Recorded Future - Inside Threat Intelligence For Cyber Security

From WBUR's “Endless Thread" podcast, a story on a growing segment of artificial intelligence: immortalizing the dead through predictive AI text and how bots can help us understand grief. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We revisit a sit-down interview we had with NSA contractor Reality Winner shortly after she spent 4 years in prison for passing a single classified document to a reporter. Given all the focus on classified documents and the way they’ve been handled in recent weeks, it seemed a good time to take another look at what happened to Reality. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Two decades after Arab militias first torched villages and killed hundreds of thousands of people in West Darfur, violence has returned to the region. We tell the story of one group of researchers who use open source intelligence, algorithms and satellite imagery in a bid to quell the violence in Sudan. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We go behind the scenes of U.S. Cyber Command’s Hunt Forward Operation in Ukraine. We interviewed half a dozen American cyber warriors who were on the ground in Kyiv, and they provide new details about the effort to defend Ukrainian networks against Russian cyber attacks in the weeks before the war. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive begins, we revisit a story we did last winter about some unusual Ukrainian women training to become part of the nation’s Army of Drones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Russian private army known as the Wagner Group is trying to persuade young men to join the fight in Ukraine. Their online recruitment efforts don’t just hint at the future of modern warfare: they’re a callback to an earlier time, when a group called ISIS lured young men to fight in Syria. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This month, the FBI added Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev to their Most Wanted hacker list for his alleged role in a number of ransomware attacks against U.S. targets. In a rare interview shortly after the FBI announcement, he talked about the new designation and what he wants to do next. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

From “The Underworld” podcast, a conversation about casino towns, gangster owners, and a new twist on scamming operations. Nathan Paul Southern and Lindsey Kennedy took a trip along the Mekong River and revealed new details about southeast Asia’s latest scourge: cyber slaves.ADDITIONAL READING: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3195932/laos-criminal-casino-empire-chinese-gangsters Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the FBI and Justice Department took down a collective of cybercriminals known as Hive earlier this year, it targeted a group that made a name for itself, in part, by holding hospital and healthcare systems for ransom during the pandemic. What made the group so effective was its own twist on WeWork-style collaboratives… and it led to their demise. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Department of Justice says last month’s effort to bring down the Genesis Marketplace represents a departure from traditional law enforcement actions. ‘Operation Cookie Monster' wasn’t about nabbing masterminds. It was about making it harder for JV hackers to enter the world of cybercrime. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Iraqi government has unveiled an app that helps ordinary citizens report “indecent” content online. Since its introduction, the Ballegh app has received some 144,000 reports. And the Iraqi app isn’t the only one: A roster of similar morality apps have popped up across the region, raising new questions about the future of free speech in the Middle East. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What makes a hacker tick? That’s what we wanted to find out when we reached out to Bassterlord, a 27-year-old hacker in Ukraine who joined some of the most infamous hacking crews of our time. Researcher Jon DiMaggio of Analyst1 has released a report about him, and he gave Click Here an exclusive first look. Then, we spoke to Bassterlord ourselves. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We go behind the scenes of the new book by WIRED’s Andy Greenberg, "Tracers in the Dark." It explains how a handful of entrepreneurs and investigators demystified cryptocurrency tracking. Recently, we spoke with Andy and some crypto tracers onstage at the Links 2023 conference in New York City. Plus, North Korea’s ingenious effort to launder its stolen crypto.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When cryptocurrency burst on the scene in 2008, it was touted as anonymous — a boon to cyber criminals all over the world. Then a few mathematicians and some federal agents proved otherwise, in a way so big it birthed an industry. With a tip of the hat to Andy Greenberg’s new book “Tracers in the Dark,” we talk to them about how they did it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Six months after demonstrators took to the streets of Iran hoping to end its draconian hijab laws and push for a change in the leadership, the protests have moved online — into a quiet civil disobedience campaign that leadership is finding hard to control. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Drones of all shapes and sizes are part of the war effort in the skies above Ukraine. Some are helping kill the enemy; others spy on formations and guide bombs to their targets. We take you inside a school meant to boost that effort by training women to fly them. Plus, a leading dark web hacking forum meets its demise. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In a recent conversation on WAMU’s nationally syndicated show 1A, we talked about lessons learned one year into the world’s first truly hybrid war. The conversation happened amid a report from Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center that found new worrying signs on the Russia-Ukraine cyber front. They believe Sandworm, a cyber military unit of Russia’s intelligence service, has been launching new phishing campaigns, cyber espionage operations, and is stepping up coordination with hacktivists groups. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We follow up last week’s episode on spyware and the Mexican military with a look at Guacamaya, the hacktivist collective that helped provide key documents that showed the army purchased Pegasus spyware used on human rights advocates and local journalists. Guacamaya isn’t just targeting Mexico, though. The group has been hacking into military servers all over Latin America, and its efforts have people asking: ¿Quién es Guacamaya? (Who is Guacamaya?) Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A new report has published classified documents and internal memos that make clear the Mexican Army bought Pegasus spyware and systematically deployed it against journalists and activists in Mexico. R3D, a Mexican digital rights group, and University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, also found evidence of a formerly unknown military intelligence unit whose sole focus appears to be secret surveillance and deployment of spyware. Some of the sensitive material published in the report came from a massive hack into the Ministry of Defense by the hacktivist group Guacamaya last year. Click Here was part of a small group of journalists given early access to their findings. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Russia has deployed the Iranian-built Shahed drone to wreak havoc on Ukraine’s infrastructure. We speak to a man who is a kind of drone whisperer. After years of taking these Shahed drones apart, he says if you listen, they have amazing stories to tell. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices