Evil Corp: 3. Agents on the doorstep

Cyber Hack

BBC

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The net tightens on the Jabber Zeus crew. Police and intelligence services across borders are poised to synchronise raids, but cops in London are thrown a last-minute curveball that could see the whole operation implode. Meanwhile, tales of Tank’s past emerge - and his former life as club DJ Slava Rich. But as FBI agents working in Ukraine brace to break down doors and make arrests, are the hackers already aware of what’s coming?

Hosted by Joe Tidy, the BBC’s cyber correspondent – one of the few Western journalists to have met an alleged member of Evil Corp – and the BBC’s Eastern and Southern Europe correspondent Sarah Rainsford, who spent more than two decades reporting from Moscow.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts.
0:05.0	Welcome to Cyberhack.
0:07.0	Episodes are released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:11.0	But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode, a week early, first on BBC Sounds.
0:24.2	I joined the Sveu Academy from the age of 17.
0:26.3	I spent five years in that academy.
0:33.6	Mikhailo Sakali, or Misha, for short, joined Ukraine's SPU security service straight out of high school.
0:34.9	Yeah.
0:41.3	In Ukraine, there are service academies, military academies that you can join. By 24, his computer tech skills were clear.
0:44.3	So when the FBI came to town, with evidence of Ukrainian hackers stealing millions of dollars
0:49.3	in the US, so basically financial fraud.
0:52.3	It was Misha who got the job of combing through their data and mapping who was who in Ukraine.
0:58.2	First time, I guess, I heard about the case was sometime in spring 2010.
1:04.1	The FBI shared chat logs from inside the hacker's own network, the Java server we've heard so much about.
1:11.3	A bunch of criminals discussing malware and deployment of that malware.
1:16.2	And Misha's stunned by the criminal's professionalism.
1:19.6	Like literally the criminal enterprise with all the roles, there was leadership, there
1:24.5	was the malware team, there was a QA team. There was a cash-out team.
1:29.1	There was kind of a help desk. A help desk? Yeah, they're stealing all this money with the help of that
1:34.3	malicious software Zeus. And we all know there's always glitches with any IT system. So these guys
1:40.1	created their own IT help desk. So all those roles, it was a revelation to me that the criminal organization could work a bit more like a typical legal business.
1:51.0	Now it's very established thing for criminals, but back then it was pretty new to me.
	...

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