I’m not sure whether you have all heard of DarkNet Diaries, but if you haven’t, I strongly recommend it.
DarkNet Diaries is a podcast about hackers, breaches, shadow government activity, hacktivism, cybercrime, and all the things that dwell on the hidden parts of the network.
I’ve never listened to podcasts generally as they’ve never taken my interest, but since starting DarkNet Diaries, I have been hooked, and have listened to every episode. Each episode goes into a great level of detail, so it is very interesting hearing about these security stories every other week (episodes are released every other Tuesday).
Some of my favourite episodes:
- Episode 4 – Panic! At the TalkTalk Board Room – this episode covers the October 2015 breach at UK Internet Service Provider TalkTalk.
- Episode 18 – Jackpot – A man addicted to gambling finds a bug in a video poker machine that lets him win excessive amounts of money.
- Episode 29 – Stuxnet – Stuxnet was the most sophisticated virus ever discovered. Its target was a nuclear enrichment facility in Iran. This virus was successfully able to destroy numerous centrifuges. Hear who did it and why.
- Episode 30 – Shamoon – Saudi Aramco was hit with the most destructive virus ever. Thousands and thousands of computers were destroyed. Herculean efforts were made to restore them to operational status again.
- Episode 31 – In late November 2018, a hacker found over 50,000 printers were exposed to the Internet in ways they shouldn’t have been. He wanted to raise awareness of this problem, and got himself into a whole heap of trouble.
- Episode 33 – RockYou- In 2009 a hacker broke into a website with millions of users and downloaded the entire user database. What that hacker did with the data has changed the way we view account security even today.
- Episode 36 – Jeremy from Marketing – A company hires a penetration tester to pose as a new hire, Jeremy from Marketing, to see how much he can hack into in his first week on the job. It doesn’t go as planned.
This is just a small extract of some of my favourite episodes. If you haven’t listened already, you can listen to them here.