Risky Business Features

In this podcast episode, investigative journalist Geoff White joins James Wilson to talk about what happens to the money after ransomware gangs get a payday. The payment itself might be in the millions, but it’s difficult for gangs to convert their ill-gotten crypto gains into cash they can actually spend. Geoff explains the role of professional launderers and why cash-rich drug gangs are useful connections for crypto-rich cybercriminals. They also dive into who operates these international laundering networks, other types of crime they enable, and whether this affects the argument of whether victims should be allowed to pay.

In this podcast episode, OpenSourceMalware founder Paul McCarty joins James Wilson to explain how researchers find and analyse malicious packages, GitHub repositories and developer tools. Paul walks James through static analysis, deobfuscation and reconstructing multi-stage kill chains to identify what attackers are trying to steal. They also discuss how LLMs make malware development easier while introducing operational security mistakes. The pair examine DPRK tradecraft, blockchain-based payload delivery and what Paul calls Pollen Rider, which can reinfect developers through their own repositories.

In this podcast episode, Brad Arkin joins James Wilson to chat about the Trump administration’s call to let private entities conduct cyber operations against criminal groups. Brad’s firsthand experience responding to cyber incidents alongside US law enforcement gives him a unique perspective on how government and private sector relationships work, and how this program could improve the ability of both sides to tackle cybercrime. James and Brad also explore who might participate in these campaigns and whether the government will be able to effectively oversee them.

In this podcast episode, James Wilson chats with Brian Krebs about the investigation that led him from recycled cybercrime handles and old forum records to the true identity of TeamPCP’s alleged leader in Perth. TeamPCP is the hacker group that has gone berserk in the software supply chain over the last year or so, stealing credentials to compromise developers, their software packages, and their repositories. In this interview Brian talks about his Signal conversations with the group’s ringleader, the strange Cybercats community surrounding TeamPCP, and the passive DNS breakthrough that helped him unmask what he thinks are the ringleader’s true identities.

In this podcast episode, James Wilson chats with PortSwigger’s Director of Research James Kettle about using an LLM to develop genuinely new attack techniques. Kettle has built what he calls the HTTP Terminator, an autonomous research system that generates and tests tens of thousands of potentially new HTTP desync techniques. The Terminator, which makes use of Kettle’s own research methodology, has already come up with new desync methods that James hadn’t thought of before. Kettle and Wilson discuss how to develop and evaluate machine-generated ideas without drowning in false positives, and why the most powerful part of the process is the discovery cascade, where one unexpected result becomes the seed for another. The upshot is AI can conduct genuinely novel security research, but don’t expect to one-shot your way to an army of robot hackers.