CyberWire Daily - Geoff White: Suddenly all of the pieces start to line up. [Career Notes]

Episode Date: October 11, 2020

Investigative journalist and author Geoff White talks about tracing a line through the dots of his career covering technology. Geoff shares that he has always been "quite geeky," but came to covering technology after several roles in the journalism industry. Newspapers, magazines and television were all media Geoff worked in before covering technology. Geoff got into journalism not due to the glamour sometimes associated with it, but because he wanted to fight for the public to cover stories that helped those who didn't have massive amounts of money, power or a huge lobbying campaign in political circles. When writing his book, Crime Dot Com, Geoff reflected on the cybercrime and cybersecurity stories he's covered and saw how things started falling into place. Our thanks to Geoff for sharing his story with us.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. My name is Geoff White, and I'm an investigative journalist covering technology. We're quite geeky, my brother and I. You know, we had a ZX Spectrum, which I've still got. I'm actually looking at the ZX Spectrum at the moment. So clearly we were a bit geeky as youngsters.

I still got interested in journalism, I guess, a little bit at university. I did work experience at a couple of newspapers, and I'm not quite sure what it was. I think, like a lot of people, I had the idea that journalism was quite glamorous. It is and it isn't. You know, we'll maybe come on to that later. But yeah, there were some glamorous bits, I suppose, and some less glamorous bits.

But the heart of it all is communication. It's basically taking stuff that's known about by a certain group of people and communicating it to the general public. And just being able to use words to craft a story, to get something over to people and get their attention and say, look, this is important. You should read this. I think that was what was the heart of my attraction to it.

I started doing, I started on local newspapers, which, you know, is the classic. I don't know whether you have these in the US to the same extent, but the kind of local news, you know, cat stuck up tree kind of thing, went on to magazines and then started doing bits of radio and then television. And I kind of stumbled into the technology beat. There was a reporter at the time who was doing technology and he needed a producer to work with him. In television, you often have a reporter and a producer. The reporter is on camera and the producer works behind the scenes.

And I'd actually worked for an internet advertising company before that. So I'd built my own website lovingly in HTML. I'd handcrafted my website in HTML. So I sort of knew which end of a computer was which. And so the bosses saw that. And so we paired up. And to be honest, since then, I haven't looked back. That's been my career really for the past 10 or 12 years. Honestly, the favorite part is being a real pain in the ass for people who believe that their power and their money exempts them from having people being a pain in their ass. And I have to say, with some of the technology companies, you know, when you phone them up and you say, look, I've discovered this particular thing,

their reaction sometimes is one of almost bewilderment that you're accusing them of anything other than saving the world. The problem is when you sort of point out the unpleasant truth, which is, well, hang on, you've got a massive problem with X, you know, with monopoly practices or with child protection or whatever, it sort of bursts their bubble a bit. It's like, oh, we're not saving the world. We've got issues. So, you know, that's the bit that I really enjoy, almost just popping that bubble and saying,

no, you're no better than anybody else, mate. You've got to... I've told you about a problem and now you have to fix it. There's a really interesting crossover between techies who are turning to journalism and journalists who are turning to tech and that the stream is going both ways, a bit of a revolving door. I mean, I think for techies who are turning to journalism and journalists who are turning to tech and that the stream is going both ways a bit of a revolving door i mean i think for techies who are getting into journalism the wonderful thing about now is that the old model

of the sort of gatekeepers where you had to get a job as a journalist on newspaper because only newspapers could afford the printing presses and you had to get a job on you know on the bbc because only they had the radio licenses all that's gone you know you can start blogging and you can start making videos on YouTube and you can release your own podcast. This is the wonderful thing. If you're interested in getting into journalism, you just start. You don't need any more somebody to give you,

you know, the keys to the office. And you can practice, you know, if you're blogging and if you're making your own podcast, you can make those early mistakes. You can screw it up. You can listen back to it and think, oh, that wasn't very good. You've got a little grace period online to sort of practice your skills. For journalists

getting into tech, we really have a job of work of taking quite complicated and quite advanced but important things about tech and making them clear to the public. There's quite a lot of tech security journalists I read where you get to the end of it and you think, well, that sounds very worrying, but what does it all amount to? A, what problem does this cause to me as a member of the public and b how can i fix it and make myself safe from it so there's there's lessons on both sides for journalists going to tech and techies going into journalism there's i think different approaches one of the things about writing a book which has been really interesting is looking in the rearview mirror suddenly all the pieces start to line up. There's this great quote from this book called Zen and the

Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The guy says, you know, if you look ahead and forward in life, everything seems chaotic and you don't quite know where things are going. But if you look backwards, you can sort of trace a line through the dots. And if you extend that line forwards, that's probably where you're going to go. And I just found that really interesting that looking back over cybercrime and cybersecurity that I've covered, all these things that I sort of at the time covered and then kind of went on to other things have all started to fall into place, you know, as a timeline. The emergence of Bitcoin covered it, wasn't sure about it, it turned out to be big. The dark web, again, it emerged, covered it, and then covered it and

covered it a few more times. And then suddenly it turned out to be big. The personal data stories that we covered, you know, I covered more times and then suddenly it turned out to be big the personal data stories that we covered you know i covered them and then suddenly Cambridge Analytica comes out and so suddenly in the book all these pieces have lined up and i can tell a story that that actually feels like a narrative it feels like it was you know like a timeline whereas when i was going along covering as a journalist it felt like individual stories you know popping out of the woodwork and me reacting desperately to them. One thing I really hope is that people think I was fighting for them. So for me, my sort of employer, if you like,

is the public, my audience is the public. I really hope that when all's said and done, they look back and think, well, yeah, actually, he covered stories and broke stories that helped us, the public, who didn't have massive amounts of money and massive amounts of power and a huge lobbying campaign in political circles. Because for me, that's what journalism is all about. The people who buy our papers and read our stories

and listen to our podcasts and stuff, they're the rank-and-file public. That's who you're working for. So as long as they feel I did a good job for them, that would be a good result for me. And now a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cybercriminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives and their families at home? Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform

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