Pig Butchering
mnemonic security podcast
09/01/25
•42m
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Trust is one of the most powerful and dangerous currencies that we have. Whether it's a phishing email, a romance scam or a human trafficking operation, the criminals behind it exploit some of the same dynamics; mainly that trust can be earned by playing to our emotions.
This is particularity true when it comes to this episode’s topic; the global crime of "pig butchering". The scam involves luring victims into fake romantic relationships, convincing them to invest in cryptocurrency schemes, and then stealing their money through fake investment platforms. It’s worth to add that the term is a violent term for a violent crime, and that financial grooming might be more fitting description.
This week’s guest, Erin West, spent 26 years as a district attorney, and the last few years she’s been exclusively working on these kinds of scams. She’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal about her work, testified before Congress and started her own non-profit (Operation Shamrock) focusing on educating about and disrupting transnational organised crime.
Erin explains how Chinese organised crime uses high-tech methods, including cryptocurrency, to defraud victims of their life savings, the link to human trafficking, and the surprising scale of it all.
Previous Episode
The Economy for Phish
August 18, 2025
•50m
This episode, we’re joined by Ford Merrill, Senior Director of Research and Innovation at SEC Alliance, to discuss the evolution and sophistication of Phishing as a Service (PhaaS).
Merrill shares from his 11 years of experience working on security research in primarily the areas of phishing and DDoS botnets. In the episode, he talks about the shift from Russian to Chinese-speaking operators, who the developers of advanced kits like Darcula and Lighthouse are, and who actually uses them to impersonate brands for financial gain.
Merrill also outlines a complex ecosystem with supporting technologies and roles involving spammers, data brokers, and money launderers. He also shares what thinks needs to be done to respond this problem, and where he sees rays of hope already.
Related resources:
If you haven’t listened to our series on Darcula, a phishing-as-a-service operation targeting victims globally, check out episode 137 and 138 to hear Robby’s interview with mnemonic's security researchers Erlend Leiknes and Harrison Sand about the findings from their technical investigation into the phishing kit platform Magic Cat. And hear how this story progressed as Robby interviews investigative journalist Martin Gundersen from the Norwegian media agency NRK.
Next Episode
Autonomous cyberattacks
September 15, 2025
•34m
Brian Singer, a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, joins Robby to talk about his research on creating autonomous attackers and defenders for networks. In their conversation, they discuss how Brian and his team made a system that uses LLMs to autonomously attack networks.
Singer and his team recently got a lot of attention after using this system to successfully recreate the Equifax cyber-attack from 2017, one of the largest data breaches in U.S. history, in a virtualised cloud environment. In turn, showing how LLMs can be taught to plan and execute sophisticated cyberattacks without a human involved.
They also talk about how LLMs are unlocking new capabilities for defenders, where he is seeing a lot of opportunity, and how he thinks security will be developing the next three to five years.
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