Hacked - The Chicken Drumstick Gang

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

The story of the biggest video game cheating bust in history and the cheater who got away, with Motherboard senior staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, who frequently appears on Motherboard's own infosec podcast CYBER. If you like the show and want to make sure we can keep making it, please subscribe, and if you can visit https://www.patreon.com/hackedpodcast and show us some love. Thanks to our sponsor Command Line Heroes. Check out the show right over here -> https://link.chtbl.com/commandlineheroes_cyoa?sid=s9.podcast.hacked Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How did catfish get away with all this? So catfish got away with it because he knew what it was doing. He told me that since the very beginning, he was very careful what he told his collaborators. He was very careful what information he put out there. He was careful with us, too. He asked me to use catfish instead of the nickname that he was using with his collaborators. So it's a couple years ago. And this computer developer is playing an online video game, a shooter called HubG.

And as is the case in almost every game, but especially online shooters, there are a ton of cheaters in this game. Tons of folks cheat. And the developer thinks to themselves, you know what? I could probably develop some cheats. And judging by just how many people are cheating, there would probably be. probably be some money in that. So the developer, he tries. And it turns out he's really good at this video game cheating thing.

And he says, I think I can make a buck doing this. And it turns out that the developer is right. And this little video game cheating project that he starts out with grows into something I doubt even he could have imagined at the outset. Until the point, years later, when this happens. It was game over for what Chinese authorities called the world's biggest gang of video game hackers. Recently, China announced a major e-sports cheating bust. Ten were arrested for selling cheat software used in best-selling game titles like Call of Duty.

Luxury cars were among the assets seized from an illicit enterprise ranking in more than $70 million. But after the dust settles, after those arrests, after all the headlines, after the top members of this infamous video game hacking group had all been arrested, a journalist named Lorenzo gets a message from none other than the original developer, who it turns out hadn't been caught after all. who was not amongst those arrested, who was still free, and now wanted to share his story, under an assumed name for his safety,

Catfish. So naturally, we had a lot of questions for Lorenzo, and he was gracious enough to give us his time. In the game, PubG, when you win, it's called chicken dinner, as in winner-winner chicken dinner. which is why the cheating ring chose a chicken drumstick as their logo and why the authorities chose that as the nickname for the gang at the heart of the biggest video game cheating ring bust in history.

This is the chicken drumstick with Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Lorenzo Franceschi Bickory frequently appears on the excellent podcast cyber. Here, on Hacked. So there are a lot of different ways you can cheat in an online shooter. There's the obvious one, aim bots. The cheat essentially allows you to aim without actually aiming. It aims for you.

So your gun just automatically locks onto an enemy and shoots the enemy. There's wallhacks. Which is a very useful feature because it shows your enemy is moving around the map. And not just the map, like moving around in front of you, even when they are behind. behind the wall or other obstacles. And we don't really know which one catfish started with. We don't really know much about who catfish was before he was catfish. So catfish, catfish's story before he becomes catfish is very much a mystery.

What he told me was only that he works in tech, that he used to play video games and he loves video games and at some point he was playing with his friends. He was playing PUBG with his friends and they noticed that there were a lot of cheaters and as a developer he got curious. He essentially wondered how hard it is to actually make a cheat. So he started developing in his free time as a hobby as a project as a weekend project so to speak. Then at the time Tencent launched PubG Mobile for iOS and Android, and Catfish got curious. It's like, how hard it is to make a cheat for mobile.

And at the time, there weren't that many cheats for mobile because, you know, mobile games were not that popular yet, and it was just easier to buy cheats for the PC versions. So he developed a cheat, and he realized that he worked, and he realized that there weren't that many out there, that many competitors out there, and he thought, well, maybe I could do this for work. And he started like frequenting some forums and Discord channels where other cheaters would discuss how to develop cheats and how to sell cheats and he quickly found a business partner to start selling his cheat.

How did you confirm that this person who reached out to you was actually the person behind this operation? Yeah, that's a good question. And that was the first thing that I thought, because the way that this worked, the way that this happened was that Catfish reached out after we wrote like just a short story on the news that everyone was writing about the bust of this ring. And this guy reaches out to me and says, hey, I'm the one who actually is behind this whole operation. And my first reaction was like, no, you're not. There is no way, like, I don't know, believe you. This is some sort of a troll. And, you know, unfortunately, these days is very common for people to have approached journalists with the goal of tricking them into publishing fake stories or, you know, stories

with false information in them. So we were very careful and one of the first things I asked him was, okay, is there any way you can prove this? And it turns out that he actually had a few, he was able to provide a bunch of evidence. One of them was that he showed me a control panel. He showed me that he could log into a control panel for the domain. That was a cheat-chit ninja.com,

which was the main website that they used to distribute the cheat. So he essentially proved that he was in control of this domain. He also showed us a video of a Slack channel where he was the administrator. He also shared a cheat that he had developed for Call of Duty Warzone mobile, which I showed to someone who works in anti-cheat and they said that it was indeed a real cheat. So essentially he gave us a bunch of evidence that strongly supported his claims that he was the person behind the operation. In China, there are about 650 million mobile video game players,

making it dollar for dollar pretty much the most profitable gaming market in the world. Case in point, Tencent, the company that owns and operates the mobile version of PubG, piecekeeper elite as it's known in China, is worth about a half a trillion dollars. Which is all to say that when you start developing sheets for one of Tencent's games, you are entering into an arms race with an incredibly well-resourced opponent, which is where Catfish pretty quickly finds himself.

Yeah, that was one of the most interesting things that Catfish told me. You know, he said that despite the money, it was a very stressful life because Tencent would constantly update the game, would constantly put out new detection systems, new detection rules to find cheaters, to ban cheaters, to make it harder for people to use cheats. So his was really just another software development company. They had to update the software constantly,

always be on the lookout for any updates that Tencent would put out. And he said he was very stressful, especially at the beginning when it was basically just him. He wasn't sleeping well. He had angry customers asking for their money back. So at this point, because he was... Because of all the regular maintenance required, instead of a one-off fee, Catfish is charging a recurring monthly subscription for access to these cheats. So like all monthly subscriptions,

the revenue starts to really stack up quickly, but so do the customer's expectations. And remember that these cheats are not very cheap. We're talking about, you know, cheats ranging from $5 to $15 a month. So, you know, it's decent money. And people obviously don't like to pay for stuff that doesn't work. So what's a person to do when they're trying to run this business? And the demand for their product is greater than their capacity to produce it. When you can only stretch yourself so thin, you expand.

So what he did was to hire more people. He realized that he couldn't do this on his own. needed more help. And so he put out a call for people to join him. And so, and soon he got more developers. So, cheating in video games. Specifically online games, for anyone that doesn't know or maybe hasn't tried to cheat in a video game in a long time, isn't like video games cheating maybe used to be. You're not entering up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, and getting a bunch of free lives. You're not picking up a little game shark cartridge, as was the fashion in my day. because the games are all online,

it's a lot more technically difficult on the back end and because the people hosting those games actively don't want you doing it, that already difficult thing then gets even more difficult. Yeah, so at the beginning, Catfish and his colleagues developed a cheat that was essentially a separate app that would launch on an Android phone,

on the Android device, and this app would virtualize the game. So within this app, you would run both the cheat and the game itself, which would make it harder for Tencent to detect the cheats. But at some point, Tencent got better in their anti-cheet detections, and were able to find this, were able to counter this and ban cheaters. Catfish had to change his tactics, and he realized that he could only do this by rooting the device,

which means essentially giving the device owner full control over the phone, the ability to install, to sideload apps, to change how the operating system runs and essentially gain what is called as root privileges. This is a challenge because it's not that easy to root an Android phone. It's possible, you know, there are online guides, obviously. people can just follow these online guides, but it is an extra step that some people are not willing to take

just for cheating. So it was a big blow to his operations, but eventually they were able to keep making money even with this new system. So on one hand, you've got this just colossal pain in the ass developing the cheats to begin with. But that's just the product.

Then you have the question of distribution. Like a lot of business, businesses, chicken drumstick, starts out with word of mouth. Then they start working with resellers, essentially independent salespeople, folks who buy the cheats and then resell them in new markets at a profit, almost like they're in the import-export business, but there's not really any importing because the product is digital and it's a dubious legality, depending on where in the world you are. But before long, this kind of independent, decentralized distribution chain starts to strain under the weight of the whole operation.

And Catfish decides, we got to build a permanent home. We need like a storefront. We got to build a brand. Initially, they approached the marketing of their cheats sort of in an almost sort of almost in an organic way. They had resellers, they posted on forums. It was like people talking to other people and recommending this cheat.

There wasn't really a central place where you could find this cheat. But at some point, especially after they needed to launch the root cheat, they realized that they needed more publicity. They needed to be a little bit more public to attract more customers. So they rebranded. Initially the cheat was called sharpshooter.

they realized that that was also used by another cheat, so it was creating confusion among customers. So they just rebranded to Cheet Ninja, launch the website, and sort of revamped their whole operation. CheatNinja.com. And sheetinja.com is a hit, a very profitable hit very quickly.

And if we look at old cached versions of sheetnidja.com, before it goes down, we can get a bit of a sense of the products that they were in the business of selling. It starts out with PubG, Peacekeeper Elite. But the Enterprise pretty quickly expands into other games. Games with a bigger footprint in different geographies, with a clear eye towards, you know, expansion.

They focused on China originally because China is such, you know, it's the world's biggest games market. And especially there's a lot of mobile gamers in China. I didn't realize this, but in the research that I did for the article, I spoke with an analyst that we ended up not quite, quoting, but he told us that in China, it's very common for people to play on mobile phones because a lot of people don't have PCs, maybe they play in school or during work hours, you know, they're at the office, so they just play for a little bit on their phone. So it's very

commonly, it's a cultural thing. It's very common to play on phones. So for Catfish and his colleagues, this was really a market ripe for domination. But when PubDGG, it's a public, became less popular. After a couple of years, they were losing, well, they were losing customers because people just were not playing PUBG as much. So they moved into different games, realizing that, you know,

making a cheat for one game is not that much different than making a cheat for another game. So their idea was really to expand into other countries, find new audiences, find new customers. They also hired the support, people that would speak the language like Arabic when they spend it in the Middle East. So that's another aspect that's really interesting about cheat companies

or cheat organizations. I don't even know if we could call in companies. They're not registered or anything. But they need to provide support. So they need people almost on call 24-7 to answer customers who are angry that their cheat doesn't work anymore. So you need people that know how the system works that can answer questions.

and also that can speak the language of the customers. So in most of the world, there aren't really any federal laws against cheating in video games. Even like serial cheaters really only have to worry about like lifetime bans inside of the game that they're cheating in. The stakes aren't that high. There have been lawsuits, civil cases. Ubisoft and Bungee have teamed up for a lawsuit

against a popular hacking ring on the grounds that the cheating ring's products, quote, impair and destroy not only the game experience, but also the plaintiff's overall business and their reputation amongst their player communities. There have been lawsuits on copyright grounds. It was a really interesting instance when the FBI investigated a counter-strike cheating ring

that seemed to have more to do with match fixing because it was in e-sports. But generally speaking, you're only going to get in so much trouble creating video game cheats. Unless, of course, you're in one of the small handful of countries that do pursue criminal cases against cheaters.

Australia, South Korea, where the government find one Overwatch cheater $10,000 and another to a year in jail. But the place where you really, truly, don't want to be in the business of games cheating, even if it might be the biggest gaming market in the world, is China, which is where the heat on cheatininja.com

really starts to ramp. thought. Yeah, I think at the beginning it was sort of naive. We thought that, you know, it wouldn't really get the attention of authorities. And, you know, we have to remember that in most places around the world, making sheets is not a crime. It's obviously something that is a little bit of a gray area. You know, you're still technically hacking. You're developing malware, but, you know, there's an argument to be made that you're not really accessing other people's machines, you're just reverse engineering code and then developing systems that allow people to get around protections, but you're not really hacking anyone. So in most places, it's a

violation of the terms of service. In some countries, including the US, gaming companies, have argued that you're violating their IP, which has ended up in a lot of lawsuits. Most of them end up with settlements where the developers agree to pay back a lot of money, in some cases millions. But in China and South Korea, it's actually a crime. Reverse engineering games and their code is considered a hacking crime, and so people can actually go to jail for this. It's important to remember that for however much of this story kind of takes place in and around China, for however much it's already come up,

Catfish, who started it, is not necessarily from China, which would make what happens next in the story. In 2020, probably pretty surprising to catfish. In 2020, the police in the eastern city of Kunshan make an announcement. They have arrested 12 people charged with selling cheats for peacekeeper elite, PubG. But the announcement was not that they had taken down cheat ninja, The announcement was that they had arrested people who were buying cheats from, quote, overseas personnel using Bitcoin and then reselling them in China. They had arrested some of Catfish's resellers who were buying cheats from the chicken drumsteak crew.

So suddenly Catfish, with his significant customer base in China, realizes kind of the stakes of the whole operation. Not necessarily for him, but for the people he works with and sells to. That's when he started being a little bit more, he started being more paranoid, he started having a little bit more fear about his future and the future of his, of his organization. Wherever he's likely from, he's selling something kind of dodgy, where he's selling two, he's selling something illegal. At the height of their business, they were making around $400,000 a month,

and most of it was in Bitcoin, if not all of it actually, was in Bitcoin. So the number that the authorities came up with, you know, the $70 or $77 million or $75, was based according to Catfish. That was because it was accounting for Bitcoin's rise over the years. You know, Catfish didn't claim that they made $77 million directly. He said that, you know, if you look at how Bitcoin raised increased in price, that was what they made. And he told me that clearly he could have, you know, he could retire now.

He didn't really need to keep working. But he just likes technology. So he plans on staying employed. So by this point, chicken drumstick is generating in and around 400K U.S. equivalent to month in Bitcoin subscription fees. Some of their customers, these resellers have been arrested. But chicken drumstick and their main site, cheat ninja.com, still have heaps of customers. Heaps of monthly subscriptions.

Their operation is still running smoothly, and they still have a lot of people reselling their stuff. So while those arrests certainly aren't good, it wasn't enough to slow things down for the core team behind the operation. Catfish and his right-hand men. As Lorenzo mentioned earlier, Chicken Drumstick was deeply decentralized. That's part of how Catfish was able to get away in the evening. get away in the end. It was anonymous. Even the people at the top didn't necessarily know each other by their real names. But the fact that they didn't know each other by their legal names doesn't mean they weren't in the trenches together for years and years. That anonymity doesn't mean that they

weren't still friends. And one of those friends went by the name of Nine Eyes. Just his username was the letter I nine times. And one day, Catfish gets a message from me. nine eyes. And he can immediately tell something is off. In January of 2021 of last year, he gets a catfish gets a weird message from his collaborator, you know, nine eyes, who later the Chinese authorities identified as he. So his colleague, Catfish's colleague, reaches out and says, hey, I'm going to Shanghai on a trip. I won't be available for a little bit. And Catfish was already suspicious because he thought, because usually his colleagues were very good at telling him in advance when they were living or going on work trips or going

on trips. And this was unusual. But, you know, initially it was like, all right, that's, you know, that happens, whatever. But then another colleague said that he had received the message from IAIII with a link to a like China's eBay Taubo. right? And when Catfish looked into it, he sort of realized that this was some sort of fishing, fishing attempt. And immediately he said that he panicked. He realized that there was something off, that it was something going on. He checked the logs to see who had access to the website, and he saw that IAI had access it from a Chinese IP, which was unusual because him and his colleagues were always careful in using VPNs and proxies.

So he immediately thought that these were actually the authorities. Catfish starts to realize that his collaborator Nine-Eyes, who was not an arm's-length reseller, but an essential part of the operation who knew how it worked, had been compromised. And now, whoever was messaging him with Nine-Ey's device was not Nine-Eyes, which meant that whoever had caught Nine-Ey's

was now trying to catch him. But once they arrested he and Wong, who were sort of like his right-hand man, he realized that this was, you know, it was too late. They were really on to them. And, you know, he also felt sorry and felt sad for his colleagues because, you know, he claimed that they were essentially friends at that point. He never thought that they would end up in jail.

And finally, years after he'd had that first thought that I should try developing a video game sheet. After the whole thing had scaled into something huge, things had finally started to get truly out of control. He said that he wiped all the servers. He took the hard drives and smashed them with a hammer and then threw them away. You know, he really got scared.

So Catfish looks over at the plug, and he pulls it. Yeah, and decided that this was not really... for him anymore. You know, it's fair to say that he's probably never going to go to China or never going to go on a vacation there just in case. I wouldn't for sure. The rest of the story. After the break. Think about the last time you heard a breach story on this show. It always starts the same way. Someone somewhere saw something too late. An alert buried, a signal missed, an SOC that just couldn't keep up. Arctic Wolf set out to solve that problem by rebuilding security operations

from the ground up for a world where attackers are already using AI. They created the Aurora Super Intelligence Platform, a fully agentic system powered by the swarm of experts. Instead of single-purpose bots or lucky-guess LLMs, this swarm is full of deterministic agents that handle whole entire workflows. Humans stay in the loop and on the loop to validate the critical decisions and keep everything trustworthy, and all of this is just off running on their secure operations graph. A constantly updating intelligence engine fueled by more than 9 trillion telemetry events every week and over a decade of real-world incident response. The system reasons on real signals and real context, not synthetic training data.

And the result is the new Aurora Agent SOC. It's the first SOC that is agent led by design. You get agents that coordinate, agents that investigate, agents that respond at machine speed, and hundreds more that automate the repetitive work that normally buries human analysts. Arctic Wolf didn't try and bolt AI onto an old model. They rebuilt the model entirely. What makes it even more effective is how it works with Arctic Wolf's concierge experience. The team brings customer-specific context directly into the platform so every AI-driven

decision reflects your environment instead of generic assumptions. The automation frees your concierge security team to focus on higher value strategy and proactive risk reductions while the agents handle the grind. If you want to see what trustworthy, production-ready AI insecurity operations actually looks like, go to Arcticwolf.com slash hacked. Ever feel like cyber threats are evolving faster than anyone can keep up? Last year, 2025 was nothing short of a record-breaking year for major breaches, from sophisticated ransomware operators to AI-enabled attacks to turn defenses on their head.

Organizations around the world saw headlines they never expected, and cybersecurity teams were tested like never before. But here's the thing. These incidents aren't just news headlines. They're learning opportunities. And that's why Arctic Wolf is hosting a live webinar on February 5th, diving into the most impactful breaches of 2025. Their field CTO and security leaders are going to unpack not just what happened, but why these attacks succeeded. And most importantly, what businesses

can do to fortify their defenses for it's too late. You're going to walk away with real insights and how threat actors are evolving, how defenders are responding, and what strategies can help you stay ahead of the next big breach. It's not fearmongering. It's practical, actionable, intelligence from experts in the trenches. Register now at arcticwolf.com slash hacked. So Catfish has pulled the plug on cheatinja.com. But people still want to cheat in games. And those people still know the cheat ninja name. And trademark law not really being a thing in most cybercrime,

some knockoffs start to emerge. Yeah, this happens a lot in the video game cheating world. Sometimes when there's an organization that's very successful, someone comes in, just copies the name, maybe even copies the actual technology. They just clone the cheat and put it out and try to ride the wave. They try to get the same customers. Sometimes it's even like a scam. You know, they actually don't provide the service and just get the money.

In Cheat Ninja's case, because Catfix shut it down and there was still a demand for their services. Someone else stepped in and launched a clone. In one case, I think there were two different organizations. One claimed to be the original one. They were calling themselves Chit Ninja. They didn't really say that they weren't the original ones. Another one was more open. They clearly said this is a clone of Chid Ninja.

We're not the original organization, but we're still providing same services. My understanding is that neither of these had really the same amount of customers that the original Chid Ninja had. their quality didn't seem to be as good either. I was in one of the telegram channels and there were more complaints about the cheats getting detected and not getting updated often enough. It just seemed like a smaller organization.

But it still exists to this day. I'm still in one of those telegram channels and the developer are still post updates. So they must still be making money, this new organization. It's estimated that by the time catfish pulled the plug on cheat ninja.com. It had generated in and around $77 million U.S. That's the number that the Chinese police reported.

And with the money coming in through Bitcoin and its wildly fluctuating value, catfish pegged that number is basically accurate. 400K a month and $5, $10, $15 subscriptions for these video game cheats. And for as much money as that is, and it's a lot of money, it's still an incredibly tiny fraction of the industry.

online video games that cheaters are going up against. We talked about the arms race between game developers and cheat developers earlier in the episode. And even if large legal responses are only plausible in some markets, still all this other stuff that these companies can and are doing to try and stop cheaters from ruining these games. Because if folks want to play your game enough, they will let you do some pretty, pretty, privacy invasive stuff to their devices. If that's what it's going to take for that game they love to run. Yeah, so I think it is a really interesting world because obviously video games are huge.

You know, the gaming industry is bigger than Hollywood at this point. There's a lot of money to be made. And you can make a lot of money by making sheets as catfish and his organization proved. So there's a lot of people who are motivated to create sheets. And some of them are just very good. malware riders. They're very good reverse engineers, they're very good developers, they're very good at getting around the protections that game companies put in. And it's important to remember that in most cases the anti-chit measures are sort of server side. So the companies

check, you know, check the behavior of a of a player in particular, see if there's anything weird going on. But in most cases, they don't have access to the people's, the players' machines. that has started to change. Riot Games was one of the first companies that really made a big deal of their new anti-cheat. When they launched it a couple of years ago, they said that it was a kernel-level anti-cheat,

so it was running at all times. At the beginning, it was even running just when the player would turn on their computer, even before they launched the game, which people were really freaked out by a lot of security experts, criticize this, asking, like, do you really need to do this? You know, this is like even worse than an antivirus, basically, because, you know,

at least an antivirus company is a cybersecurity company. You know, that's kind of the deal you strike with them when you install the antivirus. You know, you give them access to your machine in exchange for protection, but in this case, you're just playing a video game. Eventually, Riot games change their approach and allowed people to just turn on the anti-cheat when the game turns on. But that was really the beginning of, that really opened up the floodgates.

I think a lot of companies were resistant to launching something like that. Worried that, you know, their players would, their customers and their players would be freaked out by this level of access. But I think that's only, that's the future. And it's already the present. Activision last year launched their own

anti-chit system. That's kernel level. It's called Ricochet. It came after, months and months of just a lot of problems. Like Activision was really struggling with cheaters in Warzone, which is, I think at this point, one of the most popular online games in the world. There were a lot of reports of cheaters there. Like my colleagues played pretty often and they saw cheaters. There were streamers that were complaining about it, like people with like millions

of followers on YouTube saying, you know, I'm quitting Warzone because there's too many cheaters. So Activision chose to take a step further and launch an anti-cheet that actually has access to your whole system. And that is the ultimate weapon for these game developers because they can see why you're running on your machine. They can see if you're launching like an app that messes with the game, if you're launching something that maybe they have signatures for that they already know it's a cheat. know, as part of their war against cheaters, video game companies have pretty competent and large anti-cheat teams that not only develop the anti-chid systems, but also infiltrate forums, buy the cheats, reverse engineer them, you know, keep an eye on this whole ecosystem.

So it's, you know, it's a huge problem and companies are definitely starting to take it very seriously. But, you know, just like everything else in cybersecurity, there's no perfect system. It's still a cat and mouse games. And a lot of these cheat developers are really good. And, you know, I think it's also, I don't know this for a fact, but I would imagine that if you're good at making malware, maybe you don't want to be in a ransomware gang because you may end up in jail. Maybe you want to make just, maybe you just want to make cheats, which, you know, unless you're in China or South Korea, will not lead you to be in jail. We don't really know who Catfish was before all of this.

So we can't really guess who he'll be after this. On one hand, messing around with games is how a lot of people get into development and hacking. So maybe this is just the story of the birth and death of a very weird career in programming. But considering Catfish's ability, his ambition, and the scale of what the chicken drumstick crew built, odds are he was doing something before all this. And now he's off doing something else. In some ways, this is very different than most cybercrime stories.

The crime in question might not depending on where you are even be a crime. But it's got all the same, like, beats. The big, powerful system, the people who start to wonder if they can kind of pull it apart, and all the chaos that ensues when they realize that they can't. This is a really interesting world because, you know, in cybersecurity, we are very focused on, you know, government malware, spyware, stalkerware, you know, zero days and vulnerabilities. And obviously, those are really important topics that can really have incredible influence, right? Like, you know, obviously things like Stocknet where are super important.

but we forget that there's this underground of people who create cheats that are essentially malware developers. And that's also a lot of people who end up getting into cyber security start. They start by hacking their video games, by making cheats. And again, this is a huge industry. The video game industry is huge. And so there's just going to be more and more cheaters and cheat developers. And it's just an interesting kind of mouse game. Thank you for listening, everybody.

Huge thanks again to Lorenzo for being so generous with his time. Lorenzo often appears on Motherboard's own Infosec podcast, Cyber, which you should definitely be listening to because it's great. This episode was based on his super well-reported piece on chicken drumstick for VICE's motherboard. I highly recommend you check it and all of his other stuff out. His recent coverage on cyber warfare situation folding in Ukraine is honestly essential. Big old shout out to our pals. new and old on Patreon.

If you like to support the show, patreon.com slash hacked podcast. Thank you to Trent Bessel, you jump straight to the front of line. Thank you for your very generous support. Frank Turple, thank you for your generous support. James Duff, thank you. Inge, thank you.

And Bradley Schoyer, thank you so much for supporting the show. Your support means the world. Our pal Scott couldn't make it for this episode. He sends his love. If you like the show, If you even tolerate the show, spread the word, like, subscribe. We've been noticing a really fun uptick on our downloads on Spotify.

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