Chasing The Most Hated Hacker In History - Joe Tidy

What's happening with Scattered Spider? Well, Scattered Spider is the name of this very loosely coordinated collective of hackers that are, we think, currently causing havoc around the UK and the US as well. So, I don't know if you've heard about the news of the M&S cyber attack and the co-op cyber attack. So, um there's a really big, if you're not in the UK, there's a really big uh chain of of supermarkets called M&S. very much loved, over a hundred years old, one of the pillars of the high street. And around Easter time, there was a cyber attack which started causing problems for M&S. And it just got worse and worse and worse for them because initially they said, "Actually, we we can't take orders on the internet, which for a massive company like M&S is really bad." Then we started seeing logistics problems, empty shelves in some stores. And then around the same time, there was a very similar attack on the co-op. Again, another big supermarket chain in the UK. They also do funeral services and insurance as well. Um, that attack wasn't as bad, but again, we're seeing disruption at stores, empty shelves, real chaos behind the scenes. And around the same time, we saw an attack on Harrods, obviously the uh the luxury retailer in London. Um, so everyone's wondering what on earth is going on. And things have got progressively worse. And then we hear the last couple of days there are attacks on US retailers as well. And everyone is pointing towards this really infamous group called Scattered Spider. And they're not a normal cyber crime gang. They haven't named themselves that they are uh you know not very organized. They come together on Discord and Telegram. A little bit like have you heard of Anonymous? Yes. Yeah. So they're a little bit like that but more out for cyber crime and money and infamy than sort of activism. So uh one company called Crowd Strike started looking at this activity coming from this sort of corner of the the cyber crime ecosystem and they said who are these people? They're doing the same kind of tricks to get into into places. So they nicknamed them scattered spider. Spider is the name that CrowdStrike gives cyber crime groups and scattered is is what they um the term they give for you know because they're loose and they're all over the place. And actually I'm looking right now at the Crowd Strike Scattered Spider figurine. Um it's very controversial actually that they've done this but here you go. So this is the So they sell these on their merch website and like I say quite controversial actually because it kind of glamorizes these these guys and there are some people who would who would say we shouldn't really glamorize cyber criminals because um the the type of individuals that we think scattered spider are very young probably teenagers in the US and UK they will love the attention of having their own figurine. Do you think that social media platforms like Twitter have sort of changed what hackers motivations are from just exploration or exploitation to now fame, cloud chasing, stuff like that? Absolutely. Yeah. When when I wrote this book, my publisher on on the first draft, my publisher said, "Yeah, that's all great, but can you answer some questions as to how this has happened and why this has happened?" And they really kind of challenged me. and I work for the BBC. So, normally, you know, we got to be very careful about giving opinions and and putting our necks on the line in terms of theories about things. But it was quite good cuz I landed on this. There are two kind of factors which I think have turned teenage hackers from largely benevolent groups of people that are out to, you know, they're out to to make a name for themselves, but they're also out to make the internet a safer place to where we are now where we've got cyber crime gangs, teenage gangs that are causing mayhem and trying to make money. And I think Twitter is a very that you could kind of see at that point when Twitter becomes mainstream this shift starting to take place because of course before Twitter social networks were about being social with your network whereas Twitter sort of invented the idea of followers and retweets and likes and you know clout online and that's when we started seeing in 2011 when Twitter was really on the ascendancy we saw Lulc the first of this conveyor belt of teenage cyber crime gangs Yeah, there's no one flexing their recent uh ransomware exploitation on their personal Facebook account. That wouldn't work. But on Twitter, that would be great. Yeah, absolutely. And and we know from interviews with arrested hackers and convicted hackers, they loved it. They loved the attention back then. And I think where we are now is slightly different because I think what we're seeing is they have come off Twitter or X, whatever they're calling it. Um, and now it's more in the kind of insular communities, but they're still they're still after that online clout and that that infamy. It's just they're in their own channels in Telegram and Discord. I was going to say, where do these people live? Yeah, Telegram and Discord. Yeah. So, if we're talking about Scattered Spider, which very much formed the last part of my book because I talk about the kind of this gradual shift to where we are now, but Scattered Spider, they're part of this larger collective known as the Comm, the community, which is a group of thousands of online delinquents, really, largely boys, obviously, it always is. And they're causing mayhem and in some cases doing some really nasty stuff like sextortion. Do you know what sextorion is? No. So, sextortion is this horrible sort of criminal harassment campaign where you trick someone into sending you nudes. So, I would I might befriend someone on the internet and and strike up a relationship, a romantic relationship, send them some nudes that they think are of me, but I'm I'm a criminal. I'm a I'm a man, not not not the the young girl they think I was. Convince them into sending me nudes. and then you start extorting them saying if you don't pay me then I'm going to release all these pictures. So we see that kind of activity in the com and we see some really nasty stuff some other stuff like um there's some uh it's really nasty but but like cut signs. Have you heard of cut signs? No. So like you know a fan sign where if you're a big fan of someone you will hold a sign up saying I love them or you hold their name or their band name. A cut sign is like that, but you literally cut into your own skin the names of hackers, the names of hackers that are extorting you or or Wow. So, the hackers are saying that you need to show me that you've selfharmed my name into your arm. Yeah. To show devotion or to make them feel powerful. There's a excuse me there's a a bit in my book where we we there's a gang called Lizard Squad that was around in 20145 and they destroyed someone's online life. They hacked all of this kid's accounts and in order to get them back he had to make a cut sign and say Lizard Squad made me do this. So although people are really shocked about what we're seeing in the com now this kind of activity has been around for a while. We know it's there. We've got the history for it. So, Scattered Spider are part of this larger online cyber crime nastiness. They're a very kind of small niche of this much larger group of largely unskilled cyber people. You wouldn't even call them cyber criminals, but then there are they come together with a little bit of skill and a lot of bulls and take on these big hacking campaigns. It seems I don't know. I I I have to assume that although M&S is a 100-y old institution, I would like to think that their cyber security isn't 100 years old. How if you've got to have someone with talent, I I assume like how how do they get into a system of any kind? Is this cyber hacking or is this social engineering or is this some combination of the two? It's yeah, it's a combination of the two. I think the initial entry is usually through social engineering. But to be honest with you, I mean, a lot of hacking is that to get into a system, it's not really like in the movies where you kind of hunch over a laptop typing code furiously to get in. Normally, it starts with like an email that you can trick someone into downloading an attachment or you call up. This is this is what we think happened with the the latest um attacks is that they call up the IT help desk and they pretend to be a member of staff and they say you know I've forgot my password can you let me in please and it sounds so stupid but it works and then what that what often happens is once they are in that's when you would argue the hacking starts that's when they find a vulnerability that allows them to spread themselves throughout the network deploy ransomware which is this type of malicious software that scramles a company or a victim's computer and systems and servers, makes that data completely unreadable, useless, brings computers to their knees, and that is where they send the the ransom note saying, "If you want the key, pay us in Bitcoin certain amount, and we'll give it back to you." And ransomware is by by far the number one problem in cyber right now. Right? So, this is uh social engineering. pretend to be Julie from the front [ __ ] front from reception who's locked herself out. Find the person who is sufficiently gullible or doesn't stick to protocol and actually allows you in in some ways. Then you've got access to some internet type system that means that you can access other bits maybe some more sort of spreading from there. I would imagine maybe you as that person emails someone else an attachment which gets you more access to a higher admin level your way up criminal. Well, look, what can I say? I'm I am a young British man. Um, but no, I I mean, my password manager is a [ __ ] mess, so I I would be bad at that. It's good that you got one. Yes, you're way you're way step ahead of most people if you've got a password manager. I had Who was the FBI's most wanted guy? That hacker for a while. [ __ ] Kevin Mitnik. No. Uh maybe I he was on the show probably about three years ago or so and you know he'd gone through all of this stuff that he done. He broken himself out of jail twice and all of this [ __ ] And I got to the end of it and I was like, "Hey man, I'm I'm [ __ ] terrified. Like what what what do I do?" And he's like, "Dude, just use a use a password manager." Like the the TLDDR 9010 solution is just get a password manager and use that. So uh someone once said to me there are there are buckets of how difficult you are to hack and hackers will always go for the easiest bucket. Who can I hack? Who uses the same passwords across multiple accounts? Who uses weak passwords? If you take yourself out of that easy bucket into the slightly harder bucket massively reduce your chance of getting hacked. Yeah. Why? Like even if you're the target but you're a difficult target, there's so many more easy targets. [ __ ] it. We might as well go for them. Okay. So um ransomware. What? This is This can just totally debilitate computer systems companies. If M&S can't get eggs on the shelves, it seems it's pretty comprehensive. Yeah, absolutely. Ransomware completely cripples an an organization. It's like going back to medieval times. Your pen and paper. You really are. And sometimes we've had situations where ransomware has hit hospitals, for example, and they can't even function in any way you'd imagine. like some of the systems, some of the scanning systems they use in hospitals, for example, they've been infected by ransomware, so they're down as well. So yeah, I I would not want to be in an organization where they've been hit with ransomware. M&S is going through a tough time. I wonder whether or more likely when we will see the first uh vehicle hack, autonomous driving vehicles. I was in a I drove from Palm Springs to Newport Beach last week. Very nice. And I was in a It was lovely. I mean, it was way too hot in Palm Springs, but And I was in a a rented Nissan Rogue, a new one. And it had normal run-of-the-mill medium level trim Nissan Rogue. And it had this radar guided cruise control and lane assist that was keeping in lanes and would if you just knocked the indicator on would allow you to change. I was like this is assisted autonomous driving in a [ __ ] Nissan Rogue, right? Old school petrol 2 L chug chug chug American car like Japanese American car in America. And uh I just remember thinking I've been in uh Whimo. Whimo is now available on Uber here in Austin. Mhm. And uh I thought, "Holy [ __ ] like if these ransomware attacks, you need as as the level of kinetic importance to people's lives increases, the level of security around those systems needs to increase in I have to assume you've thought about this, your autonomous driving and and the potential risks to cyber security." Yeah. Yeah. We we haven't seen anything like you're talking about, but I mean, yeah, it just it does seem almost inevitable that someone will find a way to cause havoc with autonomous driving. It it's uh it's a bleak thought. But of course, the companies that that are behind these these cars, they know that too. And you hope and and you pray that they are pretty much on top of security. Christ, we got to we've got to the point of hope and prayer as a forget your password manager. just get on your knees and you know have you read a book called Robo Apocalypse? No. It's it's so good. Spielberg brought the rights to it a few years ago. He never actually did anything with them, but it would make and is going to make an awesome movie if they ever make it one day. So, in that in that book, it's about how AI kills us all. And the one of the ways that um they initially get that first kind of like 50% of humanity dead is they take over the driverless cars. And the description of what can happen is it's always it's always stuck with me. But not to scare anyone, that's not going to happen. It's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine. Okay. They are super duper cyber secure. I'm sure. Yeah. Well, yeah. Up until up until you're reporting on it for BBC News, mate, and then and then I'm going to ring in. I'm going to say Joe said to me from a from a I'm locked inside of my Tesla in which I don't yet own in Austin, Texas. People from outside are trying to molotov cocktail it. people from inside are trying to hack it. I'm [ __ ] Um, okay. So, on that point, there was there was very recently, only like 3 weeks ago, some tech CEO in some American uh company uh city. I can't remember which one. It was a self-driving city. So, whatever, maybe San Fran or something, something like that. He was stuck in one of these cars and it just kept going around the um the car park and he couldn't get it to stop. And it was funny, but also like hm bit worrying. I've got, look, I you're the guy for me to give this take to. I've said this before, but I have switched off uh the autonomous toggle on Uber in Austin. So, you just it's on on the back end of the settings. Do you want to be more likely to be matched with an autonomous vehicle? And I've said no. Reason being, every time that there is a vehicle that's 10 minutes away, that's a a Whimo, it takes 20 minutes to get to me every single time. And every single time that we do the journey, they say it's going to take 15 minutes for me to get home from the east side of town or whatever. And it always takes nearly double. And I realized why. And it's because Whimos outwardly are so obvious. They're these big like bulbous clunky things, lidar on top and all, you know, additional Jaguar [ __ ] And it's white, right? So it really stands out. I think there's two reasons why humans behave on the road. One is because of fear of retribution, especially in America with a very heavily armed uh populace. Uh and the second one is guilt at sort of uh inconveniencing somebody else. So safety and and in human [ __ ] decency, I suppose the two. The problem is when you see a Whimo, there's no one in the driver's seat and you can't see if there's anybody in the back. So they just get cucked at every single junction. No one lets them out. Everybody's like, "Pedestrians will just I I will too when I go on a walk around Austin. I'll just happily walk out." I'm like, "H, it's 100 feet away. It's going to 30 m. It'll slow down. It'll be fine." You wouldn't do that if there was a human driving the car. So, it means that until you can program in retributive tailgating and beeping the horn and flashing the lights from the Whimo to somebody else or until you end up with more than 50% of the cars on the road being autonomous, you don't have this level of coordinate. It's an arms race, right? It's an arms It's an arms race of uh uh like being mean as drivers. And unfortunately, the Whimo has come without any ammunition. Uh Tesla self-driving people got a hold of this take online and said that that's different because uh Tesla self-driving is trained on real drivers. So you do have more natural merging sort of more aggressive driving styles are built in because competent drivers are the drivers that this has been built on. Whereas Tesla focused on software, way more focused on hardware. And yeah, with Whimo, it's just it's like being in the back of the car with your mom all the time. Is that Tesla thing true? Have you have you done a comparison? No, I've never been in a Tesla that's got full self-driving. Uh, but I also know that the Tesla full self-driving community online is um like very evangelist. It's like oddly oddly militant. Uh, so I don't know. Well, I guess I'll wait and see until I get into one. But yeah, that's my that's my current working thesis on autonomous vehicles. I thought you were going to say you don't do that because of like the safety concerns, but actually yeah, it's I also thought you were going to say they're slow because they're slow and like they're very safe, aren't they? But no, I I I hadn't appreciated there other other people on the road intense for me. Going back to the youth, these youths online, I think I've heard you say that today's youth hacking culture has tipped from chaotic good into chaotic evil, apart from clout. Is there anything else that's triggered some moral decline in this scene? Yeah, so we mentioned earlier about the rise of Twitter. I would put that very much as one of the reasons we've seen this shift. I would also say the rise of Bitcoin as well because if you think about when Bitcoin started becoming valuable and useful as a store of value or as something you could buy things with sort of 2011 12 13 that's when we saw this shift and certainly looking at some of the people I do in my book they go from not even thinking about money just doing it for the for the lulls um and for the clout to thinking hang on a minute I can make some money here and as soon as you start in introducing Bitcoin coin into the lives of young teenage boys, you're looking at trouble. So without cryptocurrency, would this be even harder again? Yeah. I think without cryptocurrency, a lot of cyber crime that happens these days would be a lot harder because the great thing about crypto, of course, if you're a cyber criminal, is that I can steal crypto or I can uh extort crypto from someone and then it goes to my wallet and people don't know know who I am. No banks can stop that. And if I can find a way and it's becoming harder now, but if I can find a way to launder that Bitcoin, I can get it out of the system, turn it into money I can use, happy days. if we without Bitcoin, you get things like uh bank card fraud, that kind of thing. And we did see that in in some of the early days of of hacking. But of course, that's easy to trace and track and stop if you're a bank. And one of the guys in the in the book, the main hacker that we follow who started as a as a teenage cyber criminal, ended up becoming one of the most wanted criminals in the world. He started by carding which is a where you take credit cards and you use the numbers and the details to spend uh without the owner knowing and the banks usually you know reimburse the owner and and what's interesting about that is they when they first arrest him and they're going through all the bank receipts they work out he spent about €33,000 which you'd think like that's quite a lot of money for I think he was like 15 16 and when you look at the things he's spending the money on. It's of course what you would do. We've both been 14, 15 year old boys. It's PlayStation games. It's the latest phone. It's Netflix subscription. He even went and bought um some land. He bought like a little bit of land. He could call himself a lord like his Highland titles. And you know that that's what you would do if you had unlimited money. But of course, the problem with that is when you get arrested, it's all there and the police have got it all and you know, it's very hard to hide from. Whereas cryptocurrency makes that way easier. The other way that you could do it, I'm not giving anyone any ideas because this is how some cyber criminals work, is through gift cards. So you don't say to someone, "Send me $200 in a ransom," for example. You say, "Send me $200 worth of gift cards." And then you can sell those online for $190. So then you get, you know, you have to shave a little bit off each time. Oh, okay. That's interesting. But they're untraceable. So Well, I you've said uh teenage hackers are sort of a kind of digital cartel. Should we be thinking about them more like organized crime than bored kids in bedrooms? What's the tension there? Well, I think um modern ransomware groups, for example, these really really well-run, highly organized um moneyoriented gangs like I don't know uh evil core or lockbit, there's loads of them. Um Conti was another one. They are like modern cartels. They are run with, you know, there's a there's someone who develops the malware. There's someone that sends out the fishing emails. There's someone that does the extortion negotiations. There's 247 customer service on the darknet websites for these things. But the teenage hacking gangs, they are slightly different. They're becoming more organized now with the likes of Scattered Spider, but it is a different type of culture. It's more of a hacking culture than a than a hacking organization. I wouldn't necessarily put them in the same bracket, but certainly if you look at the um the rise of the teenage hacking gangs, every single step of the way, they've been under underestimated. There's a there's a researcher called Allison Nixon who is she features quite a lot in my research and um she came up with this new phrase for these types of gangs. She calls them NPTs which stands for noob persistent threats. So they're newbies, they're noobs, but it's play it's a play on this very famous and wellused term APS which stands for advanced persistent threat. So, she's sort of poking fun at them, but she says, you know, they're not advanced, but they are persistent and they are a threat and we should take them seriously. And to be honest, I've been doing this job quite a long time now and and we don't we don't take them seriously. Every time there's a a case like we're seeing right now in the UK, people are shocked. How can this be done by teenagers from their bedrooms? Well, we know from history that this is how they work. They've just rolled the dice enough times. They just keep on going. Yeah. And also they they don't really care about getting caught. This is the other thing about these these teenage gangs unlike the cyber crime gangs that are based in Russia or places where you know law enforcement in the West can't really get them. Um these guys are very grabbable. They're very getable. In the last about year and a half, there's been six arrests of of teenagers and sort of early 20s hackers that are thought to be from the scattered spider um culture or community because they're in the UK and the US and they don't they don't protect themselves very well. They don't actually disguise their voices when they call up IT desks pretending to be someone else. Stuff like that, you know, like it's called operational security. And these groups, these NPTs are terrible at it because they don't seem to care. What are the patterns or dynamics about how young kids get pulled into these communities online? What's the typical trajectory of one of these people? It's nearly always the same. It's every single hacker I've ever met has had the same pathway. It's computer games. So Minecraft or Runescape or whatever it is, I probably Fortnite these days, probably still Minecraft. It's so popular. So you you get into gaming and you play with your mates and then you start wanting to be better. So you buy some uh extra bits for your character or you find some shortcuts, some cheats. Then you find yourself on a hacking forum and you find ways to become better at the game and cheat the game. Then you find yourself sort of drawn away from the game and drawn towards more fun ways to have fun on the internet, i.e. hacking. And it always starts off as just a bit of fun. See? Well, what happens if I type that in there? What happens if I go into this server over here? Oh, where am I? This is exciting. And then it's, oh, quick, you escape. Oh, that was that was wrong. I shouldn't have been there. And then it's, hang on a minute. What else can I do? And then it goes on from there. And then as soon as you start bringing money into it, Bitcoin, then it can quite quickly become serious cyber crime. And that's that is the path that I have personally seen speaking to all the hackers I've interviewed over the years. But also the NCAA, the National Crime Agency, in 2015 they did a kind of massive research of all the convicted cyber criminals and it was exactly the same. It was step one gaming, step two gaming cheats all the way down until serious cyber crime. So it is a cliche but it's true. Where are most of these people? You mentioned Russia. I always when I think hacking group I just think oh it's the what is it IRA or whatever in in Russia or some oh G gu GU sorry whatever there's loads of them loads of acronyms uh what is it what where where are all of these you mentioned these two are notable or at least scattered spiders notable because they're primarily English speakaking in the US and the UK but that that's a rarity I guess it is. Yeah. Um, that's probably why they're so interesting as well because we're like, well, hang on a minute. They could be upstairs in in in in the bedroom. Um, so if you're looking at the the kind of if we take the whole cyber crime ecosystem, these are the people that are out to make money, defrauding, stealing money, extortion, ransomware, all that kind of stuff. They're they could be anywhere. But the biggest gangs are organized and run, we think, from Russia, Eastern Europe. And we know this because there are lots of lots of kind of like hints that you get. So, for example, I spoke to a guy who deals with um ransomware negotiations. And I said, "How how can you be so sure that they're in Russia?" And he said, "Well, they speak and they plan in Russian on Russian forums. They um work in Moscow hours and they don't ever answer you on um public holidays in Russia. So, you know, there's a few hints there. Um but of course, the actual affiliates, the people that are carrying out the everyday attacks, we don't know where they are. They could be anywhere. And there was an very famous um arrest of a an IT expert in Canada who was, you know, an upstanding citizen of the Canadian IT scene. and he was working for a Russian cyber crime gang uh called Net Walker. Um and I actually on that one it was really interesting because someone uh one of my contacts sent me the negotiation portal for when Net Walker was extorting this university and it was during the pandemic and I was over the course of about 3 weeks I watched this negotiation this extortion take place. What what's what what do you mean by the portal? Like a chat like a private chat type thing? Yeah. So, if you um if you get hit with ransomware, you'll have on your screen on your computer, it will pop up saying, "Hey, you've been hit by ransomware. Go to this darknet website um which is like a jumble of numbers and letters. Onunion um and we can start the start the the negotiation." They always it's really really kind of like irritating and frustrating, but they always like frame themselves as um we are here to help. Follow this link, we will help you, you know, we we'll get you through this. And of course they're the they're the bastards who are trying to um but it was fascinating watching this Net Walker ransomware group extort San Francisco. Um I think it was it was uh the Southern California University or something and they were like this is during the pandemic. We are working on a vaccine please we haven't got any money leave us alone. And they're like how much you got? And they're like yeah know $750,000 that's nothing. I can't even buy McDonald's with that. send more. And it ended up they paid uh I think it was $1.2 million to these guys. Anyway, so he turned out to be in in in Canada. Um but most we think if you look at the arrests, they could be anywhere, but they are normally based in Russia. Then you've got um North Korea. They are very very uh big on the on the hacking scene. But what's really interesting about North Korea is they're the only country that that we know of in the world that as well as doing cyber spying, which we all do. Every country does it. UK and US all over it. But North Korea does that. Plus, they steal cryptocurrency and they are very very good at it. They just stole oh my what was it now? I think it was like I can't even remember. It was it was it was like 1.5 billion. The country, the country of North Korea or the country of North Korea has a cyber team that they've always denied this of course, but they have a cyber team that is dedicated to making money for the regime by hacking. They used to do banks, but now they do cryptocurrency companies, but they're unusual. Most countries don't have that. Most countries just have their cyber spies, and they're out to project power, steal secrets. In some cases, they'll be used in military. So Russia we know has hacked against Ukraine in in the war for example. Um but most cyber crime is done by criminals um who could be anywhere but are yeah largely kind of organized in Russia and Eastern Europe. Why is that area of the world such a hot bed? Have they got lacks internal scrutiny from the law enforcement? Is it sort of side eye allowed by the state to try and [ __ ] up everybody else? What's going on? Well, yes. So, there's this golden rule if you're a Russian cyber criminal, which is you do not hack Russia or former Soviet states. It's like a kind of unwritten rule. If you do, you get in lots and lots of trouble. And there was a a cyber crime gang called Reval or R Evil. And um they were they were allowed to kind of just run a muk for years and years hacking left, right, and center western companies causing huge amounts of problems. Um but then so the story goes they accidentally hacked Russia and then suddenly there was some arrests. Uh so yeah there is that kind of that kind of um culture in Russia. Obviously the Russian government denies this every single time it comes up. Um there was this uh this summit between Biden and Putin. Um when was that now? 2021 I think. It came off the back of some absolutely horrendous ransomware attacks. One of which was on against colonial pipeline which is a really important part of the US um petrol and oil uh infrastructure and it meant that there was shortages at pumps and panic buying and there was no fuel going up and down the east coast. So this conversation between Biden and Putin according to him was like you've got to stop your people hacking. This is no good. And Putin was like it's not us we get hacked too. But the evidence really is not really there for that. M how close are we to seeing cyber attacks being treated as acts of war? Oh, well there's this Yeah, there's this thing called I think it's article 5 in NATO which means that when you get attacked and it's a confirmed attack then everyone else is you know piles in um and it's one of the founding you know parts of NATO one of the tenets and some people have said what we've seen in um in Ukraine uh sorry in with the attacks against Colonial Pipeline and others is oh could this be article 5 There was another attack on US government solar winds attack thought to be from Russia. People are saying maybe that crosses the threshold. But I think people are very very scared to bring cyber in the same anywhere near the same kind of um seriousness as a as a missile when in fact sometimes the damage can be you know can be just as bad. What was that one that tried to get? Was it Iranian nuclear reactors and it waited around the stuckset? Can you tell me the story behind that? Oh, just like unbelievable. You have to take your hats off to them. So stuckset was a an attack by they've never admitted it but Israel and the US against Iran and they were very worried about the uranium enrichment helping to create nuclear weapons for Iran. So according to the the story the the uh the president at the time said right well what can we do to slow them down and someone said let's let's hack them and the stuckset virus was so specifically and perfectly targeted that it only infected that certain system and I think they spread it through USB sticks or something. They dropped them in the car park. Absolutely brilliant. Um it's dumb but it works. That's what they always say in cyber. It sounds dumb, but if it works, it's not dumb. Um, and it managed to get inside the system of this very specific machinery that they were using in the Natance um, refinery and it sped up the refinery um, centrifuges so fast that it caused apparently, we don't know because obviously Iran would never admit it, but we think it caused physical damage and potentially broke some of those centrifuges and slowed them down. We don't know how much it slowed them down. We don't know how much damage was done, but it's largely been, you know, hailed as one of the most impressive cyber attacks of all time, didn't it? It was infected some insane percentage of computers around the world as well. Like loads and loads of machines had it, but it just it didn't do anything. It was just is this is this computer attached to an Iranian nuclear facility? No. All right, just chill out. Nothing for you to do. May maybe you'll get maybe you'll meet someone in future that is and it just did that over and over again. That's it. And it it's really targeted really precise and there have been cases where a country is blamed for releasing something like that. You're you know an uncontrollable worm that's got out of hand. So there's this one called not Petra which was 2017 17 I think it was and um it was well again Russia would uh Russia would never admit this but it was uh thought to be from Russia against Ukraine and they hacked into a really popular accountant accountancy sort of software that the Ukrainians used and it was a worm that spread uncontrollably and it was a fake ransomware. So normally the thing comes up and it says pay this and you get your your files back. But with not Petia it was it was a shredder. It was fake. Even if you paid you wouldn't get you wouldn't get anything back. And that spread from Ukraine all over the world. Hundreds of countries affected by this. And it caused they think the most damage of any hack ever. I can't remember the figure now but it was I know one company lost a billion. MK, the the logistics company, they were back to pen and paper. So, they had ships coming into harbors. They didn't even know what was on the ships. They didn't know how to unload it, where it was going. Absolute carnage. And it cost them well over a billion. I can't remember the details of that. This is like the Wuhan Institute of Veriology equivalent of a a online worm. Exactly. And you can't stop it. The only way to stop it is to inoculate all the computers so that if you get it, they don't get ill. It's like a vaccine around the world. Yeah. What are the ways that cyber security firms find these sorts of hackers? Like what is it? I know TTP's sort of part of this, but I don't know. I if you're good if you're good enough to construct a worm that does ransomware and scrambles and does all the rest of it, I have to assume that you're good enough to be able to hide your tracks. So, it's yeah, how how do the security companies track down who caused it? Well, a lot of it is is follow the money because if you can follow the trail of of of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, then you you might be able to get them. But thinking about um about that, there's there's a there's a a part in my book where Julius Kamaki, this guy that we follow all the way through, he gets caught. One of the ways that they find out it's him, is because he does the biggest self own in cyber crime history, an absolute monster of a blunder. Someone in the book called Anti Kuritu, who's a cyber expert, he says that um everyone thinks that cyber criminals are masterminds when they're carrying out the hacks, but they're not masterminds at covering their tracks. They often get a bit lazy or a bit um you know, arrogant about that part of it because operational security is really really hard. So um this guy Kamaki, he starts sending out um he's got all these the the patient data of psychotherapy uh patients all over Finland, 33,000 people. He's managed to steal all the notes from the from the therapists. So he starts extorting the company by releasing every day 100 new records. Um and yeah, this is the kind of stuff that you do not want on the internet. like this the stuff you say to your therapist is the most sensitive information probably that you could ever hope that you know stays safe. So day one 100 records day two this is on the darknet. Day two another 100 records. Day three another 100 records. But then he says to make it easier for all the people on the forum here's a bulk download so you can download all 300 patient data notes um instead of having to do one after the other. Um, then he goes to bed. Uh, and then what he doesn't realize is he's accidentally uploaded the entire database of 33,000 patients. So, he's given away all his bargaining chips, but also he's accidentally uploaded his entire home directory for his computer. So, it's like, for example, I want to send you an email. I accidentally send all the emails in my inbox and all the attachments and every folder on my desktop as well. Wow. So the police found this in the morning and they obviously downloaded it as quick as they could. He woke up and he realized that what he'd done and he starts deleting files from the server. The police find an IP address which is a internet protocol which is like tells you where roughly where the physical computer is. They find an IP address in that home directory uh you know accidental dump for a computer server a cloud server company which is only half an hour away from them in Helsinki. So, there's this race against Ransom Man, that's what he's called, deleting everything as he's going because they've got this massive server that could potentially give them all the clues they need. They get to the uh the server farm, pull out the internet cable, severing Ransom Man from his server. I put it like this. It's if you imagine a drug dealer, the cops are arriving, he's trying to flush all the cocaine, but then suddenly, I don't know, they cut off the water or something. Exactly. Something like that. So he Yeah. He's nothing he can do. So then um they had this they had this massive server full of all the evidence they needed to track him down. It was a little bit harder than that. Um he did he did try and use aliases and that kind of thing, but there was just so much there on that server that led them back to him and that's what led to ultimately led to his conviction. So it's that kind of thing, those mistakes that that can be made. It's Russell Brick@gmail.com. Yes. That kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you're going to start the biggest online drug selling network in human history, make sure that your old forum posts aren't linked to your name atgmail.com. But that's a really good example, isn't it, of how someone's online presence can start, you know, innocently enough. You're building something. You're you're a software developer. You're just asking for advice. You don't know that in five years time you're a massive mastermind. You got to future proof yourself. Be careful what be careful what Runescape username you use in 2012 because God knows where you're going to end up 14 years later. Yeah. Okay. So, we're giving advice now to I'm I'm I'm I uh I welcome our internet overlords. I I my operational security is horrible. Uh okay. So, another hack that I knew about, one of the most famous ones, uh, the Christmas hack of computer games, and it seems like this sort of kicks off a lot of the story that you've been following. So, what what first drew you to this? What what's the story behind Lizard Squad? Give me the give me the overview. Yeah. So, um, 2014, Christmas time, there was a ginormous DOS attack, which is a very low-level form of hacking. It's like I liken it to when Glastonbury tickets go on sale, everyone lands on the website and and accidentally the website crashes. It's like that really in cyber crime. If you get enough traffic into a server or a website, you can bring it down. So the Lizard Squad were part of this, as I said earlier, this conveyor belt of these teen hacking gangs, these NPTs that emerged in 2010s, and they decided they were going to go after not just Xbox Live, but PlayStation Network as well. And I don't I still don't really know how they did it, but they managed to bring these services down for hours and hours on what was, you know, the busiest time of year, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day. So that was uh coincidentally like that was the first story I ever covered. And I went into the Sky I used to work for Sky News and I walked into the Sky News um newsroom. I think it was like very early on Boxing Day or the day after Boxing Day. And they said to me, "Have you heard about this massive hack these kids have done?" I was like, "What are you talking about?" No. So then I looked into it and I couldn't believe the power that that these kids could wield. I I found it absolutely fascinating. So my news editor came over to me and he said, "Um Riley's called who's the head of Sky News. He says he wants a lizard on air tonight." So, I was like, "Right, how on earth am I going to get one of these anonymous Lizard Squad hackers to do a TV interview in, you know, 6 hours, 7 hours, whatever it was." So, anyway, I managed to find one and it turned out to be um this kid who was, I think he was 16 at the time, 17, uh calling himself Ryan. And we did an interview and it was uh Hang on, you jumped ahead. How did you find him? Oh, just like going after person who says they're involved and then it turns out they're not, then another person, then another. I don't even know. I couldn't tell you how I got to him, but in I went through I know one of the people I went through was this guy called Vinnie who was part of Lizard Squad, kind of like an adjacent member. He didn't he said he didn't really do anything for them and I believe him and he was cleared of all wrongdoing. Um, and he actually lived in Twickenham, which was like three miles away from the gang newsroom. So, um, so he he promised he would get me this this this kid, Ryan, who was a part of the the gang that took out these these gaming services. So, anyway, I did this interview with, um, with Ryan, who it turned out was Julius Kamaki. Uh, that's one of the aliases he used, was Ryan. Um, and I I that kind of really sparked off in my mind this this fascination I've had ever since with cyber crime. Um, and I've tried to keep tabs on on on Ryan or Julius ever since. But then the trail ran cold because he disappeared for a while. So then when he pops up as potentially the person behind this ginormous hack in Finland on the the psychotherapy centers called Vastamo, I thought, "Wow, he has had a career." And my money, Kamaki is the most hated hacker in history. Not just because of the Vastamo hack and and the the PlayStation and uh and Xbox One, but also there are lots of times in that that sort of 10 12 year cyber crime career where he has done some really hateful nasty stuff to not only you know people that he wanted to go after but fellow hackers as well. What leg? So, there was a Sony um executive called John Smemedley who um fought back a bit on Twitter against Lizard Squad. He was like he wouldn't he was used to be a prolific tweeter and he he sort of fired back some tweets against these kids and they didn't like it. So, they went after him pretty badly. And um one of the things that Kamaki did was he found out that John Smmedley was flying from oh I think it was from Phoenix to Houston or somewhere. I can't remember where it was. Um and he convinced the airline that there was a bomb on Jordan Smmedley's uh flight and it had to get escorted by fighter jet to a different airport where he was um he was questioned at gunpoint and all sorts stuff like that. Um and there there is a litany of situations uh and incidents where Kamaki has done some really horrible things. What he said about um what he's done to other hackers as well. What's in that list? Well, there's a there was a kid called Blair Straater who um I spoke to in the book and Kamaki led probably a three-year harassment campaign against him. Have you heard of swatting? Not swatting. Yes. Yes. where you pretend you you call up the police and you say there's a kill someone or whatever. Yeah. Um and and the SWAT team arrive and and it's really dangerous and and people have died. Um so they would do that all day, all night for months against Blair Straighter. They they've also got this weird thing which is it's still a thing now. I don't really understand it, but it's um when you get doxed your documents come online. So that means that everyone knows where you live, your real name, all that stuff. So for a hacker, that's a pretty bad situation to be in if you're doxed cuz you, you know, the whole point of it is you're anonymous and you're powerful and you're, you know, you can disappear at any moment. So with Blair, they doxed him and then Kamaki and others would send him pizzas, Chinese takeaways, all these kind of deliveries. At one stage, a lorry load of sand and gravel arrived at his house. Personally, like if a free pizza turned up at my house, I'd be happy about it. But when you talk to people who have been victims of this for months, it becomes horrible because you are on edge the whole time and the delivery drivers want paying if you haven't paid them and they get annoyed with you. So, you know, that kind of harassment is not nice. There's a there was an article written by another journalist called Kevin Roose who um interviewed the Straighter family around this time when it was really bad. And the article was called Haunted by Hackers. And I've always thought that's such a good headline because for Blair Straater and his family, that's what it was like. [Music] Yeah. It's ruthless, man. Okay. So, you sit down with this guy. You don't know. I mean, this is what, 2014? 2014. Yeah. Yeah. The first time you do it. Um, what stuck with you from that first interview? Just just complete lack of remorse, caring, um, smirking throughout the entire interview. a lot of honesty. He didn't sort of make up uh sort of So, he didn't hide his face. No, not at all. Not at all. No. No. He he turned up uh to the Sky News interview on on Skype fully. Uh didn't disguise his voice, his face. Didn't didn't give a damn. Surely that's a bad idea. This is what I'm saying. OBSE is terrible. These NP that's that see but surely that's something different. That to me seems like operational security is covering your tracks. That seems more like a purposeful middle finger. Absolutely. Oh yeah. And don't and don't forget Well, you don't know this and I don't know how far you got in the book, but at this point Kamaki was already under investigation. He'd already been arrested. He was on bail. So So you got to factor that in. Wow. But but but you know Kibamaki and there's a few others like him in the last kind of 1015 years. They're a different breed. So you've got the MPTs who don't care. They're out to cause chaos, get some money, bit of infamy. Then you've got the kind of Allison Nixon, the researcher I mentioned earlier, she calls them the centers of gravity. There are certain teenage hacking uh hackers who they are they they are the center of their gangs and everyone follows their lead and you don't necessarily have to be the most technical to be that center of gravity but you have to be the most ballsy anarchistic charismatic charismatic and and you and you don't care. And the thing about the that that Christmas Day hack was he appeared on um on the interview fully, you know, face and voice. And yes, like it came it came very quickly afterwards. There was a knock on his door by the Finnish police, but they never they never got him on anything. All the things he told me either they didn't find evidence or they were too busy on his other cases to to look into it. But uh as far as I'm aware and as if you look at his at his court records, none of that was taken into account with any subsequent convictions. Do you know what he did in between that and the mental health hack? Not really. I know that he traveled a lot. I know that he was carrying a lot of Bitcoin. I spoke to one um fellow Lizard Squad hacker who he went out with in um in the Netherlands uh on a on a jolly and he was carrying a a a hardware crypto wallet and it had something like $50,000 worth of Bitcoin in and that was apparently just his holiday spending money. And of course that Bitcoin now would be worth something like 12 million, you know. But you're right, there is this gap in his story which I I would love um to find out what what happened. But the the actual hack happened in 2018. So he stole the Vastamo database of psychotherapy patient notes in 2018. So there wasn't like a huge gap. It wouldn't go to 2020, but yeah, there was a gap. There are there is a um suggestion by a Finnish journalist which has yet to be confirmed and it's all alleged and you know huge pinch of salt with this cuz I haven't we don't know if this is true but he thinks that Kamaki might be involved in a in a uh in a hacking sort of hacking cyber crime thing that happened around that time which was Kamaki aside whoever did this it's like the perfect crime. So what they did, I'm not going to say Kevin Macki because we don't know if it was him. But what they did was they found a website on the clear web. So that's the the the internet that we all know and love that was advertising darknet drugs marketplaces. So it had links for the the darknet links. So like as I say, jumble of numbers and letters. He hacked into that and then changed the links for those darknet websites to his own fake darknet uh marketplaces which had all the things you would imagine like buy your coke here, buy your MDMA here, but all the money going into that marketplace was going into his pocket. And I spoke to the police about this. I was like, if that is Kamaki, why aren't you looking into that? Like why isn't that part of your investigations now that he's behind bars? you know, aren't you investigating this? And the guy, Marco Lepin, the Finnish police officer, said, "We haven't got any uh complaints. There are no victims." Because, of course, no one's complaining. No one's complaining. The cocaine that I tried to buy on the dark web, I didn't receive my order for that. Exactly. It's the perfect crime. The perfect crime. But anyway, I don't know who I don't know who's behind that one, but there is some vague suggestion uh that some some journalists have have made. How did he do the Vastamo hack? Do you know? Yes, it was uh it took about 4 minutes. It was it was awful. The the security at Vstamo was terrible. And there have been convictions. Uh the CEO has been convicted. He's appealing it. um the the the cyber security practices at that company were very very poor. So he did a scan of um open servers with no passwords. He logged in, saw it all there, downloaded it. It it must have been Well, no one knows why he did it in 2018, but then he didn't do the extortion until 2020. But my theory is he couldn't believe his luck. He downloaded it and then sort of sat with it for a while waiting to see if someone's realized. I think so because of course at some point we don't know why in 2020 um he decided to extort the company run out of Bitcoin to party with. You know what I mean? I need to I need a party fund. But that was that's my other that's the other really mysterious thing about this character is that um we don't know why he did it because apparently he did have enough money. Apparently he was and is very wealthy. The court fees alone the lawyer's fees to try and defend himself absolutely humongous. And part of his defense was why would I do this? I've got loads of money. And then they say well how much money have you got? And he says I can't remember. It's all in Bitcoin. It fluctuates by the day based on what the price of Bitcoin is. Um, so why did that hack hit differently? What was it about the Vastamo hack that caused such uproar? Well, um, data breaches happen all the time. Data stolen from people all the time, from companies all the time. And to be honest, it's a kind of just like a little bubbling thing that happens in life all the time. And you know, we we kind of like uh take it for granted. There aren't many situations where people actually are badly affected by that. But when you've got a group of people who are already vulnerable because they're in therapy, some of them have had horrendous lives, childhoods, some of them are children. Um and when you get that kind of im that kind of like insight into their lives through the patient through the psychotherapy notes that the therapist is writing down like I said earlier that I mean that kind of data is the most precious of them all isn't it? So that in itself is pretty bad. Stealing that data is pretty bad. But then what happened next was run-of-the-mill. So he went to the CEO of StarMo and he said, "Give me €400,000 worth of Bitcoin and I won't publish the data on the internet." That didn't work. So then he started releasing them on the internet on the darknet as I described 100 a day, which would have carried on if he hadn't have messed it up. And then after that, he went the step even further and he sent out emails to every single one of the victims he could find email addresses for, which is about 27,000 people. and they all received an email in their inbox on Saturday night after they got out of the sauna in Finland because everyone has a sauna in Finland on a Saturday night and they saw in their inboxes an email from ransom man saying I have got your notes pay me now or I will put them on the internet and if you can imagine the kind of impact that would have on on you or on me that's horrendous but you got to put yourself in the position of people who are already in the the lowest of low and um I spoke to lots to the victims and you know some of these people have still got PTSD and some of these people are scared to leave the house and the impact the long-term impact is absolutely horrendous. Although the evidence has never been presented uh the lawyer that represents about 4,000 of the victims, she says that two of the families um have said that people have taken their lives over this. Did he send that extortion email after he accidentally leaked all 33,000? Yep. Right. Okay. So, he It was the last the last roll of the dice to see if he could make some money out of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, he face plan he Russell brick atgmail.com's his own computer onto a server. The police realize it's 30 minutes away. They get in the car. They run down there. They unplug the computer, the internet from the servers. They now have the servers and they start to do cyber forensic stuff. Yeah. Took a long time, but they managed to come up with a name. The funny thing was, of course, um even before the servers, people were wondering, could this be Julius Kamaki? Cuz he was so infamous in Finland by that by that stage as all the teenage stuff he'd done. And then um they in 200 I think it was 2022 they decided they had their man and they wanted to start finding him but they couldn't find him. So I think it was late 2023 that they no it was late 2022 that they um put out an interpol red notice for him. So they didn't know where he was. They had a feeling that he was somewhere in Europe but they didn't know where. So they put out that is bit of a nuclear option actually and a bit controversial because Kamaki has always said they could have just asked me and I'd have come back. Whether or not he would have done I don't know. Anyway, so this this um Interpol red notice went out for him and the detectives in Finland kind of just got on with other cases. I don't know what a red notice is. What is that? Oh sorry. It means that um if you are found anywhere in the world, if you've got a red notice out through your arrest, they can arrest you like that and then they send you back to wherever the the interol red notice came from. Assuming you're somewhere that's got extradition, I imagine. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um should have gone to North Korea. Could have been around. That's his mistake. Um so they put this notice out and then they kind of got on with other things and then remarkably there was this uh stroke of luck in Paris whereby um someone called in a domestic uh incident disturbance in the early hours of I think it was February 2024 and the police the French police went to the house and they were expecting it to be you know a a woman being abused or something like that and they opened the door and everything was fine and there wasn't any danger. Um, and this man sort of it was after a night out, so I think he was a bit hung over and still asleep. They dragged him out of his bed and he they just did some it some ID checks and he was uh traveling on a passport for someone called Asan Att um which is a Romanian passport and they were like, "Well, hang on a minute. This guy is 6'4, green eyes, does not look like a Romanian called Asan Art." So they ran some checks and somehow they unearthed the fact that this was Julius Kibamaki. So they arrested him on on the spot and took him back to the uh Do you know what the disturbance was? Well, the call went out from a woman who'd been out with uh the the woman and Kamaki that night and apparently there'd been a big row and and she hadn't answered her phone and he was being abusive and aggressive. But then if you ask Kamaki, which some journalists did afterwards, apparently it was someone who knew that he was hiding and they they did it deliberately to get to get police to uh to know where he was. Again, not a very liked person. Yeah, he doesn't seem like a good guy. Okay, so he then gets extradited from France. Back to Finland. Yeah, back to Finland. And then so begins this monthsl long uh time period where they were putting together the case against him um in time for the trial which was in 2014 no 2024 sorry um and led to his uh conviction. And what was the court trial process like claims defenses and and the uh sentence and all of that? Yeah. So, um, the the police had a giant folder of evidence against him, not only for the the hacking, but also for the blackmail. It took police ages to get that evidence together for the for the actual blackmail part of it because they had to go to um they wouldn't say which US tech giant, but they had to go and kind of get some evidence from them. And it literally took like 18 months for Google or Amazon, whoever it was, to send back some details about it. But that was one of the crucial pieces of evidence that they needed. Um and eventually, yeah, he was convicted. In Finland, they don't have um juries. They they do it all by judges. There's three judges that that decide um and and and they found him guilty on all counts. But what was really interesting is that every single time that it said in the paperwork, um Kamaki either by himself or with others, so every charge came with that cuz they're never quite sure whether or not he did it on his own or not. They think he might have had help from somewhere, but they don't know where. There's some discussions right now happening in Finland, like this week, about whether or not there's a suspect in Estonia that might have helped in some way, but we don't know. But the conviction happened, they said they they didn't have anything that they said that on in the totality of of the evidence, he's guilty, but if you take in each individual one, they couldn't quite pin him on each individual one. It's a strange thing, but the prosecutors are very happy. The police are very happy. They said that they took everything kind of holistically and said, "Right, yes, he did it." Because of all these bits, none of them are kind of like um a smoking gun, but all of them together were enough to convict him. What was your reaction to the arrest and the trial and stuff as you were following this going on? Because obviously this was, you know, a decade after you first sat down with this guy. That must have been a slightly I don't know out of body experience for you to see it occurring. Yeah, it was bizarre because I just had a feeling all those years ago that this kid would be worth watching. And there were rumors at the time that he'd kind of fled with a a stash of billions of Bitcoin and stuff. And I've always been fascinated about what happened after the Lizard Squad uh takeown at Christmas. Um, and being in the courtroom, seeing him as now, I think 26, 27 years old, still cocky, still smiling, still not really caring about anything was was absolutely fascinating. There was this uh bizarre moment in the in the trial where um he applied for bail because he was in prison and he was having to leave prison each day to go to the courthouse. And he applied for bail to be released so he could, you know, be a free man until until the end of the case. And um although the police objected because they were worried he'd be a flight risk, the judges agreed. So he was let out. Um and then the police were like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you doing? this is this this this guy is not going to be uh we can't pin him down. Why have you let him go? So, they very quickly appealed and the judges were like, "Oh, yeah. Okay, quick. Get him back in." He wouldn't come in. He disappeared. They couldn't find him. Where did he go? Well, um they the police kept calling him and said, "We you've got to come back in a court order." And he's like, "I'll see you on Tuesday." This was like Saturday. I'll see you Tuesday when the the case starts again. They're like, "No, no, come in now." He's like, "No, no, I'm fine." So, anyway, they they um found his social media handles or somehow like some obscure forum handle that he was using in the past and he posted a picture of himself, his hand, holding a bottle of really expensive champagne. And they saw from the background that it looked potentially like a kind of Airbnb. And then they figured out that there's no way he could could have got an apartment. He's not in any hotels, so he's he's he's he's like there's very only small places he could be. And they looked at all the pictures of all the Airbnbs in Helsinki and then got the right one, rang the doorbell, and there he was. Holy [ __ ] They they geographessed their way to finding him. Yeah. But all the court cases I have covered in my in my time as a journalist, people arrive in a suit and they're really polite and they try really hard to make the the jury and the judges realize they're good guys, but just it's classic. You know, that's that character of that teenage cyber criminal who's just got away with it for so long. What is it? He doesn't care. Yeah. What like what is it about his psychology? Is he completely detached? Is this guy a psychopath? Does he is he just really cocky and out for recognition? What do you think's driving him? Well, one thing that kept one word that kept coming up is sociopath. And it's really difficult and dangerous, I think, to kind of throw these things around. Like I'm not a clinical psychologist. I can't I can't decide on that kind of thing. But um one of the guys that used to hack with him back in the teenage days says that the thing about him was he just wanted to sort of see watch the world burn. He just wanted to cause chaos and and damage. One of the cops said that um it's like the kind of guy who likes to get in a fight in a bar, but he can do it from behind the computer to protect his bone structure, which I've always quite liked. But I don't know. I I don't know. I I I'd like to sit down with him. I tried to um get an interview with him during the trial and and and he said yes and his lawyer said yes, but the judge blocked it at the last minute so I wasn't able to. And then we were talking on text and then he just stopped talking to me. That was about when he disappeared actually. So maybe that's why he stopped talking to me. Um and I've tried many times to contact him while he's been in prison, but he he he won't answer my um my letters. Dang it. So yeah, he he uh he remains a bit of an enigma. How long's the sentence? Very short. He'll be out in probably a year and a half from now. You should have just waited to publish the book. You didn't need to publish it now. Well, you can do a follow you like a the paperback. The paperback paperback can have a Yeah. a little appendex additional chapter. That's the usual way that authors do. Well, with what's happening right now with M&S Co-op and Harrods, I think there could be enough for another chapter when the paperback comes out. A that's we've just brought up a we've doubled sales. We've doubled sales overnight. Um so I'm interested in this Maxim Yakabets guy as well that you went and and tried to track down. It seems like you have a a ponchant for uh trying to find Eastern European young men and not no accusation, but uh you you do seem to have a skill for it. So what's the story of him and evil core and stuff like that? Yeah. So, Evilcore are um are the kind of OGs of Russian cyber crime. They were there from the beginning and they evolved as the cyber crime ecosystem evolved. Um and they they've been kind of run and led by a family, the Yakubets family. And Maxim Yakobets is was the most wanted cyber criminal in the world. There's a 10 thou 10 million uh dollar reward out for his arrest. him and his right-hand man um Igor Turv. So we decided in I think it was just just for the pandemic, so 2019, that we would try and go and find him in Russia. Because one of the things that I became a bit annoyed about was that the West points fingers at these people, UK, US, and says, "H, they're cyber criminals. They're guilty. They've done this, that, and the other. They've they've stolen a hundred million dollars worth of uh of money from innocent people around the world." But you never hear from the actual cyber criminals themselves. you never actually they never get a chance to kind of have their say. I know that sounds silly but as a journalist like that's kind of like my job and that's the bit that interests me is like hearing both sides. So I was I remember I was sat in the garden there and I was just like thinking one one afternoon why don't we go why don't we try and find these people. So we did and we searched around Moscow and we got all the addresses that were known about them and tracked down their supercars and tried to take go to the garages that they were at. Um, and I managed to find an address that we thought was Makim Yakabet, but it was actually his dad, but we went there and his dad opened the door and we had this absolutely for me unforgettable interview with um with uh Yakobet Senior uh where he was like so angry with the with the West accusing his son of being a cyber criminal. And I was saying things like, you know, speaking through my producer, reporter, translator, like, well, how do you explain the Lamborghinis? He's like, well, they could be rented. So, how do you explain the quarter of a million dollar wedding? Well, we don't know how much it was. Have you seen the paperwork? It's like, well, no, but I went there and spoke to the wedding organizer, you know, and he had an answer for everything. And what was fascinating about that and what's become even more fascinating is we went there in 2019 and put the documentary out and I think it was yeah last year the National Crime Agency gave us loads more information about Evil Core and they said it wasn't just these seven or eight men it was also the dad. He's a part of it. He's in some way involved moneyaundering. You met the mastermind who was in front of you. You could have snagged him there. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so yeah, that that was a that was an amazing trip, but I I didn't enjoy it. It was the worst assignment I've ever been on. It was so And I went to Ukraine as well during the war, but this was worse. The the Moscow trip was worse. Well, you're in a what is a there aren't many countries that you go to that are kind of like um adversarial countries that that you know that that are um they're not friends of the UK. And the BBC out there is seen as an arm of the British government, even though of course we're completely independent. So like there's that plus I'm going there to track down cyber criminals who we know have got links to the Kremlin. Um and it was really intimidating the entire time. We thought we were followed at one stage. We flew out to um this place called Yoshka, which is about a thousand kilometers east to try and find um Igor Turv. and we were convinced there were guys in the airport who we saw who we then saw at our hotel. Um so that that kind of thing, you know, isn't isn't nice. And I'm here complaining, but really um the the the one that got off the worst was my um fellow reporter on the story with me, Andre Zacharov, who um was and is a very talented cyber reporter, but he helped me out with the whole story and he was there the whole time. And maybe it was that or maybe it was something else, but he was very quickly put on the enemy of the state list um after shortly after that and he had to flee the country. No way. Because of the work that you did together, we don't know if it was that cuz he's done a lot of provocative to the criminal. Right. Okay. Okay. And illustrious pissing off the It was after that. He thinks that it was possibly the the straw that broke the the camel's back. But before he before he decided to leave, he was followed around the entire city by some nasty looking men for weeks and weeks and weeks. Horribly intimidating for him. He is a superb journalist and I'm still friends with him and I know he's doing well now. But um yeah, I I I can't complain about my uh my handling or treatment when when Andre had a really tough time. Wow. I got scared in a hotel. Wow. At least I get to stay in my country though, you know? At least I'm in my home country still. That's nice. Exactly. I'll tell you though, when I got back, I installed a security camera system on around my house cuz I was I just started feeling a little bit intimidated cuz I once interviewed a guy who um he decrypt ransomware. So like when ransomware is deployed in the system, it scramles your files. You have to pay them to get the key to unlock it. This guy uh Fabian Wasa is an anonymous researcher from a company called Mcoft and he is so good at building his own decryptors that the the hackers absolutely hate him when he's searching through a piece of malware. He has found on more than one occasion, [ __ ] you, Fabian. Stuff like that. They write in their code in case he's looking in case he finds it. Yeah. Because they hate him so much. And he fled his country. He fled Germany because he was so scared of, you know, some of these gangs are are very very rich and it wouldn't be much to drop, you know, 20 grand to go and get someone's uh legs Yeah. broken or whatever. Wow. What was the fallout from that Crowd Strike thing? Because you've just held up a cool toy model thing. So, Crowd Strike, cyber security organization, maker of cool figurines, but yeah, also also subject of a lot of bad press only at the start of this year. What what first off, what the [ __ ] happened? And secondly, is this is that what was the comeuppance of that? Cuz I kind of heard about it. It was a huge deal. Loads of [ __ ] happened and then nothing. Well, give it time. There are some big court cases against Crowdstrike right now. There are companies like um oh, is it United, the airline in the US? Um they are they are trying to sue CrowdStrike for something like 7,000 flight cancellations across the day that that the Crowd Strike caused the world to implode. So, the Crowd Strike problem was um was it this year? This year has flown by. Maybe it was this year. Anyway, um so they they did an they did an update for their um their CrowdStrike software and and they're like an antivirus. Um it was a year ago 19th of July 2024. Oh, it was okay. Last year. Um and so Crowdstrike is a kind of like antivirus company, one of the biggest and best in the world and uh used by some ginormous corporations including United to protect systems from cyber attacks. They did a really innocuous update where they sent through some really like tiny bits of information to keep the software up to date. It completely bricked the system. It caused the blue screen of death on something like I think it was 2 and a half million computers around the world. And that's not just computers like we're talking on now. That's servers that run airlines, those kind of computers. So, um yeah, the the world went mad for I think like 3 days. No computers running, flights canled, uh online services down, shops offline, massive massive problems. It was like uh some sort of apocalypse was was unfolding. But, um we bounced back. We're still here. The best image that I saw of that was someone's smart fridge, the front screen of a smart fridge, which is Yeah. Yeah. You got BSODed on a on a [ __ ] Samsung American chiller. Um, yeah. It's just, you know, there is kind of like uh the uncanny valley, but the equivalent of that for smart homes. And I still don't think that we're out of the other side of it. think that most houses would benefit from a physical switch on the wall for most things and that a nice quite simple up and down you your fridge does not need an app. No, your I mean look Echo Water that's a a hydrogen water company that I love. I love hydrogen water. I think it's awesome. This like big revolution in health. What is what's hydrogen water? So, it's a special type. I haven't got it here, but like imagine that this flask um was able to hydrogenate the water. So, it's it's actually all self-contained within the the unit itself. So, it's a kind of hot thing. It'll be in the UK in 5 years time. It's big in America. It's coming big in America. It'll it'll transport over the Atlantic in about 5 years time. Hold to it. They have an app for your [ __ ] Yeah. You don't need that for your flask and it allows you to change the color of the LED and it tracks how much water you've drank. And I'm like, look, it's cool. I love the product, but the app to me and then there's they did a battery update that you need to overtheair update your flask from your phone. I'm like, guys, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's cool, but there is a there is just a little this and I think, look, if you know, Crowd Strike issues another update and I can't get my hydrogen water out of my echo echo water flask, I'm going to be pissed. So I think the the way that you or the way at least that this seems to be explained is that the hackers are always going to be out ahead of governments of they're going to be coming up with increasingly um innovative ways to circumvent both security systems and and law enforcement to try and track them down. Is regulation ever going to catch up with how fast dark web hackers crypto economy stuff can evolve? Like is this is there a a light note at all here or are we just kind of in it for the long haul? Make sure that you've got a password manager downloaded. Yeah, I think I think there are some things that we can do right now today that would make it so much harder for hackers, but but we don't because there's a thing of like security versus convenience. So, reusing passwords, keeping your software up to date. Um, actually, you know, when you think about Crowd Strike, that was one of the things about CrowdStrike that was so bad was that the people that kept their software up to date, which is what we're being told all the time, they were the ones that got hit. If you were if you weren't if you hadn't have done the software update, then you were fine because it was that thing that that bricked your system. But no, generally speaking, Crowd Strike aside, keep your software up to date. Do do two factor on your or multiffactor. Um, good passwords. And it sounds so obvious and I'm bored saying it. And I know I can see you falling asleep, but if we all did this, then the world would be the cyber world would be a safer place, but but we don't. And there's a lot of things at the moment about, you know, quantum computing and AI and deep fakes and stuff and how this is how the hackers are getting in these days with all these whisbang new things. They're not. If you look at the list of how hackers are getting in, it's the same old stuff. Someone said the other day that nothing in nothing in cyber has changed for 20 years. Social engineering, find a person who's prepared to let you into the system, go from there. Yeah. Yeah. But also, you know, that once you get in, they they're not using the the latest and greatest techniques to to to move around a system. They're going through something that should have been patched a year ago or or or two years ago. How much truth is there to this quantum computing will be able to make all um encryption totally obsolete because it can work out prime numbers in the split of a second and everyone's [ __ ] Bitcoin is going to be owned by one guy and all of our passwords are going to be released. Yes, they call it Q day. the day when the quantum computers can break encryption and there's this thing called um uh I think it's something like grab now encrypt later uh or decrypt later. So the idea being that um if you as it harvest now and decrypt later so if you're a spy agency for example China or the UK or the US you can grab all of this data that at the moment is encrypted. So all the most important vital um communications are done with really high-grade encryption. So if I'm uh if I'm uh President Trump talking to um Prime Minister Starmer, we will talk on a really really secure line which if I grab that, it just comes out as gibberish. But if I grab it now, I might be able to make it unjibberish when Qday Oh, [ __ ] That's that that's the worry is that Yeah. was that Q day will mean that kind of thing happens. But um I'm trying to be positive. It is it is a a concern. The National Crime Agency recently put out advice saying like the deadline is 2030. I think they said you need to get everything um encrypted in a way that is postquantum encryption safe or postquantum safe now because of what I just described. Uh I'm just having a look here. This is a friend's um uh a job advertisement for the new head of cyber security at his majesty's treasury in Britain provoked derision because of its stated pay of £57,000 a year. That was the total annual salary around about $70,000 for the head. The head of cyber security of his majesty's treasury in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. There's a big problem. There's a big problem. Have we considered low pay as a vector of risk? Like just disgruntled workers as a potential, you know, I mean, you don't they call it an they call it insider threat. they call it insider threat because sometimes there will be people in high levels of power who could be corrupted but you know that that's I don't want to start you know I think that's rare that's a rare thing that we see um they think potentially this is all alleged and all you know um reports have come out so I'm not saying this is this is what's happened but there's a big thing at the moment right now with Coinbase where lots and lots of people have had their crypto um stolen or exposed osed and they think that might be inside a threat. But um yeah, you you mentioned the salary there. The problem with with cyber jobs is that you can get paid a lot of money but not really in the public sector. It's all in the private sector. But of course, we need we need very good people to be in the public sector protecting the way more important stuff. Yeah, Joe, you're [ __ ] awesome, dude. You're really great. Books book's fantastic. You're a wonderful communicator. Where should people go? They want to check out all of your stuff. Oh, it's it's um Yeah. So, my book is called Control Alt Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet. Um and it's out on the 3rd or the 5th of June. Um the book launches the 3rd of June. That's why I got confused. Um and then it'll be in all the usual places and on um on audiobook as well. And it's also coming out in Finland and it'll come out in the US in January as well. Hooray, dude. You're brilliant. Uh, good luck doing more investigations. I look forward to speaking to you again when you found some more awful people from the the Eastern Europe that we can can talk about stories to do with. Thank you, mate. Thanks for having me on. Congratulations, you made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on.