02/12/2025

New Podcast – Paul Maskall: Psychology, Risk, and Cybercrime

A big thanks to Paul Maskall for joining us in a meandering conversation around how everyone from criminals to average citizens to cybersecurity professionals’ perceptions and biases affect how they face cybercrime, disinformation and more fun stuff online. We cover emotion, fallacies, and other factors that influence how we can be manipulated, or react suboptimally to cyberattacks and similar challenges.

Paul Maskall can be found online at https://paulmaskall.com

Notes and Links:

03:20 There are plenty of differing studies regarding the risk of death from flying vs. driving vs. sharks, but the World Animal Foundation has some sobering statistics about cows’ death count around the world: https://worldanimalfoundation.org/advocate/how-many-people-killed-by-cows/
Also, the fact that there is a dedicated Wikipedia page for “Death by vending machine” is telling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_vending_machine
03:40 Paul’s website has all of his publications listed
04:48 https://www.protectuk.police.uk/
06:37 Or when you’re in Spanish rush hour traffic in the rain and you’ve made your peace with whatever deity you believe in.
06:54 Foreign information manipulation and interference – https://www.disinformation.ch/EU_Foreign_Information_Manipulation_and_Interference_(FIMI).html
07:23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
07:32 Paul Slovic – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Slovic
07:33 Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman – “Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability” – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010028573900339
10:50 You really need to watch these. And go down the rabbit hole of cyberpunk media from the era.
13:00 E.g. https://www.boston.com/culture/entertainment/2015/06/19/why-the-author-of-jaws-wished-he-never-wrote-it/
On a bit of a tangential note, see also L. David Mech, a wolf researcher who was influential in the spread of the idea of an “alpha wolf”. He has been working hard to undo the fallout from what subsequent research revealed to be flat-out wrong, not to mention the pretty cringeworthy social application of the term – https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-alpha-wolf-idea-a-myth/ Point being, people can and do change their views when presented with better evidence. It’s a sign of intelligence and critical thinking, and we’ll leave it at that…
14:10 E.g. Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) – https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/ransomware/ransomware-as-a-service-raas/
14:53 Arguably one of the major drivers of cybercrime – since a lot of victims are disadvantaged, such as older people, poorer and more economically destitute individuals, etc., many psychological obstacles that might keep a criminal from taking advantage of others break down. Shame is abstracted.
15:43 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam, including the original Chinese term referenced at 16:58
17:50 There’s a trove of articles and studies on this phenomenon, e.g. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/cybercrime-halifax-police-data-computers-1.5055078
19:14 Many people who have suffered sexual and similar assault prefer the term “survivor”. Don’t yell at us about semantics, they’re both correct.
24:18 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jdn4yjze6o – includes a reference to KK Park whom Paul mentions
24:57 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_Thieves
26:20 Oh boy, this could be a rabbit hole of 4chan, incel culture, the alt right…
27:03 Interestingly, the EFF has a reference (French language website) to alt.sex.hamsters.duct-tape and that’s enough Internet for today – https://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Net_info/EFF_Net_Guide/Other_versions/French/HTML_version/chap10.html
27:58 On the topic of “falling in with the wrong crowd”, we recommend, among other things, Robert Evans’ Behind the Bastards episodes on 8chan at https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/the-man-trying-to-resurrect-8chan-52653860/ as well as some of the research Emily Lawford and others have done on the “manosphere”. Of course we’d be remiss if we didn’t plug our multiple talks with Bjørn Ihler of the Khalifa Ihler foundation, and his work tracking online violent extremist communities and contents – here’s a start: https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/05/16/new-podcast-lets-talk-terrorism-with-bjorn-ihler/
33:39 https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/news-and-insight/blog/what-difference-between-fraud-and-marketing
34:15 See above – the first of three episodes is linked at https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/05/16/new-podcast-lets-talk-terrorism-with-bjorn-ihler/
35:50 Our friends at https://veridica.ro do some great work training educators in the CEE region on how to teach this topic in schools.