137: Predator

Darknet Diaries

Jack Rhysider

True Crime, Technology

4.9 • 8.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2023

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A new type of mercenary spyware came on the radar called Predator. It’ll infect a mobile phone, and then suck up all the data from it. Contacts, text messages, location, and more. This malware is being sold to intelligence agencies around the world. In this episode we hear from Crofton Black at Lighthouse Reports who spent 6 months with a team of journalists researching this story which was published here: https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/flight-of-the-predator/. We also hear from Bill Marczak and John Scott-Railton from Citizen Lab. If you want to hear about other mercenary spyware, check out episodes 99 and 100, about NSO group and Pegasus. To hear another episode about Greece check out episode 64 called Athens Shadow Games. Sponsors Support for this show comes from Axonius. The Axonius solution correlates asset data from your existing IT and security solutions to provide an always up-to-date inventory of all devices, users, cloud instances, and SaaS apps, so you can easily identify coverage gaps and automate response actions. Axonius gives IT and security teams the confidence to control complexity by mitigating threats, navigating risk, decreasing incidents, and informing business-level strategy — all while eliminating manual, repetitive tasks. Visit axonius.com/darknet to learn more and try it free. Support for this show comes from Varonis. Do you wonder what your company’s ransomware blast radius is? Varonis does a free cyber resilience assessment that tells you how many important files a compromised user could steal, whether anything would beep if they did, and a whole lot more. They actually do all the work – show you where your data is too open, if anyone is using it, and what you can lock down before attackers get inside. They also can detect behavior that looks like ransomware and stop it automatically. To learn more visit www.varonis.com/darknet. Support for this show comes from Akamai Connected Cloud (formerly Linode). Akamai Connected Cloud supplies you with virtual servers. Visit linode.com/darknet and get a special offer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you ever think about the proliferation of weapons?
0:04.4	Well, shoot, let's get into it.
0:06.0	I want you to think about this guy, Sam Cummings.
0:09.0	Here, I found an old vintage documentary made by CNN.
0:12.0	This is Sam Cummings.
0:14.0	And this 57-year-old is the biggest private military weapons dealer in the world.
0:19.0	The business as a business is fascinating.
0:22.0	Cummings is sold tens of millions of guns to armies and sportsmen.
0:27.0	Okay, so how did he become the biggest private military weapons dealer in the world?
0:32.0	Well, the U.S. Department of Defense taught him. That's how.
0:36.0	When he was 18, in 1945, he was recruited into the U.S. Army,
0:40.0	which at the time they were just wrapping up World War II.
0:43.0	There was a big ramp up to provide all these weapons for armies around the world to use in wars.
0:49.0	And then suddenly the war was over.
0:51.0	So where's all the weapons going to go?
0:54.0	As a young arms buff, Cummings got his start at the CIA.
0:57.0	His assignment was to buy surplus weapons in Europe.
1:00.0	At the age of 23, he left the spy agency and started his own business.
1:05.0	Buying surplus weapons in the CIA gave him a crazy idea.
1:11.0	How about buy a whole bunch of cheap weapons now that the war is over and then slowly sell them over time?
1:17.0	He had all the contacts. He needed to go buy them.
1:21.0	And so he did. And he was selling them to the public, like to hunters or sportsmen.
	...

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