Tech Breaking
Transcript Kevin Roose: How did North Korea pull off the biggest heist of all time? Casey Newton: Was Nvidia's CEO befriended by a Chinese spy? Roose: What took the internet's biggest library of fan fiction offline?
Newton: And is your refrigerator running a botnet? Roose: I'm Kevin Roose. Newton: I'm Casey Newton.
Roose: And from San Francisco, this is Machine Gods, in partnership with NPR. Newton: The official podcast of the singularity starts now. Roose: Machine Gods.
Casey, our first story this week is about the massive hack of Binance. Newton: The bisexual finance corporation. Roose: [Laughs] Yes.
No, Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, suffered a debilitating hack, bringing a dramatic end to the month of Hacktober, which is what we are calling the last month. Newton: And taking us right into what they're calling Breachvember. Roose: [Laughs] Is that what they're calling it?
Newton: Well, I'm trying to make it happen. Roose: Okay. Newton: We'll see if it sticks.
Roose: Yeah. I think it has a chance. So last Thursday, someone, we'll get to who in a minute, drained roughly $6 billion from Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, in about 20 minutes.
Newton: And Kevin, would you say that that is the largest known hack of all time? Roose: I think it is the largest theft of any kind of all time. It's just a huge, monumental heist.
So we know a little bit about what has been going on. There's now been a few days for the investigators to dig in, and according to a U.S. blockchain intelligence firm, TRM, the hack began at around 4:20 p.m. on Thursday, when hackers started moving money out of these Binance hot wallets, as they're called. This triggered Binance to halt deposits and withdrawals, to set up an internal war room, and to start trying to figure out how to get customers their funds back.
On Saturday, the FBI released a statement attributing the hack to North Korea. In particular, to a group that is known as TraderTraitor. Newton: Yeah, and you pronounced that very well, because if you said it any faster, I think it would be unclear.
And I have to say, I don't like this name, really. Roose: [Laughs] It's very hard for the homonym you know, reason— Newton: Community, yeah. Roose: Yeah, the homonym community. [Laughs] Newton: The homonym community has called for more clarity when it comes to the naming of North Korean state-sponsored crypto hackers.
Roose: Okay. Well, so let's talk about this hack, because I think this was obviously just a big deal for the affected crypto traders, but I think also points to some stuff we should be paying close attention to with crypto and these AI hacking tools. Newton: Yes.
Roose: As for the sort of whereabouts of the customers' funds, there have been some reports and investigations looking at how these criminals are laundering this stolen money. They are basically just moving this money around, like one transaction at a time, in these sort of newly created wallets. It's all happening very quickly.
Newton: Yeah, and this is like the classic crypto thing, like whenever there's a big heist, they use these systems like Tornado Cash, I know has been a big one. But what seems different here is just the sheer scale of the laundering, the amount of transactions, and how quickly the whole thing unfolded, that seemed to give the hackers a leg up. Roose: Yeah, and just to put it in context here, this is about four times the size of the previous record crypto hack.
That was in February 2025, and the FBI also pinned that one on North Korea. This appears to be like a huge piece of the North Korean economy now, is just hacking crypto exchanges. Newton: Yeah.
Roose: South Korea's central bank puts North Korea's 2025 GDP at $26 billion. So this is like— this would be, like, a quarter of overall North Korean GDP, this one hack that took about 20 minutes. Newton: I mean, that is truly just staggering, and it is crazy to think about the entire global crypto system as essentially just an indirect way of funding the state of North Korea.
But like, it— like, that's not really an exaggeration at this point. Roose: No, it's not. Newton: Yeah.
Roose: They've reportedly used this to fund their nuclear program, to, like, keep their sort of economy going. It does appear to be the single most successful industry in North Korea, is just hacking international crypto exchanges. Newton: What about sort of like social programs, welfare programs, education for the citizens?
Any of that going on? Roose: Not that we know of. [Laughs] So this is still being investigated by the FBI and other agencies. Binance first said that the attacker appeared to have compromised an engineer's laptop, and then added that there were additional points of breach.
So we're still trying to figure out exactly how the hackers got in, but as of this recording, Binance says that it has covered roughly 95 percent of the stolen money. Basically, it is just paying out the affected users from its cash reserves. Newton: Yeah.
They have this special fund, the SAFU, which they created after a previous giant hack, because they're obviously very nervous that if people see their money getting stolen, they're just not gonna want to put it in Binance. But that fund, Kevin, was only a billion dollars, so these guys had to reach deep in order to cover all the losses here. Roose: Well, they had to reach a little deeper.
Newton: Yeah. Roose: I mean, this is a company— the staggering thing here is just how much money Binance has on hand to cover hacks like this. Like, when FTX collapsed, they had a liquidity crisis.
They did not have billions of dollars sitting around in reserve to, like, pay out victims. So that's in part why this feels so different. Like, Binance was able to just step in and say, "Here are some tokens that you can use to cover your losses." Newton: Yeah, and I guess if you're looking for, I don't know, something positive about this whole situation, it is that whatever its, you know, many ongoing flaws, the crypto industry does seem to have matured enough so that in the event of a massive hack like this, the entire thing doesn't collapse overnight.
Roose: Yes. So let's talk about the AI piece of this a little more. We don't know for sure what tools may have been used in carrying out this attack.
Chainalysis, another one of these firms that investigates these crypto hacks, says that the laundering pattern did suggest some kind of automation. Microsoft has also talked about North Korea using a lot of AI tools for its hacking groups, including AI coding tools like Cursor. And the FBI said over the weekend that it had observed a bunch of these accounts sort of shuffling money around, and it released a long list of the suspected addresses affiliated with North Korean hackers, which I will now read.
Newton: Please. Roose: 0x8532FA14A. Anyway, you can find a full list on the FBI's website.
But if one of these is your crypto address, you're in trouble. Newton: [Laughs] You really are. Also, you know, it's interesting you say that North Korea has been found using tools like Cursor.
Presumably, Cursor does not want that happening. Like, I don't think you're allowed to sort of sign up with your, you know, North Korean cor— you know, state-sponsored corporation email address for a Cursor account. But we know that North Korea gets very creative with— like, building these laptop farms in the United States, essentially, you know, creating these, like, farms of computers that have U.S.-based IP addresses so that they can run some of these operations.
It's really sophisticated, and as we just said, it's, like, a quarter of their economy. Roose: Yeah, totally. I also think it's really interesting— like, I saw some people arguing over the weekend that in some sense it is actually good that crypto exchanges exist for those of us who are not, like, crypto traders.
Because it is just such low-hanging fruit for people who want to steal money, because it is sort of this lightning rod that if you are a North Korean hacker group, your options if you wanna fund your country's GDP are you either hack a bunch of crypto exchanges, which is relatively easy, you can do it from afar or from these server farms, or you could try to hack, like, JPMorgan Chase. Which is gonna be a lot harder. You're gonna have to do some actual, like, know-your-customer stuff.
You're gonna have to maybe show up at a branch. It's, like, going to be a much more difficult thing to do. And so I think for this reason, it's like, it's probably good for those of us who just have regular bank accounts that crypto is just sort of there absorbing the chaos and energy from the hackers.
Newton: Yes, absolutely. Also, with a traditional bank and traditional currency, transactions can be reversed. [Laughs] Roose: Right. [Laughs] Newton: If you commit a massive fraud, JPMorgan Chase will say, "No. Actually, we're not gonna send you that money." That's why it often takes a few days for these transactions to settle.
But yeah, no, I saw a similar take. Matthew Green, the great cryptography expert, described the crypto economy as a kind of heat shield that is protecting normal people from the North Korean hackers who, you know, presumably might come after their, you know, real money if they didn't have all of this crypto money to steal. Roose: Right.
So I'm curious, Casey, do you think this is going to just happen forever, that as long as there are crypto exchanges and North Korean hacking groups trying to fund their domestic ambitions, that there will just be these regular hacks of crypto exchanges? Or is this kind of, I don't know, a big wave that will at some point subside? Newton: Well, I guess there are a couple of questions embedded in that.
One is, to what degree are the exchanges like Binance able to harden their infrastructure and make themselves a less appealing target to North Korea? My suspicion is they're gonna have a really difficult time doing that, and this is just going to be a perpetual game of cat and mouse between the very motivated attacker and the very motivated defender. Where I think it gets interesting though, Kevin, is in this outstanding question of what was the AI piece of this.
Do— will we sort of come to find out that using an AI tool, these North Korean hackers were able to chain together a bunch of vulnerabilities, create an exploit, and that's how they got into the engineer's laptop, right? There is a sort of whole spy novel that is being obscured by the phrase "compromised a laptop," because there's the, like, version of it where he just sort of left it unattended in a coffee shop where he went to the bathroom, which would be, you know, unfortunate but, like, kinda boring. And then there's the version where they're, like, using an open-source Chinese model to, like, [Laughs] fully compromise the Binance infrastructure, in which case, I think we're in for a world of hurt.
Roose: I agree. I think it's, like, it's going to be a big wave of this stuff as these crypto exchanges, like all other digital infrastructure, just have to kind of harden their systems against attacks from these new agent tools. But I also think it's, like— It is inherently going to be more risky for crypto financial institutions than for traditional financial institutions.
Like, the entire promise of crypto is, like, you can do everything you can do on a bank without ever interacting with a human. Like, it doesn't have to touch a human. You don't have to, like, show up with an ID at a branch anywhere.
Like, that is the value proposition of crypto, which makes it, you know, very attractive to people who don't wanna be part of the financial system. But it also makes it incredibly vulnerable to hacks like this. And so, you know, I think this is one wave where we're gonna just see the infrastructure of these exchanges tested.
Then I think there might be an additional wave when and if these tools get so good that they start breaking some cryptography and the actual, like, smart contracts that hold the crypto get compromised. Newton: Oh, well, so talk about this a little bit, because there has been a little bit more discussion around this with some of the recent breakthroughs in math from OpenAI and some of the labs, and people are saying, "Like, it's great that you're making these advances in math, but if you get too good at it, you will actually break cryptography and, like, nobody's password may be safe anymore." So you're saying that you think that this is going to come into play with some of these crypto exchanges before too long? Roose: I think so, and people that I talk to think so as well.
And one person actually pointed out to me that in the recent raft of discoveries that OpenAI published, cryptography was actually not one of the areas that they published findings on. Now, that could suggest either that the models aren't very good at breaking encryption yet or doing sort of, you know, core cryptographic research, or it could suggest that they are and OpenAI's just not publishing it because they don't wanna give anyone any hints about how to, say, break the encryption on a set of crypto wallets. Newton: And there's maybe even a third possibility, which, I don't know, maybe is a good thing, where OpenAI was just like, "Maybe don't train our most powerful systems on the question of whether they can break cryptography." Roose: [Laughs] That's— Newton: We got enough problems, Kevin.
Roose: I mean, I would put this in the category of things that are kind of a when, not an if. And so I would just say, like, if you are still holding money on a crypto exchange in the year of our Lord 2026, like, you are a brave soul. And you— I hope you have some money stuffed under your mattress too.
Newton: Should folks move from a hot wallet to a cold wallet? I don't know what that means. Roose: [Laughs] Yes, you should absolutely, if you are going to have crypto, have some kind of cold storage.
And I also don't really know what that means, but— Newton: I believe it is just sort of a wallet that is not connected to the internet. Roose: But I get ads now when I go online for, like, cold storage, 'cause I guess I'm, like, a man in my— in middle age who's, like, into tech stuff, and so I just get followed on the internet by these things that are like, "You wanna secure your Bitcoin? You should put it in our cold storage wallet." It always sounds too complicated.
Also, I don't own any Bitcoin. Newton: Yeah, I mean, the— to me, the really difficult thing here is that I don't know what to tell people who want to trade crypto online. I mean, the thing that I would tell them is obviously, like, be careful, but this doesn't seem like it's a case where, like, any of the victims, like, did anything wrong really, right?
Like, they trusted Binance, and someone found a vulnerability in Binance. And, you know, I hope we learn more about what Binance did wrong, but I'm gonna assume that any exchange, you know, might have been able to be compromised in this way. So if you are a crypto person, I just do think that you're going to be in a realm of increased risk for the foreseeable future.
Roose: OK, now let me run a kind of off-the-wall theory past you. Newton: Let's do it. Roose: So I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
But I do love a good conspiracy theory. And my favorite, one of my favorites, is this theory that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, was actually an artificial superintelligence sent back in time to spur the production of GPUs. [Laughs] Newton: Go on. Roose: So that one day we could end up with enough GPUs to run Bitcoin and all the other crypto tokens, as well as to build the superintelligence.
Newton: Kevin, I have probably read 11 feature-length stories about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. I've watched two feature-length film documentaries. This is the most plausible theory that I've heard for the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
So my hat's off to you, sir. I think we've cracked it. Roose: I think we cracked it.
So this may be North Korea, could be Satoshi time traveling. We just don't know. Newton: [Laughs] Roose: Well, Casey, you know I love a good spy story, and today we've got a good one.
Newton: Boy, do we. Roose: So The New York Times reported last week this bombshell story about Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, and his close relationship with a person who turned out to be a Chinese spy. Newton: Tell me more.
Roose: So her name, confusingly, is Alice Huang. She is no relation to Jensen Huang. But US officials have concluded, according to this reporting, that Alice Huang has been funneling information to Beijing.
She and Jensen Huang have been photographed out together at various events, and this story makes clear that this has become a very worrisome connection to US intelligence officials, who are like, "Wait a minute, why is the CEO of the largest company in the world all of a sudden hanging out with this Chinese spy?" Newton: Yeah, and she works at this company that I had never heard of, called Megaspeed, which is apparently also under investigation about whether maybe one of its lines of business is helping China get around chip restrictions. It has a Malaysian sister company that bought at least $4.8 billion worth of Nvidia-based equipment over the past two years. Roose: Megaspeed is a part of the, what I would consider, like, this sort of gray market for AI.
You know, they exist in Singapore, but many of their connections are to companies in China. Alice Huang herself is a Chinese national. And so I think what we've seen is that as the US has cracked down on the export of these very powerful Nvidia AI chips to China, there's just grown up this category of company that sort of exist in the sort of space between illegal and legal, that do things like buying up massive amounts of these Nvidia chips and helping Chinese companies access them through building data centers that they can use to train their models.
Newton: One really interesting detail about this story is that President Trump was apparently briefed about a year ago about the fact that Alice might be a spy, did not do anything about it. Jensen himself was never warned. But I have to note, Kevin, this is kind of our second big AI spy story just over the past couple of weeks.
There was also that man who was an employee of OpenAI who was arrested and is believed to maybe have some connections to the government of Saudi Arabia. Roose: Right, well, and I think it's a particularly big deal in this case, not just because it involves Jensen Huang, who's, you know, arguably the most important person in AI, at least on the hardware side, but because the big narrative right now is about China and the US, and how close or far behind China is in catching up with US AI capabilities, and a big piece of that is hardware. One of the major reasons that China has not caught up to the US is because they don't have the most powerful AI chips, or at least they're not supposed to have the most powerful AI chips that companies like Nvidia are making.
And so when a story comes along that says, well, maybe there's actually this sort of unexplored link or underexplored link between Chinese intelligence and the CEO of the most powerful American chip company, I think it's worth exploring. Newton: Also worth saying, Jensen Huang has been a relentless cheerleader for the idea of getting rid of export controls, and being able to sell as many of Nvidia chips to China as he can. There's an obvious self-interest in this.
He argues there is also a geopolitical interest in having the world building on Nvidia's chips. But this story also introduces this other little complication, which is obviously the Chinese government wants this, too, and it seems like maybe they were able to place an asset very, very close to him. Roose: Well, and it's also instructive to look at how the Trump administration responded or did not respond to this.
As The Times reports in its story, this first came to their attention about a year ago, and they briefed President Trump last October on this suspected link between Jensen Huang and this Chinese spy. And according to the report, Trump's response was to do nothing, and they didn't even give Jensen Huang what's known as a defensive briefing, where you basically tell someone, "Hey, it looks like you're hanging out with this person a lot, who we kind of have some information to suggest they are a spy for a foreign country," and they did not even go so far as to warn Jensen Huang, at least according to The Times report, that he was hanging out with this suspected spy. Newton: Well, fascinating story.
We have lots of questions about it. Why don't we bring in an expert to help us understand? Roose: Yes.
Our next guest is Ana Swanson. She is one of the six New York Times reporters who was part of this most recent story on Alice Huang and Jensen Huang. She is the international trade and economics correspondent at The Times.
She's been doing that for many years. And so we really thought there was no better person to tell us not just about this particular story, but just the overall picture of how this chip war is playing out in China and the US. She's coming to us from Washington, and we should note that we are taping this before the US midterm elections, so you will hear a reference in there to that.
We know it will not go out until after the elections. Ana Swanson, welcome to Machine Gods. Ana Swanson: Thank you so much for having me.
Roose: So let's start with the basics. Who is Alice Huang, and how did she and Jensen Huang get so close? Swanson: Yeah.
So Alice Huang is a Chinese national. She's a Chinese businesswoman who had something of kind of a mysterious and meteoric rise. She ended up at the head of a company called Megaspeed that was based in Singapore that started buying a lot of chips from Nvidia, nearly $5 billion of advanced AI servers and technology containing Nvidia chips.
And at the same time, she was also seen personally with Jensen Huang on a couple of occasions after some industry events in Taiwan. They were photographed together both at a bar with other suppliers and then also out to dinner with some other executives. Roose: So I had actually not been familiar with Megaspeed until I read your story.
What does Megaspeed nominally do, and what are US officials worried it might be doing on the side? Swanson: So Megaspeed is a company that's buying a lot of chips, building data centers in Southeast Asia, and basically, you know, it's kind of a common business model at this point. These companies will build big data centers in Southeast Asia that then remotely serve Chinese clients.
There's a lot of demand in China for these AI chips, and they're able to access them remotely. But US officials started getting concerned kind of late 2024 into 2025 that the company was also smuggling some of the chips into China, so they started investigating them for this. They visited a Megaspeed data center and found that some of the equipment there was still kind of packaged up, leading to concerns that maybe they had been shipping it elsewhere.
And so the company had been under scrutiny for these accusations, allegations from the US government. Roose: This seems like one of those companies, Megaspeed, that sort of operates in this gray zone where they're like, they're serving these chips to companies in China that would not be allowed to buy those chips outright because of these export controls. So they're kind of this middleman or this suspected of being this middleman that is sort of allowing the Chinese AI giants to use the chips from Nvidia that they would not be allowed to buy by routing them through this Singaporean set of data centers.
Does that match your understanding? Swanson: Yeah. So this is, you know, something that, you know, Nvidia describes this type of business in Southeast Asia as, you know, very normal, but a lot of US officials do think this is a huge loophole to the rules that they've set up to stop China from accessing these chips.
Nvidia and Jensen Huang pretty much deny that there is any smuggling at all. They pretty much just, you know, sort of categorically say this is not happening. You know, they say things like, you know, GPU systems are really big.
You can't put them in your pocket. But, you know, over the course of a few years, there's been reporting, including by The New York Times, documenting some instances of the smuggling. And then more recently, there have been also, like, very large busts showing that, you know, companies weren't just putting these things like sort of in a suitcase or a pocket.
They were sending shipping containers of them over into China. So there is more documented evidence now out there in the public sphere that smuggling is something of a concern. How big it is, I think, is debatable.
Roose: Your story describes the relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang as a close relationship, and when I read that, I can, like, smell the lawyers behind— That's like one of those statements where you can, like, you know that that is being carefully scrutinized. There have been some speculations that this was sort of more than a business relationship. Can you shed any light on the nature of this relationship between Jensen and Alice?
Swanson: Well, you know, we are the Gray Lady. We have high standards for publication, obviously. You know, what we had the ability and the confidence to report is in the story.
You know, there are a lot of sort of photos and video out there that sort of show that it did seem like they had, you know, kind of a personal relationship, but at this point, I'm not in a position to characterize it beyond what we've said in our story. Roose: Among the people that you spoke with, does anyone worry that Jensen Huang himself may be compromised, that he might be cultivating these relationships with Chinese officials or assets to, I don't know, maybe sort of flout the export controls or something like that? Or is this purely, do you think, a case of people assuming that he's just kind of in the dark about any connections that Alice Huang may have had to Beijing?
Swanson: I mean, there is also a lot of concern about, you know, how much Nvidia is sort of looking to cater to the Chinese market versus the US market. Lawmakers have, you know, considered some rules in recent years to sort of demand that Nvidia gives its chips to the United States domestically first. So that's always kind of an issue for US officials of whether the company is putting the United States first or China first, and whether it should have to make those choices or can just pursue business with both those countries equally.
Roose: I know you can't comment on anything beyond what's in the story, and you've been very careful to only report what you're certain of. But let's just say, in general, what would a Chinese spy gain from becoming close with an American tech executive? What kind of information would be valuable to send back to party leadership in Beijing?
Swanson: Yeah. So as you say, I don't know, you know, precisely what kind of information she was passing back to the Chinese government, right? But obviously, as the chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang is somebody who is incredibly influential in deciding, you know, who gets certain amounts of Nvidia chips, where this very valuable resource goes.
And he's also been really privy to the president's thinking on issues when it comes to technology, and is generally just seen as a very influential advisor on Trump's thinking, particularly when it comes to AI. So I think inside the White House, there would just be concerns both about the level of access, both to information about the AI industry and AI chips, but also government deliberations on these policies and President Trump's sort of thinking on a lot of this. Newton: It also strikes me, Kevin, that if you're able to have a Chinese asset with a close personal relationship with the CEO of Nvidia, that asset can then just lobby him, right?
And, like, whatever China wants out of Nvidia or, you know, wants Nvidia to argue for or lobby for, you know, that becomes a point of leverage. Roose: You've been covering trade and international economics for a long time, and one thing that I have been struggling to understand is, like, the amount of chip smuggling that is going on into China right now. There's one narrative that says, this is sort of the Nvidia official line, "Oh, this is, you know, this is— if it's happening at all, it's so small it barely registers." People are pointing to, you know, China building its own chips as a sort of an explanation for why its AI models keep getting better.
Then there's this other explanation that's like, "You guys are idiots. These are all being smuggled, even despite the export restrictions." You know, we've heard these stories of, you know, people using hair dryers to get off the serial numbers off the GPUs, and this is actually, like, a much more widespread problem. So, you know, let's step back from this particular story, but, like, how much smuggling do you think is going on of these banned chips into China?
Swanson: Yeah, I mean, it's extremely difficult to quantify. I will say that I actually had the experience of going to Shenzhen and going into one of these markets to ask about chips a couple years ago, and people seemed very ready to supply them. Someone showed me a message arranging, like, a rather large shipment.
It really wasn't that hard to find at that point. You know, it— Roose: People just opening their trench coats and, like, you know, a stack of GPUs falls out. [Laughs] Swanson: Right. Well, these are very entrepreneurial, enterprising people in Shenzhen who had been doing this for Nvidia gaming chips for a long time and then kind of just switched over to the AI market.
So that definitely shaped my thinking on it. You know, I have heard more reports recently about Blackwells being, like, pretty readily available and fairly cheap to rent inside China. You know, it does seem like, yes, China is very compute constrained because of these rules, but also there is access to quite a lot of compute.
So, you know, the truth is probably kind of somewhere in the middle. But I do see, you know, smuggling as definitely a substantial issue. And then, of course, a lot of companies are remotely accessing these data centers in Southeast Asia, and there's just a huge amount of compute there that is not nominally Chinese, but is really Chinese, so.
Roose: I mean, that's the part that shocked me, that I genuinely did not understand until reading your coverage, is that if you are Alibaba or another Chinese company that is prohibited from buying Blackwells or other Nvidia chips by these export controls, you can just rent them from a server in Malaysia or a data center in Singapore, and that is totally legal. Is that, like, a hole in the export controls, or how did that happen? Swanson: Yeah, absolutely.
And this has been hard to make people aware of this because it's just, like, kind of complicated, right? But it's what a lot of people consider to be a massive loophole. It's something that was more regulated at the end of the Biden administration, and then the Trump administration rolled those rules back.
They've been kind of contemplating and trying to figure out how to replace them with something new, but it's been really difficult for them to decide on something, and so it still remains just unregulated right now. And Nvidia, you know, argues that this is a policy decision and, you know, that this arrangement benefits the United States by being able to sell more. But certainly a lot of officials don't see it that way.
They see it as a massive loophole in what they were trying to do. Roose: Well, Ana, thank you so much for coming. Great to talk to you, and if you could connect me with your GPU dealer in Shenzhen I've got some large orders to place for unspecified reasons.
I'd really appreciate it. Swanson: Sounds great. Roose: All right.
Thank you, Ana. Newton: Thanks, Ana. Swanson: Thank you.
Newton: All right, Kevin. Well, to close out today, we wanted to highlight a couple of mysteries that are in keeping with this theme that everyone is calling Breachvember. Roose: Was it Colonel Mustard in the drawing room?
Newton: It very well could be, because at this point, Kevin, we do not know who is the culprit between two unrelated and very different — or are they? — kind of hacks that have taken the worlds of fan fiction and refrigerated foods by storm. Roose: [Laughs] Okay. I'm assuming North Korea's involved, but go on.
Newton: They might. We don't know that yet, but here is the story. Supermarkets across Europe woke up on Monday to news that refrigerators were failing in grocery stores across the continent, thanks to some suspected cyberattacks that are forcing stores to pull their food from sale.
Roose: Sacrebleu. Newton: [Laughs] Indeed. Indeed.
And meanwhile, Archive of Our Own, AKA AO3, which is this giant volunteer-run fan fiction archive— Roose: I thought it was the— [Laughs] I thought it was a congresswoman from New York. Newton: I— the— that's a common mistake. But this is AO3, and this fan fiction archive, Kevin, it remains offline after an unspecified security incident, and it might be down for another two to four weeks.
And so the mystery here is, who is targeting these things? What do they want? And as always, how can we protect our families?
Roose: Okay, so just to clarify these things have no actual link to one another. You just wanted to talk about both of them? Newton: Yes, because here's the thing: as we saw during Hacktober, all of a sudden it felt like nothing was safe anymore.
But at the time, it seemed like the initial targets were things that frankly just didn't affect you and I very much day to day. Oh, there's a vulnerability in PHP. Well, that sounds bad, but is that affecting me when I shop at the grocery store?
No. Well, as we enter Breachvember, Kevin, that is beginning to change. Roose: [Laughs] Okay.
Newton: So let's talk about what's going on here. Roose: Open the schools, educate me. Newton: [Laughs] Okay.
Let's begin with Europe's freezers, a sentence I've never said before on this podcast. Roose: [Laughs] Newton: According to Bloomberg, fridges went haywire on Monday, Kevin, in Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, and Estonia at branches of a variety of grocery stores, including Carrefour, Delhaize, Spar, SuperValu, ICA, and Coop. So that's gotta be most of the grocery stores in Europe, right?
Roose: [Laughs] Newton: According to one ICA supermarket in Sweden, Kevin, its fridges and freezers were hacked and set to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Roose: That's hot. Newton: Very hot.
Kevin, they're calling this the first cyberattack that you can smell from the parking lot. Roose: [Laughs] Okay, A, can I just say none of this is funny. Newton: Wait, none of it is?
Roose: But it is kind of funny that Europe is having a refrigeration crisis. Europe, a continent that does not believe in air conditioning. Newton: [Laughs] That's very true.
Roose: Or putting ice in your drinks. Newton: Yeah. Roose: Now they're getting a taste of their own medicine.
Joke number two. Newton: Yeah. Roose: Do you know what AI model you use to hack a fridge in Europe?
Newton: What's that? Roose: ChatBriePT. Newton: [Laughs] Okay.
Very good. Well, speaking of brie, I have actually been tracking this story for a while now, Kevin, because last month during Hacktober, 700 French stores were hit with a very similar-seeming attack. And of course, because it was France, people assumed that the refrigerators had just gone on strike.
Roose: [Laughs] Newton: But when they looked into it, they found that [Laughs] apparently somebody had hacked into these things, and so they had to throw out all sorts of food. So I know what you're wondering, which is, how do you hack a freezer? Roose: How do you hack a freezer?
Newton: And you're asking that only out of curiosity, not because you plan to do it. Roose: Correct. Newton: I'll still obscure some of the details, just lest you get any ideas.
But basically, it turns out that these freezers just, like, are connected to the internet, basically. Roose: Mm. Newton: You know, they have sort of public-facing, like, control panels that people can access.
And after the French attacks, there was this research group called Claroty, and they used Claude through Cursor to reproduce the attacks, basically saying, like, "If we wanted to take down a fridge on the internet, how long and how hard would it be?" It took them 28 minutes and cost $6. Roose: Wow. Newton: So this is a weird one, because security researchers had identified this as a vulnerability, like, many, many months ago.
Like, it was sort of known in the industry that this vulnerability existed, but as often happens in these sort of obscure-seeming realms, nobody took it that seriously. Roose: Yeah. Newton: Because it's like, well, who's gonna hack into the freezers?
So I understand that, you know, you probably haven't had a chance to do a lot of reporting on this yet, but do you have any guesses [Laughs] as to what's going on here? Roose: [Laughs] No, I have a basic establishing question first. Newton: Yeah.
Roose: Are all freezers connected to the internet at, like, supermarkets? Newton: I don't think all of them are, but what we're learning is that in Europe, apparently many of them are. Roose: And my second follow-up question: why?
Newton: Right. Roose: Why would you need your freezer to be connected to the internet? Newton: Well, Kevin, maybe these grocery stores need to remotely manage the temperatures of their freezers.
Are you saying that it's not worth the risk? Roose: I'm saying that it's not worth the risk. I'm saying we could create jobs in Europe, place where, you know, God knows they could use some job growth by hiring people to go around and turn the knobs on the freezers like the fricking old days when nobody got hacked.
Newton: [Laughs] Roose: I know I sound like a grumpy old man but, like, we really did used to have freezers that could not be remotely disabled by, like, North Korean botnets. Newton: The freezers in this country were once the pride of America. Roose: [Laughs] Newton: Now, Kevin, I know what you're wondering, which is, you know, I live in America, why should I care?
Roose: Yeah, why should you care? Newton: Well, Reuters has reported that the Pentagon said last week it is examining freezer failures at multiple military facilities. Roose: Oh, boy.
Newton: So if you wanna respect the troops, you gotta get to the bottom of this. Roose: Well, and I can also imagine this would be bad in, say, a hospital, where things do need to be kept cold, whether they're medicines or vaccines. Like, you do actually need to— Newton: Or bodies.
Or— [Laughs] Well, if we're being honest. Roose: Yeah, yeah, true. You went there.
Newton: Yeah. So okay, so that's what's going on with the freezers. It's a big mystery.
We don't know what's going on. It seems bad. The second mystery hack is taking place on the internet's most beloved fan fiction website, Kevin, AO3.
On Thursday, AO3's status page said "down for maintenance," and then by that afternoon, the page had been updated to say that it would be down for between two and four weeks. Later that night, the company said, "We detected evidence of a security incident," and people started to freak out. Roose: Where are they gonna get their Heated Rivalry fan fiction?
Newton: Well, exactly. You know, AO3 is really, really big. It has more than 18 million pieces of published fan fiction, more than 11 million registered users and, crucially, the whole thing is run by volunteers.
And this is where I think the story of AO3 and the fridges start to speak to each other. These are sort of obscure corners of the internet where cybersecurity professionals are not typically paying a lot of attention, right? So the good news is, according to AO3, no works have been deleted.
They don't believe that its database of users were stolen, although they say they can't rule it out. They have advised anyone who has reused their AO3 password anywhere else, they probably going to want to change those passwords. Roose: This sounds very personal for you.
Are you an AO3 user? Newton: You know, I am not, but I respect it as, like, a massive engine of culture. Roose: Mm-hmm.
Newton: Like, we have seen over and over again how something that will begin as fan fiction will turn into a massive cultural phenomenon. Roose: The Machine Gods podcast. Newton: [Laughs] And the Machine Gods podcast began as fan fiction about teenage vampires falling in love.
Roose: [Laughs] Newton: And the story got completely out of control, and now here we— Roose: Now here we are. Newton: Now here we are. Roose: No, so okay, I'm joking, but I actually— Like, what is the reason that a fan fiction website would get hacked now?
What is in it for the hackers? If they're not stealing money— Like, I understand why you would hack Binance. Newton: Yeah.
Roose: I even can understand why you would hack— Well, I don't really understand why you would hack fridges in Europe. Newton: Yeah. Roose: Maybe just to, like, 'cause you're trying to cause some trouble.
You're a vandal. Newton: Yeah. Roose: But, like, why are you doing this to a fan fiction website?
Newton: Well, so, I mean, this is a great question we don't have the answer to yet. My fear is that these are essentially vandals, right? Like, fan fiction is free.
There isn't really any obvious financial motive for why you would want to take down AO3. It does seem like the sort of thing that people would be doing just for the lulz. And while again, we don't know that AI was involved here, we do know from Hacktober that there are just clearly a lot of vulnerabilities on the internet.
They're getting easier to find, and they take time to patch. So it would not surprise me if we learned that someone just found one of those vulnerabilities and said, "I know how I can wreak a lot of havoc. I'm gonna take down AO3." Roose: The big question hovering over the cybersecurity world right now is, like, who has the advantage?
In a situation where attackers and defenders both have access to very capable AI models, like, do the attackers win or do the defenders win? And I think the way that we've seen these AI companies release these very capable cyber models is by giving them to, like, priority institutions, right? Newton: Yeah.
Roose: Like, the sort of backbone of the internet companies that are running the rails that everything else runs on, and giving them sort of a head start on the attackers. But supermarket chains in Europe and fan fiction websites are not gonna be on anyone's list of, like, the high priority defense situations. Newton: Yes.
Roose: So there you actually do have the attackers that are probably getting to these places first before they can really defend themselves. Newton: I think that is exactly right. You know, ever since we started to see these, you know, very powerful cybersecurity models coming out, the labs have been saying we're in this window where the defenders have the advantage, but it's, like, a relatively narrow window, and we should use as much of that time as we can to, you know, rebuild infrastructure and patch vulnerabilities.
What these two things suggest to me is, like, maybe the defenders' window is, like, closing really rapidly. And, like, while there's still a lot we can do, the attackers also clearly have a window, and they're starting to use it. Roose: One question I've been thinking about is whether it's just not going to work this whole strategy of, like, let's dole out the defensive cyber capabilities to the most important institutions, like, give them a head start.
Like, I agree with that strategy. I think we should continue to do it. And I have also felt myself becoming something of, in this very particular case, an accelerationist where I'm like, let's just get all the hacks done with.
Newton: Mm-hmm. Roose: Because this sort of rolling thing where, like, every day there are, like, three or four new hacks of, like, some major institution caused by these AI tools, I feel like— You know, I recently heard Alex Stamos, the sort of cybersecurity executive, former Meta CISO, et cetera, talking about sort of shortening the dark age of cybersecurity this sort of era where everything is getting hacked all the time because of these tools, and institutions are racing to patch and defend themselves. And I'm kind of a believer in what I heard Alex say, which is that, like, the goal should not be to eliminate the dark period of all this bad stuff happening.
It should just be to, like, compress it. Newton: Yes. Roose: So, like, in some sense, what we're seeing now is this compression of, like, these institutions might have all gotten hacked eventually, but, like, we're seeing it happen now in the same week.
And I think we're just gonna see many more weeks like that, where it's, like, maybe a year's worth of hacks getting discovered and applied in a week. Newton: Yeah, I think we're gonna have a lot to talk about this. Just a couple more notes.
AO3 is run by a group called the Organization for Transformative Works. It's a donation-funded nonprofit. They have about 1,000 volunteers.
I did try to reach out to them for comment today, but their comment page was also down, [Laughs] so the place where you can sort of go to request comment, so that was really unfortunate. You know, Kevin, I think my final question here is, you know, given all of the cybersecurity risks, there's been a lot of talk of, you know, what we should do. I'm told that the grocery stores are calling to freeze the frontier.
Do you think that that would potentially be helpful here? Roose: [Laughs] I do. Newton: Yeah.
Roose: I do. And, you know, we're making light of this, but look, it's a really hard week if you are a cryptocurrency trader in Sweden who loves fan fiction and really wanted to enjoy your latest fan fiction over a nice smoked salmon dinner. Newton: Yeah.
What would disrupt your household more, a month without ice cream or a month without fan fiction? Roose: [Laughs] Oh, ice cream would be an extinction-level event in my house if we— There would be riots in the perimeters of my walls. Newton: Yeah.
Well, let's hope that, like, Safeway and Albertsons are updating the firmware in their freezers right now. Roose: Okay, can I make another alternative proposal? Newton: Yeah.
Roose: Could we just not connect the fucking freezers to the internet? Newton: [Laughs] I mean— Roose: That just seems like— [Laughs] Newton: Kevin, I want to play Doom on my Samsung smart refrigerator, and I will not be kept from doing that. Roose: Why are we doing this?
Newton: Yeah. Roose: It makes no sense. Newton: [Laughs] Roose: The iceman cometh and the iceman taketh away.
Newton: Well, before we go, we have to do a correction, Kevin. Roose: Our first correction here on Machine Gods. Newton: [Laughs] Are we gonna say that every time we do a correction, is that it's our first one?
Roose: [Laughs] Wait, have we had other corrections? Newton: Yes, we absolutely have. Roose: Oh. [Laughs] Newton: Okay, so— [Laughs] Roose: [Laughs] Every day is day one, and every correction is our first correction.
Newton: Period. Roose: [Laughs] Newton: So for our first correction, I must acknowledge that on our most recent episode, I mispronounced the name of the great reporter, Alix Spiegel, and also, we misidentified her current occupation because she is no longer at This American Life. She is writing books.
Alix, I have to come clean with you. I had never seen your name written out before, but of course, I've heard it a million times. So apologies to Alix, and thank you again for the great question.
Roose: Real quick, Casey, did you see this story in Axios about how OpenAI is trying to rebrand data centers? Newton: Not only did I read it, this morning I got my first email from OpenAI using the new terminology. Roose: And what are we calling them now?
Newton: Well, say goodbye to data centers, gang, and say hello to compute campuses. Roose: Compute campuses. Newton: Which I guess is where Nvidia chips go to college?
Roose: [Laughs] Yes. Yes. I— let's say I got expelled from Compute Campus.
Newton: Did you really? Roose: Yeah, my frat was up to no good. Newton: You know, there are a lot of states trying to expel compute campuses altogether.
Roose: [Laughs] Yeah. Newton: They're trying to ban data centers is what I'm trying to say. Roose: Anyway, good luck with the rebranding.
Newton: Yeah, good luck. We'll see how that goes. Roose: Yeah.
Newton: Yeah. It's giving freedom fries. Roose: [Laughs] Newton: Kevin, who makes this show?
Roose: Machine Gods is made in partnership with NPR, with generous support from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Emerson Collective. This episode was produced by Sasha Ashall and Jacob Blumberg. Our senior producer is Rachel Cohn.
Our executive producer is Danush Parvaneh. Original music by Armen Bazarian. Branding and visual design by Alex Castro.
Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum, Nadine Zylstra and Erica Berry. You can email us as always at hey@machinegods.fm. Keep those questions coming.
They are so good, and we read them all. Newton: And for the love of the gods, please do not forget to like and subscribe. Roose: And until next time, stay blessed.
Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of transcripts for NPR programming may vary. Transcript text may also be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio may be edited after its original broadcast or publication.
The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. Please note that NPR platforms and products also include some programming produced by third parties; NPR cannot guarantee transcripts for that content and some transcripts may be produced using automated or other tools.
Source: NPR
