Packet Trace

Cybercrime cases explained for people without a computer science degree

Wei Liang Choo2 episodes1 min of audio91 playsEpisodic

Episodes

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S1 · E2Sep 7, 20260:3755 plays Preview

The Morris Worm: The Night the Internet Learned It Was Fragile

In November 1988 a Cornell graduate student released a self-replicating program that crashed thousands of machines. Wei Liang explains the bug that made it dangerous and the first ever computer crime…

S1 · E1Aug 21, 20260:4436 plays Members

A Spelling Mistake Saves 850 Million Dollars: The Bangladesh Bank Heist

In February 2016 thieves inside Bangladesh Bank's network sent 35 SWIFT transfer orders to the New York Fed. Wei Liang explains how 81 million got away and a typo stopped the rest.

About the show

Packet Trace tells the story of one cybercrime case per episode in language a curious non-engineer can follow. Wei Liang Choo spent nine years on incident response teams in Singapore and London, so when he explains how the 2016 Bangladesh Bank thieves nearly moved a billion dollars through SWIFT, or how a 1988 graduate student's experiment took down a tenth of the early internet, he is drawing on what it feels like to sit in the room while a breach is unfolding. Each episode is a narrated case study with a short interview with a researcher or investigator, around 30 minutes, every Wednesday. There is no glamorising of attackers and no victim blaming. Listeners finish with a clear picture of what went wrong, what defenders did right, and one practical habit worth adopting.

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