PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — On Location at InfoSecurity Europe 2026 On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli Investigative journalist Geoff White has read 300,000 leaked messages written by a ransomware gang in their own words, when they thought no one was watching. We talked about what those messages reveal — not about hacking, but about the stories criminals tell themselves to get out of bed in the morning, and why storytelling, not jargon, is how the rest of us finally understand any of it.
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 laughing about cue balls, Geoff describes cloning his own mother’s voice with an AI tool and phoning her. She thought the line was just a little muffled. I told him what I tell my parents: if anything feels strange, hang up and call me directly. A pre-digital instinct, used as armor against a very digital trick.
So what do we carry forward, and what do we leave behind? We carry the stories. We leave behind the comfortable idea that any of this is happening somewhere else, to someone else.
The new season of Cyber Hack is expected in July. Listen to it — not because it will scare you, though it might, but because it makes a hidden world legible, and legibility is where every defense we have begins.
Geoff’s books and the show are linked below. And if you’d like more of these conversations, subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com.
Let’s keep thinking.
— Marco
Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍
Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age. His on-the-ground event coverage is produced with ITSPmagazine co-founder Sean Martin under the On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli banner.
🌎 marcociappelli.com | itspmagazine.com | studioc60.com
Geoff White is a British investigative journalist and author who has spent two decades covering the place where organized crime meets technology — cybercrime, financial crime, fraud, and money laundering. A former technology correspondent for Channel 4 News, his work has appeared on BBC News, The Sunday Times, and Forbes, earning multiple British journalism nominations and awards along the way, including for his reporting on the Snowden leaks and the TalkTalk hack.
He is the author of three books: Crime Dot Com: From Viruses to Vote Rigging, How Hacking Went Global (Reaktion Books, 2020); The Lazarus Heist: From Hollywood to High Finance — Inside North Korea’s Global Cyber War (Penguin Random House, 2022); and Rinsed, his most recent book on how technology reinvented money laundering. The Lazarus Heist began as a hit BBC World Service podcast he co-hosted with Jean Lee, reaching number one in the UK Apple chart and the top seven in the US. The series has since become the BBC’s broader Cyber Hack strand, whose latest season investigates the Conti ransomware gang.
A sought-after public speaker with more than 300 keynotes for organizations including Microsoft, HSBC, and Mastercard, Geoff has a rare gift: making the technical human, and the criminal understandable.
🎙️ Listen to Cyber Hack: BBC Cyber Hack on Apple Podcasts
🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/geoffwhitetech | Website: geoffwhite.tech
More from this event:
Geoff’s earlier conversation with Marco on storytelling in cybersecurity: youtu.be/sKI9SzgvD6I
Full InfoSecurity Europe 2026 coverage: ITSPmagazine InfoSecurity Europe 2026
All ITSPmagazine event coverage: Technology & Cybersecurity Conference Coverage
TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY & QUOTES — Geoff White | InfoSecurity Europe 2026
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----- EPISODE SUMMARY -----
Recorded On Location at InfoSecurity Europe 2026, Marco Ciappelli sits down with investigative journalist and author Geoff White to talk about the story behind the BBC's Cyber Hack — the podcast strand that grew out of The Lazarus Heist and now turns its attention to Conti, one of the world's largest ransomware gangs. White explains the slippery line between extortion and blackmail, how ransomware crews evolved from simply locking files to leaking stolen data, and what he found inside the Conti leaks: 300,000 internal messages written by the criminals themselves, in Russian slang so dense that "Bitcoin" became "cue ball" and cash hid behind the word for "grandmothers." The conversation moves from the gang's startling self-image as a legitimate business to the human cost of their attacks — including an Irish cancer patient whose treatment was thrown into doubt — and on to AI voice-cloning, where White recounts fooling his own mother with a synthetic version of his voice. Running underneath it all is the question Marco keeps returning to: why storytelling, not technical jargon, is the only thing that makes cybercrime real to the people living alongside it.
----- 3 QUOTES — GEOFF WHITE -----
On how criminals rewrite their own story:
"A smart person doesn't want to extort people every day. So they reframe what they're doing in their brain — 'I'm not a criminal, I'm a business person.' And that helps them get out of bed in the morning."
On the Conti leaks:
"It's 300,000 messages written by the crooks in their own words, when they didn't even realize those messages would be made public. Normally journalists would kill for that kind of access."
On reaching people:
"We got a hardcore investigative cyber podcast in at number seven in the US — Joe Rogan's at number one. You tell it to people in a way they can enjoy, and they'll listen."
----- 3 QUOTES — MARCO CIAPPELLI -----
On the thin line:
"My brain is going through all the things I thought were one thing, and they turn out to be the other. It's a thin line — but the bottom line is, it's still crime."
On the analog defense:
"What I tell my parents is simple: if you ever hear anything strange, hang up and call me directly. You know where to reach me."
On why this matters:
"We talk about cybersecurity like it's this untouchable mystery, and that's part of the problem. Tell it as a human, real story, and suddenly people can actually understand it."