Jul 14, 2023 - 27min
EPISODE 38
Lazarus Heist with Geoff White
Over the last few years North Korea has attacked the cryptocurrency ecosystem at alarming speed and scale, stealing over a billion dollars in cryptocurrencies to use for weapons proliferation and other destabilizing activity. In June 2022, TRM's Ari Redbord moderated a TRM Talks with experts from the U.S. State Department, Harvard's Kennedy School, and TRM Labs to discuss the North Korea threat and how to mitigate it.
In July 2023, we build on that discussion with this special TRM Talks: Lazarus Heist with "Lazarus Heist" author, and co-host of the BBC's Peabody Award nominated podcast of the same name, Geoff White.
Mr. White discusses the first and second seasons of the podcast which focus on North Korea's attack on Sony Pictures and the Bank of Bangladesh as well as the evolution and growing sophistication of North Korea's elite, state sponsored, cybercriminals. In addition, Mr. White discusses North Korea's pivot to theft in the crypto ecosystem and how law enforcement and regulators are using authorities to mitigate the risk of North Korea cyber attacks. This is an in-depth and fast paced discussion into some of the most interesting and timely issues in the crypto space.
About the guests
From billion-dollar cyber heists to global money laundering rings and crypto-gangsters – Geoff White has covered it all. As an author, speaker, investigative journalist and podcast creator, his work’s been featured by Penguin, the BBC, Audible, Sky News*,* The Sunday Times and many more. His new book for Penguin, Rinsed, reveals how technology has revolutionized money laundering, from drug cartels washing their cash in Bitcoin to organised fraud gangs recruiting money mules on social media.
His first book, Crime Dot Com, covered cybercrime’s emergence as a primal threat to modern society and was published in August 2020 by Reaktion Books. One of the key chapters detailed North Korea’s unlikely emergence as a cyber superpower. It was adapted by the BBC World Service into the hit 10-part podcast series The Lazarus Heist, co-created and co-hosted by Geoff, which immediately ranked number one in the UK Apple chart and within the top 7 in the US.
He has written and presented two major podcast series for Audible. The Dark Web exposes the shadow internet created by the US military and now home to hackers, crooks and freedom fighters. It has been a top ten hit on the platform since its launch in 2017. Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe? reveals the origins of AI, and shows how the technology is seeping into everyday life. Geoff’s own podcast series Cybercrime Investigations takes you inside the world of an investigative journalist, detailing the twists and turns as the story unfolds.
As the technology correspondent for Channel 4 News, one of the UK’s leading daily news programs, Geoff won multiple awards for his work on the Snowden leaks, the hacking of Britain’s largest ISP TalkTalk and his exposés of fraud in the internet dating industry. He was the creator of the program's Data Baby project, a unique experiment which used a fictional online persona to expose how personal data is used – and abused – online.
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