• Can You Bomb a Hacker?

    The 2008 Russo-Georgian War marked a turning point: the first time cyberattacks were used alongside traditional warfare. But what happens when the attackers aren't soldiers, but ordinary citizens? This episode delves into the ethical and legal implications of civilian participation in cyberwarfare, examining real-world examples from Ukraine and beyond.



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    30m | Mar 19, 2024
  • Kevin Mitnick, Part 2

    In 1991, Kevin Mitnick was bouncing back from what was probably the lowest point of his life. He began to rebuild his life: he started working out and lost a hundred pounds, and most importantly - he was finally on the path towards ditching his self-destructive obsession of hacking. 

    But just as he was in the process of turning his life around, his brother introduced him to a hacker named Eric Heinz, who told him about a mysterious piece of equipment he came across while breaking into Pacific Bell: SAS, a testing system that allowed its user to listen in on all the calls going through the telephone network. SAS proved to be too great of a temptation for Mitnick, who desperately wanted to wield the power that the testing system could afford him.



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    49m | Mar 4, 2024
  • Kevin Mitnick, Part 1

    For Kevin Mitnick - perhaps the greatest social engineer who ever lived - hacking was an obsession: even though it ruined his marriage, landed him in scary correction facilities and almost cost him his sanity in solitary confinement, Mitnick wasn't able to shake the disease that compelled him to keep breaking into more and more communication systems. 



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    37m | Feb 19, 2024
  • SIM Registration: Security, or Surveillance?

    Right now, hundreds of thousands of people in the southern African country of Namibia are faced with a choice. At the end of next month, their phone service is going to be shut off permanently: to prevent that from happening, they’ll have to give up their data privacy. As a result, nearly two million Namibian citizens are facing a data privacy problem which may haunt them for years to come - and hundreds of thousands more are set to join them, or else they’ll lose their phone service for good. All of which raises the question: was making everybody register their SIM cards a good idea in the first place?



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    31m | Feb 5, 2024
  • The Mariposa Botnet

    In 2008, The 12 million PCs strong Mariposa Botnet infected almost half of Furture 100 companey - but the three men who ran it were basiclly script kiddies who didn't even knew how to code.



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    44m | Jan 22, 2024
  • The Real Story of Citibank’s $10M Hack

    Valdimir Levin is often presented as "the first online bank robber," and appeares on many lists of the "Top 10 Greatest Hackers." But a few veteran Russian hackers cliam that Levin's infamous hack had been mangled by the journlists who wrote about it. What's the truth behind the 1994 $10.7 million Citibank hack?...



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    32m | Jan 9, 2024
  • How to Hack Into Satellites

    About a year ago, six academics from Ruhr University Bochum and the CISPA  Helmholtz Center for Information Security set out to survey engineers and developers on the subject of satellite cybersecurity. But most of these engineers were very reluctant to share any details about their satellites and their security aspects. Why were satellite engineers so reticent to talk about cybersecurity? What was so secretive, so wrong with it, that they didn’t feel they could answer even general questions, anonymously? Because let’s be clear: if there’s something wrong with the security of satellites, that’d be a serious problem.



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    30m | Dec 27, 2023
  • Moonlight Maze

    When investigators discovered in 1996 that US military networks were being extensively hacked, they didn't realize they were witnessing the birth of what would become Russia's formidable Turla APT espionage group. We uncover the 20-year metamorphosis of this original group of hackers into one of the most sophisticated and dangerous state-sponsored threats that's still active today.



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    35m | Dec 11, 2023
  • Volt Typhoon

    In August 2021, a port in Houston, Texas, was attacked. Over the following months, a series of attacks occurred in various locations, reminiscent of a serial killer's pattern. Targets included telecommunications companies, government agencies, power plants, and water treatment facilities. How did Volt Typhoon manage to evade authorities and analysts for such an extended period?



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    31m | Nov 28, 2023
  • Is NSO Evil? Part 2

    By the time Forbidden Stories published its “Pegasus Project” in 2021, NSO was already knee deep in what was probably the worst PR disaster ever suffered by a cybersecurity company - and then, in November 2021, came the fateful blow: the US Dept. of Commerce added NSO to its “Entity List.” Is NSO to blame for its troubles? Could the company have acted differently to prevent its downfall? 



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    40m | Nov 13, 2023
  • Is NSO Evil? Part 1

    NSO Group, creator of the infamous Pegasus spyware, is widely regarded as a vile, immoral company: a sort of 21st century soldier of fortune, a mercenary in the service of corrupt and evil regimes. Yet among its many clients are many liberal democracies, including the US, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, to name but a few. So, is NSO really as evil as many think it is?



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    32m | Oct 30, 2023
  • Should You Pay Ransomware Attackers? A Game Theory Approach

    The FBI explicitly advises companies against paying ransomware attackers - but itself payed 4.4 million dollars worth of Bitcoin after the Colonial Pipeline attack. So, should you listen to what the experts say, or follow what they occasionally do? It’s complicated, but we can model this problem.




    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    32m | Oct 17, 2023
  • Silent Firewalls: The Underrepresentation of Women in Cyber

    In the vast landscape of STEM, women constitute a mere 28% of the workforce. Yet, when we zoom into the realm of cybersecurity, the number dwindles even further to a startling 20 to 24 percent. What are the underlying reasons behind this disparity?



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    29m | Oct 2, 2023
  • Operation Kudo

    In 1981, during the G7 Summit in Quebec, French president Francois Mitterand handen President Raegan a top secret collection of documents, called "Farewell Dossier." The information found in the dossier allowed the US to devise a cunning plan - the very first supply chain attack, if you will - to bring a firey end to one of largest industrial espionage campaigns in history. 



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    33m | Sep 20, 2023
  • Can We Stop the AI Cyber Threat?

    Much of the cybersecurity software in use today utilizes AI, especially things like spam filters and network traffic monitors. But will all those tools be enough to stop the proliferation of malware that will come from generative AI-driven cyber attacks? The potential of AI to disrupt cyberspace is far greater than any solutions we’ve come up with thus far, which is why some researchers are looking beyond the traditional answers, towards more aggressive measures.



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    27m | Sep 4, 2023
  • Is Generative AI Dangerous?

    Every so often, the entire landscape of cybersecurity shifts, all at once: The latest seismic shift in the field occurred just last year. So in this episode of Malicious Life we’re going to take a look into the future of cybersecurity: at how generative AI like ChatGPT will change cyberspace, through the eyes of five research teams breaking ground in the field. We’ll start off simple, and gradually build to increasingly more complex, more futuristic examples of how this technology might well turn against us, forcing us to solve problems we’d never considered before.



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    37m | Aug 22, 2023
  • Why aren't there more bug bounty programs?

    On the face of it, there's an obvious economic incentive for both vendors and security researchers to collaborate on disclosing vulnerabilities safely and privately. Yet bug bounty programs have gained prominence only in the past decade or so, and even today only a relatively small portion of vendors have such programs at place. Why is that? 





    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    33m | Aug 8, 2023
  • The Voynich Manuscript

    The constant battle between those who wish to encrypt data and those who wish to break these ciphers has made modern encryption schemes extremely powerful. Subsequently, the tools and methods to break them became equivalently sophisticated. Yet, could it be that someone in the 15th century created a cipher that even today’s most brilliant codebreakers and most sophisticated and advanced tools - cannot break?...



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    29m | Jul 25, 2023
  • Roman Seleznev: Did the Punishment Fit the Crime?

    In 2019, Roman Seleznev, a 34 years-old Russian national, was sentenced to 27 years in prison: A sentence that’d make any criminal quiver. Seleznev's deeds had a horrendous effect on the 2.9 million individuals whose credit cards he stole and sold to cyber criminals for identity theft and financial crimes. On one hand, it’s hard to imagine any nonviolent computer crime worth 27 years in prison. But then what is an appropriate sentence for such a man as Seleznev?



    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    38m | Jul 10, 2023
  • Sony BMG's Rootkit Fiasco

    "We made a mistake and Sony paid a terrible price.” A terrible price indeed: an arrogant and ill-advised decision to include a rootkit in its music CDs cost Sony BMG a lot of money - and painted it as a self-centered, self-serving company that cares more about its bottom line than its customers. Why did Sony BMG make such a poor decision?




    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    41m | Jun 27, 2023
Audio Player Image
Malicious Life
Loading...