Lock and Code

Ransomware is becoming bespoke, and that could mean trouble for businesses and law enforcement investigators. 

It wasn't always like this. 

For a few years now, ransomware operators have congregated ar…

In January, a mental health nonprofit admitted that it had used Artificial Intelligence to help talk to people in distress. 

Prompted first by a user's longing for personal improvement—and the difficu…

The list of people and organizations that are hungry for your location data—collected so routinely and packaged so conveniently that it can easily reveal where you live, where you work, where you sho…

How many passwords do you have? If you're at all like our Lock and Code host David Ruiz, that number hovers around 200. But the important follow up question is: How many of those passwords can you ac…

Becky Holmes knows how to throw a romance scammer off script—simply bring up cannibalism. 

In January, Holmes shared on Twitter that an account with the name "Thomas Smith" had started up a random cha…

Government threats to end-to-end encryption—the technology that secures your messages and shared photos and videos—have been around for decades, but the most recent threats to this technology are uni…

In November of last year, the AI research and development lab OpenAI revealed its latest, most advanced language project: A tool called ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is so much more than "just" a chatbot. As users…

In 2020, a photo of a woman sitting on a toilet—her shorts pulled half-way down her thighs—was shared on Facebook, and it was shared by someone whose job it was to look at that photo and, by labeling…

Last month, the TikTok user TracketPacer posted a video online called “Network Engineering Facts to Impress No One at Zero Parties.”  TracketPacer regularly posts fun, educational content about how t…

When did technology last excite you? 

If Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is to be believed, your own excitement ended, simply had to end, after turning 35 years old. De…

On June 7, 2021, the US Department of Justice announced a breakthrough: Less than one month after the oil and gas pipeline company Colonial Pipeline had paid its ransomware attackers roughly $4.4 mil…

Decades ago, patching was, to lean into a corny joke, a bit patchy. 

In the late 90s, the Microsoft operating system (OS) Windows 98 had a supportive piece of software that would find security patche…

A cyberattack is not the same thing as malware—in fact, malware itself is typically the last stage of an attack, the punctuation mark that closes out months of work from cybercriminals who have infil…

Last month, when Malwarebytes published joint research with 1Password about the online habits of parents and teenagers today, we spoke with a Bay Area high school graduate on the Lock and Code podcas…

A thief has been stalking London. 

This past summer, multiple women reported similar crimes to the police: While working out at their local gyms, someone snuck into the locker rooms, busted open thei…

Growing up is different for teens today. 

Issues with identity, self-expression, bullying, fitting in, and trusting your friends and family—while all those certainly existed decades ago, they were ne…

Ransomware can send any company into crisis. 

Immediately following an attack, the notoriously disruptive malware can spread across networks and machines, locking up important files and rendering vita…

The in-person cybersecurity conference has returned.

More than two years after Covid-19 pushed nearly every in-person event online, cybersecurity has returned to the exhibition hall. In San Francisco…

In 1993, the video game developers at id Software released Doom, a first-person shooter that placed a nameless protagonist into the fiery depths of hell, equipped with an arsenal of weapons to mow do…

When Mike Miller was hired by a client to run a penetration test on one of their offices, he knew exactly where to start: Krispy Kreme. Equipped with five dozen donuts (the boxes stacked just high en…