Government Hacking Tools Are Now in Criminals' Hands (with Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai)

This week Joseph talks to Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a journalist at TechCrunch. Lorenzo has possibly the deepest understanding of one of the wildest cybersecurity stories in years: how an employee of Trenchant, a government malware vendor that is supposed to only sell to the ‘good’ guys, secretly sold a bunch of hacking tools to a Russian company. Those tools, it looks like, then ended up with the Russian government and possibly Chinese criminals too. It’s a really insane story about how powerful hacking tech can fall into the wrong hands.

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Inside the story of the US defense contractor who leaked hacking tools to Russia (techcrunch.com/2026/02/25/inside-the-story-of-…)

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US military contractor likely built iPhone hacking tools used by Russian spies in Ukraine (techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/us-military-contract…)

Youtube Version: youtu.be/MWxLqopMo5o

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