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.

70. An unlikely teacher: What Wagner Group learned from ISIS

The podcast that tells true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. We take listeners into the world of cyber and intelligence without all the techie jargon. 
Every Tuesday and Friday, former NPR investigations correspondent Dina Temple-Raston and the team draw back the curtain on ransomware attacks, mysterious hackers, and the people who are trying to stop them.

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Infostealers commit close to the perfect crime. They sneak into your computer, grab your logins, passwords, and anything of value, and then delete themselves on the way out — victims don’t even know they’ve been robbed. We talk to the alleged co-founder of the Meduza infostealer and to some of the people intent on stopping this kind of attack.

138. Almost every cyber attack begins with a key ingredient: an Infostealer

As Russian forces zero in on Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, drones are among the weapons that are coming to the rescue. We went to a secret drone academy where Ukraine is training its drone operators to help fend off the Russians while Ukraine awaits new arms from the U.S.

137. Mic Drop: Inside a secret drone school in Ukraine

A hacktivist group called the Belarusian Cyber Partisans rocked Belarus when it hacked into government servers and released secret police files and government wiretaps – the kinds of hacks we’re used to seeing by nation-states. They represent the changing face of hacktivism. Some hacktivists are becoming more professional, while others are falling prey to darker forces.

136. Money and fame — not just  social change — are creating  a new kind of hacktivist.

Oren Etzioni used to be one of those AI optimists. Now, not so much. In fact, he’s so worried about AI-manipulated content, he created a non-profit, TrueMedia.org, to help ordinary people sort AI fact from fiction.

135. Mic Drop: Oren Etzioni has a way to help us sort fact from AI fiction

US adversaries are on a propaganda offensive around the world. Earlier this month, the Council on Foreign Relations in DC convened a discussion about the changing landscape of disinformation campaigns with James Rubin, special envoy at the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, Jon Bateman from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. CLICK HERE moderated the conversation, and here are some highlights.

70. An unlikely teacher: What Wagner Group learned from ISIS

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