Geoff White
Geoff White is an investigative journalist covering organised crime and technology. His work explains how hacking, fraud and money laundering fit together, and who the people behind them actually are; his own site describes a career spent reporting on cybercrime and financial crime across books, broadcast and podcasts.
On this episode of The BEYOND Podcast he speaks with host and producer Aleksandra King about the industrialisation of cybercrime: the three groups behind the hacking, the ransomware franchise economy, criminal due diligence, and why money laundering is the part that makes all the rest possible.
On this episode of The BEYOND Podcast, Geoff White sets out the argument in full: Cybercrime is not a technology story but an economy, and it is organised like one. State hacking is the new face of espionage and openly so; the people who do the criminal version largely learned to think in video games, where the whole skill is finding what the other side did not expect. Ransomware now runs as a franchise, the affiliate keeping eighty percent of what a victim pays, and the gangs behind it research a target with the same due diligence an acquirer would run before a takeover. Underneath all of it sits money laundering, without which Geoff White argues none of the rest would happen: the trick is not the theft but mixing dirty cash with clean, which is why criminals care where in society cash still lives. The named concepts the conversation walks through, in his own words on the recording: Government hacking is the new face of espionage, and in his account it is allowed, warranted and necessary rather than something he condemns; The criminal hackers largely came out of the video gaming community, where the skill is thinking around corners and finding what the opponent did not expect; Ransomware runs as a franchise; There are direct parallels between how organised cybercrime works and how ordinary organisations work, starting with research and due diligence on a target.
The Geoff White podcast appearance on The BEYOND Podcast carries the conversation in full. Read the episode synopsis on BEYONDai, and find every episode on the The BEYOND Podcast page.