174: Pacific Rim
Darknet Diaries
Jack Rhysider
4.9 • 9.2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2026
⏱️ 94 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
For six years, Sophos fought a secret cyber war against a state-backed hacking group targeting its firewalls. This forced Sophos to drastically change tactics to properly secure their firewalls.
Was it ethical? Was it effective? They disrupted nine zero-day attacks, exposed who was hacking them, and forced the hackers to change tactics. But at what cost?
You have to listen to one of the most audacious corporate cyber defenses ever conducted.
Sponsors
Support for this show comes from ThreatLocker®. ThreatLocker® is a Zero Trust Endpoint Protection Platform that strengthens your infrastructure from the ground up. With ThreatLocker® Allowlisting and Ringfencing™, you gain a more secure approach to blocking exploits of known and unknown vulnerabilities. ThreatLocker® provides Zero Trust control at the kernel level that enables you to allow everything you need and block everything else, including ransomware! Learn more at www.threatlocker.com.
This show is sponsored by Meter, the company building networks from the ground up. Meter delivers a complete networking stack - wired, wireless, and cellular - in one solution that’s built for performance and scale. Alongside their partners, Meter designs the hardware, writes the firmware, builds the software, manages deployments, and runs support. Learn more at meter.com.
Support for this show comes from Drata. Drata is the trust management platform that uses AI-driven automation to modernize governance, risk, and compliance, helping thousands of businesses stay audit-ready and scale securely. Learn more at drata.com/darknetdiaries.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Jack Riesider. |
| 0:01.5 | Host of the show. |
| 0:02.8 | Back in 2018, an interesting cyber attack took place. |
| 0:07.6 | It's kind of a funny thing. |
| 0:09.7 | I mean, it basically came onto my radar the second month I was working at Sophos. |
| 0:14.9 | Oh, I should introduce you to Andrew. |
| 0:17.0 | Yeah, so I'm Andrew Brandt, and throughout the time that the research was going on for this story, I was a principal researcher for Sophos, but I am now a principal threat researcher for a company called NetCraft. |
| 0:32.1 | So one of the things Sophos wanted Andrew to do was research novel threats and write about them on their newly established |
| 0:38.7 | Sophos blog. The team that I was on eventually didn't exist. I was the only person on it. |
| 0:46.0 | And one of the analysts reached out to me through the company chat and said, hey, I've got a |
| 0:51.6 | great story for some really cool research. I'd like to write it up |
| 0:55.7 | and have you publish it on the blog and do some edits on it. I said, great. Tell me more. |
| 1:01.5 | And he told me the story. But the one thing he didn't tell or what he said he couldn't tell me |
| 1:07.3 | was who the target was. So he's like, okay, fine, send me what you got, let me research it, and I'll write about it. |
| 1:13.2 | It started with a TV set. |
| 1:16.5 | So there was a sales office, and they had a bullpen, like you have a lot of, you know, in a lot of sales offices where people are on the phone, you know, trying to sell the product. |
| 1:26.1 | And so they had like this leaderboard that was on a computer screen that was running off a little |
| 1:30.7 | Linux computer. |
| 1:33.1 | And that was the first machine that got infected. |
| 1:36.1 | And the threat actors managed to pivot from that, you know, Intel Nuck, which is like a tiny |
| 1:42.9 | little computer that's small enough |
| 1:44.4 | it can mount on the back of a TV monitor that's hanging on the wall, that they were able |
... |
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