In this podcast Patrick Gray talks to Tom Uren about North Korea’s foray into state-sponsored ransomware targeting healthcare organisations. There’s reasons to be concerned — North Korea has pulled off some sophisticated hacks and the responses that maybe “work” against cybercriminals might not work at all against the DPRK. Tom thinks that the international community can do a lot more around sanctions that will help.

They also look at President Biden’s talk about privacy at his recent State of the Union speech. Does this mean that the US will finally get meaningful federal privacy and data security legislation? We hope so.

Finally, Tom and Patrick revisit the Chinese spy balloon saga. Even though a single balloon is not a huge threat, an uncontested balloon surveillance program would be and the US is responding strongly. It’s sanctioned six Chinese firms and the US is looking for balloons and finding them. Three more have been shot down since last week, but it looks like they are all just errant balloons rather than more surveillance craft.