Podcast
Malicious Life
Hosted by Cybereason · EN
Malicious Life by Cybereason tells the unknown stories of the history of cybersecurity, with comments and reflections by real hackers, security experts, journalists, and politicians.
12episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Ad Fraud, Part 2
Jun 12, 202300:28:33Tap to summarizeIn the last episode of our show, we heard the story of Methbot: an army of hundreds of thousands of bots, programmatically viewing thousands of advertisements on thousands of made-up websites in order to siphon away millions of dollars worth of ad revenue. But even the giant Methbot scam was just a drop in the ocean that is ad fraud. Putting Zhukov in jail made hardly any difference at all, because of how many other people just like him are still out there today. What makes ad fraud so successful, and so prevalent, and why can’t we stop it? The answer isn’t technical at all. It’s not hard to understand. But it’s a harsh reality that many people are simply not willing to face.
Transcribe →Ad Fraud, Part 1
May 30, 202300:23:36Tap to summarizeRight now, a man named Aleksandr Zhukov is sitting in jail for one of the most financially ruinous schemes ever invented for the internet. Zhukov is guilty. He was caught and convicted under a mountain of evidence against him. Except the deeper you look into it, the deeper the well goes. In this episode, we’ll learn how Aleksandr Zhukov defrauded some of the biggest American corporations for millions of dollars. And we’ll ask the question that hardly anyone else is willing to acknowledge: Was this clever, successful, guilty cybercriminal merely a fall guy for everybody else playing his twisted game?
Transcribe →The Economics Of Cybersecurity
May 15, 202300:26:32Tap to summarizeThe numbers can’t be any clearer: a DDoS attack costs less than a hundred dollars, while the price tag for mitigating it might reach tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. A single well crafted phishing email can easily circumvent cyber defenses which cost millions of dollars to set up. How can we change the extreame cost asymmetry between attackers and defenders in cyberspace?
Transcribe →The Reason You Don’t Have Data Privacy
May 1, 202300:37:02Tap to summarizeWe’ve all experienced the creepiness of modern data trafficking, but that kind of daily annoyance is the surface of a much bigger issue: Big Tech companies such as Amazon & Microsoft are lobbying policymakers to veto laws that harm their business, and often hide their lobbying behind industry coalitions or organizations with names that are vague and seemingly harmless. Will current and future privacy laws actually protect your information, or will they protect the companies collecting your information?
Transcribe →How Entire Countries Can Lose the Internet
Apr 17, 202300:32:44Tap to summarizeDisruptions to the world’s internet cables happen more often than you think: Whether it be ship anchors or animals or saboteurs, cut a few wires in the right places and at nearly the speed of light you can disrupt or shut off the internet for broad populations of people at a time. It is an immense power that runs through these lines — a power that can be sabotaged or, in the right hands, weaponized.
Transcribe →Olympic Destroyer
Apr 3, 202300:36:00Tap to summarizeIn the midst of 35,000 exhilarated spectators eagerly chanting the time-honored countdown to kick off the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, a sinister malware crept through the games’ network, threatening to disrupt the highly-anticipated event. The obvious question in everyone’s minds was – who was responsible for the attack? Who was vile enough to launch such a potentially destructive attack against an event which, more than anything, symbolizes peace and global cooperation?
Transcribe →The Lawerence Berkeley Hack, Part 2
Mar 20, 202300:35:18Tap to summarizeOמ May 23rd, 1989, Karl Koch – a 23 years old West German hacker who worked for the KGB – took a drive, from which he would never return: Nine days later his charred remains were found by the police in a remote forest. Was Koch assasinated by the US or the Sovient Union, or is there another, more ‘mystical’ explanation for his death?
Transcribe →The Lawerence Berkeley Hack, Part 1
Mar 8, 202300:29:33Tap to summarizeFour decades ago, three quarters would’ve gone a lot further than they do today. With that kind of loose change you could’ve picked up some milk from the grocery store, or over half a gallon of gas, or a bus ticket. But that doesn’t explain why, on one fateful day in 1986, a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California made such an issue over 75 missing cents.
Transcribe →Russian Propaganda, Explained [ML B-Side]
Feb 28, 202300:33:00Tap to summarizeYou may have heard of the cyber operations performed by Russia. You definitely heard about the missiles being fired by Russia at Ukraine – but how about the propaganda being distributed through the different media platforms?In this B-Side episode, our Senior Producer Nate Nelson interviewed Dr. Bilyana Lilly – CISSP, a leader in cybersecurity and information warfare with over fifteen years of managerial, technical, and research experience, and author of “Russian Information Warfare” – about the Russian use of instant messaging and social media platforms such as Telegram and Twitter in their war efforts. Dr. Lilly discusses who they are targeting and the real-world impact their propaganda has on various populations.
Transcribe →Operation Ivy Bells
Feb 20, 202300:44:31Tap to summarizeIn the early 1970’s, US intelligance pointed at the possibility that the Russians have laid an underwater communication cable between two important naval bases in the Far East. The dangerous mission of installing a listening device on that cable was given to the navy most secretive and unusual submarine.
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