The Business of Extortion — Storytelling, Ransomware, and the BBC's Cyber Hack | Geoff White | PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — On Location at InfoSecurity Europe 2026 On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli

There is a moment in every conversation about cybercrime when the criminal stops being a shadow and becomes a person with a desk, a calendar, and a complaint about Monday. That moment is the one that interests me.

For years I’ve been told cybersecurity is a technical problem. Firewalls, patches, acronyms nobody outside the room understands. And it is, partly. But sit with Geoff White for fifteen minutes at InfoSecurity Europe and the technical layer becomes what it always was underneath: people. People who get out of bed, argue with their partners, drink too much vodka after a breakup, and worry about a grandmother in the hospital — while running an extortion racket that, somewhere else, is shutting down the hospital treating someone else’s grandmother.

Geoff is an investigative journalist and author who has built a career out of refusing to let crime stay abstract. His new BBC series, Cyber Hack — the strand that grew out of The Lazarus Heist — turns its attention to one of the world’s biggest ransomware gangs, Conti. And here is the detail that stayed with me: he has read their mail. Three hundred thousand internal messages, leaked, written by the criminals themselves when they assumed no one was watching. A journalist’s candy store, as he called it. Also a nightmare — in Russian, thick with slang, mistranslated so often that “Bitcoin” comes out as “cue ball” and money hides behind the word for “grandmothers.”

What fascinates me is not the heist. It is the self-portrait.

Because the gang does not see a gang. They see a company. They have clients, they say. Customers. Negotiations conducted professionally. Some of them even hand the victim a report afterward — here is how we got in, here is what you should fix — as though extortion were a security audit with an invoice attached. Geoff has a theory I find hard to argue with: extortion is exhausting work for a smart person to do every day, so the brain quietly rewrites the job description. Criminal becomes businessman. The part that knows the truth shrinks. The story they tell themselves takes over.

I’m Italian, so of course The Godfather arrived uninvited in the middle of our conversation. It’s a business. Nothing personal. We laughed — I get to make that joke and Geoff doesn’t — but underneath the laugh is something genuinely unsettling, and it has nothing to do with hackers. It’s about all of us. We are all narrating ourselves into the people we’d prefer to be. The ransomware gang simply does it with higher stakes and worse intentions.

This is why storytelling isn’t decoration on top of cybersecurity. It’s the only tool that makes the invisible visible. Geoff’s last BBC series landed at number seven on the US charts, a few slots below Joe Rogan, because he tells these stories as stories — with the technical iceberg sitting safely below the waterline. People learn when they aren’t being lectured.

And we should learn, quickly. The same week I’m