What's good internet welcome back to Waypoint Radio. I'm Austin Walker and I'm joined by a special guest for today's bonus episode

Ben Makoo. I did it wrong. Makoo. Is that right? You got it right?

Fuck okay. It's the silence. C-H. It is. It totally blows my mind. It's because it's Polish.

I didn't speak Polish but that's I'm told that's your toll that's properly Makoo.

You are of course the National Security Reporter for Vice and you're currently hosting a podcast called Cyber from Motherboard

which you can find on any major podcast host I'm guessing that's how podcasts tend to work. You put them in a box and then that box just gets spat out

Two bunch of other boxes. That's how the internet works. People in two is a Saturday in a box. That's the Austin Walker method for thinking about it.

Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. We're gonna do a little talk with an interview and then I think toss the episode the first episode on

So people can listen to that and then they can go subscribe to it if they want to hear more about it. What is cyber pitch me?

Pitch me the show. So basis came out of the fact that you know Motherboard has this staple of amazing hack reporters like Lorenzo and Joseph Cox

and they do some of the most I mean kind of mind-boggling reporting on this the space has obviously become a massively influential thing.

Yeah, especially since you look at something like the DNC hack or I always say the Sony hack.

Yeah, you know it took a James Franco stoner comedy to make people give a shit about hacking. Yeah, but it happened and we have some of the best reporters who are doing this stuff and how do you capitalize and bring cyber or cyber security.

I don't want to say dumb it down but simplify it so that people can understand exactly what the fuck it actually means and how it affects the world and your world and your consumer goods and our first episodes on

Simjacking which is the most cyberpunk term. Yeah, it is. It's like it's wild because it's the most it's the term that reminds me the most of 80s era hacking like hackers like hackers or like or like sneakers before that.

Right. Like very much like phone freaking. Yeah, Simjacking is really the evolution of phone freaking. It is and it's kind of like honestly it's it works very similar because a lot of social engineering too. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, which I think is like very much old school hacking but I think the crazy thing about Simjacking is that it's something that combines that social engineering with like oh shit I can't use my phone my bank account is locked.

Right. And I now have to pay some creepy hacker a bit coin to get my shit back and that's that's a really like it's a very much a mixture of these two worlds and I would say also I'm a reporter in cyber security happen for years.

I do more national security but this is something that happens quite often you know hacking quite often is something that combines human weakness with technological advancement right well I think part of the thing that makes these stories interesting to me and motherboards reporting on hacking in general

interesting to me or maybe it's even just the concept of trying to report this stuff out is one a lot of this stuff happens at such a large in human scale like you look at the Sony hack you look at the

the leak of the social security numbers last year that stuff happens at such a broad scale that it's hard to talk about it in a human sense because it's just like oh 150 million you know social security numbers got got released via it was the aqua facts or was it actually a hack really that was just like was an actual hack was the just a hack okay.

Okay and so like things like that happen at the scale that's hard to comprehend in a personal sense and so you hear a story like the sim jacking story that that's told in the first episode of cyber and this is very personal story it's like oh this is a person who talks to another individual person the hacker the sim jacker in that in that story and something that's contextualized in this very important way very not important way but in a very personal way in a way that I as a reader and a listener can understand and comprehend in terms of my personal life.

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