Libsyn Directory

Reclaiming the Internet

Release Date: 05/21/2025

Easy Prey

Most security breaches don't begin with sophisticated code or elaborate technical exploits. They begin with a phone call, a convincing email, or someone at a help desk who just wanted to be helpful. The human layer is often the weakest link, and the criminals who understand that are the ones causing the most damage. My guest today is May Chen-Contino. She's the CEO of Unit 221B, a threat disruption company that delivers actionable intelligence to enterprises, law enforcement, and government agencies. Her background spans cybersecurity, fintech, and SaaS leadership at companies like PayPal and...

Stopping Phone Scams

Easy Prey

Phone scams get dismissed as background noise or just annoying interruptions and unknown numbers with robotic voices we learn to ignore. But behind that noise is an industry built on psychology, automation, and staggering profitability. My guest today is Alex Quilici. He’s an engineer, entrepreneur, and the CEO of YouMail, a company focused on protecting consumers and businesses from unwanted and fraudulent calls. Alex has spent years analyzing how robocalls and scam campaigns are designed, how they evolve, and why they continue to work despite better technology and increased awareness. What...

Stolen Identity - Stolen Peace

Easy Prey

Identity theft gets talked about a lot, but usually in the abstract: freeze your credit, watch your statements, don't click suspicious links. What doesn't get talked about nearly enough is what it actually feels like when someone isn't just using your card number, but is actively living as you. My guest today is Brooklyn Lyons. She's 25, recently married, and by her own admission, had no particular expertise in fraud or cybersecurity before October of 2024. That changed when her car window was smashed in a parking lot, and her work bag, laptop, wallet, driver's license, and everything...

Inside Modern Fraud

Easy Prey

Fraud doesn’t always announce itself with obvious warning signs. Quite often, it shows up wrapped inside something that feels routine — a purchase you’ve made before, a link that looks legitimate, a message that arrives at just the wrong moment. Nothing feels suspicious, so your guard stays down. By the time questions start forming, the transaction is already done. My guest today is Iremar Brayner. He’s spent more than 15 years working in fraud prevention and risk management across payments, retail, ride-hailing, fintech, and digital marketplaces. In his role at G2A, he leads fraud...

Money Laundering

Easy Prey

Organized crime is often imagined as something violent, chaotic, and obvious. But today, it looks far more polished than that. It operates like a multinational business, spread across borders, built on trust networks, specialization, and efficiency rather than brute force. This episode looks at how modern scams, fraud, and money laundering actually work and why they’re so hard to spot before serious damage is done. My guest is Geoff White, an investigative journalist who has spent decades covering organized crime, cybercrime, and financial fraud. His reporting has appeared on BBC News, Sky...

Critical Infrastructure Risks

Easy Prey

Most cybersecurity conversations focus on stolen data, breached accounts, and attacks that live entirely on screens. This episode looks at a far more consequential threat: what happens when cyberattacks target the physical systems that keep society running. Power, water, transportation, and manufacturing. When those systems fail, the consequences aren’t just digital. They’re immediate, visible, and sometimes dangerous. My guest is Lesley Carhart, Technical Director of Incident Response at Dragos, a cybersecurity firm focused exclusively on protecting critical infrastructure. Lesley...

Familial Identity Theft

Easy Prey

Identity theft is usually framed as an external threat. Hackers, data breaches, anonymous criminals operating somewhere far away. This episode looks at a much harder reality to face: identity theft that happens inside families, often quietly, over many years, and without immediate detection. The damage isn’t just financial. It reshapes trust, relationships, and a person’s sense of stability long before anyone realizes what’s happening. My guest is Axton Betz-Hamilton, an associate professor of financial counseling and planning whose research focuses on familial and child identity theft....

Exploiting Trust (Part 2)

Easy Prey

Security failures rarely come from cutting-edge attacks or sophisticated tools. They happen in ordinary moments when someone holds a door, follows an instruction without questioning it, or finds a workaround that makes their day easier. Those small, human decisions are often the real entry points, and they tend to compound over time. This episode picks up the second half of our conversation on exploiting trust with FC Barker, a veteran ethical hacker and physical security expert known for legally breaking into banks, government buildings, and high-security facilities around the world. With...

Exploiting Trust (Part 1)

Easy Prey

Most security failures don’t start with a dramatic breach or a mysterious hacker sitting in a dark room. They usually start quietly. Someone assumes a system is locked down. Someone trusts that a door shouldn’t open, or that a machine “just works,” or that no one would ever think to look there. Over time, those small assumptions stack up, and that’s where things tend to go wrong. Today’s guest is FC Barker, a renowned ethical hacker, social engineer, and global keynote speaker with more than three decades of experience legally breaking into organizations to expose their blind...

Surviving a Ransomware Attack

Easy Prey

A ransomware attack doesn’t always announce itself with flashing warnings and locked screens. Sometimes it starts with a quiet system outage, a few unavailable servers, and a sinking realization days later that the threat actors were already inside. This conversation pulls back the curtain on what really happens when an organization believes it’s dealing with routine failures only to discover it’s facing a full-scale cyber extortion event. My guest today is Zachary Lewis, CIO and CISO for a Midwest university, a 40 Under 40 Business Leader, and a former Nonprofit CISO of the Year....

More Episodes

We may not always understand the evolution of the internet and how tech monopolies exist, but having digital freedom fighters is vital to making conscious change. Today's guest is Cory Doctorow. Cory is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. He is the author of many books and most recently, Picks and Shovels, The Bezel, and The Lost Cause, a solar punk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate change emergency.

His most recent nonfiction book is the internet con How to Seize the Means of Corruption, a big tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame

Cory talks about the slow decline of online platforms and has spent decades fighting for digital rights, fair tech policy and a better, freer internet. His work spans peer to peer networks to antitrust reform and his books—fiction and nonfiction—have become battle cries for tech reformers and digital freedom fighters around the world.

In this episode we talk about how we got here, what Cory sees as the most urgent threats to digital freedom and the small cracks in the system that might finally let the light back in. From jailbreaking laws and app store monopolies to what comes after big tech’s dominance, Cory shares a roadmap for reclaiming the internet—not just as consumers but as citizens.

Show Notes:

[00:59] Cory shares his background. He's a science fiction novelist, activist, and journalist. He worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for over 23 years.
[01:20] Cory has written more than 30 books. Most of them are science fiction novels. He's also co-owner and was co-editor for 19 years for the blog Boing Boing.
[02:43] Being born in 1971 with a computer scientist father meant they had teletype terminals in the house.
[04:01] Cory shares his interesting and pioneering internet and tech history.
[05:17] We learn about the origins of Cory's love for science fiction.
[07:21] Cory shares a story about how he was mentored by Judy Merril.
[09:08] Cory talks about the internet and the changes we've seen from modems and memory cards to FidoNet to now.
[15:09] Currently, he's as worried about the internet as he is excited about its potential.
[16:13] He's concerned about the internet becoming a powerful tool of surveillance and control.
[18:46] Possible paths forward or hill climbing and reevaluating.
[22:00] We discuss why printer ink is $10,000 a gallon. It's about laws protecting big tech.
[29:45] The hopeful optimistic view of the internet. We're close to making positive changes.
[32:31] Advice for consumers is to be a citizen.
[34:16] Cory talks about the Electronic Frontier Alliance or EFA.
[45:30] Talking about Cory's books and art.
[46:31] He says he writes when he's anxious. He talks about his book Red Team Blues. He wrote the last book first and realized that you can write in any order.
[49:01] Bizarre early computers and the storyline of the new.

Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.

Show Notes:

Links and Resources:

TOPICS