Lock and Code

Malwarebytes
  • 4.8 (34)
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • UPDATED SEMIMONTHLY
Lock and Code Podcast

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. 3 DAYS AGO

    What the arrest of Telegram's CEO means, with Eva Galperin

    On August 24, at an airport just outside of Paris, a man named Pavel Durov was detained for questioning by French investigators. Just days later, the same man was charged in crimes related to the distribution of child pornography and illicit transactions, such as drug trafficking and fraud. Durov is the CEO and founder of the messaging and communications app Telegram. Though Durov holds citizenship in France and the United Arab Emirates—where Telegram is based—he was born and lived for many years in Russia, where he started his first social media company, Vkontakte. The Facebook-esque platform gained popularity in Russia, not just amongst users, but also the watchful eye of the government. Following a prolonged battle regarding the control of Vkontake—which included government demands to deliver user information and to shut down accounts that helped organize protests against Vladimir Putin in 2012—Durov eventually left the company and the country all together. But more than 10 years later, Durov is once again finding himself a person of interest for government affairs, facing several charges now in France where, while he is not in jail, he has been ordered to stay. After Durov’s arrest, the X account for Telegram responded, saying: “Telegram abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act—its moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving. Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe. It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of the platform.” But how true is that? In the United States, companies themselves, such as YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook often respond to violations of “copyright”—the protection that gets violated when a random user posts clips or full versions of movies, television shows, and music. And the same companies get involved when certain types of harassment, hate speech, and violent threats are posted on public channels for users to see. This work, called “content moderation,” is standard practice for many technology and social media platforms today, but there’s a chance that Durov’s arrest isn’t related to content moderation at all. Instead, it may be related to the things that Telegram users say in private to one another over end-to-end encrypted chats. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Electronic Frontier Foundation Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin about Telegram, its features, and whether Durov’s arrest is an escalation of content moderation gone wrong or the latest skirmish in government efforts to break end-to-end encryption. “Chances are that these are requests around content that Telegram can see, but if [the requests] touch end-to-end encrypted content, then I have to flip tables.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus 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 a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" rel="noopener noreferrer"...

    34 min

  2. AUG 26

    Move over malware: Why one teen is more worried about AI (re-air)

    Every age group uses the internet a little bit differently, and it turns out for at least one Gen Z teen in the Bay Area, the classic approach to cyberecurity—defending against viruses, ransomware, worms, and more—is the least of her concerns. Of far more importance is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Today, the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz revisits a prior episode from 2023 about what teenagers fear the most about going online. The conversation is a strong reminder that when America’s youngest generations experience online is far from the same experience that Millennials, Gen X’ers, and Baby Boomers had with their own introduction to the internet. Even stronger proof of this is found in recent research that Malwarebytes debuted this summer about how people in committed relationships share their locations, passwords, and devices with one another. As detailed in the larger report, “What’s mine is yours: How couples share an all-access pass to their digital lives,” Gen Z respondents were the most likely to say that they got a feeling of safety when sharing their locations with significant others. But a wrinkle appeared in that behavior, according to the same research: Gen Z was also the most likely to say that they only shared their locations because their partners forced them to do so. In our full conversation from last year, we speak with Nitya Sharma about how her “favorite app” to use with friends is “Find My” on iPhone, the dangers are of AI “sneak attacks,” and why she simply cannot be bothered about malware.  “I know that there’s a threat of sharing information with bad people and then abusing it, but I just don’t know what you would do with it. Show up to my house and try to kill me?” Tune in today to listen to the full conversation. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus 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.

    49 min

  3. AUG 12

    AI girlfriends want to know all about you. So might ChatGPT

    Somewhere out there is a romantic AI chatbot that wants to know everything about you. But in a revealing overlap, other AI tools—which are developed and popularized by far larger companies in technology—could crave the very same thing. For AI tools of any type, our data is key. In the nearly two years since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the public, the biggest names in technology have raced to compete. Meta announced Llama. Google revealed Gemini. And Microsoft debuted Copilot. All these AI features function in similar ways: After having been trained on mountains of text, videos, images, and more, these tools answer users’ questions in immediate and contextually relevant ways. Perhaps that means taking a popular recipe and making it vegetarian friendly. Or maybe that involves developing a workout routine for someone who is recovering from a new knee injury. Whatever the ask, the more data that an AI tool has already digested, the better it can deliver answers. Interestingly, romantic AI chatbots operate in almost the same way, as the more information that a user gives about themselves, the more intimate and personal the AI chatbot’s responses can appear. But where any part of our online world demands more data, questions around privacy arise. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Zoë MacDonald, content creator for Privacy Not Included at Mozilla about romantic AI tools and how users can protect their privacy from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots. When in doubt, MacDonald said, stick to a simple rule: “I would suggest that people don’t share their personal information with an AI chatbot.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus 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.

    41 min

  4. JUL 29

    SIEM is not storage, with Jess Dodson

    In the world of business cybersecurity, the powerful technology known as “Security Information and Event Management” is sometimes thwarted by the most unexpected actors—the very people setting it up. Security Information and Event Management—or SIEM—is a term used to describe data-collecting products that businesses rely on to make sense of everything going on inside their network, in the hopes of catching and stopping cyberattacks. SIEM systems can log events and information across an entire organization and its networks. When properly set up, SIEMs can collect activity data from work-issued devices, vital servers, and even the software that an organization rolls out to its workforce. The purpose of all this collection is to catch what might easily be missed. For instance, SIEMs can collect information about repeated login attempts occurring at 2:00 am from a set of login credentials that belong to an employee who doesn’t typically start their day until 8:00 am. SIEMs can also collect whether the login credentials of an employee with typically low access privileges are being used to attempt to log into security systems far beyond their job scope. SIEMs must also take in the data from an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tool, and they can hoover up nearly anything that a security team wants—from printer logs, to firewall logs, to individual uses of PowerShell. But just because a SIEM can collect something, doesn’t necessarily mean that it should. Log activity for an organization of 1,000 employees is tremendous, and the collection of frequent activity could bog down a SIEM with noise, slow down a security team with useless data, and rack up serious expenses for a company. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Microsoft cloud solution architect Jess Dodson about how companies and organizations can set up, manage, and maintain their SIEMs, along with what advertising pitfalls to avoid when doing their shopping. Plus, Dodson warns about one of the simplest mistakes in trying to save budget—setting up arbitrary data caps on collection that could leave an organization blind. “A small SMB organization … were trying to save costs, so they went and looked at what they were collecting and they found their biggest ingestion point,” Dodson said. “And what their biggest ingestion point was was their Windows security events, and then they looked further and looked for the event IDs that were costing them the most, and so they got rid of those.” Dodson continued: “Problem was the ones they got rid of were their Log On/Log Off events, which I think most people would agree is kind of important from a security perspective.”Tune in today to listen to the full conversation. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus 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...

    43 min

  5. JUL 15

    How an AI “artist” stole a woman’s face, with Ali Diamond

    Full-time software engineer and part-time Twitch streamer Ali Diamond is used to seeing herself on screen, probably because she’s the one who turns the camera on. But when Diamond received a Direct Message (DM) on Twitter earlier this year, she learned that her likeness had been recreated across a sample of AI-generated images, entirely without her consent. On the AI art sharing platform Civitai, Diamond discovered that a stranger had created an “AI image model” that was fashioned after her. The model was available for download so that, conceivably, other members of the community could generate their own images of Diamond—or, at least, the AI version of her. To show just what the AI model was capable of, its creator shared a few examples of what he’d made: There was AI Diamond standing what looked at a music festival, AI Diamond with her head tilted up and smiling, and AI Diamond wearing, what the real Diamond would later describe, as an “ugly ass ****ing hat.” AI image generation is seemingly lawless right now. Popular AI image generators, like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, and Midjourney, have faced valid criticisms from human artists that these generators are copying their labor to output derivative works, a sort of AI plagiarism. AI image moderation, on the other hand, has posed a problem not only for AI art communities, but for major social media networks, too, as anyone can seemingly create AI-generated images of someone else—without that person’s consent—and distribute those images online. It happened earlier this year when AI-generated, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift were seen by millions of people on Twitter before the company took those images down. In that instance, Swift had the support of countless fans who reported each post they found on Twitter that shared the images. But what happens when someone has to defend themselves against an AI model made of their likeness, without their consent? Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Ali Diamond about finding an AI model of herself, what the creator had to say about making the model, and what the privacy and security implications are for everyday people whose likenesses have been stolen against their will. For Diamond, the experience was unwelcome and new, as she’d never experimented using AI image generation on herself. “I’ve never put my face into any of those AI services. As someone who has a love of cybersecurity and an interest in it… you’re collecting faces to do what?”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus 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 a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" rel="noopener noreferrer"...

    36 min

  6. JUL 1

    Busted for book club? Why cops want to see what you’re reading, with Sarah Lamdan

    More than 20 years ago, a law that the United States would eventually use to justify the warrantless collection of Americans’ phone call records actually started out as a warning sign against an entirely different target: Libraries. Not two months after terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, Congress responded with the passage of The USA Patriot Act. Originally championed as a tool to fight terrorism, The Patriot Act, as introduced, allowed the FBI to request “any tangible things” from businesses, organizations, and people during investigations into alleged terrorist activity. Those “tangible things,” the law said, included “books, records, papers, documents, and other items.” Or, to put it a different way: things you’d find in a library and records of the things you’d check out from a library. The concern around this language was so strong that this section of the USA Patriot Act got a new moniker amongst the public: “The library provision.” The Patriot Act passed, and years later, the public was told that, all along, the US government wasn’t interested in library records. But those government assurances are old. What remains true is that libraries and librarians want to maintain the privacy of your records. And what also remains true is that the government looks anywhere it can for information to aid investigations into national security, terrorism, human trafficking, illegal immigration, and more. What’s changed, however, is that companies that libraries have relied on for published materials and collections—Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, Lexis Nexis—have reimagined themselves as big data companies. And they’ve lined up to provide newly collected data to the government, particularly to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. There are many layers to this data web, and libraries are seemingly stuck in the middle. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Sarah Lamdan, deputy director Office of Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association, about library privacy in the digital age, whether police are legitimately interested in what the public is reading, and how a small number of major publishing companies suddenly started aiding the work of government surveillance: “Because to me, these companies were information providers. These companies were library vendors. They’re companies that we work with because they published science journals and they published court reporters. I did not know them as surveillance companies.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus 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,...

    55 min

  7. JUN 17

    (Almost) everything you always wanted to know about cybersecurity, but were too afraid to ask, with Tjitske de Vries

    🎶 Ready to know what Malwarebytes knows? Ask us your questions and get some answers. What is a passphrase and what makes it—what’s the word? Strong? 🎶 Every day, countless readers, listeners, posters, and users ask us questions about some of the most commonly cited topics and terminology in cybersecurity. What are passkeys? Is it safer to use a website or an app? How can I stay safe from a ransomware attack? What is the dark web? And why can’t cybercriminals simply be caught and stopped? For some cybersecurity experts, these questions may sound too “basic”—easily researched online and not worth the time or patience to answer. But those experts would be wrong. In cybersecurity, so much of the work involves helping people take personal actions to stay safe online. That means it’s on cybersecurity companies and practitioners to provide clarity when the public is asking for it. it’s on us to provide clarity. Without this type of guidance, people are less secure, scammers are more successful, and clumsy, fixable mistakes are rarely addressed. This is why, this summer, Malwarebytes is working harder on meeting people where they are. For weeks, we’ve been collecting questions from our users about WiFi security, data privacy, app settings, device passcodes, and identity protection. All of these questions—no matter their level of understanding—are appreciated, as they help the team at Malwarebytes understand where to improve its communication. In cybersecurity, it is critical to create an environment where, for every single person seeking help, it’s safe to ask. It’s safe to ask what’s on their mind, safe to ask what confuses them, and safe to ask what they might even find embarrassing. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Malwarebytes Product Marketing Manager Tjitske de Vries about the modern rules around passwords, the difficulties of stopping criminals on the dark web, and why online scams hurt people far beyond their financial repercussions. “We had [an] 83-year-old man who was afraid to talk to his wife for three days because he had received… a sextortion scam… This is how they get people, and it’s horrible.”Tune in today You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus 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.

    39 min

  8. JUN 3

    800 arrests, 40 tons of drugs, and one backdoor, or what a phone startup gave the FBI, with Joseph Cox

    This is a story about how the FBI got everything it wanted. For decades, law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the world have lamented the availability of modern technology that allows suspected criminals to hide their communications from legal scrutiny. This long-standing debate has sometimes spilled into the public view, as it did in 2016, when the FBI demanded that Apple unlock an iPhone used during a terrorist attack in the California city of San Bernardino. Apple pushed back on the FBI’s request, arguing that the company could only retrieve data from the iPhone in question by writing new software with global consequences for security and privacy. “The only way to get information—at least currently, the only way we know,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook, “would be to write a piece of software that we view as sort of the equivalent of cancer.” The standoff held the public’s attention for months, until the FBI relied on a third party to crack into the device. But just a couple of years later, the FBI had obtained an even bigger backdoor into the communication channels of underground crime networks around the world, and they did it almost entirely off the radar. It all happened with the help of Anom, a budding company behind an allegedly “secure” phone that promised users a bevvy 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 speak 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.Joseph Cox, author, Dark Wire, and 404 Media cofounderTune in today. Cox’s investigation into Anom, presented in his book titled Dark Wire, publishes June 4. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus 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:...

    51 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 - 2024
  • Episodes
    116
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2020 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Lock and Code

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