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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?

More from our interview:

https://therecord.media/trump-cryptocurrency-reserve-depaul-lamont-black

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.

(November 12, 2024)

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.

More from our interview: https://therecord.media/nakasone-click-here-interview-north-korea-exploding-pagers-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 firehose 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.

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 they 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 they are embracing slickly-produced videos and social media influencers to try to rehab their image abroad. Afghan anthropologist Omar Sharifi unpacks whether it's 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.

Sky Lakes 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 cybercriminals, 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.

The latest on disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News — and why the Dominion Voting Machine settlement doesn’t necessarily help her case.

A new wave of piano scams is targeting the weakest link on the internet: humans.

Today, we’re talking to TJ Nelson at Recorded Future in a bid to understand how the CrowdStrike outage caused millions of computers around the world to fade to black.

In a recent conversation on WAMU’s 1A news magazine, Click Here host Dina Temple-Raston discusses the latest developments in the case of former IRS investigator Tigran Gambaryan. He now works for the cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. Nigerian prosecutors have charged Gambaryan, a middle manager at the company, for what they say are his employer’s transgressions. He’s been held in Nigeria since February.

In an ancore episode of Click Here's Mic Drop, we speak with the leader of one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service gangs the world has ever known — LockBit. We spoke to him weeks after Operation Cronos, a global police action against the group.

The hack on Change Healthcare left hundreds, if not thousands, of providers without the ability to obtain insurance approval or payment for everything from prescriptions to surgeries, and it shed new light on a part of the health care system that is often overlooked. Dan Weissmann, the host of An Arm and a Leg podcast, speaks with reporters Brittany Trang of STAT News and Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect about the hack and what it is telling us about antitrust concerns in the health care industry.

Chinese hackers are stepping up their game, according to Nigel Inkster, the former director of operations for Britain’s MI6. In an encore episode of Mic Drop, he says Chinese hackers are taking on a new swagger in cyberspace and borrowing things from a familiar playbook: a Russian one.

In an encore episode, we report on a specific kind of cyber attack targeting big industrial systems that is coming back into fashion: it’s called a ‘living off the land’ attack. What makes it particularly scary is that unlike traditional attacks in which bad actors break into a system and plant malicious code, in living off the land attacks, there’s nothing to find — bad actors leverage what’s already in the network.

Before Nigerian authorities detained two mid-level Binance executives back in February, they were telling anyone who would listen that the cryptocurrency platform was manipulating the value of its currency, the naira. It turns out the more likely culprit is more than a decade of economic mismanagement, as we explore in an encore episode of Mic Drop.

In the latest season of Understood from CBC, Mumbai-based journalist Salimah Shivji examines how Modi went from being barred from the US, to becoming one of the most powerful men in the world. 

About Understood: Know more, now. From the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, to the rise of Pornhub, Understood is an anthology podcast that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. Over a handful of episodes, each season unfolds as a story, hosted by a well-connected reporter, and rooted in journalism you can trust. Driven by insight and fueled by curiosity…The stories of our time: Understood. More episodes of Understood are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/fsa0lPa_

From an encore episode of Mic Drop. Everyone is talking about the power of Al in conservation, but a professor at Arizona State University has found an even simpler, more elegant solution — and all you have to do is listen.

In an encore episode, we look at the tension between AI and the work of humans from which it learns. Media companies like the New York Times and a roster of authors and artists have sued some of the makers of these generative AI models to try to get an answer to a very fundamental question: What do human creators own?

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has been working with young people not just to show them how to sort fact from fiction, but to give them a reason to believe that truth can still empower the weak and hold the guilty accountable.

Antibot4Navalny is a small but mighty group of anonymous researchers calling out Russian disinformation — and punching way above their weight.

Omny Miranda Martone has been working with a handful of Washington lawmakers for more than a year on legislation that would put an end to the impunity of deepfake abuse. The bill, known as the Defiance Act, is being fast-tracked through Congress with a rare procedure known as “hotlining” and it may land on the president’s desk as early as this fall.