Recorded Future - Inside Threat Intelligence For Cyber Security

Back in August, the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in a fiery plane crash. So we decided to revisit an episode we did a few months ago about the Wagner group and how it recruits. It turns out they tore a page from the ISIS playbook.

Led by a motley crew of old-school cops and cyber whiz-kids, a Dutch police unit takes control of one of the dark web's most notorious drug markets and make history.

Remember ding-dong ditch? You and your friends rang a doorbell and then ran away? These days the prank of choice among the young cyber set is something called swatting: calling the police with a hoax report that sends them rushing – guns drawn – to some address and unsuspecting victim. After years of writing it off as childish mischief, legislators, law enforcement and tech companies are finally trying to address it.

Back in May, a Russian-speaking cyber gang named Clop broke into MOVEit, a little-known file transfer program. They managed to steal data from some 60 million people (and counting). While the scale of the attack was impressive, what really raised eyebrows was how they did it.

Ilya Sachkov co-founded the cybersecurity company Group-IB to make the world safe from Russian-speaking cybercriminals. Then he asked Russian authorities to help round them up, and things went spectacularly wrong.

Wave “goodbye” to those pesky emails from Nigerian princes and say “hello” to the latest generation of AI enabled email scamming. It’s smarter, faster and, by the way, looks like it’s coming from your boss. The only thing that might stop them? AI itself.

We look at an American disinformation campaign that makes clear online abuse directed at women goes far beyond a couple of mean tweets. And, an update on a Syrian activist who was on the receiving end of a misinformation crisis of her own.

Putting your data in the cloud used to be seen as the gold standard of information security. Why have your small IT team protect your data when the experts at Microsoft or Google or AWS can do it instead? And then in May, Chinese hackers broke into the Microsoft cloud, exposing not just a flaw in the code, but a glitch in company’s business model as well.

This week, we share an episode from PRX and Inkstick Media’s “Things that Go Boom” podcast about the thousands of miles of fiber optic cable lying at the bottom of the sea. Some 95 percent of the world’s electronic data is traveling through them and cables are taking centerstage in the high-stakes competition between the U.S. and China.

Since our story on spyware in Mexico aired back in March, researchers have discovered a roster of Pegasus spyware infections on the phones of local journalists, activists, and even officials within the Mexican president’s inner circle. This week, we return to our deep dive on the use of spyware in Mexico and the revelation that the army created a secret military intelligence unit dedicated to its use.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.