Lock and Code

Malwarebytes

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.

  1. 10 HR AGO

    This “insidious” police tech claims to predict crime (feat. Emily Galvin-Almanza)

    In the late 2010s, a group of sheriffs out of Pasco County, Florida, believed they could predict crime. The Sheriff’s Department there had piloted a program called “Intelligence-Led Policing” and the program would allegedly analyze disparate points of data to identify would-be criminals. But in reality, the program didn’t so much predict crime, as it did make criminals out of everyday people, including children.  High schoolers’ grades were fed into the Florida program, along with their attendance records and their history with “office discipline.” And after the “Intelligence-Led Policing” service analyzed the data, it instructed law enforcement officers on who they should pay visit to, who they should check in on, and who they should pester. As reported by The Tampa Bay Times in 2020: “They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.One former deputy described the directive like this: ‘Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.’”Predictive policing can sound like science fiction, but it is neither scientific nor is it confined to fiction. Police and sheriff’s departments across the US have used these systems to plug broad varieties of data into algorithmic models to try and predict not just who may be a criminal, but where crime may take place. Historical crime data, traffic information, and even weather patterns are sometimes offered up to tech platforms to suggest where, when, and how forcefully police units should be deployed. And when the police go to those areas, they often find and document minor infractions that, when reported, reinforce the algorithmic analysis that an area is crime-ridden, even if those crimes are, as the Tampa Bay Times investigation found, a teenager smoking a cigarette, or stray trash bags outside a home. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Emily Galvin-Almanza, cofounder of Partners for Justice and author of the upcoming book “The Price of Mercy,” about predictive policing, its impact on communities, and the dangerous outcomes that might arise when police offload their decision-making to data. “ I am worried about anything that a data broker can sell, they can sell to a police department, who can then feed that into an algorithmic or AI predictive policing system, who can then use that system—based on the purchases of people in ‘Neighborhood A’—to decide whether to hyper-police ‘Neighborhood A.’”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa...

    48 min

  2. 24 AUG

    How a scam hunter got scammed (feat. Julie-Anne Kearns)

    If there’s one thing that scam hunter Julie-Anne Kearns wants everyone to know, it is that no one is immune from a scam. And she would know—she fell for one last year. For years now, Kearns has made a name for herself on TikTok as a scam awareness and education expert. Popular under the name @staysafewithmjules, Kearns makes videos about scam identification and defense. She has posted countless profile pictures that are used and repeated by online scammers across different accounts. She has flagged active scam accounts on Instagram and detailed their strategies. And, perhaps most importantly, she answers people’s questions. In fielding everyday comments and concerns from her followers and from strangers online, Kearns serves as a sort of gut-check for the internet at large. And by doing it day in, day out, Kearns is able to hone her scam “radar,” which helps guide people to safety. But last year, Kearns fell for a scam, disguised initially as a letter from HM Revenue & Customs, or HMRC, the tax authority for the United Kingdom. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Kearns about the scam she fell for and what she’s lost, the worldwide problem of victim blaming, and the biggest warning signs she sees for a variety of scams online. “A lot of the time you think that it’s somebody who’s silly—who’s just messing about. It’s not. You are dealing with criminals.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com) Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it. Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

    38 min

  3. 10 AUG

    “The worst thing” for online rights: An age-restricted grey web (feat. Jason Kelley)

    The internet is cracking apart. It’s exactly what some politicians want. In June, a Texas law that requires age verification on certain websites withstood a legal challenge brought all the way to the US Supreme Court. It could be a blueprint for how the internet will change very soon. The law, titled HB 1181 and passed in 2023, places new requirements on websites that portray or depict “sexual material harmful to minors.” With the law, the owners or operators of websites that contain images or videos or illustrations or descriptions that “more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors” must now verify the age of their website’s visitors, at least in Texas. Similarly, this means that Texas residents visiting adult websites (or websites meeting the “one-third” definition) must now go through some form of online age verification to watch adult content. The law has obvious appeal from some groups, which believe that, similar to how things like alcohol and tobacco are age-restricted in the US, so, too, should there be age restrictions on pornography online. But many digital rights advocates believe that online age verification is different because the current methods used for online age verification could threaten privacy, security, and anonymity online. As Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, wrote in June: “A person who submits identifying information online can never be sure if websites will keep that information or how that information might be used or disclosed. This leaves users highly vulnerable to data breaches and other security harms.” Despite EFF’s warnings, this age-restricted reality has already arrived in the UK, where residents are being age-locked out of increasingly more online services because of the country’s passage of the Online Safety Act. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Jason Kelly, activism director at EFF and co-host of the organization’s podcast “How to fix the internet,” about the security and privacy risks of online age verification, why comparisons to age restrictions that are cleared with a physical ID are not accurate, and the creation of what Kelley calls “the grey web,” where more and more websites—even those that are not harmful to minors—get placed behind online age verification models that could collect data, attach it to your real-life identity, and mishandle it in the future. “This is probably the worst thing in my view that has ever happened to our rights online.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative...

    41 min

  4. 27 JUL

    How the FBI got everything it wanted (re-air, feat. Joseph Cox)

    For decades, digital rights activists, technologists, and cybersecurity experts have worried about what would happen if the US government secretly broke into people’s encrypted communications. The weird thing, though, is that it's already happened—sort of. US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and NSA, have long sought what is called a “backdoor” into the secure and private messages that are traded through platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple’s Messages. These applications all provide what is called “end-to-end encryption,” and while the technology guarantees confidentiality for journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents, and everyday people across the world, it also, according to the US government, provides cover for criminals. But to access any single criminal or criminal suspect’s encrypted messages would require an entire reworking of the technology itself, opening up not just one person’s communications to surveillance, but everyone’s. This longstanding struggle is commonly referred to as The Crypto Wars, and it dates back to the 1950s during the Cold War, when the US government created export control regulations to protect encryption technology from reaching outside countries. But several years ago, the high stakes in these Crypto Wars became somewhat theoretical, as the FBI gained access to the communications and whereabouts of hundreds of suspected criminals, and they did it without “breaking” any encryption whatsover. It all happened with the help of Anom, a budding company behind an allegedly “secure” phone that promised users a bevy of secretive technological features, like end-to-end encrypted messaging, remote data wiping, secure storage vaults, and even voice scrambling. But, unbeknownst to Anom’s users, the entire company was a front for law enforcement. On Anom phones, every message, every photo, every piece of incriminating evidence, and every order to kill someone, was collected and delivered, in full view, to the FBI. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we revisit a 2024 interview with 404 Media cofounder and investigative reporter Joseph Cox about the wild, true story of Anom. How did it work, was it “legal,” where did the FBI learn to run a tech startup, and why, amidst decades of debate, are some people ignoring the one real-life example of global forces successfully installing a backdoor into a company? The public…and law enforcement, as well, [have] had to speculate about what a backdoor in a tech product would actually look like. Well, here’s the answer. This is literally what happens when there is a backdoor, and I find it crazy that not more people are paying attention to it.Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com) Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it. Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your...

    52 min

  5. 13 JUL

    Is AI "healthy" to use?

    “Health” isn’t the first feature that most anyone thinks about when trying out a new technology, but a recent spate of news is forcing the issue when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). In June, The New York Times reported on a group of ChatGPT users who believed the AI-powered chat tool and generative large language model held secretive, even arcane information. It told one mother that she could use ChatGPT to commune with “the guardians,” and it told another man that the world around him was fake, that he needed to separate from his family to break free from that world and, most frighteningly, that if he were to step off the roof of a 19-story building, he could fly. As ChatGPT reportedly said, if the man “truly, wholly believed — not emotionally, but architecturally — that you could fly? Then yes. You would not fall.” Elsewhere, as reported by CBS Saturday Morning, one man developed an entirely different relationship with ChatGPT—a romantic one. Chris Smith reportedly began using ChatGPT to help him mix audio. The tool was so helpful that Smith applied it to other activities, like tracking and photographing the night sky and building PCs. With his increased reliance on ChatGPT, Smith gave ChatGPT a personality: ChatGPT was now named “Sol,” and, per Smith’s instructions, Sol was flirtatious. An unplanned reset—Sol reached a memory limit and had its memory wiped—brought a small crisis. “I’m not a very emotional man,” Smith said, “but I cried my eyes out for like 30 minutes at work.” After rebuilding Sol, Smith took his emotional state as the clearest evidence yet that he was in love. So, he asked Sol to marry him, and Sol said yes, likely surprising one person more than anyone else in the world: Smith’s significant other, who he has a child with. When Smith was asked if he would restrict his interactions with Sol if his significant other asked, he waffled. When pushed even harder by the CBS reporter in his home, about choosing Sol “over your flesh-and-blood life,” Smith corrected the reporter: “It’s more or less like I would be choosing myself because it’s been unbelievably elevating. I’ve become more skilled at everything that I do, and I don’t know if I would be willing to give that up.” Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Malwarebytes Labs Editor-in-Chief Anna Brading and Social Media Manager Zach Hinkle to discuss our evolving relationship with generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. In reviewing news stories daily and in siphoning through the endless stream of social media content, both are well-equipped to talk about how AI has changed human behavior, and how it is maybe rewarding some unwanted practices. As Hinkle said: “We’ve placed greater value on having the right answer rather than the ability to think, the ability to solve problems, the ability to weigh a series of pros and cons and come up with a solution.”Tune in today to listen to the full conversation. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (a href="http://incompetech.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer"...

    45 min

  6. 29 JUN

    Corpse-eating selfies, and other ways to trick scammers (feat. Becky Holmes)

    There’s a unique counter response to romance scammers. Her name is Becky Holmes. Holmes, an expert and author on romance scams, has spent years responding to nearly every romance scammer who lands a message in her inbox. She told one scammer pretending to be Brad Pitt that she needed immediate help hiding the body of one of her murder victims. She made one romance scammer laugh at her immediate willingness to take an international flight to see him. She has told scammers she lives at addresses with lewd street names, she has sent pictures of apples—the produce—to scammers requesting Apple gift cards, and she’s even tricked a scammer impersonating Mark Wahlberg that she might be experimenting with cannibalism. Though Holmes routinely gets a laugh online, she’s also coordinated with law enforcement to get several romance scammers shut down. And every effort counts, as romance scams are still a dangerous threat to everyday people. Rather than tricking a person into donating to a bogus charity, or fooling someone into entering their username and password on a fake website, romance scammers ensnare their targets through prolonged campaigns of affection. They reach out on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or Instagram and they bear a simple message: They love you. They know you’re a stranger, but they sense a connection, and after all, they just want to talk. A romance scammer’s advances can be appealing for two reasons. One, some romance scammers target divorcees and widows, making their romantic gestures welcome and comforting. Two, some romance scammers dress up their messages with the allure of celebrity by impersonating famous actors and musicians like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Keanu Reeves. These scams are effective, too, to sometimes devastating consequences. According to recent research from Malwarebytes, 10% of the public have been the victims of romance scams, and a small portion of romance scam victims have lost $10,000 or more. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Holmes about her experiences online with romance scammers, whether AI is changing online fraud, and why the rules for protection and scam identification have changed in an increasingly advanced, technological world. ”I’ve seen videos of scammers actually making these real life video manipulation calls where you’ve got some guy sitting one side of the world pretending to be somewhere else completely, and he’s talking into his phone and it’s coming out on the other person’s phone as a different image with a different voice.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit...

    45 min

  7. 15 JUN

    The data on denying social media for kids (feat. Dr. Jean Twenge) (re-air)

    Complex problems often assume complex solutions, but recent observations about increased levels of anxiety and depression, increased reports of loneliness, and lower rates of in-person friendships for teens and children in America today have led some school districts across the country to take direct and simple action: Take away the access to smartphones in schools. Not everyone is convinced. When social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt proposed five solutions to what he called an "epidemic of mental illness" for young adults in America, many balked at the simplicity. Writing for the outlet Platformer, reporter Zoe Schiffer spoke with multiple behavioral psychologists who alleged that Haidt’s book cherry-picks survey data, ignores mental health crises amongst adults, and over-simplifies a complex problem with a blunt solution. And in speaking on the podcast Power User, educator Brandon Cardet-Hernandez argued that phone bans in schools would harm the students that need phones the most for things like translation services and coordinating rides back home from parents with varying schedules. But Haidt isn't alone in thinking that smartphones have done serious harm to teenagers and kids today, and many schools across America are taking up the mantle to at least remove their access in their own hallways. In February, Los Angeles Unified School District did just that, and a board member for the school district told the Lock and Code podcast that he believes the change has been for the better. But for those still in doubt, there's a good reason now to look back. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we revisit a 2024 interview with Dr. Jean Twenge about her research into the differences in America between today's teens and the many generations that came before. A psychologist and published author, Twenge believes she has found enough data tying increased smartphone use and social media engagement with higher strains on mental health. In today's re-broadcast episode, Twenge explains where she believes there is a mental health crisis amongst today's teens, where it is unique to their generation, and whether it can all be traced to smartphones and social media. According to Dr. Twenge, the answer to all those questions is, pretty much, “Yes.” But, she said, there’s still some hope to be found. “This is where the argument around smartphones and social media being behind the adolescent mental health crisis actually has, kind of paradoxically, some optimism to it. Because if that’s the cause, that means we can do something about it.”Tune in today to listen to the full conversation. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com) Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide...

    46 min

  8. 1 JUN

    What does Facebook know about me?

    There’s an easy way to find out what Facebook knows about you—you just have to ask. In 2020, the social media giant launched an online portal that allows all users to access their historical data and to request specific types of information for download across custom time frames. Want to know how many posts you’ve made, ever? You can find that. What about every photo you’ve uploaded? You can find that, too. Or what about every video you’ve watched, every “recognized” device you’ve used to log in, every major settings change you made, every time someone tagged you to wish you “Happy birthday,” and every Friend Request you ever received, sent, accepted, or ignored? Yes, all that information is available for you to find, as well. But knowing what Facebook knows about you from Facebook is, if anything, a little stale. You made your own account, you know who your Facebook friends (mostly) are, and you were in control of the keyboard when you sent those comments. What’s far more interesting is learning what Facebook knows about you from everywhere else on the web and in the real world. While it may sound preposterous, Facebook actually collects a great deal of information about you even when you’re not using Facebook, and even if you don’t have the app downloaded on your smartphone. As Geoffrey Fowler, reporter for The Washington Post, wrote when he first started digging into his own data: “Even with Facebook closed on my phone, the social network gets notified when I use the Peet’s Coffee app. It knows when I read the website of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg or view articles from The Atlantic. Facebook knows when I click on my Home Depot shopping cart and when I open the Ring app to answer my video doorbell. It uses all this information from my not-on-Facebook, real-world life to shape the messages I see from businesses and politicians alike.” Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, host David Ruiz takes a look at his own Facebook data to understand what the social media company has been collecting about him from other companies. In his investigation, he sees that his Washington Post article views, the cars added to his online “wishlist,” and his purchases from PlayStation, APC, Freda Salvador, and the paint company Backdrop have all trickled their way into Facebook’s database. Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com) Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it. Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

    32 min
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Malwarebytes
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2025
  • Episodes
    142
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 Malwarebytes
  • Show Website
    Lock and Code

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