Full Transcript

A miner wearing a hard hat with light on top and holding a pickaxe crawling through a narrow cave that's shaped like side of sunglasses.

What if you got infected by a friend who wanted to spy on you? This is the story of how BlackShades spread to more than half a million machines, and 97 people got arrested.

Sponsors

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.

Support for this show comes from Ramp. Ramp is a financial operations platform bringing spending visibility and control to AI. With Ramp, you can see spending across AI providers and set real-time controls and guardrails by team and model. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. Learn more at ramp.com/darknet.

Support for this show comes from ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker is a Zero Trust Platform that gives organizations control over what can run and what users and devices can access. It combines prevention with real time detection and automated response, helping security teams stop unauthorized activity and quickly contain compromised machines. Learn how ThreatLocker can strengthen your defenses at threatlocker.com/Darknet.

View all active sponsors.

Sources

Attribution

Darknet Diaries is created by Jack Rhysider.

Written by Yael Grauer

Assembled by Tristan Ledger

Episode artwork by odibagas.

Mixing by Proximity Sound.

Theme song created by Breakmaster Cylinder. Theme song available for listen and download at bandcamp. Or listen to it on Spotify.



Transcript

JACK: Have you ever tried installing an app on your computer but then ended up with something else? Like, you downloaded something you actually wanted like a app to retrieve a deleted file or to get some video to play properly, [Music] you get it on your machine the way everyone does, you downloaded it, run the installer,

Read Full Transcript