forensics

Kim Nilsson presents his investigation into how Mt. Gox was hacked and mismanaged, tracing the finances and the missing bitcoins. It was given at the 2017 Breaking Bitcoin meetup.

A Black Hat USA 2017 briefing by the prosecutors who caught Russian carder Roman Seleznev. It covers the electronic evidence collected, the international trail, and how he was located and arrested.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 18 talk on changing threats to privacy argues that surveillance arrived through convenient services and network effects, so opting out is not a real solution. It also includes his framing of getting social democracy rather than the fascism people feared.

Dan Geer's Black Hat 2014 keynote argues that cybersecurity is a matter of power and policy rather than wishful thinking. He covers surveillance, the vulnerability market, software liability and privacy as the capacity to misrepresent yourself.

Cory Doctorow's 28c3 keynote argues that the copyright wars were just a skirmish and that the real fight will be a war on the general-purpose computer. He explains why locked-down devices, DRM and surveillance tools all depend on removing general computation.

Zoz's DEF CON 22 talk on operational security in the age of pervasive surveillance. He shows how hard it is to avoid mistakes even for people who should know better.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment explains how data brokers collect and sell personal information, including a stunt in which his team bought data to identify members of Congress.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that the machine-learning systems used to serve ads also decide what political and social information people see. She explains how opaque algorithms can nudge, segment and manipulate users, and warns that the real danger is powerful people using AI to control populations.

A DEF CON 23 talk showing how weak controls in electronic death registration systems let someone virtually kill a person and obtain a real death certificate, with consequences for their identity and life.

John Oliver interviews Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance, including street interviews showing people have not thought about what the government can see. The segment famously frames the issue through private photos.

A Last Week Tonight segment on pig butchering scams, in which long-con romance and investment fraud is run, often by trafficked workers. It explains how victims are groomed and interviews people who lost large sums.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk is a hypothetical account of how an intelligence agency such as the NSA would sabotage open source software, standards and online discussion. It covers Skype's history, OpenSSL and psyops against standards.

Benn Jordan explains how Flock Safety's license plate cameras log and share vehicle locations, and explores how adversarial AI can defeat them. It covers weak security and the surveillance risks of private police-camera networks.

Benn Jordan details security vulnerabilities in Flock Safety license-plate-reading cameras and how easily they can be compromised. It includes citations from security researchers and discussion of police surveillance.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 18 talk argues that privacy threats have shifted from centralized state databases like TIA to corporate data collection by companies like Google, despite wins in strong cryptography and decentralization.

Patricia Aas's EuroBSDCon keynote is about ethics for people who build software, covering how the tech industry got to its current state and what engineers can do about it. It steps back from technical detail to the bigger picture.

Eben Moglen speaks at NYU in 2010 about freedom in the cloud, arguing that centralized services and handing over personal data and server logs erode privacy and freedom. The talk lays out the motivation for FreedomBox, a personal server for your own data.

A DEF CON 30 talk by Sam Bent, a former darknet vendor, on operational security when using Tor and the darknet. He applies the hacker mindset to staying anonymous and avoiding capture.

Adrian Crenshaw's DEF CON 22 talk gives an overview of Tor and I2P, then goes through real cases where darknet users were caught. These include Silk Road and its operator.

Moxie Marlinspike speaks at Next Generation Threats 2014 about the challenges of encrypted communication and how Signal addresses them. He also draws on American action movies as narrative for secure communications.

Journalist Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on the CIA's operational security failures in the 2003 Milan kidnapping. Phone and location metadata exposed the team and led to arrest warrants.

A 57-minute account of Clifford Stoll's tracking of a KGB-linked hacker through Lawrence Berkeley Lab computers in 1986, the story of The Cuckoo's Egg. It covers the FBI and Chaos Computer Club involvement.

Karla Burnett presents real phishing campaigns run against a Bay Area tech company, including conversion rates and how existing protections were bypassed. She argues for evidence-based techniques to prevent credential phishing, not just mitigate it.

VICE News reporter Isobel Yeung goes undercover as a tourist in Xinjiang, documenting heavy surveillance, policing and internment of Uighurs. It also covers children taken into state-run institutions.

Mark Rober and collaborators build glitter bomb traps and other pranks to fight phone scam call centers, and share evidence about the operations.

Jayson E. Street's DEF CON 19 talk shows photos from real security engagements where he was already inside client facilities, illustrating how social engineering and physical intrusion can cause huge losses. For each attack he also explains what defenses would have stopped him.

A 37C3 talk by Kaspersky researchers on Operation Triangulation, a zero-click iPhone attack that targeted their own colleagues. They describe capturing every stage of the chain, four zero-days and a previously unknown spyware active for years.

Kitboga baits tech-support scammers into believing they will get $3,000, wasting hours of their time while he plays along and screen-shares. The scammers become frustrated as it becomes clear the money will not reach them.

Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on operational security failures by CIA operatives. It covers the Abu Omar case and how sloppy tradecraft with cell phones exposed officers through call records and metadata.

Ivan Krstic's Black Hat talk on Apple platform security, including the Find My design that uses elliptic curve key diversification to locate offline devices privately. It also covers hardware features such as the T2 chip and secure boot hardening.

Poul-Henning Kamp's FOSDEM 2014 talk presents a fictitious NSA program called ORCHESTRA, satirizing how intelligence agencies could influence startups and open source. It is a humorous but pointed look at surveillance and subverted software.

A 32C3 talk dissecting Red Star OS, North Korea's state-built operating system. The speakers explain its internals and how it invades users' privacy, including file watermarking.

Moxie Marlinspike's 36C3 talk examines why distributed and decentralized technology is hard to build into consumer products, from the perspective of developing Signal. It argues that ecosystems move slowly and federation causes problems.

The 1990 NOVA documentary follows astronomer Clifford Stoll as he tracks a hacker through military and research computer networks, a story that involved the CIA and KGB. It is based on The Cuckoo's Egg.

Trevor Paglen's 30C3 talk on photographing and documenting the secret state, including CIA flights, spy satellites and military sites, to reveal the geography of covert programs.

A Channel 4 News interview with technologist Jaron Lanier, who argues that social media damages people's lives. He discusses how Facebook, YouTube and Google use algorithms and data collection to shape what users see.

Veritasium explains how investigators caught the Golden State Killer using forensic genealogy, matching crime scene DNA to distant relatives in public genealogy databases. It also covers the privacy implications of DNA databases.

A 36C3 talk on the AMD Platform Security Processor, an undocumented ARM core inside AMD CPUs that runs before the main processor. The speakers present their reverse engineering of its internals.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix keynotes the OMR 2017 marketing festival on big data and personality-based targeting in political campaigns. It was given before the company's scandal broke.

Chris Paget's DEF CON 18 talk on practical cellphone spying, showing how GSM traffic can be intercepted with a fake base station. It covers 2G interception and the weaknesses of cellular networks.