Global News Podcast - Criminals offer reporter money to hack BBC

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

The BBC's cyber correspondent was offered money if he helped criminals hack his employer's IT systems. They said they would steal data or install malicious software and hold his employer to ransom. Joe Tidy played along with them for a couple of days before things turned ugly. Also: President Trump posts then deletes a video promoting fake news about something called med-beds which conspiracists believe have magic powers to restore missing limbs and reverse ageing. The Danish government temporarily bans civilians from flying drones, as it prepares to host an EU summit this week - this follows drone incursions in European airspace, prompting suspicions that Russia is deliberately testing Nato defences. And trials are carried out in Britain to test whether tomatoes can be genetically edited to boost people's vitamin D levels. The Global News Podcast brings you the breaking news you need to hear, as it happens. Listen for the latest headlines and current affairs from around the world. Politics, economics, climate, business, technology, health – we cover it all with expert analysis and insight. Get the news that matters, delivered twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends, plus special bonus episodes reacting to urgent breaking stories. Follow or subscribe now and never miss a moment. Get in touch: [e-mail]

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Your idea of banking that's personal happens here. RBC, ideas happen here. You're listening to the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. This edition is published at 16 hours GMT on Monday the 29th of September. Hackers have tried to recruit our cyber correspondent, offering him a share of the ransom in return for access to the BBC computer systems. We'll have the story.

As we record this podcast, President Trump is due to meet the Israeli Prime Minister to discuss a new US plan to end the war in Gaza. And can Europe stop Russia's drones? Also in the podcast? This variation, which gives a stripy colour, it looks a bit like a sunrise or a sunset, that relates to the vitamin D content, because it's called the sunshine vitamin. Could genetically modified tomatoes boost our health? Now, if you want to hack into an organisation's computer network,

is it a good idea to target their cyber specialist? Well, our cyber correspondent Joe Tidy has recently been contacted by criminals hoping to get into the BBC system. They promised him a large cut of any ransom if he gave them his login details, as Joe Tidy himself explains. They offered me quite a deal. So this was a random message that I received from some. someone calling themselves syndicate on the encrypted chat app signal.

And they said, we would like you to hand over your password, login and security codes, and we'll give you a share of the ransom that we will extract from the BBC. So they wanted an in, and they hoped that I would be it. And they were hoping to basically steal as much private data as they could or install some malicious software, maybe ransomware, and then get the BBC to pay them tens of millions of pounds in a ransom. and I would get a decent chunk of that. They offered me 25% of the ransom.

Obviously, I had no intention of selling out the BBC, but I sort of played along for a few days to try and find out how these things work. Because this is a thing. The insider threat is something that we talk about in cybersecurity, but it's very rare to kind of have that firsthand insight of it. And so did at any point these criminals get close to getting into the BBC systems? Well, no. I mean, I was in control the whole time,

but there was this very troubling moment at the end, which was quite, well, genuinely quite chilling for me, because after about three days of playing along with these criminals, they wanted me to run a piece of code on my laptop to see what kind of IT access I had in order for them to kind of work out their next steps of once I hand over my password and log in, what would they do? How would they go about hacking the BBC? And I didn't want to do that because I was sort of worried that it might actually give them some sort of information that could put the BBC in jeopardy. So I sort of stalled for time and tried to get the IT team to talk to me about it on Monday. This was Sunday afternoon.

But they ran out of patience, these hackers. They're from a gang called Medusa. And they bombarded my phone with login requests through our Authenticator app. So you know, when you try and log into your BBC account or any accounts, I suppose people listening will have this as well. It comes up with a, is this you trying to log in and you click accept? So I had every minute for about an hour, I had these pop-ups coming on my phone. And it was, and again, this is a technique I know about, this is something I've reported on called multi-factor bombing, an MFA bomb. And I knew not to do anything. I knew basically to leave my phone

alone and don't open it because, you know, I could accidentally let the criminals in. But it was, it was a very troubling thing to be on the other, on the receiving end of. I would liken it to kind of like, you're talking to a criminal on the phone and then suddenly they're at your front door and they're banging quite aggressively on your door. Joe Tidy, talking to Rob Young, From hacking to another kind of scam, and President Trump has posted a now deleted video promoting fake news about something called medbeds. The footage appears to have been generated by AI

and describes what would be an extraordinary innovation in healthcare if it were real. It shows space age pods which are, quote, designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength. The claim that these can restore lost limbs or reverse ageing is popular among Q and on conspiracy theorists. I heard more about the video from our correspondent, Mike Wendling. It is all fake. The report that Donald Trump posted is fake

and the idea of med beds, which there's various different strands, but basically it's a miracle cure that people posit has been hidden from the public by the government, by big pharma, and that these med beds, you lie in them and it can cure, like you said in the intro, all sorts of different things. but it's complete fiction. And you've actually visited a med bed facility. What did you make of it? I did. It was quite a sad place.

It was an old hotel. Some of the signage of the hotel chain that had owned the building was still visible. But the skeleton medical staff that was in the hotel sort of led me to a room. Underneath the bed in that room, there were a bunch of canisters filled with, as far as I could tell, sort of inert material.

They said, lie down and you will feel rejuvenated and restored in about an hour. I talked to some of the people who use these in a more, I guess, credulous way. And, you know, I have to say that they were people who were fed up with the American health care system and had some very serious illnesses and they couldn't find help. So that's the kind of people who are being preyed upon, honestly, by some of these medbed care providers. Yeah. So what will be the impact of? President Trump posting this video?

Well, he has deleted it, and I don't think this will be more than a blip. It is a message to his followers, a message to the people who believe in these things and believe in Q&N type things, but I don't think it's going to have a very long-lasting impact, if I'm honest, on American health care policy. But once he's deleted it, others could, of course, have already reposted it. Oh, absolutely. And there was a fair amount of chatter about it yesterday when it did appear. you know, if you believe in these kinds of things, you see this as a secret symbol, you know, a secret message to you endorsing your beliefs. If you think it's bunk, then you're likely to just ignore it and it'll become another, in the long sort of stream of Donald Trump's social media output.

Mike Wendling there. As we record this podcast, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to meet the U.S. President at the White House, his fourth visit this year. Donald Trump will be trying to convince the Israeli leader to sign up to a new 21-point peace plan for Gaza. If he did so, it would represent a big turnaround for Mr Netanyahu. Less than three weeks ago, he authorized a failed attempt to wipe out Hamas' negotiating team in Qatar. But President Trump is optimistic, posting, we will get it done on truth social. The families of Israeli hostages are desperate for an agreement and have called on the US leader to reject any efforts to sabotage.

The deal. On Sunday, Hamas called for a 24-hour pause in Israeli attacks to protect the lives of two hostages it said it had lost contact with. Yehuda Cohen, whose son Nimrod is still being held in Gaza, gave us his reaction to that. Netanyahu's government called it a psychological terror. The fact that families had to go through this, after two years of suffrage, to go through it again in the last moment when there's a agreement rich, I put the blame on Netanyahu's government. And I hope President Trump will put down the hill on Netanyahu enforce him to end the war, get a hostage deal and move on. We have to fight to end my son, my innocent son, suffering.

But how is the Israeli Prime Minister likely to respond to the 21-point plan? Yarkov Katz is an Israeli political commentator. The main sticking point here is going to be what role does the Palestinian people? authority play. He has said that that is a red line for him, that he will not allow the Palestinian authority to control Ghazim. And the other one is any declaration by Israel that it's now embarking on some sort of track or process towards a Palestinian state. But I think in the bigger picture here is that if there is, in fact, a window to get back all of the hostages, it's going to be almost impossible for Netanyahu to reject a deal.

that would see all the hostages return home. So, after many false dawns, could there really be a deal this time? I got more from our Jerusalem correspondent, Yolitanel. According to Israeli media, things are looking quite positive for that. They're saying that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of his key aides, have been meeting both Steve Wickoff, President Trump's Middle East, Mboy and Jared Kushner in the past day or so. They have supposedly ironed out many of the differences

of opinion and agreed on revisions to this 21 point plan that the White House has already put to Arab leaders and the leaders of Muslim majority countries. And there's a White House official being quoted saying that the US and Israel are very close to an agreement on the Trump plan for ending the war. And looking through just in the headlines, the Israeli media are picking up from Arab media, Hamas sources saying that they welcome the Trump proposal. They haven't seen it in any detail yet. but they're looking for guarantees. Israel will honour commitments that they want a timetable for the implementation of the plan, an advisor to the Palestinian Authority saying that they view these efforts very seriously and positively as well.

But they're just also making these comments based on leaks that they've seen to the media. Yeah, I mean, what do we know about the plan so far? We have just a very sort of general outline of what it contains from these different leaks that there have been. and some journalists claiming to have seen the draft, but we know that it's a work in progress too. So headlines are this idea that Hamas would release all the hostages in the first 48 hours after an agreement reached, that there would be a phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

You would have Hamas having no future role in governance. That is something that it has accepted, but what it hasn't is this idea that it would disarm. You would have apparently, according to this plan, two levels of governance for a kind of interim period, and the different outlines don't give full details of a timeline for this, but they're saying there would be an international body and a committee of Palestinian technocrats.

Crucially, for a lot of Palestinians, this is not talking about forced displacement of the Palestinian population, as a previous White House plan did, or the previous White House plan, embisaged Palestinians, all two million of them leaving the Gaza Strip for President Trump's Riviera plan. That now seems to have gone off the table. Elanel in Jerusalem. It's estimated that as many as one billion people have vitamin D deficiency, which can cause problems with bone and muscle development. But scientists in the UK think

they've come up with a way of boosting vitamin D levels by our genetically edited tomatoes. They've been carrying out the first clinical trial of its kind in Britain and are recruiting volunteers to taste the fruit. Here's our health correspondent, Nikki Fox. On the outside and on the inside, tomatoes at the John Innes Centre look and taste like any other. But in the Norfolk greenhouses, they've been bred to contain something that many lack, vitamin D. Researchers believe there's enough in four to meet an adult's daily requirement. Professor Cathy Martin is leading the project. Why tomatoes?

Because it's relatively easy to do it, it wouldn't have worked in other vegetables. such as broccoli or cabbage. And lots and lots of people eat tomatoes, even tomato pasts and pizzas and ketchup. Gene editing switches individual genes on and off by snipping out a section of DNA. Doing this in the tomato means a substance can build up because the gene that stops it is turned off.

It's that substance or provitamin that when exposed to light turns into vegetables. vitamin D. For the first time in the UK, 76 people are on clinical trials to test genetically edited food. The tomatoes are frozen, then freeze-dried and added to soup. So what's the problem they're trying to solve? Professor Martin Warren from the Quadrum Institute explains. In summertime, just through exposure to sunlight, we can make enough of our own vitamin D. But in wintertime, when the sun is lower, we don't get the UV rays coming through. and you don't make enough of your own vitamin D

and you've got to get it from a food source. Traditionally, that food source would be oily fish, eggs, but of course a lot of those foods are not necessarily palatable to everybody. Participants wear a UV necklace to check it's the tomatoes, not the sun giving them vitamin D. The results go straight to researchers. Scientists in Norwich say they do want people to know what they're eating, so we're breeding a new type of tomato.

We kind of want them labeled so that consumers have a choice And we think that this variation, which gives a stripy colour, it looks a bit like a sunrise or a sunset, and that relates to the vitamin D content, because it's called the sunshine vitamin. Campaigners say genetically edited food won't be traceable if something goes wrong. But the government argues it can boost food security and improve disease resistance. It's backing the technology with a multi-million pound investment. Nicky Fox reporting. And still to come on the global news podcast,

Rembrandt would probably rather love the idea of being launched on the stock market in some way. Art fans are invited to buy a share of a masterpiece, but is it really worth it? Norway, Denmark, Germany, Romania and Poland have all reported drone incursions around their airspace, in recent days and weeks, prompting suspicions that Russia is pursuing a deliberate policy of testing NATO defences. Now, the Danish government has temporarily banned civilians from flying drones as it prepares to host an EU summit this week. Alika Franca is a specialist on the use of drones at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Some of them can be picked up by radar, but that doesn't give you anything more than,

well, there is something flying there. What we don't have is proper identification that tells you much about, you know, the model, the type. It certainly doesn't tell you who flies them for that kind of information. Usually you need to down the drone to find out more. I think the number one information you want to gather is, can European countries respond? Do they have systems in place? How do they respond? They're shooting them down. Can they figure out where these drones are coming from? What's their reaction? And so far, quite honestly, on these drone sightings, our reaction hasn't been great because again, we haven't been able to down them and we are a little bit panicky.

I mean, for good reason I want to say, but so in terms of the kind of information, Russia, if it is Russia, is gathering here, that's quite useful for them. Alrika Franca, Sweden and France have confirmed they will provide Denmark with counter-drone support and the UK is thought to be considering a similar move. The EU has already agreed to create a so-called drone wall

to protect Europe's eastern borders, but will it deter Russia? We asked Justin Crump, a British military analyst and veteran. No, unfortunately, because one of the things that Russia, I think, wants to achieve is to increase the cost of defending Europe on the basis that every pound that goes to defending Europe is something that doesn't go to Ukraine. So it's a success for the Russians, regardless. They're trying to get us to have to spend money.

They're trying to get us to defend themselves. And their calculation is that populations won't want to do that. They say, why are we even opposing Russia's wishes? The calculation is, would you just let your adversary? and Russia is undoubtedly our closest adversary within Europe and the really tangible threat. Would you just allow them to fly over your territory with impunity with drones? Well, you can't really allow that. So you've got to stop them, frankly.

And I think it's better to be thinking about how we'd stop a threat like this than doing nothing and actually looking even more weak. Russia will keep the pressure on. We've seen that melt over 10 years. I'm afraid it'll accelerate over the coming years, but at least we are reacting. We are doing something. We're doing something proactive to defend ourselves. Justin Crump of the private intelligence firm Sibiline.

A week after Typhoon Boiloi sweat through the Philippines, Vietnam has felt the full force of the storm. At least 13 people have been killed and rescuers are searching for dozens of fishermen after their boats were hit by huge waves. Vietnam is still recovering from a powerful typhoon that struck two months ago. Boerloi has now moved into neighbouring Laos where it's since weakened. journalist Nuff Farms spoke to the BBC from the Vietnamese capital. It's quite scary actually because we had a power cut and we are in central Hanoi.

But the most dangerous situation is in Nhean and Hattin provinces where communication is totally disrupted and they've been experiencing such isolation that nobody can actually access mountainous areas to verify the damage. What kind of action happened before landfill to prepare for it and particularly protect or help the places that are most vulnerable. Last week, when Ragasa, the typhoon, the biggest typhoon that hit South China Sea in many years, happened.

The Vietnamese authorities have already mobilized the military and warned people out of the areas that prone to disasters. However, Ragasa didn't hit that hard. It damaged more Taiwan, not Vietnam. But this typhoon actually is more unpredictable, faster, and actually causing much more concern, hundreds of thousands of people have been moved to higher locations from the coastal areas of Vietnam.

So they've been sheltered in schools and community halls to wait for the typhoon to pass. So I think the preparation was quite good because people have been very mindful about disasters and typhoons this season, yet the intensity and the danger, the risk of the typhoons actually,

is still very high because, as I said, it's unpredictable, and this speed is quite high. What about the intensity of a typhoon like this? Is this something that Vietnam is familiar with? It's very unusual because, you know, normally when I was growing up in Vietnam, we experienced maximum nine typhoons per year. So typhoon number nine is already like the end of typhoon season yet. This is number 10, and we still see no end of it. So whether it's changing very, very fast. So we can only be prepared, you know, do our best actually to cope with the situation right now. Vietnamese journalist Nafam talking to Priya Rai. 16 members of an online crime syndicate operating in Myanmar have been sentenced to death in China.

23 others have been given prison sentences. China has been trying to crack down on scam centres located over the border in Shan state in Myanmar, where tens of thousands of Chinese. and other nationalities were forced to work against their will. The syndicate includes many members of one notorious family. As I heard from our Southeast Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head. They're the Ming family, and they became notorious because of an event in one of the scam centers. Now, China sort of green-lighted an insurgent operation in this far north-eastern corner of Shan State,

specifically because of its concern about the scam centers and the fact that the Myanmar military was doing nothing about shutting them down. And by the end of 2023, at the beginning of last year, these insurgents had taken control of this border town. And this family was running one compound called Crouching Tiger Villa, in which in particular really appalling abuses were alleged. And we believe there was an incident where a number of people were shot dead. We think among those were four undercover Chinese police officers, which probably was the last straw for China.

So once that town was taken over, the insurgents who'd taken over, handed over the leaders of the clans who ran this town and ran the scam centers to China. And the Ming family were perhaps the most notorious. In fact, the patriarch supposedly committed suicide when he was captured. But the others have been in Chinese custody since the end of 2023. And now China has imposed these very harsh sentences. I think sending a signal to anybody else who might be involved in the scam industry that this is the kind of. treatment you will get if you get handed back to China. Now, this particular border town is very close to China. It's on the border and a large number of the people both working in it,

forced to work in it, many of them and victims, the ones who were being defrauded with online fraud operations, were Chinese. So it was a big concern to China. It's not the first action we've seen China take. They put pressure on the ties earlier this year to take action on their border with Myanmar. So there's a pattern here of China trying to show its own citizens that it is determined to stamp out this international crime, even though it takes place technically in another country. Yeah, and has this action by China stop this activity on its border? No, it hasn't. I mean, it has in Laokai, as far as we know, that town is now under the control of the same insurgent group who captured it, and they say they've stamped it out.

And we think along China's border with Myanmar, it's largely been stamped out or pushed right underground. But on the Thai-Miammar border, despite Thailand's actions, there are still tens of thousands of people working in scam centres that have proliferated there. And huge numbers of scam centres are operating in Cambodia. That's a country that's closely allied to China. And yet the scams seem to be going on there without any real control. So China's actions haven't stopped it. Our Southeast Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head. Finally, is it worth taking a share in a painting by one of the old masters? Rembrandt, say, or Vermeer. On the one hand, you get to own a piece of something remarkable.

but you'd never get to hang it on your wall. The owner of the world's largest collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings thinks it's a scheme that could catch on. Thomas Kaplan is offering investors a chance to take a stake in his 220 work art collection using a strategy called fractionalisation. We heard from Rachel Campbell Johnson, former chief art critic of the Times newspaper, and first of all, art historian Dr. Bender Grovener. I'm not sure what we're getting.

I think we're getting just a little kind of digital. slither, which we can never see, so we don't even own a fraction of the pictures themselves, because I understand the collection is not going to be sold or broken up. I'm totally with Bendel. I have no idea how this is going to work, but I suppose what you could do is you could have a little slip that maybe would give you permission to go in and see your painting if you happen to be in the country where it was being shown. Or it could work a bit like racehorse ownership when people buy a leg or syndicates buy a part of it, and that rather than sort of buying the painting, you're buying the fun around the

painting. So maybe you get invited to all the posh private views when it's being on show or you get to hobnob with the sort of people that you'd rather like to hobnob with in the art world. It's just a new, it's a new take on the commerciality of it. Rembrandt's students apparently used to enjoy sticking a golden gilder to the floor of his studio to watch that avaricious master bend down and try and scrabble it up even though it was glued to the floor. So Rembrandt would probably rather love the idea of being launched on the stock market in some way. If this tokenization got me a little fraction of a picture, which Tom might sell one day because he's a brilliant businessman, and I know that I would probably make a little bit of money as well as enjoying my

slice of Rembrandt, then I'm straight in there. But if it's just a sort of attempt to say, oh, I'm increasing accessibility to the old masters, then I would say, honestly, you can go to the National Gallery, because in the UK, we collectively, publicly own more than 50 Rembrandts already, so we do already own a slice of a Rembrandt. And if you're really keen, you know, you can buy original Rembrandt engraving or a print made shortly after he died for really not much money these days. If you think about the acquisition of something, we're also acquisitive. It's one of the ways when I go into a gallery with a child, a way to make them look at this fantastic collection we have is to say which one would you like to take home.

It appeals to a fundamentally acquisitive part of us and people go in and look very differently. So maybe just this chance that we might own a little bit will make us look harder and better. And sometimes coming up with new ideas like this, which all stick in the muds like me, you might think is a little bit eccentric. But we've got to try these things, I suppose, to get us talking about great artists like Rembrandt. Dr Bender Grovener and Rachel Campbell-Johnson. And that is all from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or anything in it, send an email to global podcast at bbc.co.uk.

or find us on X at BBC World Service and use the hashtag Global NewsPod. This edition was mixed by Abby Wiltshire and produced by Alison Davis and Stephanie Zackerson. Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Oliver Conway. Until next time, goodbye.