Can computer hackers get inside your mind?

The cyber weapon that might have prevented nuclear war. The U. S. and Israel have long been in conflict with Iran over their nuclear development program. Some of that conflict has been out in the open, with bombs and blockades, but some of it has been invisible. Recently some security researchers discovered a cyberweapon likely tied to that invisible conflict. It looks like it was designed to hide on nuclear scientists computers, then throw off their calculations--just as they got close to achieving their goals. Sounds like something out of science fiction. But it was created 20 years ago. On today’s show: a whodunit about hackers, ‘Cyber Paleontologists’, spy-vs-spy protocols, cryptic intelligence leaks, nuclear physics, high-precision math, and epistemological warfare. Pictured: Juan Andres Guerrero Saade (JAGS) and his ‘Fast16 - NOTHING TO SEE HERE, CARRY ON’ tattoo. Support: Planet Money+ https://n.pr/3HlREPz Read: Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUBOur weekly Indicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow: Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuwsTikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrqYouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3CFacebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS This episode was hosted by Nick Fountain and Erika Beras. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Marianne McCune with help from Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Charlotte Isidore and engineered by Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Music: NPR Source Audio - “High Tech Expert,” “Digital Wave,” and “Hyper Pop.” See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  On Friday, if all goes according to plan, representatives from the US and Iran will meet in Geneva to sign another 60-day ceasefire agreement. But the two sides still have not come to an agreement on what's been at the heart of this war and decades of conflict, Iran's development of nuclear weapons.

• 0:42Speaker 03

  Right. This conflict has been on again, off again, for years. And while the most recent iteration has been very violent, with bombs and blockades, there is a whole other, almost entirely invisible war that the US and allies have been waging with Iran, using cyber espionage, or more accurately, cyber sabotage. You know, computer viruses, malware. Recently, we heard a story about a piece of malware that might have been used in this invisible war that was diabolically cunning. Because it exploited weaknesses in computers, yes, but also maybe in the human psyche. The more I think about it, the more I think this must have driven people insane.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  But it also might have saved the world from nuclear destruction.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  We heard about this hack from someone whose job it is to identify computer hacks that could be a threat to all of us.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  What's your name? What do you do?

• 1:41Speaker 04

  My name is Juan Andres Guerrero Saad, which is why everybody calls me Jags.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  J A G S, Jags. His initials are shorter and cooler.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, he is a pretty cool guy. He's got a faux hawk, sleeves of tattoos. He was on track to go get a PhD in philosophy, but now?

• 2:00Speaker 04

  I'm a security researcher, which I think would be the simplest term. I think some folks would say cyber paleontologist.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Cyber paleontologist, like he digs for the remnants of cyber attacks. Jags works for a cybersecurity company called Sentinel One. It helps big companies like Samsung and the Golden State Warriors and the government protect their computers and networks.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, hacking is a whole industry. And defending against hacks is this whole other industry. Jags just so happens to have the raddest job of all, which is dusting off old malware files buried deep on servers and reverse engineering how hackers got into systems in the first place and what they did when they got there. So he can figure out how to defend against similar attacks in the future.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  And Jags is kind of a big deal. There are actually a couple of pieces in the International Spy Museum in DC based on his cyber paleontology work.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Ah, this is a little crude, but in the Jurassic Park movie, which paleontologist are you?

• 3:06Speaker 04

  As long as you don't immediately default to Jeff Goldblum.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  I was gonna go Jeff Goldblum. But I think that he is like a chaos theory mathematician.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  Which I think fits the bill, right? What the hell do I actually know about paleontology?

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  We met up with Jags because we wanted to get a peek into the invisible war because Jags has made a stunning discovery of a highly specialized, highly sophisticated cyber weapon.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Often, these weapons don't even get detected. If they do, it's not usually until years later, when someone like Jags comes across an old fragment and tries to reconstruct what top secret mission the weapon was designed to carry out.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  For Jags, the fragment he found wasn't even a piece of code. It was just six words. It came from a leaked list of malware from the NSA.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, the list came from this tool the NSA had, meant to help NSA operators, while they were hacking into some computer in enemy territory, figure out whether some other hacker was already there. And if so, whether they were friends or foes.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Essentially, it'll run all these checks and it's gonna give the operators, it's gonna give a list of instructions of saying, hey, look, suspicious thing here. We don't know what that is. Known malware, pull back.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Like little warning signs. And this was a budding cyber paleontologists' dream. Each piece of malware on that list had the potential to teach you so much about how the world's top hackers were getting the job done. And maybe one would turn out to be an incredibly sophisticated cyber weapon.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Jags, with great excitement, got a hold of this list and started scouring it for something he should start digging into. And one item screamed, "Look here."

• 5:03Speaker 04

  There's one, just one line that's like completely different to all the other ones.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  And it's, it just says, "Fast16, nothing to see here, carry on."

• 5:15Speaker 03

  In all caps.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  That's it. There's nothing else like it.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  "Fast16" was what the NSA was calling the malware. And the cryptic instruction the agency was giving its operators, not "seek help" or "pull back", simply, "nothing to see here, carry on."

• 5:33Speaker 04

  You can't put that there. Like, it was like catnip, right? It felt like bait. We couldn't let it go. I couldn't let it go.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  He didn't let it go. He had to know what this thing was. What did it do? What was its target? The NSA seemed to know about it, but who made it? And what was so top, top, top secret that the NSA was resorting to Jedi mind tricks to try to keep its own people in the dark?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  At this point, Jags just had the name of this malware, Fast16, just a tibia. But he was able to use that to dig up the rest of the bones. Basically, he rummaged around this, like, public library of suspected malware until he found it. And eventually, he was able to put together the pieces of the skeleton that is Fast16. But still, when he tried to reverse engineer it to understand what its secret mission was, he couldn't.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  I worked these, like, cracked out nights. And very often, I'll run into something, I'm like, oh, my God, I found this amazing thing. And then by the morning, you're like, no, this, this doesn't work.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  We call this the Valley of Despair.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yes, I, I, I have built a home in the Valley of Despair. I, I'm, I'm in the process of gentrifying the Valley of Despair. If any of you would like to join me there.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  After many, many fruitless nights, weeks, months, Jags had to turn to other projects and had to put Fast16 down. But to remind him of what was not solved, he inked Fast16 on his skin forever.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Fast16 has been on the back of my arm for a while now.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  You got it tattooed? Oh, yeah. Where is Fast16?

• 7:16Speaker 04

  It's, you can see Fast16 in nothing to see here.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Nothing to see here, carry on.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  And I'm Erica Beres. Today on the show, nothing to see here, carry on.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, Jags sets out to solve the mystery of Fast16 and finds a cyber weapon with the potential to chip away at our very grasp of reality.

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• 8:54Speaker 03

  So what was this mysterious piece of malware that was so secret that the NSA was using Jedi mind tricks to try to keep their people away from it? And so enticing that security researchers, or at least one over-caffeinated keyboard-wielding security researcher, got it tattooed on his tricep? Theoretical tricep, yes.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Jags, said researcher, was pretty blocked, but he knew he had to keep at it because he had a hunch that Fast 16 might reveal important details about that invisible side of the conflicts we read about every day, like back when security researchers discovered a cyber sabotage operation that blew everyone's mind. It was called Stuxnet.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, Stuxnet is kind of the mother of all cyber sabotage operations. In many ways, my industry is birthed by the discovery of Stuxnet. For those not familiar, Stuxnet was this absolutely bonkers hacking operation that reportedly slowed down Iran's nuclear program back in the mid 2000s. And to hear Jags describe it, it totally redefined what was possible. So before Stuxnet...

• 10:08Speaker 04

  If you went to these antivirus conferences with a lot of fun gals and guys,

• 10:14Speaker 04

  the possibility of cyber espionage was discussed as that, as a possibility.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  It was theoretical.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  It was theoretical.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Wouldn't it be cool? This might be happening.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're like, there's no way people won't. There's value there, of course. And then, you know, Stuxnet is discovered and you realize not only has this been happening and at a scale and capacity way above anything we'd ever found before, but it's been happening for years.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  What had been happening was that Israel and the US allegedly had used cyber weapons to destroy real world, physical things. They did this by managing to get a thumb drive into Iran and inserting malware into the computer network at the heart of their uranium enrichment program, the system that controlled the centrifuges.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  And Stuxnet was very, very clever. It spread throughout the network and carefully noted how everything looked when it was working normally, saved that, and then gave the centrifuges instructions to go haywire, speeding up and slowing down and braking, all while making everything in the computer system look a-okay, look normal.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  So the operators are hearing that these things are like making these weird noises. They're spinning up. They sound like, it sounds like things aren't going well in this room next door, but I'm looking at the computer and the computer tells me everything's normal.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  All in all, Stuxnet reportedly destroyed a fifth of all the centrifuges that Iran was using. It led to nuclear scientists getting fired. And most importantly, it is widely believed to have slowed down Iran's nuclear program.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  And to the cyber paleontologists of the world like JAGS, when the bones of Stuxnet were dug up, they revealed this whole new age of cyber warfare. But JAGS?

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Always believed that Stuxnet was just a hint of what was out there.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Just a tibia.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  Clearly, we didn't even know about all the different things they were doing.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  So, year after year, Jags remained committed to figuring out his white whale, figuring out the puzzle of Fast 16. Who made it? Who were they targeting? What exactly were they doing to that target? And how? But he didn't make much progress. Until earlier this year, for a very this year reason. AI.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, here's why. Jags heads a big team of researchers at his cybersecurity firm. And like everyone else these days, he was wondering, could these new AI tools help us in our jobs? Could they do our jobs? Could they do a job that was so hard even I, Jags, couldn't do it? Could they solve the puzzle that is Fast 16?

• 13:10Speaker 04

  There is no public guide to solving it. If it's gonna figure it out, it's gonna have to figure it out just in this little sandbox with a few tools and go, all right, kid, like, what can you do?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Jags sent a colleague to oversee these AI tests. That colleague was Vitaly Kamluuk, a Belarusian cybersecurity researcher who also has a faux hawk. He lives in Singapore and, according to Jags, is very zen-like.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  And Jags has Vitaly like any self-respecting human. He decided to, John Henry-style, try to beat the machines.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  I, being put in that position, would have said, cool, let's go make the AI sweat. And Vitaly, being a much more patient zen master-style dude, he said, well, if I'm gonna know if it's doing well, I need to know what this thing does. And Vitaly spent like two weeks in a black dark hole somewhere, not answering messages, nothing. I was like, is this guy okay? Like, what happened to Vitaly? And all of a sudden, I get a message from Vitaly, super late, well, I guess, for him.

• 14:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, it was like about 1:00 AM or so.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  And he's like, hey, man, like, I need to talk.

• 14:21Speaker 07

  Jags, yeah, we need to talk.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  This, of course, is Vitaly Kamluuk. Reverse engineering legend.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  He describes you as zen-like. Do you think that's fair?

• 14:31Speaker 07

  Zen-like?

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 07

  Does this make me more peaceful and simple? I hope so, but.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  But on this call, he was not very zen-like. Vitali said he'd done the reverse engineering, and he'd had the AI models double and triple check his work. And now, Jags says, he seemed pretty disturbed.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  He's like, "Look, I need you to test me here, but like, all the models at least agree with me, so I now need to talk to a human being. This is Stuxnet-like." And I hear that kind of nonsense from students, right? Like, you know, I hear this kind of, I'm like a lightning rod. Anybody in this industry is a lightning rod for like DMs from people clearly having like schizophrenic episodes about like the government spying on me. So you hear this kind of stuff all the time. When you hear it from Vitali, who's a very measured person,

• 15:25Speaker 04

  it makes you take pause. You go, "Okay, what are you talking about? What do you mean?"

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Vitali explained, they're from the same era, the mid 2000s. And even though they don't share any code, they seem to share similar architecture. But Vitali couldn't figure out what exactly Fast16's mission was, only that it targeted the part of a computer that did complex math.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Think of it as like floating-point math, like the really, really details-based, hard calculation stuff that most of the time you never deal with. And I've never run into a piece of malware that does that.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Jags says he's never seen malware that messed with high-precision math. Most spy malware is designed to steal data, or like in Stuxnet, make things go haywire. But this one was basically telling the computer 2 plus 2 equals 5.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  So, at this point, Jags had found Fast16 buried in a cyber library based on a hunch that it was something to pay attention to. And Vitali had confirmed it was, because who messes with math? And maybe more importantly, whose math were they messing with?

• 16:38Speaker 04

  Who is running high-precision calculations back in 2005, doing something so interesting?

• 16:47Speaker 04

  That it got somebody to build a super specific custom piece of malware to modify and mess with their workloads. Everything about this thing screams special. Like, it screams unique. It screams groundbreaking. And I think what's most excruciating about it is that the mystery won't yield. Like, you just kind of have to keep pushing and say, OK, why?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  After the break?

• 17:16Speaker 04

  OK, I guess we're back to the trenches of like, OK, how do we nail this thing?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Jags puts all the pieces together.

• 17:34Speaker 00

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• 19:07Speaker 02

  So Jags and Vitali, still separated by a 12-hour time difference, set out to answer their next question. Whose math was Fast16 designed to target?

• 19:19Speaker 03

  And pretty quickly, they come upon a major clue. By looking at a rules engine embedded in Fast16's code, like, a list of instructions, basically if-then rules. If Fast16 sees something happen on a computer-

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Then it goes, "Oh, I've recognized this thing. What does my rule engine say? Oh, if I find this thing, then I need to change these six bytes into these six other bytes. If I find this thing, then I need to set this thing back into whatever the old value was. If I find this thing, right?" But what the hell do those six bytes represent?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  So they start scanning old systems and software from way back in the day, looking for those strings of bytes. Jack says it was like looking through a mathematician's notebook of scribbles for a particular string of numbers, which is not easy. And it's not like old code just exists out in the wild. But eventually, they do find a few pieces of software that contain some of those same strings of six bytes, which all had to do with complex physics modeling. Like, how to design a car that'll crumple safely when it crashes, or a bridge that will withstand an earthquake.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  For Vitali, the idea that someone was targeting calculations that were supposed to keep us safe was incredibly disturbing.

• 20:41Speaker 07

  Like, do they have limits, really? Like, it's just a new type of kind of evil ideas. I felt that the target was scientists, civil engineers, corrupt their calculation results. And that would eventually produce risks for lives of others. So I was terrified, like, why would people do that?

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Very soon, they had a breakthrough that kind of answered the question. Jags was searching around for one of those pieces of software. It's called LS Dyna, in short for Livermore Software Dynamic Analysis.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  Something that I run into right away as I'm looking up LS Dyna is this report by The Good ISIS.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  The Good ISIS?

• 21:25Speaker 04

  That's what they call themselves. I don't know what ISIS stands for. It's some kind of think tank. The Good ISIS.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Institute for some something or other.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  And The Good ISIS has this report saying, if you look back at this research that Iranian scientists have been publicly putting out, you can see that they were using software that they shouldn't have been using.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  They knew that these guys had this piece of software, LS Dyna?

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. What's interesting is the example they put for LS Dyna is trying to figure out the right explosive materials for nuclear payloads.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  In other words, this documentation from the Institute of Science and International Security seemed to suggest that the software Fast16 was supposed to mess with was being used by Iranian nuclear scientists to maybe design nuclear bombs.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  So that was the software that the Fast16 malware was likely targeting, telling it, if you find these bytes, change them to these other ones. But why change those specific bytes? What would changing the math in the software achieve?

• 22:38Speaker 02

  To solve that part of the puzzle, they had to get their hands on that software the Iranian scientists were using. A very bespoke piece of physics modeling software released decades ago, very much not on the App Store.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Did you pay for it?

• 22:54Speaker 04

  No, you can't buy it. You can't just buy it. And moreover, People don't love it when you're like, hey, uh, do you happen to have a copy of your software from 21 years ago? I was like, why? Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Just, you know, so you've got to get your hands on this thing somehow.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  And Jax and Vitali did. And what they found was that Fast 16 was designed to hide in scientist's computers and do nothing, basically to keep watch, to wait for LS Dyna to get installed. At that point, it would stay low key until it saw the computer doing these very specific tests that only someone developing a nuclear warhead would be doing. Had to do with the pressure calculations to simulate a nuclear explosion. And that is when Fast 16 would do its mayhem. At the point when the engineers got near the pressure they needed, Fast 16 would throw those calculations off by changing the math.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  The old two plus two equals five trick.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  And furthermore, it was designed to spread from computer to computer.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  The idea being that if you, if I come to this computer and I run this simulation workload and go, hey, those results don't look right. Let's go try this other computer. And you go and you run it in the other one, that too will give you the, the right, wrong answer.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  The exact same wrong answer.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Exactly. So the idea was to drive these people nuts, right? Like you go and like it's right math, wrong answer, right formula, wrong answer over and over everywhere you go. And you probably don't know that it's wrong until you then go and try to do another thing with it and you go, damn it, this thing is not working.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  Right? Like it's devious. The cunning of this attack is truly fascinating because at some point, I think before you ever consider that the computers are wrong.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  You almost certainly look at these scientists and go, maybe you guys are clowns. Maybe you guys don't know what the hell you're doing.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Jags and Vitali were flabbergasted by the sophistication and the technical prowess of this malware from decades ago. Not just the Cody parts, but also the deep knowledge of nuclear physics.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  And after so many late nights of being haunted by Fast 16, Jags and Vitali were finally able to announce in April of this year that Fast 16, which they'd started looking into on a hunch, was indeed a major cyber weapon, whose mission seemed like it was to sabotage Iran's nuclear development program. Was it worth the wait?

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, walking around with this like bag of open questions, right?

• 25:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are still some unknowns. Number one, we don't know definitively that this was targeting Iran. For example, North Korea also had nuclear ambitions at that time.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  You look back, you go, well, North Korea was having a whole lot of problems with their missile program back then. We don't know where all of these things were being used. We just know of one target that they definitely use this kind of stuff against, which is Iran.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  You're that confident?

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Uh, no, look, let's, let's put it a different way, right? We've never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever heard of anybody doing this kind of cyber sabotage anywhere for anything other than the Iranian nuclear program in the same era as when Fast 16 is developed.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Thing number two, we don't know, who did this? It has echoes of Stuxnet, which is widely reported to have been deployed by the US and Israel. But when we reached out to the NSA and the CIA and the Israeli Defense Forces and asked them, was Fast 16 you? They didn't deny it.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  They didn't confirm it either.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true, too. The IDF never got back to us and the others said basically, sorry, but we have nothing to offer you on this.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Jags, for his part, also checked in with them.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Before you publish, do you reach out to the US and Israeli intelligence community and ask them, are we going to blow your cover?

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, yeah, but I won't go too far into that, right? Like, most of the time, we are good collaborators and good friends.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Do these meetings happen in person? Was there any pushback this time? No. Meaning, we're not worried about you blowing our cover, you weird paleontologist. This stuff is 20 years old.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Right. And the third thing we don't know is why the NSA wrote, in reference to Fast 16, "The instructions, nothing to see here. Carry on." Was that like, with a wink?

• 27:43Speaker 03

  One day, when this stuff is declassified, we might get an answer to all three of those questions. But we're much less likely to figure out, did Fast 16 change history? Jack says he sure was deployed because he couldn't have found it otherwise. But like, did it slow down Iran's or someone's nuclear program? Did it bring them to the bargaining table?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, did it prevent nuclear war?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  And the last enduring mystery? How did Fast 16 mess with the minds of the scientists who encountered it? Like, I have this picture in my head of the nuclear scientists in Iran, working on this project of intense national significance. Presumably, their boss's boss was constantly giving updates to Iran's president, the Ayatollah. And these scientists would have been doing their experiments right? And then infuriatingly, getting the wrong answer. Is epistemological warfare what you would call this?

• 28:46Speaker 04

  If I had called it that, they would have said I was just being pretentious. I wouldn't have allowed myself that, as a repentant philosopher.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but as a repentant philosopher.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. I think epistemological warfare is a fascinating way to frame it.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Break that out a little for me.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Well, I think the, um, we take for granted how much we take for granted. Certainty, people think that certainty is a, is a matter of coherent deduction, that somehow you're sitting here and you, you have this perfect cohesive worldview. That's not actually how it works. That's not how anything works. If you questioned everything in your life, you would be paralyzed, right? If you questioned that when you, you know, get out of bed, you don't know if like, the floor is gonna hold you, right? You wouldn't be able to function.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Jags told us about an interaction he recently had with Vitali that kind of brings this home. They were in Singapore, where Vitali lives, on their way to a hacker conference to present their Fast 16 research.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  He gets us on a train and he goes, oh, look, it's a driverless train. The train just, you know, and I can't remember, we were talking about something to do with Fast 16. He stops and he goes, I mean, this is precisely the kind of system that you would degrade with this kind of attack. You know, there was a collision and they said there was no cyber attack involved. And then we look at each other and we go, you know, you kind of shrug and you go, well, as far as we know, right?

• 30:16Speaker 03

  What I find fascinating is that these experts who spend their lives staring at computers, who know their capabilities more than anyone, are also some of the most skeptical people when it comes to trusting computers. Does that ever get to you?

• 30:33Speaker 04

  No.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  No?

• 30:34Speaker 04

  No, I, I don't know. I'm telling you, man, I'm not wired quite the right way.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  To me, questioning everything does seem paralyzing, but they seem well attuned to life in the computer age, life in the time of epistemological warfare.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  If you are an intelligence operative who has info on a clandestine operation and want to tell me about it, you can reach me at, you know. Who am I kidding? You know how to find me.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  And if you live outside the United States, we also need your help. For Planet Money's summer school, we are scouring the world for the most interesting, surprising economic ideas that should spread. Think like a different way to do taxes, a mega project that came in under budget. Somehow, rent is cheap. Get in touch and tell us about an idea the world should know about. Email us at [email protected] and put "summer school" in the subject. We might use your idea on the podcast.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  This episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Marian McKeon with editing help from the great Jess Jiang.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  It was fact checked by Charlotte Isador and engineered by Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Special thanks to the research team at Symantec, who also dug into Fast 16, Andy Greenberg from Wired, who broke the story, Kim Zetter, who wrote the definitive book about Stuxnet, and David Albright of, and I can't believe I'm saying this, the Good ISIS, which now I know stands for the Institute for Science and International Security. Jax has a podcast with also a funny name. It's called The Three Buddy Problem. I'm Nick Fountain.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  And I'm Erica Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

• 32:34Speaker 06

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