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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

42:08

Why businesses need a disinformation defense plan,...

Lock and Code ·

2023/06/19

When you think about the word "cyberthreat," what first comes to mind? Is it ransomware?Is it spyware? Maybe it's any collection of the infamous viruses, worms, Trojans,and botnets that have crippled countless companies throughoutmodern history.Inthe future, though, what many businesses might first think of is something new: Disinformation.Back in 2021, in speaking about threats to businesses, the former director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs,told news

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43:47

Trusting AI not to lie: The cost of truth

Lock and Code ·

2023/06/05

In May, a lawyer who was defending their client ina lawsuit against Columbia's biggest airline, Avianca, submitted a legal filing before a court in Manhattan, New York, that listed several previous cases as support for their main argument to continue the lawsuit.But when the court reviewed the lawyer's citations, it found something curious:Several were entirely fabricated.The lawyer in question had gotten the help of another attorney who, in scrounging around for legal precedent to cite, utilized

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51:01

The rise of "Franken-ransomware," with Allan Liska

Lock and Code ·

2023/05/08

Ransomware is becoming bespoke, and that could mean trouble for businesses and law enforcement investigators.It wasn't always like this.For a few years now, ransomware operators have congregatedaround a relatively new model of crime called "Ransomware-as-a-Service." In the Ransomware-as-a-Service model, or RaaS model, ransomware itself is notdelivered to victims by the same criminals thatmake the ransomware. Instead, it is used almost "on loan" by criminal groups called "affiliates" whocarry out

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41:01

Removing the human: When should AI be used in...

Lock and Code ·

2023/04/24

In January, a mental health nonprofitadmitted that it had used Artificial Intelligence to help talk to people in distress.Prompted first by a user's longing forpersonal improvement—and the difficulties involved in that journey—the AItool generated a reply, which, with human intervention, could be sent verbatim in a chat box, or edited and fine-tuned to better fit the situation. The AI said:“I hear you. You’re trying to become a better person and it’s not easy. It’s hard to make changes in our lives,

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46:13

How the cops buy a "God view" of your location data,...

Lock and Code ·

2023/04/10

The list of people and organizations that are hungry for your location data—collected so routinely and packaged so conveniently that it can easily reveal where you live, where you work, where you shop, pray, eat, and relax—includes many of the usual suspects.Advertisers, obviously, want to send targeted ads to you and they believe those ads have a better success rate if they're sent to, say, someone who spends their time at a fast-food drive-through on the way home from the office, as opposed to

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38:10

Solving the password’s hardest problem with passkeys,...

Lock and Code ·

2023/03/27

How many passwords do you have? If you're at all like our Lock and Code host David Ruiz, that number hovers around 200. But the important follow up question is:How many of those passwords can you actually remember on your own?Prior studiessuggest a number that sounds nearly embarrassing—probably aroundsix.After decades of requiring it, it turns out that the password has problems, the biggestof whichis that when users are forced to create a password for every online account, they resort tocreating

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48:05

"Brad Pitt," a still body, ketchup, and a knife, or...

Lock and Code ·

2023/03/13

Becky Holmes knows how to throw a romance scammer off script—simply bring up cannibalism.In January, Holmes shared on Twitter that an account with the name "Thomas Smith" had started up a random chat with her that sounded an awful lot like the beginnins stages of a romance scam. But rather than instantly ignoring and blocking the advances—as Holmes recommends everyone do in these types of situations—she first had a little fun."I was hoping that you'd let me eat a small part of you when we

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59:18

Fighting censorship online, or, encryption’s latest...

Lock and Code ·

2023/02/27

Government threats to end-to-end encryption—the technology that secures your messages and shared photos and videos—have been around for decades, but the most recent threats to this technology are unique inhow they intersect with abroader, sometimes-global effort to control information on the Internet.Take two efforts in the European Union and the United Kingdom. New proposals there would require companies to scan any content that their users share with one another for Child Sexual Abuse Material, or

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44:47

What is AI ”good” at (and what the heck is it,...

Lock and Code ·

2023/02/13

In November of last year, the AI research and development lab OpenAI revealed its latest, most advanced language project: A tool called ChatGPT.ChatGPT is so much more than "just" a chatbot. As users have shown with repeated testing and prodding, ChatGPT seems to "understand" things.It can give you recipes that account for whatever dietary restrictions you have. It can deliver basic essays about moments in history. It can—and has been—used to cheat by university students who are giving a new meaning

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46:03

A private moment, caught by a Roomba, ended up on...

Lock and Code ·

2023/01/30

In 2020, a photo of a woman sitting on a toilet—her shorts pulled half-way down her thighs—was shared on Facebook, and it was shared by someone whose job it was to look at that photo and, by labeling the objects in it, help train an artificial intelligence system for a vacuum.Bizarre? Yes. Unique? No.In December, MIT TechnologyReviewinvestigated the data collection and sharing practices of the company iRobot, the developer of the popular self-automated Roomba vacuums. In their reporting, MIT

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53:40

Fighting tech’s gender gap with TracketPacer

Lock and Code ·

2023/01/16

Last month, the TikTok user TracketPacer posted a video online called “Network Engineering Facts to Impress No One at Zero Parties.” TracketPacer regularly posts fun, educational content about how the Internet operates. The account is run by a network engineer named Lexie Cooper, who has worked in a network operations center, or NOC, and who’s earned her Cisco Certified Network Associate certificate, or CCNA.In the video, Cooper told listeners about the first spam email being sent over

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43:01

Why does technology no longer excite?

Lock and Code ·

2023/01/01

When did technology last excite you? If Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is to be believed, your own excitement ended, simply had to end, after turning 35 years old. Decades ago, at first writing privately and later having those private writings published after his death, Adams had come up with "a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies." They were simple and short: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a

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47:18

Chasing cryptocurrency through cyberspace, with Brian...

Lock and Code ·

2022/12/19

On June 7, 2021, the US Department of Justice announced a breakthrough: Less than one month after the oil and gas pipeline company Colonial Pipeline had paid its ransomware attackers roughly $4.4 million in bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key that would help the company get its systems back up and running, the government had in turn found where many of those bitcoins had gone, clawing back a remarkable $2.3 million from the cybercriminals. In cybercrime, this isn't supposed to happen—or at

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41:42

Security advisories are falling short. Here’s why,...

Lock and Code ·

2022/12/05

Decades ago, patching was, to lean into a corny joke, a bit patchy. In the late 90s, the Microsoft operating system (OS) Windows 98 had a supportive piece of software that would find security patches for the OS so that users could then download those patches and deploy them to their computers. That software was simply called Windows Update. But Windows Update had two big problems. One, it had to be installed by a user—if a user was unaware of Windows Update, then they were also likely unaware of

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59:30

Threat hunting: How MDR secures your business

Lock and Code ·

2022/11/21

A cyberattack is not the same thing as malware—in fact, malware itself is typically the last stage of an attack, the punctuation mark that closes out months of work from cybercriminals who have infiltrated a company, learned about its systems and controls, and slowly spread across its network through various tools, some of which are installed on a device entirely by default. The goal of cybersecurity, though, isn't to recover after an attack, it's to stop an attack before it happens. On today's

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44:27

How student surveillance fails everyone

Lock and Code ·

2022/11/07

Last month, when Malwarebytes published joint research with 1Password about the online habits of parents and teenagers today, we spoke with a Bay Area high school graduate on the Lock and Code podcast about how she spends her days online and what she thinks are the hardest parts about growing up with the Internet. And while we learned a lot in that episode—about time management, about comparing one's self to others, and about what gets lost when kids swap in-person time with online time—we didn't

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25:07

A gym heist in London goes cyber

Lock and Code ·

2022/10/24

A thief has been stalking London. This past summer, multiple women reported similar crimes to the police: While working out at their local gyms, someone snuck into the locker rooms, busted open their locks, stole their rucksacks and gym bags, and then, within hours, purchased thousands of pounds of goods. Apple, Selfridges, Balenciaga, Harrod's—the thief has expensive taste. At first blush, the crimes sound easy to explain: A thief stole credit cards and used them in person at various stores

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58:03

Teen talk: What it’s like to grow up online, and the...

Lock and Code ·

2022/10/10

Growing up is different for teens today. Issues with identity, self-expression, bullying, fitting in, and trusting your friends and family—while all those certainly existed decades ago, they were never magnified in quite the same way that they are today, and that's largely because of one enormous difference: The Internet. On the Internet, the lines of friendship are re-enforced and blurred by comments or likes on photos and videos. Bullying can reach outside of schools, in harmful texts or

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43:02

Calling in the ransomware negotiator, with Kurtis Minder

Lock and Code ·

2022/09/26

Ransomware can send any company into crisis.Immediately following an attack, the notoriously disruptive malware can spread across networks and machines, locking up important files andrenderingvital data almost useless for all employees. As we learned in aprevious episode of Lock and Code, a ransomware attack not only threatens an organization's clients and external customers, but all the internal teams who are just trying to do their jobs. WhenNorthshore School District was hit several years ago by

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