Recorded Future - Inside Threat Intelligence for Cyber Security

An episode from IRL: Online Life is Real Life  from Mozilla and PRX: Are today's large language models too hot to handle? Bridget Todd, host of the IRL: Online Life is Real Life podcast, digs into the risks and rewards of open sourcing the tech that makes ChatGPT talk. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Law enforcement agencies have been disrupting criminal gangs by intercepting their encrypted communications. Jamie O'Reilly of the cybersecurity company Dvuln talks about an Aussie effort to track Ghost. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For 150 years Knights of Old, a U.K. logistics company, survived everything from two world wars to Brexit. Then a ransomware group called Akira stormed the company's networks. In just a blink of an eye, everything changed. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Australia is trying to use age-gating to keep kids under 16 off social media. John Pane, at Electronic Frontiers Australia, is worried that kids won't be the only people losing something. He says privacy as we know it is also in the crosshairs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Session, a little known encrypted messaging app out of Australia, thought it would help the world keep its communication private—and then a new law threatened their plans.

Jordan Hobbs, a cattle farmer in the Australian Outback, discovers an unexpected offering from low-earth orbit.

Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu used to worry about asteroids crashing into earth. Now, he's turned his attention to an even more pressing problem – the weaponization of space debris — and officials say it may have already happened.

Russia's military spending has propped up and the economy and made some military families rich and set off a housing boom. But some worry the center will not hold.

We look at the strange and complicated journeys of Russian tech workers who left their country by the thousands when the war in Ukraine first began and now, begrudgingly, are returning home.

2024 was a banner year for cybercriminal takedowns. Recorded Future analyst Alexander Leslie talks about how ransomware has had to adapt and what the Trump administration's vow to take cryptocurrency mainstream will mean for the cyber criminals in 2025.

In a recent conversation on WAMU's nationally syndicated 1A news show, Click Here's Dina Temple-Raston spoke with 1A's host Jenn White about China and Russia's increasingly aggressive cyber attacks, and in the second half of the show, White speaks with human rights advocate Bill Browder about what the world needs to do for Ukraine.

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

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.

We return to a conversation we had over the summer with Unit 221B's Allison Nixon about young cybercriminals, radicalization, and the search for self in the virtual world.

Recently, the US sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity company and one of its employees who compromised tens of thousands of firewalls worldwide, with potentially deadly consequences. All of this could sound a little familiar to regular listeners. Earlier this year, CLICK HERE reported on a huge leak of internal documents from a private cybersecurity company that pulled back the curtain on the secret world of China's hacker-for-hire network.

An episode of ‘SHIFT' from PRX:AI is being integrated into our technologies at warp speed, but we are only starting to consider how it could be weaponized in the future. The SHIFT podcast talks to Lee Klarich, the chief product officer at Palo Alto Networks, about how AI is both helping and hurting cybersecurity. 

TikTok took down Esma Memtimin's posts for allegedly violating the platform's community rules, even though her videos were about little more than stickers and some current events. Just days after TikTok's Chinese parent company asked a federal court to put a temporary hold on a law that would require ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban in this country, we go back to an episode we did this fall about a mysterious dearth of TikTok posts about subjects Beijing doesn't like.

We return to an earlier interview we had with Wazawaka, a Russian hacker who, in late 2023, was added to the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List. Russian authorities allegedly jailed him late last week — though we saw he was back online a short time later.

An episode from In the Room with Peter Bergen. Longtime national security analyst Peter Bergen looks at what President-elect Trump's return to the White House will likely mean for intelligence gathering as we know it – and whether the conservative Project 2025 will turn out to be the new intelligence gathering playbook. This story was originally released before the November election.

Crypto was envisioned as the ultimate democratic currency, the thing that allowed you to buy things without “the man.” But, now the president-elect's newfound interest means “the man" may be adding bitcoin to the federal reserve. We ask DePaul University professor and former Fed economist Lamont Black what will the digital currency do now?

Before the invasion of Ukraine, Serhii Zenin was the host of one of the nation's most popular hard rock radio shows on Radio ROKS 103.6. Some three years later, Serhii is a soldier and Radio ROKS has taken on a whole new role, too.

As Vladimir Putin says the Ukraine war is about to go global, we sat down with former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Evelyn Farkas. She's now at the McCain Institute. Farkas tells us about the mood in Ukraine during her recent trip, President-elect Trump's claim he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, and what's next for the world's first truly hybrid war.

Back in February, Dylan went to the Philippines for what he thought would be a great Chinese Lunar New Year vacation. Then he found himself held hostage in a gang-run scamming compound. We tell one man's story about getting out and what the Philippines is doing to shut these operations down.

Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu says Moore's Law of computing power doesn't just apply to chips anymore – he says it describes the exponential growth of satellite launches, too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 talk to the NSA's Director of Cybersecurity, David Luber, about Ukraine, adversaries in cyberspace, and the importance of partnerships.

China's influence campaigns look different from Russia's. Instead of Moscow's firehouse 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.

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

Dozens of small acts of sabotage and arson have flared across Europe as part of Russia's hybrid battle against the West. This week, we spoke with four experts on Europe and Russia at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC to try to make sense of the Russian campaign and what the West can do in response. (edited)

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.

When Stephanie joined a WhatsApp group to get advice on cryptocurrency investing, it began a wild ride that included the CEO of a large investment firm, cybercriminals half a world away, and a brush with a rag tag team of computer nerds in Alabama chasing a $5 billion problem.

In the U.S. criminal justice system, a lot of things hinge on the simple police report. As departments begin to use AI and large language model software to help cops write them, American University law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson worries people don't understand the possible downstream effects.

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.

Leaders from Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft told the Senate Intelligence Committee that they were doing all the could to combat foreign interference ahead of the November election. The Senators weren't convinced.

We sat down with US Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia to talk about election interference, his recent hearing with tech execs on misinformation and disinformation, and the future of cybersecurity.

TikTok's lawyers were in a U.S. Court of Appeals this week trying to push back against a law that requires the popular video app to sell its American subsidiary to a non-Chinese owner or be banished from app stores. Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and expert in lawfare, explains what's at stake.

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.

The Russian-speaking cyber gang, FIN7, has fooled red team hackers into doing their dirty work by masquerading as legitimate cybersecurity companies just looking for talent. Silent Push's Zach Edwards talks about the scam.

Investigators have been chasing the Russian-speaking cyber gang for years — and they've stayed just one step ahead. Threat researcher Zach Edwards lays out why bringing gangs like this to justice has always been so hard.

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.

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.

New legislation is seeking to designate some ransomware attacks as acts of terror. Former FBI agent John Riggi talks about the proposal and how it might change the battle against ransomware gangs.

Skylakes 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.

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.

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.

We talk with Unit 221B's Allison Nixon about young cyber criminals, radicalization, and the search for self in the virtual world.

This isn't your typical hacker tale. The one about boy meets computer, boy loves computer, boy weaponizes computer to commit crimes. This is about what comes after that.