Cybercrimes with Ben Hammersley

Delve into the dark web and the drugdealing market known as the Silk Road as well as the nowfamous BitCoin currency used on it This episode covers how the FBI investigated and caught Ross Ulbricht who is believed to be the Dread Pirate Roberts

2013 was a terrible year for big business In February 45 million was stolen from ATMs worldwide after cybercriminals hacked credit cards and gave them unlimited withdrawal limits Ben Hammersley travels to New York and Washington DC to examine how crime has evolved forensically examining the many ranks and roles of a modern criminal organization

Its been estimated that almost 70 of all email traffic is spam Online it is Nigeria that is often seen as the biggest culprit Ben Hammersley travels to Lagos to meet online scammers and the police tasked with tracking them down But in a country of 168 million with the largest economy in Africa Ben asks if labeling Nigeria as the worst offender is just another lazy stereotype

The Pirate Bay is one of the largest filesharing sites in the world It was founded in Sweden in 2003 by Gottfrid Svartholm Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde They were tried for copyright infringement in 2009 Ben visits Stockholm to tell the story of the internet trial of the century and looks at how it affected our relationship with big media copyright and the notion of ownership online

It has been described as the Hiroshima of cyberwar the moment where the fevered imaginations of science fiction finally came true A computer worm called Stuxnet disrupted what the west claimed to be Irans topsecret plans to build a nuclear bomb Ben Hammersley travels to LA Berlin and London to find out what impact Stuxnet has had on the future of warfare

Edward Snowden is a hero to some but an enemy to the US government He famously exposed the NSAs unethical surveillance tactics However the agency claims that these measures are only in place to stop terror attacks and to protect the people