____________Podcast Redefining Society and Technology Podcast With Marco Ciappelli https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com ____________Host Marco Ciappelli Co-Founder & CMO @ITSPmagazine | Master Degree in Political Science - Sociology of Communication l Branding & Marketing Advisor | Journalist | Writer | Podcast Host | #Technology #Cybersecurity #Society 🌎 LAX 🛸 FLR 🌍 WebSite: https://marcociappelli.com On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-ciappelli/ ____________This Episode’s Sponsors BlackCloak provides concierge cybersecurity protection to corporate executives and high-net-worth individuals to protect against hacking, reputational loss, financial loss, and the impacts of a corporate data breach. BlackCloak: https://itspm.ag/itspbcweb ____________Title New Book: SPIES, LIES, AND CYBER CRIME | Former FBI Spy Hunter Eric O'Neill Explains How Cybercriminals Use Espionage techniques to Attack Us | Redefining Society And Technology Podcast With Marco Ciappelli ____________Guests: Eric O'Neill Keynote Speaker, Cybersecurity Expert, Spy Hunter, Bestselling Author. Attorney On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-m-oneill/ Find the book on Eric Website: https://ericoneill.net Sean Martin, CISSP GTM Advisor | Journalist, Analyst, Technologist | Cybersecurity, Risk, Operations | Brand & Content Marketing | Musician, Photographer, Professor, Moderator | Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine & Studio C60Sean Martin, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 Website: https://www.seanmartin.com ____________Short Introduction Former FBI counterintelligence specialist Eric O'Neill, who caught the most damaging spy in US history, reveals how cyber criminals use traditional espionage techniques to attack us. In his new book "Spies Lies and Cyber Crime," he exposes the $14 trillion cybercrime industry and teaches us to recognize attacks in our Hybrid Analog Digital Society. ____________Article Trust has become the rarest commodity on Earth. We can't trust what we see, what we hear, or what we read anymore. And the people exploiting that crisis? They learned their craft from spies. Eric O'Neill knows this better than most. He's the former FBI counterintelligence specialist who went undercover—as himself—to catch Robert Hanssen, Russia's top spy embedded in the FBI for 22 years. That story became his first book "Gray Day" and the movie "Breach." But five years later, Eric's back with a very different kind of warning. His new book "Spies Lies and Cyber Crime" isn't another spy memoir. It's a field manual for surviving in a world where criminal syndicates have weaponized traditional espionage techniques against every single one of us. And business is booming—to the tune of $14 trillion annually, making cybercrime the third largest economy on Earth, bigger than Japan and Germany combined. "They're not attacking our computers," Eric told me during our conversation. "They're attacking you and me personally. They're fooling us into just handing everything over." The pandemic accelerated everything. We were thrown into a completely virtual environment before security was ready, and that moment marks the biggest single rise of cybercrime in history. While most of us were stuck at home adjusting to Zoom calls, cyber criminals were innovating faster than anyone else, studying how we communicate, work, and associate in digital spaces. Here's what makes Eric's perspective invaluable: he understands both sides of this war. He spent his FBI career using traditional counterintelligence techniques—deception, impersonation, infiltration, confidence schemes, exploitation, and destruction—to catch spies. Now he watches cyber criminals deploy those exact same tactics against us through our screens. The top cybercrime gangs have actually hired active intelligence officers from countries like Russia, China, and Iran. These spies moonlight as cyber criminals, bringing state-level tradecraft to street-level scams. It's sophisticated, organized, and shockingly effective. Consider the romance scam Eric describes in the book: a widowed grandfather receives a simple text saying "Hey." Being polite, he responds "Sorry, wrong number." That single response marks him as a target. Over weeks, a "friendship" develops. His new best friend chats with him daily, learns his hopes and dreams, then introduces him to an "investment opportunity." Within months, the grandfather has invested his entire pension—hundreds of thousands of dollars—into what looks like a legitimate cryptocurrency platform with secure logins and rising account values. When he tries to withdraw money for a family vacation, his friend vanishes. The company doesn't exist. The website was a dummy. Everything is gone. That's not a quick phishing scam—that's a confidence scheme straight from the spy playbook, adapted for our Hybrid Analog Digital Society where we live in little boxes on screens, increasingly disconnected from physical reality. The sophistication extends to ransomwar
