesta" for the device, give extensive insight into the robot's design, Amazon's philosophy, how the device tracks customer behavior as well as flow charts of how it determines who a "stranger" is and whether it should take any sort of "investigation activity" against them. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is Rob Graham, an independent security researcher who is also known as ErrataRob on Twitter. What if you could go back in time and make sure you made the deadline on a college assignment? That’s basically what Rob did by hacking his professor. Rob is very well known in the community for having created Masscan, a tool that lets anyone scan the entire internet in just a few minute and for his sometimes controversial hot takes on Twitter. Rob was recently at the ridiculed cybersecurity conference organized by the MyPillow CEO. He was one of the only actual experts there, and one of the few people who wore a mask.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A strange press release went out on September 13th. Retail giant Walmart, it seemed, would soon be accepting crypto currency. “The eCommerce giant intends to give its millions of shoppers across the world an opportunity to seamlessly make payments with cryptocurrencies,” the press release said. The press release was bullshit.The world of cryptocurrency is rife with scams. Pump and dumps, fake coins, massive hacks. Members of a professional eSports influencer house have been accused of running a crypto-based charity scam, a hacker recently made off with $600 million in Bitcoin, the SEC is investigating a crypto backed fraud case that’s alleged to have screwed investors out of billions.The list goes on and on. What is it about these digital currencies that makes them so vulnerable to getting ripped off and how do you keep yourself safe?Here to help us navigate the murky waters of Crypto currency and its many scams is Motherboard Senior Editor Jordan Pearson. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out informa

Two-factor authentication is simple and easy to use, right? Whenever you log in to your email, work account, or social media platform you get a text message or email asking you to confirm your identity.  It’s easy and safe and we’re all using it. Right? Well … the numbers don’t look good. Information Security professionals are always trying to get their clients to adopt multi-factor authentication, but the clients don’t seem to be listening. Twitter recently disclosed that the number of accounts using 2FA is only 2.3%, a depressingly tiny number. Especially given the amount of security breaches we’ve seen lately. A recent T-Mobile breach is said to affect nearly 50 million customers.Here to walk us through the merits 2FA is Rachel Tobac. Tobac is a hacker and the CEO of SocialProof Security, a company that aims to get your organization politely paranoid. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you’ve played video games online, it’s happened to you. You’re holding it down in the warzone, helping your squad score a dub when suddenly your head explodes and there’s no way anyone on the enemy team could have known where you were let alone make the shot that killed you.Do you just suck or could it be … a hacker?Claiming a hacker killed you instead of taking the L with dignity is a time honored tradition in gaming. But in a lot of online shooters and Call of Duty in particular, hacking has become ubiquitous. The issue is so prevalent that Activision literally can’t remove them from the game fast enough and the people selling the hacks are running out of stock.Here to walk us through the dark side of Call of Duty is Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Double agents are a Cold War trope. An American spy has *gasp* secretly been working for the Soviets the whole time. These days, you’re more likely to run into a double agent in the world of corporate information technology. Sometimes hackers are selling company secrets while helping the very corporations they exploit.Andrey Shumeyko was one such double agent. The hacker cruised the digital hangouts of people who bought and sold the secrets of Apple. Facing financial pressure and—to hear them tell it, a sense of guilt—they reached out to Apple.Things didn’t go quite as Shumeyko expected.This is the story of Apple’s Double Agent, brought to you by Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is Ophir Harpaz, a security researcher at Guardicore. Her first hack was to reverse engineer the classic Windows game Minesweeper. Her goal was to force the program to put flags on all squares with mines—as soon as the board shows up. That essentially makes it incredibly easy to beat the game. That exercise changed her life. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, we're doing things a little differently.VICE's 2030 Fellow Samir Ferdowsi spoke with Setareh Soroush, The Women's Rights Director for Middle East Matter's, a community of online activists aiming to bring untold stories and news from the region across borders and in front of Western audiences.We sat down with Soroush to find out how the organization works, and what being a Middle Eastern activist in a volatile and sometimes, downright dangerous digital landscape looks like. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s an old story with a new twist. A top administrator of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops resigned after someone leaked information about their private life. Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill left his post after a Catholic oriented Substack accused him of being a frequent user of Grindr.Simple on the surface, but our obsession with the sex live’s of the clergy is masking something darker. How, exactly, did the Substack know that Monsignor. Burrill was using Grindr? How many of our apps are spying on us and collecting this kind of data? And just how easy is it for a viscous third party to get hold of that data for nefarious ends.Here to answer those questions and more is Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you’ve tried catching an Uber recently you may have noticed that prices and wait times are worse than they’ve ever been. Rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft didn’t fare well during the pandemic and now that restrictions are easing, drivers just aren’t coming back.Motherboard Staff Writer Edward Ongweso Jr spent some time talking to Uber drivers to find out what’s going on. He’s here to tell us what he found out, but here’s a preview: Uber and Lyft Can’t Find Drivers Because Gig Work Sucks. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Fascists love to perfect a look. Hugo Boss’ Nazi Uniforms, the striking headquarters of the Italian Fascist party, and the sleek presentation of Islamic State’s Dabiq all have one thing in common—they’re visually striking.So too with today’s extremists. Neo-Nazis from Atomwaffen Division to the Order of the 9 Angles have a certain aesthetic flair. And that’s largely down to a few influential artists. VICE extremism reporter and Cyber host Ben Makuch recently went in search of ‘Dark Foreigner:’ The Artist Who Fueled a Neo-Nazi Terror Movement.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A heat dome in the Western part of the continent reached 117 degrees. A town in British Columbia burned to the ground, and temperatures in Europe are shattering records. Climate change is here and it’s killing us. But it’s not just the heat. It’s the humidity. That’s why scientists are studying “wet bulb conditions”— or temperatures at which humans spontaneously die.What, exactly, are “wet bulb” conditions and when do we need to start worrying about them? Can we do anything to stop them? Are people already dying? Here to answer these questions and more is Motherboard intern Audrey Carleton, who has been covering this for the site. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

More than 1,800 years ago, Marcus Aurelius wrote, “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.” If you’ve ever thought the same before logging into social media, you aren’t alone. In addition to being Emperor of Rome, Aurelius is one of the founders of Stoicism—an ancient philosophy that’s recently become widely popular among the Silicon Valley elite.But what do ancient Roman philosophers have to do with billionaire tech bros like Jack Dorsey? A lot, it turns out. Vice Senior Staff Writer Shayla Love wrote the ultimate stoicism explainer and she’s here with us today to talk about what it means that the world’s rich and powerful are turning to ancient texts for life advice. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.