Steal This Show

In this episode we meet Josephine Wolff, author of a new book on financial and economic cybercrime, You'll See This Message When It Is Too Late (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/youll-see-message-when-it-too-late) .  We discuss two important case studies from the book. First, GameOver Zeus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameover_ZeuS) - a massive financial fraud botnet which innovated by using P2P to distribute its command and control infrastructure, and a network of money mules to route funds to its owners, making it extremely hard to detect. The evolution of this botnet in response to Bitcoin demonstrates how cryptocurrency has produced a real paradigm shift in cybercrime - not least in shifting the financial impact of the crime onto the individuals and away from credit card companies and banks. Moving on to the case of PLA 61398 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Unit_61398) , we discuss the Chinese deployment of hacking resources for economic advancement via China's so-called APT or Advanced Persistent Thre