
The podcast that tells true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. We take listeners into the world of cyber and intelligence without all the techie jargon. Every Tuesday and Friday, former NPR investigations correspondent Dina Temple-Raston and the team draw back the curtain on ransomware attacks, mysterious hackers, and the people who are trying to stop them.
©2025 Recorded Future News
May 5, 2026Recent reviews on Apple Podcasts (5)
Over commercialization
Too many commercials. Not enough information
TexasTattoo ·
Two Months of Repeats!
I have listened to all 310 episodes. Except the repeats. The constant repeats without a clear warning that it is a repeat suggests a strong lack of conservation for your audience. I liked when you went in depth into the details of threats. But as many others have said. The political bias has been getting out of hand. I have unsubscribed. I cannot continue to waste my time starting a podcast just to realize it is a complete repeat. The mic drops were bad enough as they had some new and some old content. Most were not worth the listen and left me feeling led astray that there would be new useful content; and like a slot machine, sometimes there was.
A Mindful Listener ·
Perfect show for now
Informed, investigative reporting. Great stories. Tech for non-techies. So glad it’s now a weekly show on our local NPR station!
MMXkMN ·
Propaganda
This podcast is communist propaganda.
zzzzzzzz....zzzz ·
Cyber cyber cyber
So much Ai slop they give credence too on this podcast I also wish they wouldn’t say cyber ever three seconds on this podcast. It’s so outdated. Give it a rest. You sound ignorant and like Trump just repeating nonsense. Also it’s “N-vidia” not “navidia.” You would think a technology podcast wouldn’t screw that up.
Syntheticg ·
Episodes (337)

It didn’t look like propaganda
May 5, 202627m
Propaganda works best when it disappears—into morning assemblies, lesson plans, even the alphabet on the wall. That’s what Pavel “Pasha” Talankin saw inside his classroom in Russia. So he started filming it all and what

Access, denied.
May 1, 202616m
You buy a phone. A car. A tractor. But what do you actually own? We talk to legal scholar Aaron Perzanowski about how software and contracts are reshaping ownership — and why the right-to-repair movement is gaining tract

Not quite yours
Apr 28, 202622m
You buy something. A phone. A car. A tractor. It feels like it’s yours. But, it turns out, the software inside sets the terms—controlling how it works, how it’s fixed, even whether it runs at all. This week: how code is

Rage against the machine
Apr 24, 202618m
AI learns by scraping our work — often without asking. Now people are fighting back. Not just in court, but raging against the machine itself — quietly corrupting the data it depends on. Which raises a question: If AI le

The price tag of you
Apr 21, 202644m
In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we hear from listeners and return to an episode on how companies are using our data to customize how online goods are priced from consumer to consumer. What happens when tech

The space debris strikes back
Apr 17, 202611m
Last week, Artemis II returned from the Moon. For a moment, it all felt clean. Simple. But space isn’t empty anymore. It’s crowded. It’s noisy. It’s filling up with the things we’ve left behind. And sometimes… those thin

Defying gravity
Apr 14, 202626m
The Artemis II mission that made its trip around the Moon didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was built in part on a mission that happened a couple of years ago. We return to a story about a scrappy lunar lander that nearly di

Reverse engineering us
Apr 10, 202616m
With digital copies of the human mind, scientists at MIT now have a new kind of testing ground --- a brain they can probe, no surgery required. It's to study how we remember, how we learn, and even how language begins. B

Every breath you fake
Apr 7, 202624m
We lie with our faces. With our voices. Even with our pauses. Now AI says it can see through all of it. But is it actually detecting the truth…or just telling a very convincing story about how we feel? Learn about your a

The Village that built the internet
Apr 3, 202620m
To live in the modern world, you have to be online. But in many places, that connection still doesn’t exist. So people aren’t waiting. They’re building their own internet—creating and running their own providers from the

Almost heaven, no reception
Mar 31, 202627m
What does it take to get everyone online? More than wires and satellites. We return to a story about a Mississippi farmer searching for a reliable connection—and end up uncovering a problem that stretches back nearly a c

Internet at the speed of light
Mar 27, 202614m
We usually think of getting online as something that requires cables—strung under oceans or buried beneath our feet. Mahesh Krishnaswamy of Taara thinks the future may lie in beams of light pointed at the sky. Learn abou

A wrinkle in time: GPS jamming in Ukraine
Mar 24, 202643m
In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we hear from listener and return to an episode on how satellites, electronic warfare, and a team of American techies MacGyver-ed a way to keep the power flowing in Ukraine. L

The other battlefield
Mar 20, 202623m
A cyberattack on a U.S. medical device company didn’t ask for money—it tried to wipe systems clean. It may be the start of a wave of Iran-linked hacks as tensions rise in the Middle East. So this week, we revisit a story

Return to code red: hacking the halls of medicine
Mar 17, 202627m
Sky Lakes Medical Center in south-central Oregon never imagined it could become the target of a cyberattack. Then, one day, its computer systems went dark. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The rise of high-tech despotism
Mar 13, 202619m
Noura Al-Jizawi thought she’d left the repression of the Assad regime behind when she left Syria with her sister. Instead she became the target of an online subversion campaign. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.

Smuggling signals out of Iran
Mar 10, 202621m
After Tehran throttled the internet during nationwide protests in 2022, Iranians started preparing a workaround: Starlink. Smugglers brought thousands of satellite terminals into the country. So when war began, and the r

When morality meets the machine
Mar 6, 202618m
When a new tool starts appearing in places where humans once wrestled with right and wrong, it’s worth asking not just what the technology can do — but what it may be doing to us. Shannon Vallor, a philosopher at the Uni

AI’s divine intervention
Mar 3, 202624m
Churches are turning to AI to write sermons and reach new congregants. But when faith is filtered through an algorithm, does it change what – or who – we’re actually listening to? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.pr

Dispatches from the Ukrainian front
Feb 27, 202631m
Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an air-defense officer named Zhan describes a battlefield dominated by drones and connectivity — and we return to a story about the tech detectives who trace the c

Your data, commodified
Feb 24, 202646m
You’ve likely received a scam call or text at some point. Some of these messages come from elaborate compounds found mostly in Southeast Asia. These compounds look like call centers but operate more like prisons. In this

Chasing shadows with The Citizen Lab
Feb 20, 202621m
The early Internet was ushered in with this widespread hope about its utopian possibilities. But the founder of The Citizen Lab, Ron Deibert, suspected there was a dark underbelly of government surveillance and censorshi

Reading North Korea
Feb 17, 202625m
As reports grow that Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter could soon be formally designated as his successor — extending the family’s rule to a fourth generation — we’re revisiting a story about the outsiders who watch North K

Miss Lonelyhearts and the money mules
Feb 13, 202621m
We return to a special Valentine’s Day episode, and look at the evolution of romance scams. They aren’t just about bilking lonely people out of their life savings anymore – scammers have diversified, and they’re making v

Defying Gravity
Feb 10, 202628m
Former astronaut Ed Lu once worried about asteroids. Now he’s turning his attention to space debris —and a new question it raises: could adversaries turn it into a weapon? Some officials are beginning to worry the answer