Show Notes
If you weren’t taking deepfakes seriously before, it’s too late now to ignore them. According to new research from Malwarebytes, one in three people who use AI every day said it’s okay to generate pornography of people without their consent. Nearly 10 years ago, “deepfake” technology provided hobbyists and film editors with artificial intelligence (AI) tools to swap the face of one person onto the body of another. In its infancy, this technology brought silly film experiments like swapping Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible with Keanu Reeves. Today, this same technology produces something far more harmful—fake nude images of teenagers. On the Lock and Code podcast today with host David Ruiz, we are re-visiting an interview from 2024, in which we spoke with a lawyer named David Chiu about his lawsuit against 16 deepfake nude generation websites. The websites named in that lawsuit often needed just one image of a person to generate fake pornography. And while nearly everyone has at least one image of themselves online, even if they had hundreds, the path towards deletion is somewhat understood—start by deactivating and deleting popular social media accounts. But for teenagers today, raised mostly online, and who share images directly with friends and boyfriends and girlfriends and exes, it’s likely impossible to remove every visual trace of themselves. Also, they shouldn’t have to face this problem alone. The Lock and Code podcast frequently discusses structural problems that require individual management. You have to skirt corporate data collection. You have to find the automated license plate readers in your hometown. You have to review every single message you get with a certain antagonism, to guard yourself against scams. So, it’s rare to encounter a solution that benefits more than one person. Chiu serves as the City Attorney for San Francisco, which means his department can file a lawsuit on behalf of not just the people of San Francisco, but also California, and that’s what his team did in going after the deepfake websites. Since then, Chiu’s department has shut down 10 deepfake nude websites, and it received a settlement agreement from a company called Briver LLC to no longer operate any website that creates nonconsensual deepfake pornography. And, as California goes, so goes the nation. In May of last year, the Take It Down Act became effective as law in the United States, which criminalizes “revenge porn” and AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery. The law is not perfect but so far it is being used as intended. Last month, two men in the US were among the first to be charged with violating the Take It Down act for allegedly creating deepfake nudes that, according to the AP, “included both celebrities as well as private women, including recent high school graduates.” Today, we revisit our conversation with San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu about the important fight against deepfake porn and the clear threat that his department found against the public. “At least one of these websites specifically promotes the non-consensual nature of this. So, and I’ll just quote, ‘Imagine wasting time taking her out on dates when you can just use website X to get her nudes.'”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com) Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it. Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
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At just 17 years old, Jordan DeMay was murdered by strangers online. That’s how Jordan’s father, John DeMay, described what happened to his son four years ago. At home in Michigan, Jordan was readying for a weekend trip when he received a friend request on Instagram. The invite was sent by a user named “dani.robertts” whose profile showed an attractive young woman. After accepting the request, Jordan and the account chatted about nothing in particular—teenage matters, getting to know one another—before “dani” became flirtatious, eventually sending Jordan what she claimed was a nude photograph of herself. Jordan responded in kind with an explicit photograph of himself. But here, a trap was revealed. “Dani Robertts” was not a young, friendly, interested woman. Dani Robertts was several men, sending messages from thousands of miles away in Lagos, Nigeria, who had followed a script to pressure young men into handing over their money. This was not the first time these men had run this scam. But with a great deal of investigative work, it hopefully has become the last. What happened to Jordan can happen to anyone—and it has happened to far too many young men and women today. It is a type of attack commonly referred to as “sextortion.” Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with John DeMay about his son Jordan, his family’s relationship with social media, and what parents should know. Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)
On Thursday, December 28, 2023, at 8:30 pm in the Utah town of Riverdale, the city police began investigating what they believed was a kidnapping. 17-year-old foreign exchange student Kai Zhuang was missing, and according to Riverdale Police Chief Casey Warren, Zhuang was believed to be “forcefully taken” from his home, and “being held against his will.” The evidence leaned in police’s favor. That night, Zhuang’s parents in China reportedly received a photo of Zhuang in distress. They’d also received a ransom demand. But as police in Riverdale and across the state of Utah would soon learn, the alleged kidnapping had a few wrinkles. For starters, there was no sign that Zhuang had been forcefully removed from his home in Riverdale, where he’d been living with his host family. In fact, Zhuang’s disappearance was so quiet that his host family was entirely unaware that he’d been missing until police came and questioned them. Additionally, investigators learned that Zhuang had experienced a recent run-in with police officers nearly 75 miles away in the city of Provo. Just eight days before his disappearance in Riverdale, Zhuang caught the attention of Provo residents because of what they deemed strange behavior for a teenager: Buying camping gear in the middle of a freezing winter season. Police officers who intervened at the residents’ requests asked Zhuang if he was okay, he assured them he was, and a ride was arranged for the teenager back home. But what Zhuang didn’t tell Provo police at the time was that, already, he was being targeted in an extortion scam. But when Zhuang started to push back against his scammers, it was his parents who became the next target. Zhuang—and his family—had become victims of what is known as “virtual kidnapping.” For years, virtual kidnapping scams happened most frequently in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, in cities like Los Angeles and Houston. But in 2015, the scams began reaching farther into the US. The scams themselves are simple yet cruel attempts at extortion. Virtual kidnappers will call phone numbers belonging to affluent neighborhoods in the US and make bogus threats about a holding a family member hostage. As explained by the FBI in 2017, virtual kidnappers do not often know the person they are calling, their name, their occupation, or even the name of the family member they have pretended to abduct: “When an unsuspecting person answered the phone, they would hear a female screaming, ‘Help me!’ The screamer’s voice was likely a recording. Instinctively, the victim might blurt out his or her child’s name: ‘Mary, are you okay?’ And then a man’s voice would say something like, ‘We have Mary. She’s in a truck. We are holding her hostage. You need to pay a ransom and you need to do it now or we are going to cut off her fingers.’” Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we are presenting a short, true story from December 2023 about virtual kidnapping. Today’s episode cites reporting and public statements from the Associated Press, the FBI, ABC4.com, Fox 6 Milwaukee, and the Riverdale Police Department. Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com) Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it. Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
If you want AI to tell you a story, it will. If you want that story to sound like one of your favorite authors, it can. And if you’re one of the authors that AI can imitate, you might be a little upset at what feels like theft. In 2024, the authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic, the creator of Claude, alleging that the company had wrongfully digested millions of copyrighted works—including some of their very own—to train its AI models. The lawsuit grew to include more than 300,000 writers, and in September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the claims. That headline-worthy payout, however, would eventually be paired with more startling news. In January 2026, a district court judge unsealed thousands of documents related to the litigation. When The Washington Post investigated the documents, reporters found references to a secret project inside Anthropic called “Project Panama,” which Anthropic itself described as the company’s effort “to destructively scan all the books in the world.” Anthropic is not alone in this. On August 17, 404 Media co-founder and reporter Emanuel Maiberg revealed that Amazon is doing something similar inside a department it calls VGT3. By hiding an Apple AirTag in one book from a 1,000-book order, and then tracking the shipment across the country, 404 Media identified the book’s final destination to be a facility outside Las Vegas, where, according to employees, books are cut apart and scanned. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Maiberg about Amazon’s VGT3 operation and the likely commonplace practice of AI companies purchasing, scanning, and destroying books in an effort to build “frontier” models. “They’re buying a book, they’re scanning it, they’re mulching the book, and then the digital version of the book exists behind this wall where we don’t even know if they plan to sell it, right? It’s like they might keep it behind a wall, and the only way we see it come out again from behind that wall is in the form of an answer from a chatbot.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com) Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it. Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
Crooks are taking a holiday. They’re counting on you to fund it. For decades, cybercriminals have stolen roughly the same types of data. Biographical and personal details—like Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses, and phone numbers—can be stolen to commit identity fraud. Credit card numbers, expiration dates, and CVC codes can be stolen to make fraudulent purchases. Usernames and passwords can, in the wrong hands, let a cybercriminal impersonate someone, steal sensitive photographs to later use for extortion, or abuse a reputation. All of these attack models seek to turn sensitive or important data into currency. But an emerging form of digital fraud is targeting data that, when used strategically, practically is currency: Loyalty points. Loyalty points programs are run by nearly every type of consumer-facing business today, from hotels to airlines to grocery stores to donut shops. As repeat customers accrue these points, they can exchange them for discounted prices on future purchases, cutting the costs of hotel stays, flights, rental cars, and even entire vacations. But the value stored within these loyalty points makes them a high target for cybercrime, said Kim Sutherland, Global Head of Fraud and Identity at LexisNexis® Risk Solutions. “Most loyalty currency is worth about one cent per point, and then there are premium programs that can be worth more than that,” Sutherland said, explaining that 100,000 airlines points, for example, can be worth $1,000 in the US. “Why criminals care so much about this is because most of us are not paying attention to our loyalty programs the same way we would our bank account.” But diligence is much needed here, Sutherland said, noting that one Chicago teacher only learned that 240,000 of his airlines points had been stolen because he received a basic confirmation email about their use. In another example, a man’s airline miles were stolen and fraudulently used to book rental cars in New York and Memphis. Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Sutherland about loyalty points theft— how it happens, what companies are doing to protect customers, and what people can do to stay safe. “Some of us don’t even know how to access those points, right? Or we don’t even know we’re accumulating them, but the fraudsters do.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com) Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it. Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.
You will die. Your data will not. The afterlife of our information is a recent phenomenon, and some of the companies with the most to sort through are still just figuring it out. As far back as 2007, Facebook was forced to reckon with mass grief when users asked the company to maintain the profile pages of the 32 victims killed by a school shooter at Virginia Tech that year. Those pages became de facto memorials for loved ones to fill with comments, and today, memorialization has become a full-fledged feature on both Facebook and Instagram. Platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn—launched with likely zero strategy for a user’s death—now have procedures for next-of-kin to request that a deceased person’s account be deactivated. Now, think about all the other ways your data can linger after death. Every year, people accumulate more and digital stuff—email addresses, social media profiles, contact lists, domain names, subscription services, online banking accounts, and the phones, laptops, and tablets that hold it all—and every year, as that digital stuff accumulates, it compounds into ever more problems for someone else to sort out. Here, a small industry of digital estate planners have cropped up, helping families retrieve and preserve anything valuable, no matter how digital, from Spotify playlists, to poignant social media posts that mattered, to the photos stored on a phone. And where retrieval fails, artificial intelligence has offered an attempt at comfort. The chatbot service Replika launched in 2015 after its founder uploaded a dead friend’s text messages. HereAfter AI reportedly let users upload voice recordings to power a chatbot that sounded and spoke like the deceased. Film studios have pursued the same idea for entertainment, seeking to portray deceased actors in future films. Surprisingly, almost none of this activity is governed by law, said Tamara Kneese, author of the 2023 book “Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond.” “By and large, there is not a great legal mechanism for protecting the privacy rights of the dead,” said Kneese. “It may not be just that a grieving loved one decides to use a bunch of your data from all of your podcasts to create a chatbot to simulate interacting with you after you’re dead, but it may be that a company chooses, in some way, to use an aspect of your personality, of your demeanor, of your voice, of your likeness after your death without anyone really being aware.” Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Kneese—Senior Research Scientist at Partnership on AI—about who owns a person’s data after they die, why every platform has invented its own private policy for the dead, and how the technology built to keep the dead close can vanish just as suddenly as they did. Or worse yet, as Kneese warned for those relying heavily on certain technologies in grief: “The company gets sold to someone else or disappears, goes bankrupt, and you no longer have that outlet or place for interaction when you’re mourning another time.”Tune in today. You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use. For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog. Show notes and credits: Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com) Further reading: Fartein Hauan Nilsen, “Caring for the Algorithm: Care, Love, and the Relational Personhood of Chatbots,” Somatosphere, February 26, 2026 Fartein Hauan Nilsen, “Therapeutic ideology and AI personhood: an anthropological inquiry into AI companionship,” a chapter from “Handbook on Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence,” Edward Elgar Publishing, July 21, 2026 University of Birmingham, “New Model Rules mark meaningful step towards digital inheritance laws,” July 16