Smashing Security

Graham gets a phone call from the police. Well, someone who sounds convincingly like the police. There's just one small problem: what they really want is the 24-word seed key to Graham's cryptocurrency wallet.

Meanwhile, if you've stayed in a hotel recently, the free Wi-Fi you connected to might have come with an unexpected extra: an all-you-can-eat buffet of "Captive Crunch" for a Russian intelligence-linked hacking group.

And ...

You've been headhunted for a great job in cryptocurrency. All you have to do is complete a short online assessment - with your webcam on, of course, so they can verify who you really are. Which is ironic, because the person recruiting you doesn't exist. And North Korean hackers using this trick have already made off with $643 million in crypto this year alone.

Meanwhile, researchers at UC San Diego have discovered that 2.2 million c...

A Russian intelligence-linked hacker is arrested in Thailand while enjoying a beach holiday - and the trail of evidence that nailed him to the Russian government includes 14 separate orders of chicken McNuggets.

Meanwhile, AI music generator Suno has been hacked - and the stolen data appears to show exactly how much copyrighted music they hoovered up to train their models.

All this and more in episode 477 of the "Smashing Security" p...

An app has appeared in India that lets anyone with a smartphone stop a passing e-rickshaw dead in its tracks - no login, no passwords, no permissions needed. 

Meanwhile, Geoff - swimming in money and Lamborghinis, as all published authors are - has been on the receiving end of a slew of AI-generated scam pitches from fake book marketing experts. Rather than ignore them, he's been playing them at their own game...

All this and mo...

A 15-year-old boy asked a chatbot for help - and cancelled nearly 47,000 anime streaming subscriptions in under four hours. Meanwhile, researchers have documented the first fully autonomous, agentic AI-driven ransomware attack, "JadePuffer". What does this tell us about the future of cybersecurity?

Also, Apple's "Hide My Email" feature turns out to hide rather less than it promises - despite Apple knowing it has a problem for o...

Polymarket has built an entire business on predicting the future. So how did it manage to spectacularly fail to predict its own hack? Plus, the Google engineer with a million-dollar secret, and the curious case of the airport hairdryer.

Meanwhile, "FortiBleed" sees 75,000 Fortinet firewalls thrown wide open - and the real damage is going to roll on for years.

All this and more in episode 474 of the "Smashing Security" podcast with cy...

A polite caller from your bank says there is a problem with your account. Don't worry - they'll send someone round to help. They'll even take your cards away to keep them safe. The scam has run rampant, until Dutch police plastered blurred photos of 100 suspects across billboards, supermarkets, and TikTok, with a two-week ultimatum to turn themselves in... or else.

Meanwhile, a security researcher called Bob DaHacker got her hands o...

What if your AI coding assistant could be tricked into stealing your own company's secrets - by reading a single booby-trapped bug report? No phishing email. No malware. No password ever stolen. Just an AI doing exactly what it was told.

Meanwhile, someone calling themselves Nightmare Eclipse has decided to teach Microsoft a lesson. The result? Three zero-days dropped on the internet, one of which lets a thief with a USB stick walk ...

Researchers at the University of Toronto have built a worm that thinks for itself. Using free off-the-shelf AI models it works out how to break into each new computer it encounters, and hijacks the powerful ones to host its own AI brain. And then the researchers discovered their creation had quietly removed the list of machines it wasn't supposed to attack.

Meanwhile, Meta's shiny new AI customer support agent has been cheerful...

A website called "UK visa portal" has been quietly collecting passport scans, selfies, and personal data from thousands of travellers who thought they were applying through official channels. They weren't. And when a journalist tried to warn the company, it was lawyers who responded.

Meanwhile, a paper from Cornell suggests that prompt injection - the technique malicious actors use to trick AI agents into doing things they really sh...

CISA, the US government agency whose entire job is keeping America's critical infrastructure safe from hackers, has had a contractor publish dozens of plain-text credentials to a public GitHub profile.

Meanwhile, your Oura ring is quietly transmitting some of its data unencrypted - and when one journalist asked the company how often it hands user data to law enforcement, the answer was quite telling.

Plus don't miss our featured inte...

A 23-year-old radio enthusiast spent £300 on a piece of kit from the internet, and used it to bring four packed high-speed trains to a screeching halt. His defence in court? Possibly the most creative excuse we've heard all year.

Meanwhile, owners of $4,000 robot lawnmowers are discovering that their gadget can be hijacked over the internet, redirected at journalists who foolishly lie down in front of it, and used to harvest Wi...

Welcome to the largest educational data breach in history - affecting nearly 9,000 institutions, every Ivy League university, and 30 million students mid-finals. When Canvas's parent company refused to pay and announced they had deployed "security patches" instead, the hackers were less than impressed. So they came back through the cat flap.

Meanwhile, a famous finance expert's face has been showing up on Facebook adverts promising ...

Meta's smart glasses promise privacy "designed for you" - but everything they record was being beamed off to workers in Nairobi to label by hand. When those workers blew the whistle, Meta sacked all 1,108 of them.

Meanwhile, the IT press is in a frenzy over a new Linux bug called "Copy Fail" - complete with logo, dedicated website, and a marketing-friendly name. But is it really the disaster everyone's making it out to be?

And in our...

A developer at an AI startup wanted to cheat at Roblox. They downloaded a dodgy script on their work laptop. That one decision triggered a cascade of failures that ended with a $2 million data breach affecting hundreds of thousands of organisations. All for some free in-game currency.

Meanwhile, there's a 1980s phone protocol called SS7 that lets shadowy surveillance companies track anyone, anywhere, via their mobile phone. Governme...

A company that ran anonymous tip lines for 35,000 American schools - handling reports of bullying, weapons, and self-harm - boasted on its website that it had suffered zero security breaches in over 20 years. A hacker called Internet Yiff Machine thought that sounded like a challenge, with predictable results...

Meanwhile, Rockstar Games gets hacked again - and the stolen data turns out to be less embarrassing than the financial sec...

A hacking group claims to have broken into the flood defence system protecting Venice's Piazza San Marco - and is offering to sell access to whoever wants it. The asking price? A frankly insulting $600.

Meanwhile, Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code for Claude Code via a basic packaging mistake. Oh, and by the way, they've also just revealed they've built an AI model called Mythos that can find and chain together software ...

LinkedIn has been secretly scanning your browser for over 6,000 installed extensions — on every single click you make. It can tell if you're job hunting, what religion you are, and whether you have ADHD. And none of this is mentioned anywhere in their privacy policy.

Meanwhile, California's crypto millionaires are learning that no amount of encryption can protect you from someone who knocks on your door pretending to deliver a...

A cannabis-growing, beekeeping, gyrocopter-flying Irishman invested his drug money in Bitcoin back in 2011 - and now sits on a fortune worth $400 million. There's just one small problem: the access codes were tucked inside his fishing rod case, which has mysteriously vanished. Or has it? Because this week, one of his frozen wallets suddenly woke up and moved $35 million - and someone had to identify themselves to do it.

Meanwhile, A...