Malicious Life Cybereason

Will BitCoin and the other cryptocurrencies be able to replace money as we know it today? will governments embrace a future where they have no control over their currencies? Jacob Goldstein (Planet Money, What's Your Problem) talks to Nate Nelson about what the future holds for BitCoin.

Years before credit cards transactions gave banks and data-brokers free access to our private financial information, a man named David Chaum became the first person to really, materially grapple with the problem of privacy in money. His ideas inspired a movement of "Crypto Anarchists" who aspired to change money, forever.

A recording of last week's special Malicious Live Ask Us Anything event: How did Malicious Life come to be? How do we choose the stories we tell, who was Ran's most memorable guest - and why does Nate keep inserting weird names into the scripts?...

In June 2011, a Con Edison truck was parked outside of Hector Monsegur's New York apartment, every day for over a week. But Hector - better known as Sabu, the ringleader of the LulzSec hacking group -wasn't fooled: he guessed, correctly, that the FBI was on to him. But it turned out that of all the people who broke or disregarded the law in this particular story, only one man had a reason to worried: Jeremy Hammond.

George Friedman and Jeremy Hammond are two very different people: the former is a capitalist middleman, the latter an anarchist-communist hacker. A spy - and a hacker. But in certain respects, they’re actually quite similar: in what lines are they willing to cross to get to their goal.

AbdelKader Curnelius, a German Threat Researcher and an expert on the cybercrime ecosystem in German-speaking countries - shares a story about how he helped the German police put a sophisticated local cybercriminal behind bars, by uncovering tiny mistakes that this hacker did in the past.