Lock and Code

The US presidential election is upon the American public, and with it come fears of “election interference.”But “election interference” is a broad term. It can mean the now-regular and expected foreign disinformation campaigns that are launched to sow political discord or to erode trust in American democracy. It can include domestic campaigns to disenfranchise voters in battleground states. And it can include the upsetting and increasing threats made to election officials and volunteers across the country.But there’s an even broader category of election interference that is of particular importance to this podcast, and that’s cybersecurity.Elections in the United States rely on a dizzying number of technologies. There are the voting machines themselves, there are electronic pollbooks that check voters in, there are optical scanners that tabulate the votes that the American public actually make when filling in an oval bubble with pen, or connecting an arrow with a solid line. And none of that is to mention the infrastructure that campaigns rely on every day to get information out—across websites, through emails, in text messages, and more.That interlocking complexity is only multiplied when you remember that each, individual state has its own way of complying with the Federal government’s rules and standards for running an election. As Cait Conley, Senior Advisor to the Director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) explains in today’s episode:“There’s a common saying in the election space: If you’ve seen one state’s election, you’ve seen one state’s election.”How, then, are elections secured in the United States, and what threats does CISA defend against?Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Conley about how CISA prepares and trains election officials and volunteers before the big day, whether or not an American’s vote can be “hacked,” and what the country is facing in the final days before an election, particularly from foreign adversaries that want to destabilize American trust.”There’s a pretty good chance that you’re going to see Russia, Iran, or China try to claim that a distributed denial of service attack or a ransomware attack against a county is somehow going to impact the security or integrity of your vote. And it’s not true.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and

On the internet, you can be shown an online ad because of your age, your address, your purchase history, your politics, your religion, and even your likelihood of having cancer.This is because of the largely unchecked “data broker” industry.Data brokers are analytics and marketing companies that collect every conceivable data point that exists about you, packaging it all into profiles that other companies use when deciding who should see their advertisements.Have a new mortgage? There are data brokers that collect that information and then sell it to advertisers who believe new homeowners are the perfect demographic to purchase, say, furniture, dining sets, or other home goods. Bought a new car? There are data brokers that collect all sorts of driving information directly from car manufacturers—including the direction you’re driving, your car’s gas tank status, its speed, and its location—because some unknown data model said somewhere that, perhaps, car drivers in certain states who are prone to speeding might be more likely to buy one type of product compared to another.This is just a glimpse of what is happening to essentially every single adult who uses the Internet today.So much of the information that people would never divulge to a stranger—like their addresses, phone numbers, criminal records, and mortgage payments—is collected away from view by thousands of data brokers. And while these companies know so much about people, the public at large likely know very little in return.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel with the ACLU, about how data brokers collect their information, what data points are off-limits (if any), and how people can protect their sensitive information, along with the harms that come from unchecked data broker activity—beyond just targeted advertising.“We’re seeing data that’s been purchased from data brokers used to make decisions about who gets a house, who gets an employment opportunity, who is offered credit, who is considered for admission into a university.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

Online scammers were seen this August stooping to a new low—abusing local funerals to steal from bereaved family and friends.Cybercrime has never been a job of morals (calling it a “job” is already lending it too much credit), but, for many years, scams wavered between clever and brusque. Take the “Nigerian prince” email scam which has plagued victims for close to two decades. In it, would-be victims would receive a mysterious, unwanted message from alleged royalty, and, in exchange for a little help in moving funds across international borders, would be handsomely rewarded.The scam was preposterous but effective—in fact, in 2019, CNBC reported that this very same “Nigerian prince” scam campaign resulted in $700,000 in losses for victims in the United States.Since then, scams have evolved dramatically.Cybercriminals today willl send deceptive emails claiming to come from Netflix, or Google, or Uber, tricking victims into “resetting” their passwords. Cybercriminals will leverage global crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and send fraudulent requests for donations to nonprofits and hospital funds. And, time and again, cybercriminals will find a way to play on our emotions—be they fear, or urgency, or even affection—to lure us into unsafe places online.This summer, Malwarebytes social media manager Zach Hinkle encountered one such scam, and it happened while attending a funeral for a friend. In a campaign that Malwarebytes Labs is calling the “Facebook funeral live stream scam,” attendees at real funerals are being tricked into potentially signing up for a “live stream” service of the funerals they just attended.Today on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Hinkle and Malwarebytes security researcher Pieter Arntz about the Facebook funeral live stream scam, what potential victims have to watch out for, and how cybercriminals are targeting actual, grieving family members with such foul deceit. Hinkle also describes what he felt in the moment of trying to not only take the scam down, but to protect his friends from falling for it.“You’re grieving… and you go through a service and you’re feeling all these emotions, and then the emotion you feel is anger because someone is trying to take advantage of friends and loved ones, of somebody who has just died. That’s so appalling”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code...

On August 15, the city of San Francisco launched an entirely new fight against the world of deepfake porn—it sued the websites that make the abusive material so easy to create.“Deepfakes,” as they’re often called, are fake images and videos that utilize artificial intelligence to swap the face of one person onto the body of another. The technology went viral in the late 2010s, as independent film editors would swap the actors of one film for another—replacing, say, Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future with Tom Holland.But very soon into the technology’s debut, it began being used to create pornographic images of actresses, celebrities, and, more recently, everyday high schoolers and college students. Similar to the threat of “revenge porn,” in which abusive exes extort their past partners with the potential release of sexually explicit photos and videos, “deepfake porn” is sometimes used to tarnish someone’s reputation or to embarrass them amongst friends and family.But deepfake porn is slightly different from the traditional understanding of “revenge porn” in that it can be created without any real relationship to the victim. Entire groups of strangers can take the image of one person and put it onto the body of a sex worker, or an adult film star, or another person who was filmed having sex or posing nude.The technology to create deepfake porn is more accessible than ever, and it’s led to a global crisis for teenage girls.In October of 2023, a reported group of more than 30 girls at a high school in New Jersey had their likenesses used by classmates to make sexually explicit and pornographic deepfakes. In March of this year, two teenage boys were arrested in Miami, Florida for allegedly creating deepfake nudes of male and female classmates who were between the ages of 12 and 13. And at the start of September, this month, the BBC reported that police in South Korea were investigating deepfake pornography rings at two major universities.While individual schools and local police departments in the United States are tackling deepfake porn harassment as it arises—with suspensions, expulsions, and arrests—the process is slow and reactive.Which is partly why San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu and his team took aim at not the individuals who create and spread deepfake porn, but at the websites that make it so easy to do so.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu about his team’s lawsuit against 16 deepfake porn websites, the city’s history in protecting Californians, and the severity of abuse that these websites offer as a paid service.“At least one of these websites specifically promotes the non-consensual nature of this. I’ll just quote: ‘Imagine wasting time taking her out on dates when you can just use website X to get her nudes.’”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, plus whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License