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Lock and Code

Lock and Code tells the human stories within cybersecurity, privacy, and technology. Rogue robot vacuums, hacked farm tractors, and catastrophic software vulnerabilities—it’s all here.

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All Episodes

47:06

The new rules for AI and encrypted messaging, with...

Lock and Code ·

2025/01/12

The era of artificial intelligence everything is here, and with it, comeeveryday surprisesinto exactly where the next AI tools might pop up.There are major corporations pushing customer support functions onto AI chatbots, Big Tech platforms offering AI image generation for social media posts, and even Google has defaulted to include AI-powered overviews into everyday searches.The next gold rush, it seems, is in AI, and for a group of technical and legal researchers at New York University and Cornell

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38:38

Is nowhere safe from AI slop?

Lock and Code ·

2024/12/29

You can see it on X. You can see on Instagram. It’s flooding community pages on Facebook and filling up channels on YouTube. It’s called “AI slop” and it’s the fastest, laziest way to drive engagement.Like “click bait” before it (“You won’t believe what happens next,” reads the trickster headline), AI slop can be understood as the latest online tactic in getting eyeballs, clicks, shares, comments, and views. With this go-around, however, the methodology is turbocharged with generative AI tools like

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33:44

A day in the life of a privacy pro, with Ron de Jesus

Lock and Code ·

2024/12/16

Privacy is many things for many people.For the teenager suffering from a bad breakup, privacy is the ability to stop sharing her location and to block her ex on social media. For the political dissident advocating against an oppressive government, privacy is the protection that comes from secure, digital communications. And for the California resident who wants to know exactly how they’re being included in so many targeted ads, privacy is the legal right to ask a marketing firm how they collect

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45:00

These cars want to know about your sex life (re-air)...

Lock and Code ·

2024/12/01

Two weeks ago, the Lock and Code podcastshared three stories about home productsthat requested, collected, or exposed sensitive data online.There were the air fryers that asked users to record audio through their smartphones. There was the smart ring maker that, even with privacy controls put into place, published data about users’ stress levels and heart rates. And there was the smart, AI-assisted vacuum that, through the failings of a group of contractors, allowed an image of a woman on a toilet

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26:59

An air fryer, a ring, and a vacuum get brought into a...

Lock and Code ·

2024/11/18

The month, a consumer rights group out of the UK posed a question to the public that they’d likely never considered: Were their air fryers spying on them?By analyzing the associated Android apps for three separate air fryer models from three different companies, a group of researchers learned that these kitchen devices didn’t just promise to make crispier mozzarella sticks, crunchier chicken wings, and flakier reheated pastries—they also wanted a lot of user data, from precise location to voice

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39:34

Why your vote can’t be “hacked,” with Cait Conley of...

Lock and Code ·

2024/11/03

The US presidential election is upon the American public, and with it come fears of “election interference.”But “election interference” is a broad term. It can mean the now-regular and expected foreign disinformation campaigns that are launched to sow political discord or to erode trust in American democracy. It can include domestic campaigns to disenfranchise voters in battleground states. And it can include the upsetting and increasing threats made to election officials and volunteers across the

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35:07

This industry profits from knowing you have cancer,...

Lock and Code ·

2024/10/21

On the internet, you can be shown an online ad because of your age, your address, your purchase history, your politics, your religion, and even your likelihood of having cancer.This is because of the largely unchecked “data broker” industry.Data brokers are analytics and marketing companies that collect every conceivable data point that exists about you, packaging it all into profiles that other companies use when deciding who should see their advertisements.Have a new mortgage? There are data

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36:28

Exposing the Facebook funeral livestream scam

Lock and Code ·

2024/10/07

Online scammers were seen this August stooping to a new low—abusing local funerals to steal from bereaved family and friends.Cybercrime has never been a job of morals (calling it a “job” is already lending it too much credit), but, for many years, scams wavered between clever and brusque. Take the “Nigerian prince” email scam which has plagued victims for close to two decades. In it, would-be victims would receive a mysterious, unwanted message from alleged royalty, and, in exchange for a little

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34:03

What the arrest of Telegram's CEO means, with Eva...

Lock and Code ·

2024/09/09

On August 24, at an airport just outside of Paris, a man named Pavel Durov was detained for questioning by French investigators. Just days later, the same man was charged in crimes related to the distribution of child pornography and illicit transactions, such as drug trafficking and fraud.Durov is the CEO and founder of the messaging and communications app Telegram. Though Durov holds citizenship in France and the United Arab Emirates—where Telegram is based—he was born and lived for many years in

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48:39

Move over malware: Why one teen is more worried about...

Lock and Code ·

2024/08/26

Every age group uses the internet a little bit differently, and it turns out for at least one Gen Z teen in the Bay Area, the classic approach to cyberecurity—defending against viruses, ransomware, worms, and more—is the least of her concerns. Of far more importance is Artificial Intelligence (AI).Today, the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz revisits a prior episode from 2023 about what teenagers fear the most about going online. The conversation is a strong reminder that when America’s

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40:34

AI girlfriends want to know all about you. So might...

Lock and Code ·

2024/08/12

Somewhere out there is a romantic AI chatbot that wants to know everything about you. But in a revealing overlap, other AI tools—which are developed and popularized by far larger companies in technology—could crave the very same thing.For AI tools of any type, our data is key.In the nearly two years since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the public, the biggest names in technology have raced to compete. Meta announced Llama. Google revealed Gemini. And Microsoft debuted Copilot.All these AI features

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43:13

SIEM is not storage, with Jess Dodson

Lock and Code ·

2024/07/29

In the world of business cybersecurity, the powerful technology known as “Security Information and Event Management” is sometimes thwarted by the most unexpected actors—the very people setting it up.Security Information and Event Management—or SIEM—is a term used to describe data-collecting products that businesses rely on to make sense of everything going on inside their network, in the hopes of catching and stopping cyberattacks. SIEM systems can log events and information across an entire

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36:13

How an AI “artist” stole a woman’s face, with Ali...

Lock and Code ·

2024/07/15

Full-time software engineer and part-time Twitch streamer Ali Diamond is used to seeing herself on screen, probably because she’s the one who turns the camera on.But when Diamond received a Direct Message (DM) on Twitter earlier this year, shelearned that her likeness had been recreatedacross a sample of AI-generated images, entirely without her consent.On the AI art sharing platform Civitai, Diamond discovered that a stranger had created an “AI image model” that was fashioned after her. The model

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54:33

Busted for book club? Why cops want to see what...

Lock and Code ·

2024/07/01

More than 20 years ago, a law that the United States would eventually use to justify the warrantless collection of Americans’ phone call records actually started out as a warning sign against an entirely different target: Libraries.Not two months after terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, Congress responded with the passage of The USA Patriot Act. Originally championed as a tool to fight terrorism, The Patriot Act, as introduced, allowed the FBI to request “any tangible

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39:22

(Almost) everything you always wanted to know about...

Lock and Code ·

2024/06/17

🎶Ready to know what Malwarebytes knows?Ask us your questions and get some answers.What is a passphrase and what makes it—what’s the word?Strong?🎶Every day, countless readers, listeners, posters, and users ask us questions about some of the most commonly cited topics and terminology in cybersecurity. What are passkeys? Is it safer to use a website or an app? How can I stay safe from a ransomware attack? What is the dark web? And why can’t cybercriminals simply be caught and stopped?For some

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51:26

800 arrests, 40 tons of drugs, and one backdoor, or...

Lock and Code ·

2024/06/03

This is a story about how the FBI got everything it wanted.For decades, law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the world have lamented the availability of modern technology that allows suspected criminals to hide their communications from legal scrutiny. This long-standing debate has sometimes spilled into the public view, as it did in 2016, when the FBI demanded that Apple unlock an iPhone used during a terrorist attack in the California city of San Bernardino. Apple pushed back on the

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47:37

Your vacation, reservations, and online dates, now...

Lock and Code ·

2024/05/20

The irrigation of the internet is coming.For decades, we’ve accessed the internet much like how we, so long ago, accessed water—by traveling to it. We connected (quite literally), we logged on, and we zipped to addresses and sites to read, learn, shop, and scroll.Over the years, the internet was accessible from increasingly more devices, like smartphones, smartwatches, and even smart fridges. But still, it had to be accessed, like a well dug into the ground to pull up the water below.Moving forward,

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45:00

"No social media 'til 16," and other fixes for a teen...

Lock and Code ·

2024/05/06

You’ve likely felt it: The dull pull downwards of a smartphone scroll. The “five more minutes” just before bed. The sleep still there after waking. The edges of your calm slowly fraying.After more than a decade of our most recent technological experiment, in turns out that having the entirety of the internet in the palm of your hands could be … not so great. Obviously, the effects of this are compounded by the fact that the internet that was built after the invention of the smartphone is a very

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46:13

Picking fights and gaining rights, with Justin Brookman

Lock and Code ·

2024/04/22

Our Lock and Code host, David Ruiz, has a bit of an apology to make:“Sorry for all the depressing episodes.”When theLock and Code podcast explored online harassment and abuse this year, our guest providedseveral guidelines and tips for individuals to lock down their accounts and remove their sensitive information from the internet, but larger problems remained. Content moderation is failing nearly everywhere, and data protection laws are unequal across the world.When we told thetrue tale of a

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