Malicious Life Cybereason

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.

In June 2012, an anonymous hacker posted a list of 6.5 Million encrypted passwords belonging to LinkedIn users on a Russian hacker forum. It was soon discovered that these passwords were hashed using an outdated and vulnerable hashing algorithm - and were also unsalted. The lawsuits followed suit shortly… what is 'hashing' and 'salting', and can we trust big organizations to keep our secrets safe?