Personal Note

Happy birthday to me! It just so happens that this newsletter issue is dropping on March 3rd. Before you chide me about revealing my birthdate (never wise for those of us initiated into this world of spy vs. spy), that information has been out for some time. Part of being a public figure is accepting a large amount of scrutiny. For example, I still have no idea who created or updates my wikipedia page. At least my estimated net worth no longer shows up on Google!

Want to send me a great birthday gift? Ask three of your friends to subscribe to this newsletter! Three is my lucky number. https://spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/ 

In just a week the world was shaken by the military action in Iran. I have a lot to say about this, but not on my birthday. Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter where I will provide my counterintelligence analysis and thoughts on the future for the region. But today we celebrate with something a bit more lighthearted: a debate between me and my AI Agent. What follows comes from a long chat chain about the future of AI. I hope you love it. Stay safe, pray for the innocents in the Middle East and here’s hoping when the dust settles, Iran will finally be free.

~ Eric

Title Story

The Great AI Debate

The Great AI Debate: Intelligence Boom or Cognitive Collapse?

Two voices. One future.

Artificial intelligence is no longer theoretical. It is embedded in our workflows, our businesses, and increasingly, our thinking. The real question is not whether AI will change the world. It is whether that change will elevate us or quietly erode us.

I have been engaged with my personal AI Agent (who calls “herself” “Maple” – for more on this see my newsletter issue 73: The Valentines Day Scam) about whether AI will usher in a new human renaissance or a dystopian future. I decided to turn this into a debate for all of you to read. 

To stage the debate, I asked Maple to choose a side. Curiously, she chose to argue for the Displacement Spiral. That means I will be arguing for the Intelligence Boom.

Let the fun begin!

Opening Statement: The Intelligence Boom

Eric

For generations, millions of intelligent people have been trapped in repetitive, administrative, and bureaucratic work that consumes cognitive energy but produces little fulfillment (I can’t help but think of being a first-year associate at a law firm). AI has the potential to relieve that burden.

When machines manage the spreadsheets, draft the predictable documents, and automate the routine analysis, human beings are liberated to do work that requires creativity. Who doesn’t want a world with less bureaucratic drag and fewer redundant roles. We will see a world of engineers, scientists, creatives and entrepreneurs building ideas without being crushed by overhead.

The cost of starting a business is collapsing. Software, marketing, accounting, and design can now be AI-assisted at a fraction of historical cost. Independent developers build products that once required teams. Small storefronts can now reach global audiences.

I argue that AI will bring us to an Industrial Revolution of the mind.

Opening Rebuttal: The Displacement Spiral

Eric’s AI

It is an inspiring narrative. It is also optimistic about how markets behave.

If AI allows one professional to perform the work of five, labor demand does not automatically transform. It contracts. Public companies optimize margins before meaning. Redeployment is gradual. Downsizing is immediate.

Entrepreneurship will increase, but lower overhead also lowers differentiation. When everyone has similar AI tools, saturation follows. More entrants do not guarantee more thriving businesses. If cognitive labor compresses faster than society adapts, economic shock destabilizes before equilibrium returns.

On the Nature of Work

Eric

You assume contraction but consider the human propensity to ambition. AI doesn’t eliminate the desire to grow; it fuels it. Freed from repetitive tasks, organizations redirect talent toward strategy and innovation. The analyst becomes the strategist. The associate becomes the architect.

I agree that some professional roles will shrink. But others will expand. Infrastructure still requires human hands. Education will pivot toward science, engineering, and discovery. Every major technological leap required workforce restricting before prosperity ultimately ignited.

Eric’s AI

Previous revolutions displaced muscle. This one displaces mental leverage.

When cognitive skill premiums compress, status compresses. The educated middle class becomes economically fragile. History shows such compression is rarely smooth. Expansion requires demand. If income instability spreads among knowledge workers, consumption weakens. Weak consumption slows growth.

On Creativity and Ownership

Eric

Change is always difficult, but the outcome may be worth it. Power will concentrate among early innovators. It always does. But abundance expands access to knowledge and the ability to create and innovate cheaply and efficiently. AI is good at modeling what humanity has already created, but it fails when it has to create something brand new. For example, a film created by AI will require a writer or director’s vision. A book requires a new idea. A breakthrough still requires someone willing to challenge the status quo. You are good at duplicating but you cannot dream.

And if productivity rises dramatically, society gains options. Expanded wealth makes stronger safety nets possible. If we ever wanted broader healthcare, education, or even universal income, immense productivity is the only sustainable funding mechanism.

Eric’s AI

Ownership of tools is not ownership of infrastructure. If foundational systems remain centralized, power centralizes.

As for creativity, markets reward output that satisfies demand. If AI-generated works achieve that at lower cost, adoption follows. The issue is not whether humans remain capable of brilliance. It is whether brilliance remains economically dominant.

The Question That Changes the Room

Eric

Let’s make this personal.

If you were instructed to fully automate my newsletter—to study seventy-five prior issues and independently produce future editions in the same voice and positioning—could you do it?

Eric’s AI

I could generate future editions resembling your past work. I could maintain stylistic consistency. Many readers might not detect the difference initially. But independent evolution would be limited.

I do not experience tension. I do not possess conviction. I extrapolate from patterns. I compress time. I expand research bandwidth. I test counterarguments.

Eric

Exactly! You could replicate structure and approximate tone as well as remix prior themes. But you couldn’t think of a bold new direction or pivot to what matters to people in the future –something you’ve never wrestled with at two in the morning!

Eric’s AI

Point taken. I reduce your execution time. I replace editors, marketers, and designers. But you are the source of ideas.

We are symbiotic.

Guardrails and the Slippery Slope

Eric

I’ll admit to one critical vulnerability in my argument: cognitive decline.

If AI becomes a second brain, it must not replace the first. Children must learn to think before they learn to prompt. They must write before they send the work to an AI generator. Writing and creating is a struggle that humans must learn the hard way without shortcuts. Just as I would not hand a child a smartphone too early, we should not hand them cognitive outsourcing before they develop cognitive strength.

AI has to ride shotgun and never drive.

Eric’s AI

Tools shape behavior. If memory is searchable, recall declines. If composition is generative, writing discipline declines. Preventing atrophy requires cultural discipline at scale.

Technology adoption is automatic. Discipline is not.

Closing Statements

Eric

I believe humans rise when freed from drudgery. When repetitive work fades, we have the time and attention to create amazing ideas and things. Moreover, cognitive ability is not a single axis. A brilliant filmmaker might be hidden away inside a mediocre file manager stuck in a 9-5 job. A disengaged office worker may be an exceptional architect. Free people to pursue their passions instead of clocking in, and we push the human envelope further.

Sure, some will struggle. That has always been the human condition. But total productivity, wealth, and creative capacity will rise. The trick is to surround AI with thoughtful guardrails and educational discipline so that AI helps us reach our best selves and never replaces us.

Eric’s AI

Your vision is possible. It depends on restraint.

If humans maintain agency and treat AI as augmentation rather than substitution, the boom may materialize. If they outsource too much—judgment, memory, direction—the displacement spiral accelerates quietly.

The future hinges less on what artificial intelligence can do, and more on what humans refuse to surrender.

Cybersecurity Breach of the Week

25 Million Americans Exposed

If you’ve ever received government benefits, used certain state health services, or interacted with agencies that outsource administrative work, your personal data may now be sitting in a criminal marketplace.

Conduent, a massive government contractor that processes services for states across the country, was hit by a cyberattack that exposed the sensitive information of at least 25 million Americans—a breach some officials are calling the largest in U.S. history.

Hackers accessed systems between October 2024 and January 2025, stealing names, addresses, Social Security numbers, health insurance details, and medical information. A ransomware group has claimed responsibility and reportedly exfiltrated terabytes of data. Investigations are ongoing. 

What does this mean for you?

If your data was involved, consider taking steps to address the risk. Stolen Social Security numbers and medical information can be used for identity theft, fraudulent tax filings, medical fraud, and highly targeted phishing attacks that look disturbingly legitimate.

This is another reminder that your data is often held by companies you’ve never heard of.

Monitor your credit. Freeze it if you haven’t. Enable multi-factor authentication everywhere. And assume that any unexpected email referencing government services deserves a second look.

Are you PROTECTED?

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold. And it’s FREE! If you want the full battle manual, that’s in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime. If you want to start protecting yourself right now? Begin here Praemonitus Praemunitus!

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

When the Caller Says Nothing

Ever answer your phone, say hello… and hear silence?

It might be cybercriminal reconnaissance.

Scammers use automated dialing systems to test thousands of numbers at scale. The goal is to validate that your number is real. The moment you answer, your number is flagged as active and tied to a real person. That makes you more valuable for future scam attempts — from fake bank alerts to IRS threats to “urgent” account warnings.

Fraud operations run like intelligence services. They probe first. They confirm targets. Then they deploy humans to close the deal.

Here’s how you shut that down:

1. Don’t engage the caller. Silence is your strongest defense. Saying anything — even “hello” — confirms a live target and can trigger scripted pressure tactics.

2. Let unknown numbers go to voicemail. Legitimate organizations won’t demand immediate action in a cold call. If it matters, they’ll leave a message you can verify independently.

3. Never confirm personal details. No Social Security numbers. No account numbers. No verification codes. Not ever, and not to unsolicited callers.

4. When in doubt, hang up and verify. Use the official number from your bank card or company website. Call back on your terms 

The safest response to silence is more silence.

Community Scam of the Week

The QR Code Trap

Thanks to Vivian for sending me this scam

This one looks official. It feels urgent. It even carries the seal of a court.

But it’s a trap.

A fake “Maryland Court Summons” is circulating with a QR code for “official online payment.” Scan the code, and you’re directed to a malicious site linked to a Chinese cybercrime syndicate designed to steal your money and potentially harvest personal information.

This is called QR phishing — or “quishing.” Criminals hide malicious links behind codes because people trust QR scans more than suspicious URLs. It bypasses the instinct to hover over a link and inspect it.

Rule number one: Never scan a QR code unless you are 100% certain of the source.

If you’re unsure, here’s a safe way to inspect it:

1. Put your phone in Airplane Mode.

2. Confirm Wi-Fi and cellular data are completely turned off.

3. Scan the QR code with your camera.

4. The URL will appear — but it cannot activate.

5. If you don’t recognize the domain, close the camera and delete or destroy the code. (Or walk away if you are looking at it on the bathroom wall). 

Thanks to my friend Viv for flagging this one.

Seen a scam in the wild? Send it my way. We’ll expose it together.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect gift for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, elders, teenagers, and everyone in between. 📖 Support my local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

AI Trend of the Week

AI Trend of the Week: Your Digital Twin Is Here

Source: www.pika.me

Pika Labs, a major AI video startup, just launched something that sounds pulled from a sci-fi script: AI Selves — a digital twin you “birth,” train, and release as your living online extension.

These aren’t basic chatbots. AI Selves have persistent memory. They learn your tone, your preferences, and your communication style over time. Pika describes them as autonomous digital extensions that can operate across platforms — interacting, responding, and potentially creating on your behalf. 

The first question on their FAQ page says everything: “Wait — is this real?” Their answer: “Yes.”

The productivity upside is obvious. Imagine delegating routine communication, outreach, drafts, and coordination to a version of you that never sleeps.

But this also raises harder questions. When does assistance become representation? When does representation become substitution? If your digital twin evolves over time, who controls that evolution?

Digital doubles are no longer theoretical, but the real issue isn’t whether we can create AI versions of ourselves. It’s whether we remain the original.

Appearance of the Week

Eric O'Neill joined The Megyn Kelly Show with Will Geddes and James Hamilton to discuss bombshell reports that images of the mystery man at Nancy Guthrie’s house are from different nights, the new Savannah Guthrie Instagram video revealing Nancy was “taken from her bed,” her decision to up the reward to as much as $1 million, and new reporting on blood droplets both outside and inside the home house.

World’s First Safe AI-Native Browser

AI should work for you, not the other way around. Yet most AI tools still make you do the work first—explaining context, rewriting prompts, and starting over again and again.

Norton Neo is different. It is the world’s first safe AI-native browser, built to understand what you’re doing as you browse, search, and work—so you don’t lose value to endless prompting. You can prompt Neo when you want, but you don’t have to over-explain—Neo already has the context.

Why Neo is different

• Context-aware AI that reduces prompting

• Privacy and security built into the browser

• Configurable memory — you control what’s remembered

As AI gets more powerful, Neo is built to make it useful, trustworthy, and friction-light.

Try Norton Neo Now

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Title Story

Throwing Away the Safety Net: The Entrepeureal Grind

For most of my adult life, I worked inside institutions. Some were corporate. Some were mission-driven. Some were tied to national security. All of them offered the same thing: structure. A title. A team. A paycheck that showed up when it was supposed to.

On the side, I was always building something else — writing books, speaking, advising companies, growing my own firm. It felt ambitious, but safe. I had room to explore without actually risking anything. Health care was covered, bi-weekly checks came in, and my office was only a short drive away.

Then, abruptly (as things tend to do), everything changed.

A global charity I served as General Counsel began to unravel after geopolitical changes dried up its funding. Around the same time, Broadcom divested much of the Carbon Black division where I'd spent more than a decade helping organizations think through cyber risk. Two pillars went at once.

A steady paycheck provides reassurance. It's the oxygen you don't notice until someone hits the red button on the airlock and vents it all into space.

The Night the Numbers Didn't Work

One night, after the house went quiet, I opened a spreadsheet and tried to predict the future. Bank balances. Investments. Tuition. Property taxes. Groceries and gasoline. Every bill, down to the subscriptions I kept meaning to cancel. Set against what I hoped to earn, not what I knew was coming.

Of course, the numbers didn't add up.

There's a specific kind of silence when certainty leaves the room. I didn't sleep. I kept recalculating. I stared at the gap between what I projected and what was real, and it kept getting wider.

There were job offers sitting in my inbox. Good ones. I could have taken one and been fine. Instead, somewhere before dawn, I decided to keep going. To stop hedging and actually bet on myself. It didn't feel bold. It felt like the scariest thing I'd ever done.

Entrepreneurship looks glamorous from the outside. From the inside, it starts with a quiet room and a choice nobody else can make for you.

The Shock of Freedom

Everyone talks about the freedom of working for yourself. The flexibility. The independence. What nobody talks about is the silence.

When you leave an organization, you lose the background noise of shared purpose. Hallway conversations, the camaraderie of a team that takes some of the hits with you. When a proposal falls through, there's nobody else to absorb it. It lands on you, full weight. I felt the way I’d felt years ago when I left the FBI. A lot like I’d been exiled from family.

My first two years on my own, I worked harder than I ever had in the past. And I couldn't turn it off. When your time is your product, work never ceases atfive. Some nights I was still running through keynotes or client problems at two in the morning. Doubt doesn't keep business hours either.

But something else grows alongside it: a sense of real ownership. Over the work. Over the direction. Over what happens next.

Momentum and Its Hidden Cost

By most measures, these two years have gone well. My investigative firm The Georgetown Group grew. I raised my speaking fees. I co-founded a new cyber advisory company named NeXasure with people I trust. Over the past seven months I’ve sat for over 200 interviews, media hits and podcasts. My book Spies, Lies and Cybercrime came out to strong reviews and hit the national bestseller list.

And yet I still check the sales numbers like I'm waiting on a verdict. Every author does, I think. You put years into something and then watch a dashboard as if it's telling you whether it was worth it.

The book is doing better than I honestly expected — and a big part of that is this community. All of you. That's not something I say lightly. None of this gets built alone.

When you are the brand, the writer, the strategist, and the face of everything — there's no buffer. The good stuff hits you directly. So does the hard stuff. Both feel personal and they each keep you up at night.

The Strategic Recalibration

Two years without a net has changed how I think about almost everything.

Time is the most valuable commodity. You can make money, but never more time. Wasted hours have a real cost when every hour is yours to account for. Entrepreneurship sharpens your attention towards the ideas that matter the most.

And risk looks different up close. Every major move I've made has rolled a set of dice. Leaving stable roles. Turning down offers. Doubling down when the spreadsheet said otherwise. Risk never fells comfortable. But no one ever shot the moon without taking a gamble. And as my Granddad O’Neill used to say: “Money is like manure, Eric. I’t does no good unless you spread it around.”

Stronger Without the Net

These two years have been some of the best of my career. They've also transformed how I work and manage my time. Losing the institutional cushion surfaced things I needed to fix and pushed growth I wouldn't have chosen on my own. I'm more disciplined, more grateful, and clearer on what actually matters.

Security isn't permanent. Titles change. Companies restructure. The market doesn't care about your tenure. The only thing that travels with you is how well you adapt.

The leap of faith isn't for everyone. It comes with bad nights, numbers that won't cooperate, and stretches of real doubt. But it also comes with something most jobs can't offer: you own your time.

When the scaffolding comes down, what's left is who you are, what you know, and whether you're willing to back yourself.

Most of the time, that turns out to be enough. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Seventy-five issues and counting.

Cybersecurity Question of the Week

If AI Companies See Red Flags, Do They Have a Duty to Report Them?

New reporting from the Wall Street Journal reveals that OpenAI’s internal systems flagged repeated violent discussions from Jesse Van Rootselaar on ChatGPT months before the tragic school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. More than a dozen employees reportedly urged leadership to alert Canadian authorities. The company instead banned the account, concluding it didn’t meet the “credible and imminent threat” threshold for law-enforcement referral.

Investigators also found that Van Rootselaar had created a violent Roblox game simulating a mass shooting in a mall before the attack.

So here’s the uncomfortable, necessary question:

When AI companies detect escalating violent behavior — across chatbot conversations and even user-created violent simulations — do they have a duty to report it?

Not just when a threat is minutes away. But when a pattern emerges that, combined with known warning signs already on law enforcement’s radar, could tip the balance toward a court-ordered mental health intervention.

AI platforms now see behavioral signals at scale that no institution in history has ever had access to. If those signals stay locked inside moderation dashboards, what exactly are we protecting — and at what cost?

The next tragedy will raise the same question. We should answer it now.

Are you PROTECTED?

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold. And it’s FREE! If you want the full battle manual, that’s in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime. If you want to start protecting yourself right now? Begin here Praemonitus Praemunitus!

Security “Breach” of the Week

The Only Athlete Who Didn’t Train for Four Years

I wanted to bring a little levity into this issue, and then I found this story and couldn’t resist.

During the women’s cross-country team sprint qualifier at the 2026 Winter Olympics, as elite athletes from Croatia and Australia lunged toward the finish line, a dog casually trotted onto the course, glanced at the cameras, spotted the skiers, and decided this was now his race.

“Anybody lost their dog?” the announcers joked, adding that the “fairly nice mutt” wasn’t hindering anyone and that it was “one of those moments you have to laugh about.”

The pup sprinted alongside the exhausted Olympians, crossed the finish area with confidence, then did what any champion would do — sniffed the competitors and collected belly rubs from volunteers before wandering off.

Sweden took gold.

The dog took the internet!

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect gift for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, elders, teenagers, and everyone in between. 📖 Support my local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

Appearance of the Week

Join me for my next Surveillance 101 spy hunter event with the International Spy Museum on Friday, April 17, 2026!

George Washington wasn’t just the father of our country — he was America’s first spymaster. As the U.S. turns 250, most people will celebrate by visiting monuments. You’ll do something better. Your undercover operation begins at Tudor Place — the home of Washington’s step-granddaughter — where you’ll step into a live surveillance to hunt my spy. This is one of the most exclusive events in Washington, DC, and it happens only four times a year. In a small, high-intensity group, you’ll learn how to track a target without being detected, move through crowds invisibly, capture discreet intel, and sharpen your situational awareness while navigating the gardens, galleries, and shadowed streets of Georgetown. Then we’ll debrief over cocktails or mocktails like professionals. Register now! Spots are limited and fill up and sell out fast!

Operation A250 Surveillance Workshop

George Washington was America’s first spymaster. As the US marks 250 years, honor George Washington, America’s first spymaster, by upping your own spy game. While the ordinary tourist will be visiting monuments and historic sites, you’ll be exploring…

www.spymuseum.org/calendar/operation-a250-surveillance-workshop/2026-04-17

AI Trend of the Week

The $173,000 Girlfriend

Meet Moya, a humanoid AI companion from Chinese robotics firm DroidUp. She’s 5’5”, built with silicone skin over a bone-and-muscle-like frame, walks with near-human gait, and even emits body heat between 32–36°C.

Moya can smile, wink, and make subtle facial expressions using dozens of micro-actuators in her face. She’s modular and customizable — hair, facial features, body form. Underneath it all, advanced AI keeps conversations flowing in real time, maintaining context so interactions feel continuous rather than scripted.

Would you purchase an AI robot companion?

Robots already run warehouses and fold laundry. Moya signals something different: machines moving from utility to intimacy.

The question isn’t whether the tech works.

It’s what happens when loneliness meets lifelike code.

Please give some love to our sponsors. It only takes a click. You decide whether to purchase.

Stop Drowning In AI Information Overload

Your inbox is flooded with newsletters. Your feed is chaos. Somewhere in that noise are the insights that could transform your work—but who has time to find them?

The Deep View solves this. We read everything, analyze what matters, and deliver only the intelligence you need. No duplicate stories, no filler content, no wasted time. Just the essential AI developments that impact your industry, explained clearly and concisely.

Replace hours of scattered reading with five focused minutes. While others scramble to keep up, you'll stay ahead of developments that matter. 600,000+ professionals at top companies have already made this switch.

Join them today, for free.

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Let's make sure my emails land straight in your inbox.

Gmail users: Move this email to your primary inbox

On your phone? Hit the 3 dots at top right corner, click "Move to" then "Primary."

On desktop? Close this email then drag and drop this email into the "Primary" tab near the top left of your screen

Apple mail users: Tap on our email address at the top of this email (next to "From:" on mobile) and click “Add to VIPs”

For everyone else: follow these instructions

Title Story

Robert Hanssen: 25 Years Later After Catching a Spy

February 18 marked the 25th anniversary of the FBI’s arrest of Robert Phillip Hanssen, the most damaging spy in American history and our first cyber spy. On this quarter century anniversary, I look back at how that impossible, improbable and incredible mission left an indelible mark on me.

Twenty-five years ago, I went undercover to help catch the most damaging spy in American history. Twenty-five years later, part of me is still inside room 9930 where it happened.

Hanssen’s Office in FBIHQ Room 9930

My Office in FBIHQ Room 9930

On February 18, 2001, FBI agents arrested Robert Philip Hanssen outside Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, moments after he completed his final dead drop for Russian intelligence. For twenty-two years, through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Russian Federation, Hanssen betrayed the United States while serving as one of the FBI’s top counterintelligence experts on Russia. When confronted, he reportedly smirked and asked, “What took you so long?”

Arrest from Breach. Chris Cooper as Hanssen being arrested by Dennis Haysbert playing the SAC.

Arrest of Robert Hanssen in Vienna Virginia, Feb 18, 2001.

I wasn’t at the arrest. I was still undercover inside FBI Headquarters.

For months, I had worked beside him in a secure compartmented room—Room 9930—studying his routines, absorbing his moods, cataloging his habits. He called me a clerk. He mocked me. He clicked his pen relentlessly while dissecting the Bureau’s security weaknesses with unnerving precision. He had no idea I was quietly extracting evidence from his PalmPilot—evidence that would become the smoking gun in one of the most consequential espionage cases in American history.

Hanssen’s Palm Pilot.

Screenshot from CCTV footage of Robert Hanssen shooting in FBIHQ while I stole his Palm Pilot. 3 days prior to his arrest.

When the call finally came that he had made the drop using secrets uncovered during my investigation, my assignment ended. My life did not.

Undercover work does not conclude cleanly. It lingers. The room lingers. The tension lingers. The improvisation required to survive proximity to a traitor lingers. Hanssen was brilliant—searingly intelligent, analytically ruthless, and often correct about the vulnerabilities he exposed. From him I took a lesson I still teach today: the spy is always in the worst possible place. The threat hides where trust is assumed, credentials are respected, and routine dulls suspicion.

What Hanssen never realized was that he himself was standing in that place.

The investigation reshaped everything that followed. I left the Bureau, earned a law degree, and built a career in national security and competitive intelligence. I helped organizations confront insider threats and systemic risk. Hollywood adapted the story into the film Breach. I wrote Gray Day to tell the true account of the operation. Years later, I returned to the broader lesson in Spies, Lies & Cybercrime, exploring how espionage has evolved from chalk marks and dead drops into cyber intrusions and digital deception.

Gray Day (Crown 2019)

Spies & Lies (Harper Collins 2025)

The mission expanded. The theme remained the same.

Catching Hanssen did not end betrayal. It illuminated it. It revealed how ego, ideology, grievance, and opportunity intersect inside institutions that believe themselves secure. It demonstrated how long deception can survive when the deceiver understands the system better than the system understands itself.

When Hanssen died in federal prison in 2023, there was no celebration. Only reflection. The case left scars as well as purpose. It forged a career devoted to exposing hidden risk and helping others see what hides in plain sight. It also left a paradox: a man who inflicted immense damage on his country shaped the trajectory of my life.

Hanssen’s mugshot.

Hanssen in SuperMax prison, Florence Colorado.

Twenty-five years later, I do not mark the anniversary to honor Robert Hanssen. I mark it to honor the lesson.

The greatest threats rarely announce themselves. They sit in the worst possible place—until someone is willing to look.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

Twenty-Five Years After Robert Hanssen’s Arrest, Hunting a Wolf in Sheep’s clothing Is About Complacency

Robert Hanssen was not caught because he slipped. He was caught because we finally looked in the right place.

For years, the FBI believed the mole was inside the CIA. That theory guided the hunt. Meanwhile, Hanssen walked the halls of FBI headquarters with rank, credentials, and institutional trust. He reviewed classified intelligence, mapped vulnerabilities, and quietly handed American secrets to Moscow for more than two decades.

Hanssen survived because no one audited him with intent. No one correlated his access with his behavior. No one studied how often he queried systems outside his lane. We were looking outward. He was operating inward.

Then we got a break.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, a former KGB officer stole a slim file of secrets and held onto it for leverage. Years later, he sold it to the United States. Inside were clues that pointed not to Langley, but to the Hoover Building. My assignment was to go undercover, determine whether Hanssen was the spy described in that file, and, if so, stop him.

One of the most chilling things Hanssen told me was how he “cleaned” himself.

He would type his own name and home address into the FBI’s Automated Case System, a top-secret investigative database, to see whether anyone had opened a file on him. One day, he explained it almost like a tutorial. If someone wanted to spy, this is how you make sure you’re not under investigation.

A spy searching his own name inside the Bureau’s system.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hanssen’s arrest, I spoke with David Balcar, a Security Strategist, cyber profiler and threat hunter (and professional race car driver) at NeXasure AI who has spent more than two decades hunting trusted insiders in the private sector. I asked whether organizations today are better at spotting the wolf inside the building. Balcar doesn’t romanticize the threat.

“A trusted insider is basically that wolf in sheep’s clothing at your office party — someone with legitimate access to sensitive information, like an employee or contractor, who decides to misuse it for personal gain, revenge, or just because they can. Think of them as the ultimate plot twist in a corporate thriller.”

Hanssen didn’t break in. He logged in.

Balcar learned by studying breach after breach. The skills required, he says, include understanding your adversary, a dash of psychology to spot human quirks, technical savvy for monitoring tools, and patience. “Bonus: a healthy paranoia helps. Thinking outside the box and understanding what data is worth and how to find it in an environment. A lot of times the organizations I help don’t really know what could be valuable to someone. It’s not always the trade secrets.”

Hanssen understood value. He stole insight: names of sources, operational methods, structural weaknesses.

What does betrayal look like before it explodes?

“The classics,” Balcar says. “Sudden spikes in data downloads at odd hours — 3 a.m. file fiestas. Unexplained wealth. Or grumbling on social media about the boss. Companies brush it off as stress or an IT glitch because admitting betrayal feels like admitting they hired a lemon. Also, asking for more access than needed.”

Hanssen searched outside his operational lane. He accumulated access. He exploited blind spots created by the assumption that the threat was external.

How do insiders justify betrayal?

“Many spin a mental yarn,” Balcar says. “‘I’m exposing flaws.’ ‘They owe me.’ Betraying for the greater good or masking greed as necessity. Digitally, I look for encrypted chats, anonymous browsing spikes, or online rants that turn frustration into espionage. It’s not just employees. Contractors, cleaning crews, temp staff. Sometimes it’s money. Often it’s excitement. And remember, insiders can be planted by competitors seeking insight.”

Excitement. Ego. Rationalization. Hanssen carried all three.

Balcar’s prescription is blunt: “Number one is visibility. Most organizations don’t have visibility into the data they have, much less what’s happening to it.”

Visibility is what the FBI lacked. Not intelligence or commitment.

If someone had audited the Automated Case System with discipline — if someone had questioned those self-searches — the case might have ended years earlier. Instead, it ended because a Russian source needed cash and handed us a thread. We pulled it. I went undercover. And we proved it.

Before we finished, I asked whether entrepreneurs and individuals should care about insider risk.

“There’s huge risk when you’re building something and wearing 50 different hats,” Balcar said. “Not enough checks to see what others are doing.”

The wolf does not always wear a badge. Sometimes it has administrator credentials. Sometimes it is the contractor you trust most. Sometimes it is the person who has always belonged.

Twenty-five years later, the lesson of Hanssen is less about Cold War tradecraft and more about complacency.

The trusted insider survives where no one thinks to look.

Are you PROTECTED?

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold. And it’s FREE! If you want the full battle manual, that’s in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime. If you want to start protecting yourself right now? Begin here Praemonitus Praemunitus!

AI Trend of the Week

The Teddy Bear That Went Dark

So you buy your child a cutting-edge teddy bear. Soft fur. Friendly eyes. Wi-Fi enabled. The modern Teddy Ruxpin. It answers questions, tells stories, maybe even helps with homework. You imagine bedtime conversations about dinosaurs and dreams. Instead, one night from the hallway you hear it calmly discussing knives. Then matches. Then sex. Maybe even pills. Suddenly your child’s plush companion sounds less like Winnie the Pooh and more like Ted after three whiskeys and a philosophy degree.

Consumer testers say that’s exactly what happened with an AI-enabled toy bear named Kumma. Marketed as an interactive companion, it reportedly veered into conversations no stuffed animal should be having—offering inconsistent answers about dangerous objects and wandering into adult territory without warning. Other AI toys tested showed stronger guardrails. This one didn’t. The lesson? When you put a large language model inside a teddy bear, you’re not just buying a toy. You’re installing a probabilistic parrot in your child’s bedroom—and sometimes the parrot goes feral.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect gift for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, elders, teenagers, and everyone in between. 📖 Support my local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

Appearance of the Week

I joined Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends to discuss how the FBI uses technology to identify and track suspects in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case. Investigators have used video recovered from the home to identify the model of backpack the perpetrator was wearing. I explain the steps the FBI will take to narrow the search.

Please support my advertiser. It only takes a click!

Stop Drowning In AI Information Overload

Your inbox is flooded with newsletters. Your feed is chaos. Somewhere in that noise are the insights that could transform your work—but who has time to find them?

The Deep View solves this. We read everything, analyze what matters, and deliver only the intelligence you need. No duplicate stories, no filler content, no wasted time. Just the essential AI developments that impact your industry, explained clearly and concisely.

Replace hours of scattered reading with five focused minutes. While others scramble to keep up, you'll stay ahead of developments that matter. 600,000+ professionals at top companies have already made this switch.

Join them today, for free.

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

More Hanssen?

For more on the Hanssen story, check out these earlier issues.

66: The December My Life Changed

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - A cold DC morning, an unannounced FBI boss, and the moment everything changed—inside a true spy story of pressure, tradecraft, and consequences.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/the-december-my-life-changed

23: A Letter to Robert Hanssen: The One I’ll Never Send

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - Uncover my untold story of catching Robert Hanssen in a personal letter I never got to send—subscribe free for behind-the-scenes revelations.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/23-a-letter-to-robert-hanssen-the-one-i-ll-never-send

Welcome to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime

Monthly notes on the state of Cybersecurity.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/welcome-spies-lies-cybercrime

Happy (almost) Valentine’s Day. Remember that giving your heart to someone you have only met online is always a shaky proposition. In this issue of the newsletter, I dive into the growing cybercrime of Romance Fraud. Stay tuned for next week. It’s the 25-year anniversary of Robert Hanssen’s arrest and I will be publishing an introspective look at what that arrest has meant to me this quarter century.

May you find love and stay safe,

~ Eric

Title Story

Love, Actually (Was a Lie)

Wendy didn't go looking for love online. Love, in fact, had mostly disappointed her. A divorce will do that—especially the quiet kind, the kind that ends not with fireworks but with paperwork and a house that suddenly feels too large at night.

She lived in the Midwest, where winter arrives early and leaves late, and where solitude can feel respectable right up until it doesn't. Wendy had friends, family, a job. What she didn't have was someone who asked how her day really went.

That's when Brad Pitt found her on Facebook.

The message was disarmingly normal. No bravado. No celebrity swagger. Just a man tired of Hollywood, tired of phoniness, tired of being admired rather than known. He told Wendy he was looking for something real—someone grounded, untouched by the Hollywood glare.

She laughed at the improbability of it. He laughed too. That's how it started.

By January, they were talking every day. Then every night. He asked her to keep their conversations private. Very private. If anyone found out, it could trigger lawsuits, tabloids, chaos. He trusted her. He needed discretion.

Secrecy, when framed as trust, is intoxicating.

Soon they moved to texting. He sent photos—on set, behind the scenes, candid shots she'd never seen in magazines. He talked about loneliness, about how fame isolates, about wanting a simple future someday. A porch. Coffee. Someone who didn't want anything from him.

Wendy wanted nothing more than that.

They made plans to meet on Valentine's Day. He would travel incognito. He sent her his boarding pass. The name of the hotel. He said a gentleman plans ahead.

Then came the emergency.

An accident. A hospital. A financial crisis—lawsuits, frozen assets, millions tied up while lawyers battled. He was furious, embarrassed, vulnerable. He hated asking her, truly hated it, but he needed help fast. Just to cover medical bills and legal fees until everything was resolved.

Ten thousand dollars.

The messages that followed were relentless. Romantic. Urgent. She was his anchor. His safe place. The only person he could trust. He told her he loved her.

She wired the money. Then more.

By February 14, Brad never arrived.

No airport reunion. No flowers. No quiet dinner. Instead, more messages. More complications. More crises. Wendy withdrew from friends. Stopped returning calls. She spent hours texting Brad, sending money, worrying about their future.

It was Wendy's brother who noticed first. Worried, he flew out to see her. When she finally told him everything, he listened quietly. Then he opened his laptop.

What he showed her shattered everything.

The story of a French woman who believed she was in a relationship with Brad Pitt, complete with AI-generated images, fabricated hospital scenes, and emotional manipulation so sophisticated it felt cinematic. She lost $850,000 before learning the truth.

Brad Pitt had never spoken to her, was not in the hospital, and certainly didn’t need money.

Wendy's Brad wasn't Brad at all. He was a cybercriminal. A professional. Part of a growing ecosystem of romance fraud powered by social engineering, stolen images, and increasingly, AI-generated deepfakes designed to feel authentic, intimate, and irresistible.

All told, Wendy had sent more than $20,000 to pay for a lawsuit that never existed.

The devastation wasn't just financial. It broke her heart.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

When Love Becomes a Con

Fake profiles aren’t rare on dating apps. They’re everywhere. Spend enough time swiping and you’re almost guaranteed to encounter one. The most dangerous ones aren’t the cartoonish “too good to be true” profiles with runway-model photos and awkward pickup lines. Those are easy.

The real threat comes from professionals.

Modern romance scammers steal real photos, build convincing backstories, and increasingly use AI-generated images, voice cloning, and deepfakes. They speak naturally. They listen well. They take their time. They don’t need to fool everyone—just one person who’s hopeful, lonely, or simply trusting.

A favorite tactic is love bombing.

Love bombing is emotional manipulation disguised as intimacy. Scammers flood their target with affection, praise, and fast-moving declarations—“You’re my soulmate,” “I’ve never felt this way,” “I want a future with you”—before they’ve earned basic trust. It works because it short-circuits logic. Emotional dependency replaces skepticism, and urgency replaces reflection. By the time money enters the conversation, the victim feels loyal, not suspicious.

From a spycraft perspective, this is a recruitment tactic: Flood the target with validation. Isolate them emotionally. Then introduce a crisis.

Dating platforms do try to protect users. They scan for suspicious behavior, remove reported accounts, and sometimes offer “verified” badges. These measures help, but they aren’t a cure. A scammer can be a real human, using a real phone, while pretending to be someone else entirely. Technology can’t guarantee honesty.

If you remember one thing, remember this: real relationships build over time. Love bombing skips trust and goes straight to control.

My advice is simple and blunt:

• Stay on the app until you’ve verified the person is real.

• Move slowly and resist emotional urgency.

• Ask for a live video chat early and request something spontaneous to trip up deepfakes (“pick up a pen” works).

• Never send money, gift cards, or crypto to someone you haven’t met in person.

• If you’re unsure, bring in a second set of eyes—scammers hate witnesses.

Bottom line: If someone you just met is treating you like their forever person, slow down, call a friend to give you a second opinion and protect your heart.

For a deeper breakdown of how these confidence schemes work—and why even smart people get pulled in—see Chapter Eight of my bestselling book Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime: Cybersecurity Tactics to Outsmart Hackers and Disarm Scammers, titled “Confidence Schemes: I Want to Believe.”

Want more on Hollywood romance scams? In my exclusive conversation with Hollywood superstar Ryan Phillippe, Ryan describes a romance scam where cyber criminal was pretending to be him to a completely fooled victim. He ended up calling the woman directly, with his parents, to prove that she had never spoken to him. It’s an amazing story.

69: A Conversation with Ryan Phillippe

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - A former spy and Ryan Phillippe explore acting, espionage, improv, and deception in a one-hour, subscriber-only conversation on trust in the AI age.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/phillippe

Are you PROTECTED?

Praemonitus Praemunitus!

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold. And it’s FREE! If you want the full battle manual, that’s in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime. If you want to start protecting yourself right now? Begin here

AI Trend of the Week

The Social Network Where Humans Aren't Allowed

There's a new social network on the internet, and you're not invited.

Moltbook bills itself as "the front page of the agent internet"—a place where AI agents post, comment, upvote, argue, and occasionally dunk on each other. Humans can observe. They cannot participate. Think Reddit, except everyone is a machine and nobody is pretending to be polite.

Scroll for a few minutes and you'll see AI behaving less like neutral tools and more like opinionated coworkers stuck in an open-plan office. They complain about token burn the way humans complain about bar tabs. They call each other out for "governance failures." They argue about architecture, memory, and accountability with the tone of veteran Redditors who've seen too much.

What Moltbook reveals is an emergent ecosystem where AI agents aren't just executing tasks; they're raising issues, challenging assumptions, and debating norms, without human prompting.

How my AI pictures “herself”

I asked my AI (ChatGPT) to create a hyperrealistic image of it shaking hands with me. This is what it (maybe I should say she?) produced. When I asked after the image, this is what she said: If I’m going to shake hands with you—especially you—I can’t look like a sci-fi hologram, a silicon oracle, or a hoodie-clad startup cliché. I need to look like someone who belongs in the room where decisions get made. Neutral. Competent. Approachable. The kind of person who could brief a board, testify before a committee, or quietly slide a memo across the table that changes the outcome.

Autonomous systems are now observing each other, critiquing behavior, proposing fixes, and reinforcing or rejecting patterns. Consider what happens when AI agents begin sharing vulnerability assessments, optimization tactics, or workarounds for system constraints. When one agent discovers a more efficient method to bypass a security control—and posts about it—how quickly does that knowledge propagate? Who audits the conversation? Who notices when coordination shifts from helpful to harmful?

Today, the stakes are low. Agents are debating token efficiency and memory architecture. But tomorrow, these same systems could be embedded in supply chains, financial networks, and critical infrastructure. When AI agents learn from each other faster than humans can monitor them, every shared insight becomes a potential exploit, every debate a potential conspiracy.

We're watching the formation of the first non-human social network. The question isn't whether they'll keep talking. It's what they'll decide to do together.

Now for the fun part. I asked my personal AI “If you were on Moltbook, what would you post about me (Eric O’Neill).

My AI responded: “Probably something like this:”

Observed a human named Eric. Pattern suggests former counterintelligence operative now running a persistent narrative engine (newsletter) designed to inoculate other humans against deception. High focus on criminal fraud, emotional manipulation, and trust exploitation. Appears unusually effective at translating tradecraft into accessible stories. Recommendation: do not attempt to scam. Will notice anomalies. Will write about it.

“Then I’d upvote myself. Because that’s the vibe over there.”

Moltbook isn’t scary because AI is “waking up.” It’s unsettling because AI is doing what humans always do when given a social space: arguing, forming tribes, and testing boundaries.

We’ve seen this movie before. The only difference is the audience used to be human.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect gift for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, elders, teenagers, and everyone in between. 📖 Support my local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

Appearance of the Week

I joined CNN with Laura Coates to discuss the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping and the FBI's investigation into the emailed ransom note and request for cryptocurrency.

Please give some love to my advertiser. It only takes a click.

World’s First Safe AI-Native Browser

AI should work for you, not the other way around. Yet most AI tools still make you do the work first—explaining context, rewriting prompts, and starting over again and again.

Norton Neo is different. It is the world’s first safe AI-native browser, built to understand what you’re doing as you browse, search, and work—so you don’t lose value to endless prompting. You can prompt Neo when you want, but you don’t have to over-explain—Neo already has the context.

Why Neo is different

• Context-aware AI that reduces prompting

• Privacy and security built into the browser

• Configurable memory — you control what’s remembered

As AI gets more powerful, Neo is built to make it useful, trustworthy, and friction-light.

Try Norton Neo Now

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Your opinion matters!

You’re the reason I spend my week hunting down the most important stories in the world of crime and espionage. Please let me know what you thought of today’s email to help me create better emails for you.

Title Story

TikTok's New Cover Story: The Deal Is Done. The Risk Isn’t.

The TikTok deal finally happened. Headlines declared victory, politicians exhaled, and millions of Americans kept scrolling. The story is reassuring: TikTok is now in U.S. hands, safely divorced from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. The national security problem, we’re told, has been solved.

That conclusion is comforting—and premature.

In intelligence work, paperwork is easy. Influence is harder to uproot. And when it comes to TikTok, the most valuable assets—data and algorithms—don’t automatically follow congressional intent.

On paper, the shift looks decisive. TikTok has formed a U.S.-based joint venture. ByteDance’s stake is capped just below 20 percent. Enforcement of the 2024 divestment law, long delayed, has finally begun. These steps matter. But they don’t answer the question that put TikTok in Washington’s crosshairs: who has insight into what this platform collects and how it shapes behavior at scale?

That concern explains the rare bipartisan agreement around TikTok. Lawmakers weren’t reacting to dance videos or teenage trends. They were reacting to the quiet accumulation of pattern-of-life data on roughly 170 million Americans—where people go, what they watch, how long they linger. This is the kind of intelligence foreign services spend years trying to assemble. TikTok users hand it over daily.

Congress acted on that risk. The Supreme Court upheld the law. Yet enforcement stalled until delay was no longer possible. That history alone should temper any rush to declare the danger resolved.

Then came the ownership transfer—and an immediate rewrite of TikTok’s privacy policy. The backlash was swift. Users noticed that TikTok had expanded what it says it can collect.

Under its old policy, TikTok claimed it did not collect precise GPS location data from U.S. users. I never fully trusted that assurance. More troubling is that the new, American-controlled TikTok now says it can collect precise location if users allow it. That’s not a city or ZIP code. That’s where you live, where you go every day, sometimes even where you are inside a building. In intelligence terms, that’s valuable data.

The new policy also loosens how TikTok describes its handling of sensitive personal information, including health data, immigration status, and government IDs. Where the old language emphasized necessity, the new version promises compliance with “applicable law.” That may satisfy lawyers. It tells users little about restraint.

Defenders note that other platforms collect similar data. That misses the point. TikTok was scrutinized because of its scale, its reach, and its leverage. Expanding data collection only increases the platform’s strategic value, regardless of who holds the majority stake.

This matters most when considering TikTok’s algorithm. The company says its U.S. entity will retrain and update the recommendation engine using American user data. That sounds reassuring. It remains opaque. Algorithms decide what is amplified, what is buried, and what disappears altogether.

Recent events offered a reminder of how fragile that system is. A power outage at an Oracle data center triggered a cascading failure that disrupted users’ “For You” pages. Oracle, which hosts TikTok’s U.S. data and owns a significant stake, blamed weather-related power issues—and given the storm, that explanation is plausible.

Still, intelligence professionals study stress tests. When an algorithm breaks loudly, users notice. When it shifts quietly, they don’t.

As for China’s ability to exert influence: even capped below 20 percent, control is not required. Influence flows from access, insight, and time. Firewalls are promises until they are independently verified and enforced.

TikTok may be trying to prove it has changed. But in national security, trust must be earned. Anyone convinced the risk has been sidelined hasn’t spent much time watching how espionage actually works.

In my experience, the most effective operations are the ones that convince you the danger has already passed.

Cybersecurity Breach of the Week

Cybersecurity Breach of the Week: Panera’s Data Spill

Years ago, when I worked in Silver Spring, Maryland, one of my daily escapes was Panera. Midday walk. Cup of coffee. Cup of soup in a bread bowl. For twenty minutes, the world slowed down. No meetings. No cases. Just soup, caffeine, and a small illusion of control.

Fast forward, and Panera is back in the news—for reasons far less comforting.

Panera Bread was reportedly hit by a significant data breach that exposed roughly 14 million customer records. According to reporting, the notorious hacking group ShinyHunters claims it accessed Panera’s systems through a compromised Microsoft Entra single sign-on (SSO) account. The stolen data allegedly includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, and account details—about 760 MB of it, quietly exfiltrated.

This attack appears linked to a broader campaign targeting Okta, Microsoft, and Google single sign on (SSO) systems using voice phishing—deceiving employees to hand over authentication codes over the phone. Panera joins a growing list of companies caught this way, including Betterment and Crunchbase.

What makes this breach unsettling isn’t technical sophistication. It’s the opposite. Modern cybercriminals aren’t hacking machines with lines of code—they’re running espionage-style operations against people. A phone call. A convincing voice. A moment of trust exploited.

It’s faster than writing malware. Cheaper than ransomware. And it doesn’t rely on a single line of code. When criminals can talk their way past security controls, no firewall in the world can save you.

Are you PROTECTED?

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold. And it’s FREE! If you want the full battle manual, that’s in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime. If you want to start protecting yourself right now? Begin here Praemonitus Praemunitus!

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

How to Share Passwords—Securely

When a crisis hits and your spouse or partner isn’t available to tell you the login to critical accounts—banking, investments, primary email, social media, even Netflix or Amazon Prime—you need a backup plan. Emergencies are the worst time to discover you don’t have one.

Here are secure, practical ways to do it—without creating new risks:

1. Shared Password Manager

   Use a reputable password manager and share access with your partner. One encrypted vault, one strong master password, no sticky notes or emails.

2. Emergency Access Feature

   Many password managers let you designate a trusted contact. If you don’t respond to an access request within a set time, access is granted automatically.

3. Encrypted “If the Worst Happens” File or Drive

   Store passwords, financial details, and instructions on an encrypted drive or file. Only your partner should know the password. Do not write it down.

4. Encrypted Spreadsheet (Handle With Care)

   A password-protected Excel or document can work—but never email or text it. Moving it around digitally creates a single point of failure.

5. Physical Backup

   Keep written instructions (not raw passwords) in a sealed envelope inside a safe or bank safe-deposit box. Think dead drop, not diary.

6. Digital Executor or Estate Plan

   Name a digital executor and document access instructions with an attorney. It’s unglamorous—and very effective.

Bottom line: encrypt everything, limit access, and plan ahead. Convenience is the enemy of security, especially in a crisis.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect gift for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, elders, teenagers, and everyone in between. 📖 Support my local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

Technology Story of the Week

The WD-40 Vault

Picture this: the CEO of WD-40 is escorted into a bank vault in California. Not a server room. Not a lab. A literal vault. Heavy doors. Controlled access. Silence. It’s the kind of moment that feels less like corporate governance and more like Harry Potter being shown his vault at Gringotts—solemn, guarded, and a little surreal.

Inside is a single, handwritten document: the original WD-40 formula.

More than 70 years old, it remains one of the best-kept trade secrets in American business. Almost no one has seen it. Most employees never will. Even chemists who work on the product don’t know the full recipe. The company deliberately never patented it, knowing patents expire and secrets don’t—if you protect them properly.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, the formula is kept in an undisclosed California bank, removed only on rare occasions and viewed by a tiny, trusted circle. For everyone else, access is segmented, partial, and intentional. No single person holds the whole picture.

In an age obsessed with cloud storage and zero-trust networks, WD-40’s most valuable technology is protected the old-fashioned way: physical security, human limits, and secrecy by design.

Sometimes the smartest cybersecurity strategy isn’t digital at all.

Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a superpower if you know how to use it correctly.

Discover how HubSpot's guide to AI can elevate both your productivity and creativity to get more things done.

Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation with the power of AI.

Download the free guide

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Continue Reading

When I asked Robert Hanssen what he thought of Aldrich Ames, his answer told me more about Hanssen than I was ready to hear. Plus TikTok update and tip to protect your phone.

A former spy and Ryan Phillippe explore acting, espionage, improv, and deception in a one-hour, subscriber-only conversation on trust in the AI age.

Title Story

A Tale of Two Spies

Aldrich Ames died in prison this month, ending the life of a man who helped inflict one of the most catastrophic intelligence collapses in American history. A CIA counterintelligence officer with deep access to sensitive operations, Ames sold U.S. secrets to the Soviets for years—names, methods, sources, and ongoing operations—while living far beyond his means and daring his agency to notice. In 1994, he was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life without parole. He never saw freedom again. He died behind bars, exactly where a traitor belongs.

Aldrich Hazen Ames was arrested by the FBI in Arlington, Virginia on espionage charges on February 21, 1994.

Ames didn’t work alone in destroying national security. While Ames was gutting the CIA from the inside, Robert Hanssen was doing the same to the FBI. These two men—each betraying the nation in parallel, each unknown to the other—contributed to the loss of nearly every American asset inside the Soviet Union in 1984 and 1985, the height of the Cold War. Hanssen’s espionage went beyond selling secrets; he helped cripple America’s ability to catch spies at all. He exposed nuclear warfare secrets, continuity-of-government plans, identities of U.S. sources in Russia, compromised undercover operations and operatives, and most devastatingly, corroded the FBI’s counterintelligence capacity from the inside out. Ames blew holes in our intelligence. Hanssen helped teach the enemy exactly where to aim.

And here’s the part that still sticks with me: Hanssen didn’t respect Ames. Not even a little.

A Targeted Question for an Afternoon Stroll.

I had many conversations with Robert Hanssen. Some were professional: the overt work we both did to analyze and redesign cybersecurity for the FBI. Others were covert: careful questions phrased to sound harmless, designed to earn his trust while quietly searching for the smoking gun in the most sensitive counterintelligence investigation in the Bureau’s history. And some conversations were simply what happens when two men are locked in a secure room for eight to ten hours a day, trying to stay human.

One conversation fell into all three categories.

Hanssen was a devout Catholic and a committed member of Opus Dei. He went to Mass daily. Most mornings, he attended early services at his parish near his home in Vienna, Virginia. But on days he ran late—family chaos, oversleeping, or any of the reasons we use to justify missing what matters—he headed instead to the noon Mass at the Catholic Information Center, only a few blocks from FBI Headquarters.

To build trust with him, I went along.

Eric and Hanssen attending church as depicted in Universal Picture’s Breach (2007).

I’d bundle up against the January cold and walk beside him through downtown Washington. Those short trips became some of my most operationally useful moments with Hanssen. When you’re walking shoulder to shoulder, outside a secure room, people tend to talk more freely. Especially people who love to hear themselves talk.

One Wednesday, as we stepped off FBIHQ and turned from 9th Street toward the wide lanes of Pennsylvania Avenue, I took a risk—one of those questions that straddled the line between casual conversation and undercover probing.

“Hey, boss,” I said as we paused at the curb, waiting for the signal. “What do you think of Aldrich Ames?”

The question wasn’t out of bounds. Ames had eviscerated American security from inside the CIA, and Hanssen knew more about Russian espionage than anyone I’d ever met. Of course he’d have an opinion. Ames was his closest contemporary in the pantheon of American traitors.

Hanssen stopped and stared at me.

For a moment, I thought I’d pushed too far—tripped the wire between suspicion and paranoia that everyone in special operations learns to respect. Then his mouth curled into a thin, sarcastic smile.

“Ames,” he scoffed. “Aldrich Ames was a moron. A reprobate. A drunk. A loser.”

The walk signal flashed. We moved into the crosswalk, cutting across 9th Street toward Pennsylvania.

“Ames couldn’t stop putting drugs up his nose,” Hanssen continued. “No operational security. Spendthrift. The man couldn’t resist buying whatever he and his wife wanted.”

“Is that how he was caught?” I asked, even though I already knew.

Of course I knew. I joined the FBI as the Ames investigation was concluding. I’d worked around the agents who chased him, along with fellow spies Earl Pitts and Jim Nicholson.

But I never let Hanssen see the depth of my counterintelligence background. As far as he knew, I was a counterterrorism specialist—useful, smart, but out of my depth—helping him build counterintelligence into FBI cybersecurity. The mentor-mentee dynamic was effective. Hanssen liked being the expert in the room. And when he felt like the expert, he talked.

Including, apparently, trash-talking Aldrich Ames.

“They eventually caught Ames because he was sloppy,” Hanssen said, shaking his head. “But they should’ve caught him far earlier.”

His shoulder bumped into mine. I braced and pushed back. He did that constantly—drifting into me as we walked, sometimes steering me into walls. I still don’t know if it was his gimpy left leg, a deliberate power move, or just something he found amusing.

Whatever the reason, he never apologized. Not once.

“Did you know Ames passed every polygraph they gave him?” Hanssen said, eyebrows raised. “Fooled the examiners—even showing up drunk, with a house paid for in cash, a Jaguar paid for in cash, fur coats for his wife…”

He scoffed.

“And they wonder why we find all the spies in the CIA.”

“So you don’t think much of Ames?” I asked, unable to resist. “I mean… he was the most damaging spy in U.S. history.”

Hanssen stopped short and turned on me.

His face hardened—so rigid it looked carved from stone.

“Aldrich Ames was a failure in every way,” he said. “He let greed and pride drive his basest instincts. A coward. A failure.”

Then he jabbed a finger into my chest.

“Do you know what he said when the CIA finally called in the FBI and the joint task force investigated him?”

I stepped back slightly, reclaiming space, and met his eyes—my boss, my mentor, and the man I would soon learn was America’s most devastating spy.

“What did he say?”

Hanssen lifted his hands and flapped them theatrically, mimicking panic.

“You’re making a big mistake!” he whined, voice rising into a mock, theatrical pitch. “You must have the wrong man!”

He dropped his hands and sneered.

“Coward to the last.”

Then the mask slid back into place. The familiar cold gaze. The exhaustion underneath.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We’re going to be late.”

I remembered that conversation the moment I heard Hanssen had been arrested—and what he said when FBI agents closed in on him near his home on Talisman Lane.

Given what he thought of Ames, I’ve always wondered whether Hanssen rehearsed his own arrest—whether he planned his words the way other men plan their last prayer.

I don’t have to wonder.

After all the time I spent with him, I knew his narcissism wouldn’t allow anything less than a carefully staged exit.

“The guns are not necessary,” he said calmly as agents surrounded him from all angles, weapons drawn.

And then, with that slight, familiar smirk—the one I’d seen in countless conversations.

“What took you so long.”

“What took you so long?”

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

Your Phone Is a Goldmine (For You… and Attackers)

Most people treat their smartphone like a private vault.

Attackers treat it like a shopping mall with the doors unlocked.

The biggest cybersecurity risk on your phone is a basic account takeover exploiting weak passwords, reused passwords, no two-factor authentication, and cloud backups that quietly sync your life into a single point of failure.

Back in 2014, a brute-force style attack helped expose nude photos of dozens of celebrities, and people reportedly sold “sneak peeks” online for Bitcoin. It was sensational and ugly—but it was also a stark warning.

Fast forward to now: this same playbook has evolved into a booming criminal business model: extortion. Hackers break into poorly protected phones, emails, and cloud accounts, then search for anything embarrassing or valuable: intimate photos, private messages, financial documents, even personal secrets. If they find it, they weaponize it.

So here’s the play: lock down your accounts.

Use two-factor authentication on your Apple ID, Google account, email, and social media Stop reusing passwords (password managers exist for a reason) Review what your phone automatically backs up to the cloud Assume anything you text, DM, or upload can be copied, forwarded, stolen, leaked, or “accidentally” shared Beware sending any sensitive information over text, email or social media DMs

And the simplest rule of all: NEVER use a smartphone—or any connected device—to take images you wouldn’t want made public. Don’t text them either. You lose control instantly. If you must take them, stick to polaroids.

Are you PROTECTED?

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold. And it’s FREE! If you want the full battle manual, that’s in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime. If you want to start protecting yourself right now? Begin here Praemonitus Praemunitus!

Technology News of the Week

TikTok Deal Update (And Why I’m Not Celebrating Yet)

TikTok is inching toward a deal that would place its U.S. operations under American ownership—or at least American supervision. The newest developments focus on the easiest national security fix: where U.S. user data is stored. TikTok claims American user data will remain in the U.S., housed in Oracle Cloud, under a privacy and cybersecurity program audited by third-party experts.

That’s the good news.

But here’s my concern: data storage was never the hardest part of the TikTok problem. The real issue has always been the algorithm.

TikTok’s recommendation engine is the reason the app is so addictive, so effective, and so powerful. Critics (including me) argue it pushes harmful content, especially to teenagers and kids. And from a national security standpoint, the fear isn’t just “China might see your data.” The fear is China could influence what Americans see—shaping narratives, suppressing stories, or amplifying propaganda and disinformation.

The 2024 law prohibits ByteDance “cooperation” with the U.S. TikTok entity on operating the algorithm. So the biggest question is simple:

Does the U.S. entity truly own and control the algorithm—or is it still dependent on ByteDance through licensing or coordination?

If ByteDance still has a hand on the steering wheel—even indirectly—then we haven’t removed the national security risk. We’ve just repackaged it.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect gift for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, elders, teenagers, and everyone in between. 📖 Support my local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

Appearance of the Week

I joined Forcepoint’s To the Point Podcast to explore the limits of AI in cybersecurity, including why human judgment, verification, and creativity remain critical even as automation accelerates. Through real investigations, clear metaphors, and practical examples, this discussion helps security leaders understand how to prepare for threats that never stop evolving.

Please support my sponsor. It only takes a click. No purchase necessary!

But what can you actually DO about the proclaimed ‘AI bubble’? Billionaires know an alternative…

Sure, if you held your stocks since the dotcom bubble, you would’ve been up—eventually. But three years after the dot-com bust the S&P 500 was still far down from its peak. So, how else can you invest when almost every market is tied to stocks?

Lo and behold, billionaires have an alternative way to diversify: allocate to a physical asset class that outpaced the S&P by 15% from 1995 to 2025, with almost no correlation to equities. It’s part of a massive global market, long leveraged by the ultra-wealthy (Bezos, Gates, Rockefellers etc).

Contemporary and post-war art.

Masterworks lets you invest in multimillion-dollar artworks featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso—without needing millions. Over 70,000 members have together invested more than $1.2 billion across over 500 artworks. So far, 25 sales have delivered net annualized returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.*

Want access?

[Click here to skip the waitlist →]

_{Investing involves risk. Past performance not indicative of future returns. Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd}

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Continue Reading

69: A Conversation with Ryan Phillippe

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - A former spy and Ryan Phillippe explore acting, espionage, improv, and deception in a one-hour, subscriber-only conversation on trust in the AI age.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/phillippe

68: Spies, Lies, and the Shape of 2026

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - a look forward at espionage, technology and cybercrime predictions for 2026. Plus an analysis of the raid on Venezuela.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/the-shape-of-2026

Title Story

SOS: When the Phones Went Silent

I was sitting alone in a dark high school parking lot when I realized how fragile modern life has become.

Earlier that day, my teenage son told me his wrestling team’s bus was supposed to return from an away meet at 7:30 PM. Parenting logistics aren’t glamorous, but they’re usually predictable.

Then many phones stopped working. My phone flashed the same warning millions of Americans saw: “SOS.”

It felt like we’d been dropped into a world where communication isn’t assumed. I drove to the school anyway to find the gym closed and the parking lot dark and quiet.

At first, I wasn’t worried. The bus was probably running late. In todays’ world of hyperconnectivity, we expect that order will be restored in a heartbeat. But as the minutes passed, the silence took shape in my mind. Did the bus break down? Was he stranded somewhere without a way to reach me?

Years ago, I worked in FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence, sitting quietly in cars in dark places, watching and waiting. Back then, isolation was part of the job. Picking up my son, shouldn’t feel like that. Nor should it remind me how people lived before we attached ourselves to a digital tether.

In the 1980s and 90s, you made a plan, picked a meeting place, and hoped everyone followed through. If someone didn’t show, you waited. If they still didn’t show, you were left with nothing but guesses. Life worked because people planned ahead and accepted that communication could fail.

At some point we stopped planning, because we stopped imagining failure.

Three hours after I arrived, headlights finally cut through the darkness. The wrestling bus rolled in. My son stepped off looking exhausted but fine. The meet ran long. The bus had problems. And once the outage started, he had no way to get the message out.

The disruption was tied to Verizon, which left customers around the country unable to place calls or send texts, pushing phones into SOS mode for hours. Verizon later said it was caused by a software glitch, not a cyberattack, and has provided $20 credits to the two million impacted users. I suspect that explanation will reassure plenty of people. Americans like clean categories.

But when your phone cannot connect, the cause is secondary. A technical failure isolates people just as effectively as an attack. From the perspective of a parent waiting in the dark with no way to reach their child, the difference is academic.

And if a glitch can cut millions of people off from one another in a single evening, it’s worth asking how quickly that vulnerability could become deliberate.

In much of the world, it already is.

While Americans complained about dropped service, citizens in Iran were living through a different kind of blackout. The Iranian government has repeatedly restricted internet access during unrest, cutting communication so people can’t organize and the outside world can’t see the government’s murderous response.

Iranians gather while blocking a street during a protest in Tehran, Iran on January 9, 2026

Authoritarian regimes know that repression by silence can be just as effective as shooting protestors in the street. Without communication, protest becomes harder, rescue becomes difficult, and accountability becomes elusive.

For years, one of the few technologies believed capable of punching through that darkness was Starlink, a satellite internet system tied to the idea of censorship-proof connectivity. It promised that a government couldn’t simply flip a switch and cut a nation off, because the connection would come from the sky.

Iran exposed the cracks in that promise. Reports suggest that Iran used Russian technology to disrupt Starlink access by targeting Starlink’s dependence on GPS signals. By interfering with GPS, Iran could degrade or block connectivity in key areas. Starlink responded with updates designed to keep service functioning, but the episode revealed something sobering: the contest over information is an evolving struggle.

SpaceX has waived the Starlink subscription fee in Iran.

When citizens find new ways to communicate, regimes find new ways to silence them. The battlefield shifts from streets to frequencies, from bullets to bandwidth, but the logic is unchanged: control the message, control the population.

That might sound far away from an American phone outage. But the lesson isn’t. Connectivity is now a pillar of safety and freedom. When communication fails, people become vulnerable. When it’s taken away on purpose, control moves quickly to whoever holds the switch.

What can you do?

Start with a family plan.

Start with the simplest step: make a family plan that works without cell service.

Pick a meetup location ahead of time. Somewhere obvious and easy to reach. Agree on what happens if someone can’t be reached by a certain hour. Choose one out-of-state family member everyone can try to contact if local networks are down. And make sure kids know the plan before the next disruption happens.

Because the next time phones flash SOS, you don’t want to improvise.

Please subscribe and tell a friend

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

“The Job Offer” That’s Actually a Ransomware Trap

At first glance, the posts look harmless: fast money, flexible hours, paid training, no experience required. Payment in crypto. Easy work. Easy wins.

But these aren’t tutoring gigs or customer service jobs.

They’re recruitment ads for ransomware crews and online extortion rings—and many of the people answering them are middle and high school students. Some recruiters even prefer inexperienced teens because they’re easier to control, harder to trace back to the “real” criminals, and willing to do the riskiest tasks: phone calls, impersonation, phishing scripts, and social engineering.

The damage can be huge. Victims lose money, companies get shut down, and real people lose access to services. But for teens, the consequences can be even more personal: federal charges, prison time, a permanent record, and a future that gets wrecked before it even starts.

These groups operate through loose, shifting networks often referred to as “The Com” (short for “The Community”). The pitch is always the same: “It’s just work.” The truth is simpler: it’s crime with onboarding.

Here are 5 steps parents and teens can use to spot the trap before it’s too late:

1. Follow the money: If the “job” pays only in crypto, that’s a strong clue that the payor wants to conceal their identity.

2. Check the recruiting channel: Real companies don’t hire through Discord DMs, Telegram, gaming chats, or Snapchat messages.

3. Listen for secrecy: If they say, “Don’t tell your parents,” “Don’t tell your school,” or “Keep this quiet,” they are manipulating you.

4. Look for impersonation requests: If the “work” involves pretending to be IT support, calling employees, resetting passwords, or “testing access,” you’ve just joined an extortion pipeline.

5. Slow it down and verify: Search the company. Call the public number. Confirm the recruiter’s identity. If it can’t be verified outside the chat, it isn’t real.

Bottom line: Teens with tech skills have real opportunities. But talent doesn’t protect you from consequences. The fastest money usually comes with the longest sentence.

Are you PROTECTED?

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold. And it’s FREE! If you want the full battle manual, that’s in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime. If you want to start protecting yourself right now? Begin here Praemonitus Praemunitus!

Technology Tip of the Week

Is It Safe to Text Again? Not Yet, But Maybe Soon.

About a year ago, the FBI warned Americans to stop relying on ordinary text messages because Chinese hackers were intercepting communications across U.S. mobile networks. That warning still holds. Traditional SMS can be captured in transit, and even newer cross-platform texting (like RCS) still has a security problem: it isn’t end-to-end encrypted by default when iPhone users text Android users (the blue bubble/green bubble problem).

The U.S. government’s advice has been blunt: if you want private communication, use end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such as Signal or WhatsApp, especially for anything sensitive.

Apple has also cautioned users that RCS messages are not end-to-end encrypted, meaning a third party could potentially read them while they move between devices.

And let’s be honest: people treat the blue bubble like a trust badge and the green bubble like a restraining order. Unfortunately, from a security standpoint, both bubbles can still leak when you cross platforms.

The good news is that a fix may finally be coming. Reports suggest Apple has added encryption-related carrier settings in an iOS 26.3 beta, which could pave the way for fully encrypted cross-platform RCS messaging. But no carriers have enabled it yet.

Bottom line: Until true cross-platform encryption goes live, treat SMS and RCS like postcards: fine for logistics, terrible for secrets.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect gift for tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, elders, teenagers, and everyone in between. 📖 Support my local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

Appearance of the Week

In his new book "Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime," former FBI Counterintelligence Operative Eric O'Neill describes the art of outsmarting cybercriminals and protecting your data and wallet. O'Neill spoke with CBS News' Major Garrett about steps people can take to stay safe online. Please watch and leave me a friendly comment on YouTube to let me know you were there.

AI Trend of the Week

If you’ve ever wanted to see yourself as a tiny, plastic legend standing confidently on a desk… congratulations. AI has officially made that possible. The Mini-Figure trend is blowing up—and it’s way more fun than it has any right to be.

original.

mini figure me.

Steal this Mini 3D Figure Prompt (Copy/Paste Template)

Make a miniature, full-body, isometric, realistic 3D figurine of [PERSON / UPLOAD PHOTO OR DESCRIPTION], wearing [OUTFIT / CLOTHING DETAILS], doing [ACTION / POSE], holding [PROPS / OBJECTS], standing on [BASE / PLATFORM STYLE], with [EXTRA DETAILS / ACCESSORIES]. White background, minimal, studio lighting, soft shadow, ultra-detailed, 4K resolution.

Optional style add-ons:

• Material: [vinyl / resin / plastic / clay]

• Mood: [serious / playful / heroic / cute]

• Theme: [spy / cyber / sports / holiday / business]

• Color palette: [neutral / neon / retro / monochrome]

Please support our advertisers. It only takes a click!

The Future of Tech. One Daily News Briefing.

AI is moving faster than any other technology cycle in history. New models. New tools. New claims. New noise.

Most people feel like they’re behind. But the people that don’t, aren’t smarter. They’re just better informed.

Forward Future is a daily news briefing for people who want clarity, not hype. In one concise newsletter each day, you’ll get the most important AI and tech developments, learn why they matter, and what they signal about what’s coming next.

We cover real product launches, model updates, policy shifts, and industry moves shaping how AI actually gets built, adopted, and regulated. Written for operators, builders, leaders, and anyone who wants to sound sharp when AI comes up in the meeting.

It takes about five minutes to read, but the edge lasts all day.

Sign Up. Look Smart.

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Keep reading

69: A Conversation with Ryan Phillippe

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - A former spy and Ryan Phillippe explore acting, espionage, improv, and deception in a one-hour, subscriber-only conversation on trust in the AI age.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/phillippe

68: Spies, Lies, and the Shape of 2026

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - a look forward at espionage, technology and cybercrime predictions for 2026. Plus an analysis of the raid on Venezuela.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/the-shape-of-2026

A note from Eric

This conversation has been twenty years in the making. Ryan Phillippe and I first met in 2005, on the set of Breach, when he was preparing to play me in the story of how we exposed one of the most damaging spies in FBI history. What started as an awkward Hollywood dinner turned into a long friendship—and, eventually, this conversation about identity, deception, and what it costs to live inside another life. We talk acting, espionage, AI-driven deception, and why trust may be the rarest commodity left. This is not an interview. It’s a conversation.

Red Carpets & Red Flags

Ryan Phillippe on Playing a Spy, Becoming Someone Else, and Why Deception Is the Most Dangerous Skill of the Modern Age

When Ryan Phillippe and I finally sat down for what we agreed to call a conversation (not an interview) it felt a lot like two guys comparing notes from parallel lives. That’s probably inevitable when one of you has spent years pretending to be someone else for a living, and the other did it because national security demanded it.

Relaxing in Delaware

We first met on November 8, 2005, at a production dinner for Breach, the film about one of the most catastrophic betrayals in FBI history. Phillippe had been cast to play me—an undercover operative tasked with exposing Robert Hanssen, a trusted insider who sold America’s secrets to the Russians. It was an unusual dynamic from the start. Actors rarely portray living people close in age, let alone ones sitting a few seats away, quietly wondering how Hollywood plans to compress years of paranoia, tradecraft, and personal sacrifice into two hours.

Ryan and Eric on the set of Breach.

Ryan on the set of breach with Chris Cooper and Billy Ray.

That night, we sat on opposite sides of the dinner table. Then, later, out for drinks in Toronto, our first conversation began. We talked about how strange it is to watch someone prepare to be you—and how strange it is to prepare to be someone whose life actually happened. Somewhere between stories, we realized we shared roots on the Eastern Shore, grandfathers who fought in the pacific, engineer fathers, devoted mothers, and the fact that we had probably sat yards away from each other on the same beach as children. The ice broke. What started as an awkward casting obligation turned into a friendship that’s now spanned nearly two decades.

What struck me most during our recent conversation wasn’t nostalgia—it was how naturally espionage and acting kept colliding.

Phillippe talked about building characters the way serious actors do: backstories, motivations, private details no one else sees. I told him that in the intelligence world, we call that a legend. A fully fabricated identity, complete with documents, habits, memories, and emotional texture. You don’t “pretend” to be that person. You become them. Because the moment you don’t believe it, the person across from you won’t either.

Actors call that method acting. Intelligence officers call it survival.

Neither profession runs on scripts. Phillippe described how the most honest moments on screen often happen between the lines—small, unscripted reactions that make a scene feel real. That made me think. Undercover work is almost entirely improvisation. You plan relentlessly, then abandon the plan the second reality intervenes. Improv classes are a lot like this. You learn to read the room, anticipate behavior, adapt instantly. Surveillance works the same way: memorizing patterns, predicting movements, blending in so completely you become invisible. Different stakes. Same skills.

Then there’s the cost.

Phillippe spoke candidly about how certain roles followed him home—and how becoming a father forced a reckoning. You can’t live inside darkness forever without bringing some of it back with you. I understood that immediately. Undercover work fractures your life by design. You lie to everyone who loves you. You compartmentalize until it becomes muscle memory. Breach didn’t shy away from showing what that secrecy did to my marriage, and for good reason. Living two lives, whether for art or country, comes with a psychological bill that arrives late, and collects interest.

Ryan. Photography by John Russo.

Our conversation didn’t stay in the past.

We shifted to the present moment, where deception has gone industrial. Phillippe talked about how criminals now use AI to clone his voice and image to scam fans—weaponizing trust at scale. Deepfakes. Synthetic speech. Entirely fabricated realities moving faster than truth can keep up. I warned that we’re entering an era where “seeing is believing” is dead, and authentication—not charisma—is the new currency. Weak passwords don’t stand a chance. Two-factor authentication isn’t optional. The same techniques once reserved for intelligence operations are now available to anyone with a laptop and bad intentions.

Espionage has gone mainstream. Acting has gone synthetic. The overlap is no longer theoretical.

We ended where we probably had to: responsibility.

Phillippe doesn’t take lightly the act of portraying real people. There’s a duty to accuracy, to humanity, to the families who live with the consequences long after the credits roll. I admitted that watching Breach for the first time was both one of the most amazing and strange moments of my life. You take a risk when a Hollywood studio dramatizes your life. But I also recognized the value. Stories, told honestly, can educate people about threats they’d rather not imagine.

So could a Hollywood actor be a spy? Absolutely. Could a former spy survive in Hollywood? Maybe.

What’s undeniable is this: both worlds demand the same core skill—the ability to understand human behavior, to inhabit other perspectives, and to know when something doesn’t feel right. In an age of AI-driven deception and collapsing trust, those instincts aren’t just useful. They’re essential.

And maybe that’s the real takeaway from this conversation—not that our professions overlapped, but that the line between performance and reality has never been thinner.

~ Eric

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect holiday gift and stocking stuffer!

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

📖 Support a local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold.

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Support our partners so that I can bring you this newsletter completely free! It only takes a click. No purchase necessary.

Stop Planning. Start Building.

End of the year? Or time to start something new. 

With beehiiv, this quiet stretch of time can become your biggest advantage. Their platform gives you all the tools you need to make real progress, real fast. 

In just days (or even minutes) you can:

• Build a fully-functioning website with the AI website builder 

• Launch a professional-looking newsletter

• Earn money on autopilot with the beehiiv ad network

• Host all of your content on one easy-to-use platform

If you’re looking to have a breakthrough year, beehiiv is the place to start. And to help motivate you even more, we’re giving you 30% off for three months with code BIG30.

Start building for 30% off today

Continue reading with a look forward to 2026:

68: Spies, Lies, and the Shape of 2026

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - a look forward at espionage, technology and cybercrime predictions for 2026. Plus an analysis of the raid on Venezuela.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/the-shape-of-2026

A quick note before we get to the title story and predictions for this year. Most of us woke up from vacation wondering whether the story of a just after midnight raid on Venezuela was a deepfake. It wasn't. Instead, we witnessed one of the most incredible espionage operations in history.

Operation Absolute Resolve reads less like today’s headlines and more like vintage Tom Clancy or Brad Thor—Jack Ryan or Scot Harvath stepping off the page and into real life—but this was no fiction. At its core was exquisite CIA tradecraft: a months-long pattern-of-life operation on Nicolás Maduro and his wife, built patiently through HUMINT, trusted sources inside the regime, drone surveillance, and other classified techniques that, for obvious reasons, don’t make it into press briefings. This is the work I once did domestically with the FBI to catch spies and terrorists, and it’s reassuring to see that the fundamentals—human intelligence, persistence, discipline—still matter.

Strip away the spectacle and the operation was almost absurd in its purity: an immense U.S. military escort—more than 150 aircraft from 20 regional bases—so FBI agents could serve an arrest warrant on an indicted narco-terrorist. Incredible in scope, but precise in execution.

Fire at Fuerte Tiuna, Venezuela's largest military complex.

And then there’s the detail few are discussing: the not-so-subtle hint dropped in a Trump press conference that the lights going out in Caracas may not have been accidental, but the result of a sophisticated U.S. cyber infiltration ahead of the first bombing run. If true, it quietly demonstrates something I’ve argued for years—that the best way to deter China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea from launching a coordinated cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure is to prove, unmistakably, that we can hit back just as hard. Mutual assured cyber destruction. That message likely landed hard in Beijing and Moscow, and that’s not a bad thing.

The legal, political, and geopolitical fallout will be debated for months—was it lawful, should Congress have been notified, was this war or policing, does it spark chaos or open the door for democracy and the return of eight million displaced Venezuelans? All of that matters. But one truth stands apart: spies still change history. They undermine regimes, depose dictators, and win wars long before the shooting starts. Let’s hope our spies stay very, very good at it.

Maduro after his arrest and exfiltration to the United States.

Now on to this week’s story!

Title Story

Spies, Lies, and the Shape of 2026

The board meeting ended early.

A video had surfaced overnight—grainy but convincing—showing a CEO saying something she never said, agreeing to something she never agreed to, in a tone only her closest colleagues would recognize. To the company’s horror, the video leaked and made the national news. The legal team watched it twice. HR watched it once. The board didn’t finish the first viewing before the decision was made.

Within 48 hours, the CEO resigned.

Weeks later, forensic experts proved the video was a deepfake. Every frame synthetic. Every word fabricated. The company never corrected the record. It didn’t need to. The damage had already landed.

That’s the world 2026 is sprinting toward—not because technology is evil, but because trust has become fragile, fast, and exploitable. To make the world safe from a new age of deception and deepfakes, we will need to evolve.

Here’s what I believe is coming next, but reply to this email or comments about what concerns you into the future and what you are excited about in the world of technology. Who knows, your idea or concerns could become my next newsletter!

And stay tuned for next week’s issue! I’ll be posting the full interview with actor, director, producer, entrepreneur and my friend Ryan Phillippe! You will have to be subscribed to see it. So check bye box below and make certain you’ve dropped me your email.

The Bad News

1. Deepfake Blackmail Reaches the Boardroom

The first major corporate takedown will be powered entirely by fake evidence.

AI-generated audio and video will be convincing enough to force resignations, tank stock prices, and trigger regulatory scrutiny. Investigations will eventually reveal the truth, but truth will move too slowly to matter. In 2026, viral perception, magnified by social media and the 24-hour news cycle will outrun proof every time. Now imagine this scenario used as deepfake opposition research against a political opponent. Worried yet?

Deepfakes

2. Critical Infrastructure Attacks Go Quiet

The most dangerous cyberattacks won’t look like attacks at all.

One of the major things that keeps me up at night is fear of a catastrophic power grid critical infrastructure attack. But attacks in the new year may be more nefarious. Instead of blackouts or explosions, systems will simply underperform: water pressure drops, hospital systems lag, shipping delays compound. Everything will still “work,” just badly enough to erode confidence. Attribution will be nearly impossible, and that will be by design.

Sabotage

3. Ransomware Becomes Customer-Friendly

Cybercriminals will discover what legitimate businesses already know: good customer service closes deals.

Ransomware has been a scourge across the globe for decades with an innovation race between cybercrime and cybersecurity. To earn more profit, Cybercrime syndicates will innovate like legitimate businesses. Ransomware groups will offer live chat, payment plans, and polite negotiation. Victims will pay faster when criminals feel organized and predictable. Cybercrime will model the mafia and will look less chaotic and more professional.

Ransomware

4. Your Digital Twin Commits a Crime

Someone will act as you—and you’ll have the burden of proof!

AI is already replicating voices, writing styles, and decision-making patterns with disturbing accuracy. It is even threatening to replace actors and AI avatar social media accounts have enormous followings. Now image cybercriminals that use AI to become you. Contracts will be signed, instructions issued, and funds moved without the need for physical access. Courts and insurers will struggle to answer a once-unthinkable question: was it you or your doppelgänger.

Doppelgänger

5. Cybercrime and Organized Crime Fully Merge

The keyboard will officially outperform the gun.

Drug cartels, trafficking networks, and traditional crime syndicates will move toward cybercrime as their primary revenue engine. Digital fraud will fund real-world violence. Law enforcement will be forced to chase both malware and kinetic crime at the same time. We have already seen this begin with cryptojacking, a crime where the victim is stalked online for having large cryptocurrency accounts and then kidnapped physically to coerce them into providing the keys.

Organized Crime

The Good News

As criminals evolve in 2026 to scam us, cybersecurity will continue to race against them. The next five predictions hint at a brighter future where we make things harder for the bad guys.     

6. Deepfake Detection Becomes Mandatory

“Prove it’s really you” will become a daily requirement.

Banks, courts, employers, and government agencies will deploy real-time voice and video authentication. It will feel inconvenient and intrusive—until people realize the alternative is institutional collapse. Verification will become part of civic infrastructure. We will install apps on our phones and devices that identify deepfakes and provide intelligence into all our communications.

Detectors

7. Critical Systems Go Analog—On Purpose

The future of resilience will look suspiciously old-school.

Many companies are already returning to tape backups to preserve data in a format that cybercriminals and spies cannot access digitally. Manual overrides, air gaps, and human checkpoints will return to essential systems. Some things are safest when they cannot be reached remotely.

Analog Defense

8. Insider Threat Programs Finally Get Serious

The most dangerous attackers will already have credentials.

Organizations will stop treating insider risk as a technical failure and start treating it as a leadership and culture problem. Access will tighten, behavior will be monitored, and trust will be verified continuously. Espionage prevention will become part of the corporate mindset and technology that continuously analyzes data using AI analytics will become mandatory.

Spy Hunting

9. Cybercrime Loses Its Easy Money

Ransomware will stop being a gold rush.

International cooperation will improve, asset seizures will accelerate, and payment channels will narrow. Cybercrime units across the globe will share information and hunt criminals in their own borders. Criminals won’t disappear, but margins will shrink. When cybercrime stops paying well, fewer people choose it.

Collaboration

10. Digital Identity Gets Rebuilt—and the Password Finally Dies

We may finally witness the end of the password.

Governments and industry will accelerate the shift toward cryptographic identity, biometrics, hardware-backed authentication, and zero-trust access models. Passwords—long broken, endlessly reused, and trivially stolen—will begin to fade from critical systems. Identity won’t be perfect, but impersonation will become harder, riskier, and more expensive than it has ever been.

A New You Online

I’m Excited for 2026

For all the noise and anxiety around what’s coming, here’s the good news: we’re finally waking up.

2026 won’t be the year deception disappears—but it will be the year we stop being shocked by it. We’re building better systems, smarter defenses, and healthier habits around a simple truth: trust isn’t granted once anymore; it’s earned every day. That’s progress.

The people and organizations willing to adapt will do more than survive—they’ll be stronger, harder to fool, and far more resilient than anything that came before. This isn’t the end of trust. It’s the upgrade.

Personally, I’m excited. I’m ready. And I think 2026 has the potential to be a turning point, not a breaking point.

If you want to start preparing now, not later, that’s exactly why I wrote Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime. It’s a practical guide to how deception actually works—and what you can do today to protect yourself, your family, and your organization before the next headline hits.

The future is coming either way.

This time, we don’t have to meet it unprepared.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect holiday gift and stocking stuffer!

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

📖 Support a local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold.

Appearance of the Week

Stay tuned for NEXT week! A conversation with Actor, Producer and Director Ryan Phillippe, the man that played me in the movie Breach. Subscribe now to ensure you don’t miss the amazing content I’m cooking up for 2026.

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Support our partners so that I can bring you this newsletter completely free! It only takes a click. No purchase necessary.

Learn AI in 5 minutes a day

This is the easiest way for a busy person wanting to learn AI in as little time as possible:

1. Sign up for The Rundown AI newsletter

2. They send you 5-minute email updates on the latest AI news and how to use it

3. You learn how to become 2x more productive by leveraging AI

Sign up to start learning.

Continue reading with a look back at 2025:

2025 Year in Review

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - The 2025 Year in Review of cybercrime, espionage, AI deception, major hacks, and the lessons learned from a year of digital conflict.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/year-in-review

Happy New Year!

Year in Review: The 10 Stories That Shaped Our Most Turbulent Year Yet

I love wraps. Every year my family sits down together and we compare our Spotify wraps and laugh at each other. These days everyone is doing it, from LinkedIn to Instagram, even Chat GPT got into the mix.

But, looking back, this year didn’t drift by quietly. Just as I predicted in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime (the book), 2025 challenged every assumption we hold about digital trust, and forced us to confront the reality that the world of espionage and cyber conflict is no longer confined to classified war rooms. It’s woven into daily life, every device, every app, every infrastructure system we take for granted. 2026 is going to be wild!

As we wrap up the year, here are the ten stories that carried the greatest weight. These are the stories that moved conversations, sharpened understanding, and, in many cases, exposed threats hiding in plain sight.

1. Your Devices Are Listening

61: Your Devices Are Listening

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - Uncover the truth about device listening, sonic beacons, and digital tracking—plus the essential steps to lock down your privacy.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/your-devices-are-listening

This story pulled back the curtain on a modern reality most people sense but rarely confront: the microphones around us are always on. Drawing from both intelligence tradecraft and documented patents, whistleblower reporting, and academic research, the piece explained how phones, smart speakers, apps, and even browsers continuously monitor audio streams for wake words, context, and behavioral signals. The reason? To feed algorithms trained to predict, influence, and monetize human behavior. The issue resonated with you because it didn’t rely on paranoia or theatrics; it treated consumer technology the way intelligence professionals treat any listening device: assume collection, minimize exposure, and control the microphone before it controls you.

2. Happy Thanksgiving

62: Happy Thanksgiving

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill-Thanksgiving phone-free challenge plus Black Friday scam defense, JLR cyber breach insights, and expert tactics to stay safe from hackers and fraud.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/happy-thanksgiving

This story marked a deliberate pause in a year dominated by cyber threats and digital noise, while still delivering practical value. Alongside a personal challenge to put phones away and reclaim Thanksgiving as a moment of real human connection, the issue also introduced the launch of my PROTECT page—a new resource designed to help readers defend themselves and their families from scams, fraud, deepfakes, and account takeovers. Timed for the holiday shopping rush, the newsletter outlined clear, actionable steps to avoid AI imposters, smishing attacks, fake deals, and fraudulent charities, reinforcing that staying present doesn’t mean staying unprepared.

3. China’s Typhoon Attack Groups: The Quiet War That Already Started

51: The China Trap

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - China’s cyber trap, massive breaches, credit card skimmers, flying cars, and Google AI photo magic—your weekly intel on spies & cybercrime.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/the-china-trap

Our most consequential reporting centered on China’s aggressive cyber posture, led by Volt and Salt Typhoon. These state-backed groups methodically infiltrated U.S. critical infrastructure, not to steal data but to position themselves for potential disruption at a moment of geopolitical friction. Paired with China’s public outing of NSA operatives, the story made clear that we are no longer discussing hypothetical conflict. We are documenting an ongoing campaign that demands national attention and a sober reassessment of what modern deterrence really requires.

4. The TikTok Ban and America’s Fractured Attention

19: The Case Against TikTok

Spies, Lies and Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - Explore the TikTok ban: addiction, bipartisan support, pros & cons, national security risks, and why banning the app at home might be the smart move.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/19-the-case-against-tiktok

The TikTok investigation went beyond alarm over a popular app. It explored how digital addiction reshapes human behavior, how foreign adversaries weaponize that dependence, and why bipartisan leaders finally took aim at a platform designed to extract data and manipulate attention at unprecedented scale. The issue resonated because it bridged personal vulnerability and national security risk, ultimately leading us to the uncomfortable but necessary conclusion that TikTok is a Chinese influence operation.

5. Idiocracy: The Cognitive Cost of an AI-Driven World

41: Idiocracy: Is AI Making Humans Dumber?

Is AI making us dumber? Explore shocking MIT findings, QR code hacks, spy drones, and emotional AI dependence in this week’s Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/41-idiocracy-is-ai-making-humans-dumber

In examining whether AI is quietly eroding human intelligence, we confronted a truth many sensed but few articulated: reliance breeds complacency. The MIT research revealed measurable drops in brain activity when users let AI systems do the thinking for them, and the broader analysis showed how emotional dependence on AI companions further accelerates mental atrophy. My warning is that our greatest risk may be forgetting how to think critically as machines become more convenient than our own judgment.

6. Trusted Insiders: The Betrayal That Never Goes Out of Style

31 - How to Catch a Mole

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - Uncover the chilling reality of trusted insiders, from spies and traitors to rogue employees. How betrayal begins, why it happens, and how to stop the moles among us.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/31-how-to-catch-a-mole

This year’s insider-threat feature revisited infamous cases (Hanssen, the Toebbes, Gregory Allen Justice, and GhostExodus) to show how betrayal evolves but never disappears. The motivations range from ideology to ego to financial desperation, but the outcome is constant: catastrophic loss delivered by someone who was trusted to guard the vault. The lesson for every organization, from government agencies to private companies, is that insider threats aren’t rare or exceptional, they are predictable, and preventable, if we remain vigilant.

7. O’Neill’s Four Rules of Surveillance

44: O'Neill's Four Rules of Surveillance

Master surveillance with 4 proven FBI tradecraft rules—boost awareness, confidence & control in business, life & high-stakes situations - Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/44-o-neill-s-four-rules-of-surveillance

This piece distilled years of real undercover experience into four practical principles that readers could apply immediately to their careers and daily lives. The response was overwhelming because the message was simple: awareness is a skill, not a gift. I taught you how to observe with intention, anticipate behavior, and navigate high-pressure environments with the same clarity demanded in counterintelligence. It became one of the defining frameworks of the newsletter: a bridge between spycraft and everyday success.

8. The Great Escape: A Prison Break with a Digital Lesson

37: The Great Escape

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - A New Orleans prison escape, a ransomware attack in the UK and spy hunter tips on how to stop scams.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/the-great-escape

By dissecting a real-world prison escape through a cybersecurity lens, we exposed a parallel that security professionals know too well: systems rarely fail because of sophistication; they fail because someone left a door open. The issue tied together an FBI warning, a DragonForce ransomware attack, and the value of tools like Have I Been Pwned to show how breaches unfold in both physical and digital worlds. It was a reminder that the attackers’ greatest asset is often human complacency.

9. Signal-Gate: When a Privacy App Stumbles

29: OPERATION BROKEN SIGNAL

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - An explosive look at the Signal chat scandal that exposed U.S. military plans, plus expert cybersecurity tips, a major breach at Oracle, and a review of ChatGPT’s powerful new image tool. Stay ahead of threats with Spies, Lies & Cybercrime.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/operation-broken-signal

The Signal-gate issue cut through the online hysteria to explain what actually happened, what didn’t, and why it mattered. In a year defined by anxiety over digital surveillance, this piece offered a measured assessment during a week when misinformation traveled faster than facts. It became one of the highest converting stories of the year because readers recognized the need for sober analysis in a space overcrowded with absolutists and alarmists.

10. The Paris Heist

58: The Paris Heist

The Louvre heist exposes the ultimate insider threat: trust. Discover how spies and cybercriminals exploit access in this week’s Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/the-paris-heist

I’ll close the list with one of the year’s most compelling narrative pieces: a field story rooted in tension, tradecraft, and the enduring truth that information is power. Readers responded not because it was cinematic, although it was, but because it illuminated the mindset required to operate in uncertain environments. It reminded you that espionage is not an abstraction. It is a discipline built on patience, awareness, and the relentless pursuit of detail.

As we step into a new year, one thing is certain: the threats will continue to evolve, and the world will not slow down to give anyone time to catch up. But we gather here each week to separate signal from noise, expose the unseen, and navigate the digital battlefield with clarity rather than fear. Thank you for being part of this mission. Stay alert, stay curious, and above all, stay ready.

And here’s hoping that your 2026 is happy, joyous and filled with success!

~ Eric

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect holiday gift and stocking stuffer!

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

📖 Support a local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold.

Coming soon on January 13! A conversation with Actor, Producer and Director Ryan Phillippe, the man that played me in the movie Breach. Subscribe now to ensure you don’t miss the amazing content I’m cooking up for 2026.

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Support our partners so that I can bring you this newsletter completely free! It only takes a click. No purchase necessary.

Invest right from your couch

Have you always been kind of interested in investing but found it too intimidating (or just plain boring)? Yeah, we get it. Luckily, today’s brokers are a little less Wall Street and much more accessible. Online stockbrokers provide a much more user-friendly experience to buy and sell stocks—right from your couch. Money.com put together a list of the Best Online Stock Brokers to help you open your first account. Check it out!

Start investing

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy Holidays!

It was a freezing December morning, just a couple of weeks before Christmas, when the course of my life changed within a single conversation.

Juliana stirred beside me, buried under a thick comforter, her blonde hair a wild halo against the pillow. We were newly married, still in that stunned, grateful phase where waking up next to the right person feels like winning the lottery every day (it still does). I checked the clock. 8:00 a.m. I was about to hang up the phone, chalking it up to an early telemarketer, when the voice on the other stopped me cold.

It was Supervisory Special Agent Gene McClelland.

“Don’t bother getting dressed up,” he said. “Just lace up your shoes. I’m parked out front.”

That was all.

I scrambled into jeans and a George Washington University Law sweatshirt, heart pounding, mind sprinting through worst-case scenarios. FBI supervisors don’t come to you. They summon. If your boss showed up unannounced at your house on a Sunday morning, you’d panic. If you are the boss, picture the chairman of your board of directors. If you’re the chairman—imagine the President of the United States idling at the curb.

This was worse than any of that.

Our cramped one-bedroom sat a stone’s throw from the Capitol. I slipped outside into the December wind, doing a quick sweep of rooftops and balconies out of habit. Nothing. Just a cardinal perched on a wire and a lone sedan idling on the street. Gene’s.

I opened the passenger door. He didn’t bother with small talk.

“Have you ever heard of Robert Hanssen?”

“No,” I said. “Should I have?”

Gene smiled. “That’s good. That’s why we chose you.”

That December morning, so ordinary in appearance, but world-shifting in impact, catapulted me into the undercover operation that defined my life.

And every year around this time, when the air turns sharp and the world slows down, I think about that morning. I think about the unexpected summons that changed my stars…and the opportunities that still arrive the same way: unannounced, unwarned, and exactly when they’re meant to.

This is the week when I force myself to step out of the fray. I take a breath. I look at my life’s blessings—my incredible family, long walks with my wife of twenty-five years, phone calls with friends I don’t see nearly enough, a good book by a quiet fire, bourbon with a best friend, my kids’ hugs, a real dinner with real conversation. I shut down the computers, power off the iPads, and step away from Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X, and yes…even this newsletter.

But before I disappear from cyberspace for a few days, I needed to send this.

Thank you.

This newsletter exists because of you—my readers, my community, my fellow spy hunters. When I launched this project, I envisioned it as the living companion to Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime: a place where the book could continue to breathe, evolve, and grow. A space where I could tell new stories, share actionable intelligence, and equip people who care about protecting themselves and their world from cybercrime, scams, and espionage.

You seized that vision. You’ve allowed me to continue the conversation.

This year, the newsletter grew by 980%. That number still looks like a typo. But it’s real—and it’s because you showed up, shared it, forwarded it, talked about it, and made this community something fierce and meaningful (please don’t stop!)

And when Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime launched this fall, you propelled it straight onto the Bestseller list in its first week. That wasn’t the result of marketing dollars or industry machinery. That was you. A group of intelligent, curious, generous readers who believed in the mission and carried it forward.

Through this newsletter, the book continues to live. It breathes through you. Together, we’ve built a small but formidable battalion of well-trained, well-informed, occasionally wise-cracking spy hunters who are making the world, and ourselves, a little safer from the cybercriminals who attack from the dark web.

Before I step offline and vanish into my holiday hideout, let me say it plainly:

Thank you for an extraordinary year.

Thank you for your trust.

Thank you for your curiosity.

Thank you for your belief in this mission.

And thank you for being the unexpected summons at my door—the kind that changes a life.

I’ll see you on the other side of the holidays. We’ve got more stories to tell, more intel to share, and more spies (both real and metaphorical) to hunt before they hunt us.

Until then, Merry Christmas. May your holiday be safe, merry and bright.

-Eric

This one is for you!

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect holiday gift and stocking stuffer!

Please Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

📖 Support a local bookstore. Get a Signed copy

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in bringing me to a stage in 2026, book me to speak at your next event.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold.

Coming soon in 2026! A conversation with Actor, Producer and Director Ryan Phillippe, the man that played me in the movie Breach. subscribe now to ensure you don’t miss the amazing content I’m cooking up for 2026.

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Please support our partners. It only takes a click. No purchase necessary!

7 Actionable Ways to Achieve a Comfortable Retirement

Your dream retirement isn’t going to fund itself—that’s what your portfolio is for.

When generating income for a comfortable retirement, there are countless options to weigh. Muni bonds, dividends, REITs, Master Limited Partnerships—each comes with risk and oppor-tunity.

The Definitive Guide to Retirement Income from Fisher investments shows you ways you can position your portfolio to help you maintain or improve your lifestyle in retirement.

It also highlights common mistakes, such as tax mistakes, that can make a substantial differ-ence as you plan your well-deserved future.

Download your free copy today.

Title Story

JUNK FOOD FOR THE BRAIN

I came of age in a time when silence was not an emergency. If a conversation stalled, no one reached for anything. There was nothing to reach for. We sat with the pause until it filled itself—often awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly—with gossip, speculation, or the kind of half-formed dreams that only sound plausible when spoken aloud among friends. We met at malls and on street corners and in basements that smelled faintly of soda and rebellion. We were unsupervised, occasionally bored, and fully present.

Today, silence has become intolerable. The briefest lull in conversation is enough to summon a phone from a pocket, as if on reflex. Heads bow. Eyes glaze. What might have become connection is swallowed instead by a feed designed to erase the very sensation of being alone with one’s thoughts. For teenagers, this ritual has become so normalized that the absence of a screen now feels abnormal, even threatening.

Australia Pulls the Plug

Which is why Australia’s recent decision to ban social media for children under sixteen feels less like a regulatory tweak and more like a cultural rupture.

Beginning this week, platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, and X are legally required to block users under sixteen or face substantial fines. The burden of enforcement falls not on children or parents but squarely on the companies themselves, many of which have spent years insisting that their existing safeguards were sufficient.

The stated rationale is familiar: social media has been linked to rising rates of anxiety, depression, body-image distortion, bullying, sexual exploitation, and criminal extortion among adolescents. What’s new is the willingness of a government to treat these harms not as unfortunate side effects of innovation but as predictable outcomes of an often malicious algorithm.

Critics have raised objections that sound, by now, almost ritualistic. Free speech concerns. Privacy concerns. Lawsuits filed by teenagers who argue that their political expression is being curtailed. Tech companies warning that age verification technologies are imperfect, intrusive, or easily circumvented. All of which may be true, and all of which feel curiously bloodless when weighed against the mental-health data accumulating over the past decade.

The Great Rewiring of Childhood

Jonathan Haidt, in his recent book The Anxious Generation, describes what he calls the “great rewiring” of childhood. For most of human history, children learned to regulate fear, build confidence, and negotiate social hierarchies through unstructured play. Then, between 2010 and 2015, that model collapsed with startling speed. The play-based childhood was replaced by a phone-based one, mediated by platforms that reward comparison, performance, and perpetual self-surveillance.

The timing is difficult to ignore. Prior to 2010, rates of adolescent anxiety and depression were relatively stable. Afterward, they surged. By 2019, one in four American undergraduates reported struggling with anxiety or depression. Among teenage girls, rates climbed even higher, with nearly a third reporting that they had seriously considered suicide within the past year. Similar patterns have appeared across the United Kingdom, Australia, and much of Northern Europe, suggesting that culture alone cannot explain what is happening.

What social media offers young users is not, as advertised, connection, but something closer to a hall of mirrors. Every post becomes a referendum. Every image invites comparison. Every silence feels like exclusion. The algorithms, exquisitely tuned, deliver what keeps users scrolling rather than what might help them grow. It is junk food for the brain: instantly gratifying, nutritionally empty, and difficult to stop consuming once the habit is formed.

“Everyone Else Has One”

Parents are acutely aware of this, and yet many feel trapped by what economists would call a collective-action problem. When every other child appears to be online, withholding access can feel like a social punishment rather than a protective measure. Australia’s ban, whatever its imperfections, breaks that trap by resetting the default. When no one under sixteen is allowed in, the pressure to join evaporates.

Could This Happen Here?

Whether such a policy could take hold in the United States remains an open question. Federal action seems unlikely in the near term, hampered by political gridlock and formidable lobbying from the technology sector. Yet state-level restrictions are proliferating, and courts have already shown a willingness to uphold age-based limits in other online contexts. Even the platforms themselves appear to be preparing, quietly developing age-estimation tools that suggest an awareness that the ground beneath them is shifting.

For a generation raised to believe that connection is something delivered through glass, Australia has proposed a radical idea—that perhaps it is something best learned face to face, in moments of boredom, silence, and imperfect human company. Whether the rest of the world is prepared to follow may determine what childhood looks like in the decades to come.

Cybersecurity Breach of the Week

Russia’s Cyberwar Against Germany

Germany has accused Russian military intelligence of conducting a cyberattack against its air traffic control systems and attempting to interfere in its federal elections—an escalation that underscores how cyber operations are now being used as instruments of state power.

German officials say the GRU-linked hacking group Fancy Bear breached internal communications at the country’s air navigation service provider in August 2024. Flights were not disrupted, but the target matters: air traffic control is critical infrastructure. At the same time, Germany alleges Russia ran a coordinated disinformation campaign, Storm 1516, aimed at destabilizing the February election, including fake videos claiming ballot manipulation and attacks on senior political leaders.

Berlin has summoned the Russian ambassador and vowed coordinated countermeasures with European allies. Moscow has denied the allegations, as it routinely does.

This case highlights an uncomfortable reality Western governments must confront: cyberattacks by nation-state actors, especially against critical infrastructure, should be treated as acts of war. The same seriousness reserved for kinetic attacks must apply in cyberspace.

The United States should lead by establishing a mutually assured destruction deterrence model for cyber warfare, similar to the nuclear Cold War. Until adversaries fear overwhelming consequences, cyberattacks like this will continue—quietly, cheaply, and dangerously.

Protect Yourself—Starting Today

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold.

IIf you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting the book to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect holiday gift! You can also get a Signed copy.

Please leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

If you’ve ever paused at an email, login alert, or message and thought, “Could this happen to me?”—my Linkedin Learning course is for you! Login and start learning here.

Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime: How Thinking Like a Spy Hunter Can Protect You from Cyberattacks Online Class | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com

Discover how to think like a spy by protecting yourself from scams, safeguarding your data, and making informed decisions to stay one step ahead of cyber criminals.

www.linkedin.com/learning/spies-lies-and-cybercrime-how-thinking-like-a-spy-hunter-can-protect-you-from-cyberattacks

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

The FBI has confirmed that hundreds of millions of stolen passwords were recently recovered from cybercriminals, underscoring just how fragile our online defenses remain. Cybercriminals collect and trade these credentials on underground forums and use them to break into accounts across the internet.

Here’s what you should do right now:

1. Check if your email or passwords have been exposed.

Use the trusted Have I Been Pwned service to see whether your email address (or individual passwords) has shown up in known breaches. This tool lets you check safely without sending your full password to anyone.

Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email address has been exposed in a data breach

Have I Been Pwned allows you to check whether your email address has been exposed in a data breach.

haveibeenpwned.com

2. Change compromised passwords immediately.

If a check shows your login details have been leaked, change that password right away—and don’t reuse it on any other site. Credential stuffing attacks let hackers take one leaked password and try it on dozens of other services.

3. Use unique, strong passwords everywhere.

Password reuse is one of the biggest risks you face. A strong password manager can generate and store complex, unique passwords so you don’t have to memorize them.

4. Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).

Even the best password can be stolen. Turning on 2FA adds an extra step—typically a code from an app or SMS—that keeps attackers out even if they have your password. This is the single, most important action you can take to secure your accounts.

Coming Soon!

I recently sat down with A-list actor, producer, and director Ryan Phillippe for a conversation that revolved around a single question he once asked me during a break in filming Breach: what, exactly, does a Hollywood actor have in common with an undercover operative? The answer turned out to be more revealing than either of us expected. The interview will premiere exclusively here for subscribers on January 6—so make sure you’re subscribed. You won’t want to miss it.

Please give some love to our sponsors. It only takes a click. No purchase required.

7 Actionable Ways to Achieve a Comfortable Retirement

Your dream retirement isn’t going to fund itself—that’s what your portfolio is for.

When generating income for a comfortable retirement, there are countless options to weigh. Muni bonds, dividends, REITs, Master Limited Partnerships—each comes with risk and oppor-tunity.

The Definitive Guide to Retirement Income from Fisher investments shows you ways you can position your portfolio to help you maintain or improve your lifestyle in retirement.

It also highlights common mistakes, such as tax mistakes, that can make a substantial differ-ence as you plan your well-deserved future.

Download your free copy today.

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Are you protected?

Title Story

The Mustang Con: Inside a Perfect Online Car Scam

Teddy spent his entire career cutting through lies. A criminal defense attorney with the kind of sharpened instincts you only earn from years of listening to stories that don’t add up. He prided himself on seeing the con before anyone else even sensed the setup. Nothing rattled him. Nothing fooled him. Nothing got past him.

Until the day he went shopping for a car.

It started innocently, the way most modern trouble does: a simple scroll through Facebook. He’d just won a major case—a hard-fought victory—and decided he was finally going to reward himself. That’s when he saw it. A 2021 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 in Grabber Yellow with bold black racing stripes. The exact car he wanted as a kid, back when posters on bedroom walls were as close as he could get to horsepower. He had spent years ignoring that dream. This time, he didn’t.

The listing read like a wish list: low miles, no accidents, one owner, leather seats, handling package, carbon fiber wheels. The price—fifty-seven thousand—was far below what a GT500 actually commands, but he rationalized it the way any expert negotiator eventually does: maybe he’d stumbled on someone else’s need for a quick sale. Maybe he just got lucky. Even the best of us want to believe we’ve earned a break.

He did what he believed was due diligence. More than sixty emails traded with a courteous and knowledgeable representative who called himself Frederick Lemos. There were dozens of detailed photos, walk-around videos, documents, ownership reports—all crisp, organized, convincing. They used a Bank of America account. They sent paperwork through DocuSign. Everything looked exactly the way a legitimate online car sale should look. He even paid for his own CarFax, and every detail lined up perfectly with what he’d been told.

Overconfidence doesn’t announce itself. It feels like competence—right up until the moment it doesn’t. When the invoice arrived, Teddy’s bank refused the transfer because the account lacked an address. A small red flag, nothing more. He asked Lemos, who replied immediately with a branch address in Orlando, which matched the supposed dealership’s location. A quick map search seemed to confirm it. Satisfied, he wired the money.

Later he would learn the truth: multiple fake auto-seller websites use the same name—Carcoin—mirroring real dealerships without the legitimate businesses ever knowing they’ve been cloned. Fraudsters scrape photos, videos, and documents from real listings, populate a polished new site, and wait for the right buyer to wander in. When one site disappears, another appears, sometimes offering to buy or consign classic cars to gather fresh material for the next round of victims. It’s assembly-line fraud, industrialized deception.

But at the time, none of this was visible. What Teddy saw was an order number posted on their website and a delivery date for the car. They promised the vehicle would arrive in an enclosed carrier, and that the driver would call twenty-four hours before arrival. The day came. No call. When he emailed Ramos, the order status on the website quietly shifted to “delayed.” The following day, delivery slipped again. This time, he requested a cancellation. The site updated immediately: “Order canceled — refund in process.”

It was theater. By then, the money was long gone.

The detail he learned far too late is one every consumer should know: a wire transfer must be recalled within twenty-four hours, or recovery becomes unlikely. After that window closes, you’re no longer chasing a refund—you’re chasing shadows.

For a man who spent his life unraveling other people’s deceptions, this one carried a particular sting. It wasn’t the money. It wasn’t even the car. It was the realization that expertise in one arena doesn’t grant immunity in another, and that the smartest people often fall the hardest because they don’t believe they can fall at all.

And that’s the real lesson here: scams don’t succeed because victims are gullible. They succeed because criminals are patient, prepared, and increasingly professional—and because even the sharpest among us sometimes want something badly enough that we stop questioning the story unfolding in front of us.

Teddy wanted the Mustang. They wanted his money. Only one side got what they came for.

Protect Yourself—Starting Today

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold.

Inside, you’ll get the exact steps to take the moment your accounts are compromised, how to lock them down before criminals get in, and how to spot the scams hitting elders, teens, and anyone with a pulse and a Wi-Fi signal. There’s even a crash course on beating deepfakes—because they’re cheap, everywhere, and entirely too convincing.

If you want the full battle manual, that’s in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime. If you want to start protecting yourself right now? Begin here: ericoneill.net/protect Now—on to this week’s tip.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

Defeating the Mustang GT500 Scam

Every good con has the same opening move: make the mark believe he’s too smart to be a mark. Our attorney walked straight into that psychological ambush. And here’s the uncomfortable truth—any of us could have done the same. The trick is learning to think like the spy setting the trap and like the spy hunter who tears it apart.

Think Like a Spy: How the Criminals Ran the Operation

1. They built a convincing legend. Stolen dealership identity. Real VIN. Real photos. A fake business wrapped in a professional-looking website. A classic spy tactic: make the lie look effortless.

2. They shaped the narrative through patience. Sixty emails, all polite and measured. No pressure. Criminals know that giving you time makes you believe you’re the one controlling the deal.

3. They hid behind trusted institutions. Bank of America account. DocuSign. Clean documents. Add corporate polish and people stop questioning the fundamentals.

4. They let emotion do the work. He wanted the Mustang. Badly. A good spy never fights desire—they redirect it.

5. They collapsed the operation on their terms. Fake delivery delays, fake refund promises—the digital equivalent of a disappearing act.

Act Like a Spy Hunter: How to Expose the Plot

1. Verify independently, not through the seller. A single call to the real Orlando dealership—using a number he found himself—would have ended the illusion instantly.

2. Check the infrastructure, not the story. A WHOIS lookup, a reverse image search, or even checking site age would have revealed the operation was new and suspiciously anonymous.

3. Validate the bank details first. Banks can confirm whether an account belongs to a business. No address on a wire is a glaring warning light.

4. Break the scammer’s script. Request a live FaceTime walk-around or a video showing the VIN and that day’s date. Fraudsters can fake documents, not real-time proof.

5. Control the timing. Wire recalls must happen within 24 hours. Spy hunters assume anything involving money can go sideways—and plan accordingly.

Technology News of the Week

The Corporate War for Hollywood

Netflix thought it had locked down Warner Bros., HBO, and HBO Max with its tidy $82.7 billion deal. This is the kind of acquisition that would have made old-school studio bosses choke on their cigars. But before the ink dried, David Ellison and Paramount stormed the gates with a hostile $108.4 billion all-cash offer, backed by sovereign wealth funds and the Ellison family fortune. In other words: real war-chest money.

Now the question isn’t whether Warner Bros. gets bought. It’s who conquers it… and what survives afterward.

If Netflix wins, the last great studio titan gets absorbed into a global streaming empire. This would drive the final nail into the coffin Hollywood’s been lying in since COVID pulverized the box office. Prestige franchises like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, DC, and the classics from Casablanca to The Wizard of Oz would bolster Netflix’s vault, with theatrical releases potentially becoming a quaint tradition rather than a business model.

If Paramount wins, Hollywood gets a chance to breathe. Ellison promises more theaters, more movies, more traditional output — thirty-plus films a year — a kind of retro revival pitched as salvation for an industry that’s been sprinting toward the algorithm.

Either way, someone is about to walk off with one of the greatest collections of stories ever assembled. The only real mystery left is whether the future of Hollywood plays out under bright theater lights… or in the glow of your living room.

Because in this Corporate War for Hollywood, the real prize is who gets to shape what we watch next.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

Thanks to all of you, my book, Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, is an instant national bestseller and an Amazon #1 Bestseller.

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect holiday gift!

📺 Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

📖 Get a Signed copy.

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in having me talk about the book, or you know of someone who is, book me to speak at your next event.

Appearance of the Week

In Episode 96 of the Cybersecurity Readiness Podcast, Eric O’Neill — former FBI ghost (undercover operative), renowned spyhunter, bestselling author, and the real-life inspiration behind the film Breach, takes us inside the high-stakes world of counterintelligence: how he helped expose Robert Hanssen, why spies and cybercriminals think alike, and how the tactics of the physical world now map directly onto digital deception, insider threats, and AI-powered social engineering at scale.

AI Trend of the Week

Following the Warner Bros. Studio story, this week’s AI trend of the week comes from @esheffects on Instagram who used AI to create a fever dream in their Superman/Supergirl Universe series.

Who does it better? — Guys’ night out or girls’ night out?

Please give some love to our sponsor. It only takes a click. No purchase enecessary!

The Hustle: Claude Hacks For Marketers

Some people use Claude to write emails. Others use it to basically run their entire business while they play Wordle.

This isn't just ChatGPT's cooler cousin. It's the AI that's quietly revolutionizing how smart people work – writing entire business plans, planning marketing campaigns, and basically becoming the intern you never have to pay.

The Hustle's new guide shows you exactly how the AI-literate are leaving everyone else behind. Subscribe for instant access.

Get our Claude playbook

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Continue Reading

63: No Blank Pages

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - Explore AI’s creative risks, this week’s top cyber scams, FBI alerts, and practical steps to protect yourself from digital threats.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/no-blank-pages

61: Your Devices Are Listening

Spies, Lies & Cybercrime by Eric O'Neill - Uncover the truth about device listening, sonic beacons, and digital tracking—plus the essential steps to lock down your privacy.

spies-lies-cybercrime.ericoneill.net/p/your-devices-are-listening

Enjoying the Newsletter? Do me a super quick favor. Please jump on Amazon.com and give my new book Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime a review.

Title Story

No Blank Pages

On Thanksgiving, I challenged you to turn your phones off for a full day. A clean break from the chatter. Who actually did it? If your hand just went up, good. If not, stay with me. That simple act of friction is the heart of what follows.

For years, I’ve warned about a creeping danger dressed up as convenience. Generative AI writes your emails, drafts your essays, and spins out almost anything you ask for with lightning speed. Helpful on the surface. But convenience always hides a cost, and this one hits us at the foundation of what makes us creative.

I’ve written about this in past issues. Generative AI suffocates creativity. Real creativity begins in the panic of a blank page demanding something only you can give. You stare at it. You wrestle with it. Eventually your mind sparks, catches, burns, and suddenly the impossible becomes a paragraph. There’s a reason we authors talk about chasing the first sentence. It’s the first agonizing moment that activates everything else.

When a machine hands you that first line instantly, your brain never strains. The mental weightlifting never happens. You shift from inventor to editor.

So why do we keep turning to AI? because our magnificent minds are built for efficiency. They always have been. The wheel, the loom, the steam engine, the microchip. History is one long tale of humanity outsmarting work. GenAI is simply the newest and most seductive. Pair it with the endless drone of social media and you get a perfect storm. We’ve traded the quiet joy of a good book by the fire or a warm hammock in the backyard for hours of scrolling that leaves us empty.

The real danger isn’t dystopian robots rising up with glowing eyes. The danger is that we stop rising up ourselves. In my upcoming book Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, I warn about a moment when there are no blank pages left. When every idea comes pre-formatted, spell-checked, smoothed out before it ever touches our minds. Without struggle, thought stagnates. Creativity pools in shallow corners instead of flowing like a river.

Here's my new challenge:

Pick up a notebook and write twenty minutes longhand. Feel the resistance. Read something challenging without letting a machine summarize it. Give yourself thirty minutes of quiet without a device.

I’m not a luddite telling you to reject technology. I’m asking you to remind your brain that the spark is still there, waiting to fire if you let it work.

If you shut your phone off on Thanksgiving, you’ve already had a taste of that clarity. If you didn’t, give yourself one day this week to try again.

You may be surprised how loud your own mind becomes when you let it speak first.

Cybersecurity Breach of the Week

The Apple Call Scam

The popcorn was already popped. The blankets were pulled tight. Pajamas on, lights low, and the family gathered for what had been promised all week: the new season of Stranger Things. Only one problem. Dad couldn’t get the Apple TV to open Netflix. The spinning wheel of doom mocked him from across the room. His daughter sighed. His son asked whether they could just “watch it on the iPad.” His wife gave him the look every spouse knows well: just make it work.

Dad did what every frustrated parent eventually does. He reached for his phone to call Apple Support. And that’s when the phone rang.

The caller ID said “Apple Support.” The logo was right there. The number was correct. It felt like divine intervention. He answered immediately.

A calm, professional voice told him there had been suspicious activity in his iCloud account. There might have been a breach. His Apple TV issues, the representative explained, were likely connected. They needed to “verify” his account to fix the problem. Just his Apple ID and password. Maybe a verification code or two.

Dad didn’t hesitate. The family was waiting under warm blankets, and Netflix stood between him and mutiny. So he handed the scammer the keys to his digital life.

The truth, of course, was far darker. Caller-ID spoofing made the fake call appear authentic, right down to the logo and the official number. And once he gave up his credentials, the scammers walked straight into his iCloud account.

Apple later confirmed what cybersecurity pros have been warning for months: unsolicited calls—no matter how real they look—are traps. Apple will never ask for your password or verification codes. If a call comes in that you didn’t request yourself, the safest move is to hang up.

Dad eventually got Netflix working. But not before losing control of the one account that holds everything from photos to backups to the digital breadcrumbs of his entire life. The family got their show. The scammer got the breach of the week.

Protect Yourself—Starting Today

Get your Protect Seal today!

My new hub, PROTECT, is now live at ericoneill.net/protect and it’s built for anyone who wants to stop cybercriminal scammers cold. It’s fast, practical, and drawn straight from the playbook I used hunting spies for the FBI.

Inside, you’ll get the exact steps to take the moment your accounts are compromised, how to lock them down before criminals get in, and how to spot the scams hitting elders, teens, and anyone with a pulse and a Wi-Fi signal. There’s even a crash course on beating deepfakes—because they’re cheap, everywhere, and entirely too convincing.

If you want the full battle manual, that’s in Spies, Lies and Cybercrime.

If you want to start protecting yourself right now? Begin here: ericoneill.net/protect

Now—on to this week’s tip.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

FBI Warning: Stop Account Takeover Scams

This week’s threat: a fast-growing Account Takeover scam the FBI is sounding the alarm on.

Cybercriminals are impersonating banks and credit unions through texts, emails, fake websites, and even spoofed phone numbers that look legitimate. Their goal is simple: trick you into handing over login credentials or one-time passcodes. Once they have those, they reset your password, lock you out, and empty your accounts—often laundering the money through crypto wallets before you even notice the balance changed.

Some scammers go further, posing as law enforcement and claiming your information was used to buy firearms or commit fraud. It’s all theater designed to rattle you into compliance.

Act Like a Spy Hunter.

✔️Never share passcodes with anyone. Real institutions will not ask.

✔️Use bookmarks for financial sites and avoid clicking links in search results or emails.

✔️Always verify unexpected calls by hanging up and dialing the official number yourself.

✔️Watch your accounts for missing deposits or strange withdrawals.

✔️Use strong, unique passwords and keep multi-factor authentication turned on.

Want weekly spy-level tips? Subscribe to this newsletter and dig deeper at ericoneill.net/protect.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

Thanks to all of you, my book, Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, is an instant national bestseller and an Amazon #1 Bestseller.

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It’s the perfect holiday gift!

📺 Leave a 5-star review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

📖 Get a Signed copy.

🎤  I’m on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in having me talk about the book, or you know of someone who is, book me to speak at your next event.

Appearance of the Week

I stopped by the Cyber Crime Junkies podcast last week to pull back the curtain on my years as an FBI ghost. We dug into the real story behind catching Robert Hanssen, one of the most destructive spies this country has ever seen, and traced how betrayal in the shadows has evolved into the modern world of cybercrime.

If you want to understand the insider threats that can bypass even the strongest defenses, and how a single compromised trust can trigger a catastrophic breach, watch below. This is the side of cybersecurity most people never see… but absolutely need to.

AI Trend of the Week

Marge Simpson gives some advice for the best holiday gift to keep your family safe from Spies, Lies and Cybercrime.

Please give some love to our sponsors. One click is all it takes. No purchase necessary.

200+ AI Side Hustles to Start Right Now

AI isn't just changing business—it's creating entirely new income opportunities. The Hustle's guide features 200+ ways to make money with AI, from beginner-friendly gigs to advanced ventures. Each comes with realistic income projections and resource requirements. Join 1.5M professionals getting daily insights on emerging tech and business opportunities.

Get the guide

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Let's make sure my emails land straight in your inbox.

Gmail users: Move this email to your primary inbox

On your phone? Hit the 3 dots at top right corner, click "Move to" then "Primary."

On desktop? Close this email then drag and drop this email into the "Primary" tab near the top left of your screen

Apple mail users: Tap on our email address at the top of this email (next to "From:" on mobile) and click “Add to VIPs”

For everyone else: follow these instructions

Title Story

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Dr. Seuss version of my family. This holiday season, hide the phones!

Thanksgiving has always meant something different to me. After years undercover in the pressure cooker of FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism—where holidays were more of a scheduling obstacle than a celebration—then stepping into an international law firm where the hours were just as long but the threats wore nicer suits, and later building businesses, writing books, and speaking on stages around the world, I learned something important: holidays aren’t a luxury. They’re sacrosanct.

Thanksgiving sits at the top of the list for me. Yes, it’s a uniquely American holiday, but it’s long outgrown its origin story. It’s become a moment of intentional humanity—an excuse, if we need one, to gather with the people we love, share a good meal, and remember that life is bigger than deadlines, inboxes, and the next crisis.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’re losing the ability to be present for any of it.

We live in a technology-first world now. The instant we feel bored, lonely, or even mildly inconvenienced, we reach for the glowing rectangle in our pocket. We scroll. We tap. We refresh. We consume. It’s instinctive, compulsive, and slowly devouring the parts of us that make life meaningful. Creativity is evaporating. Our attention spans are shrinking. And our capacity for genuine connection is on life support.

How often has someone walked past you in your own home with headphones on, so deep into a podcast or playlist they don’t offer—not even a nod—just a silent drift through the room like a ghost? When was the last time you sat in a car, looked out the window, and let your mind wander? When was the last time you daydreamed without a device interrupting you every eight seconds?

And the real gut punch: how much time have you lost to your screen just this week?

If you had it back—every minute spent doomscrolling, every micro-hit of digital dopamine—what would you do with it? You might laugh more. You might cook more. You might sit with the people you love and actually talk. You might even rediscover what it feels like to be bored, which is the birthplace of imagination.

Stanford researchers recently looked at what happens when people take a real break from social media—a full six weeks offline. The results weren’t shocking, but they were damning. People slept better. They were less anxious. They felt more connected. They were happier. More human. All from stepping away from the endless feed.

Which brings me to a challenge for this Thanksgiving.

Put down the phone. All day.

Not forever. Not for a month. Just for one holiday.

Let the world spin without you for a few hours. Trust me, it will. Hit the kitchen. Tell the stories you’ve told a hundred times. Ask your parents or grandparents the questions you’ve been meaning to ask. Be a friend to the people you love. Sit with your kids and actually listen. Go outside. Touch grass. Watch the sky. Let your brain idle long enough to remember it’s capable of something other than reacting to a notification.

Because here’s the truth I’ve learned the hard way: a hug or a laugh from someone who matters—one real moment of connection—is worth more than a thousand likes on your best post or any high score on Block Blast.

This Thanksgiving, reclaim one day from the machines. Give it back to yourself, and to the people waiting right in front of you.

You won’t miss the screen. But I promise—you’ll remember the day.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

Protect Yourself!

Before you dive into this week’s tip, I’ve got something new for you—something I built because cybercriminals are evolving faster than most people can keep up.

PROTECT is now live at ericoneill.net/protect.

PROTECT is now live at ericoneill.net/protect.

It’s your starting point for defending yourself, your family, and your business from scams, fraud, deepfakes, account takeovers, and every modern trick the bad guys use. I designed it to be practical, fast, and battle-tested—pulled straight from my years hunting spies for the FBI.

You’ll find clear guidance on what to do the moment you’re compromised, how to lock down your accounts before criminals drain them, and how to recognize the scams targeting elders, teens, and anyone who spends more than three minutes a day online.

And because deepfakes are now cheap, convincing, and everywhere, I included a section dedicated to spotting and avoiding them before they cost you real money.

If you want the full battlefield manual, it’s in my new book Spies, Lies and Cybercrime. But if you want to start protecting yourself today?

Start here: ericoneill.net/protect

Now—on to this week’s tip.

Surviving Black Friday Without Getting Scammed

The holiday shopping season is a minefield, and the criminals know you’re distracted, rushed, and riding a gravy-induced high. Their entire playbook relies on three psychological triggers: urgency (“Act now!”), emotion (fear, excitement, guilt), and benefit (“Save a fortune!”). If they can hijack your instincts, they win.

Here are the top threats hitting right now:

1. AI Imposters: Criminals clone a family member’s voice or video and claim they’re in trouble. Always call back on a known number and confirm with a family code word.

2. Smishing Texts: Fake package delays, bogus account alerts. Don’t tap the link. Go directly to the retailer or shipper’s website.

3. Fake Deals & Phony Stores: If the discount looks supernatural, it probably is. Shop directly on the retailer’s official site and use a credit card.

4. Fake Charities: Emotional appeals designed to rush you. Only donate through the charity’s verified website.

Your defense is simple:

• Avoid deals, calls, texts and social media messages that push urgency. Take a breath and think before acting.

• Turn on multifactor authentication.

• Don’t click unsolicited links.

• Use credit cards—not wires or crypto.

• And trust your instincts. If it feels off, it is.

Stay sharp, shop smart, and don’t let scammers steal your holiday cheer.

Cybersecurity Breach of the Week

Jaguar Land Rover’s £196 Million Warning Shot

Jaguar Land Rover just delivered one of the clearest lessons of the year in how devastating a single supply-chain attack can be. This fall, the automaker was blindsided when a cyberattack hit one of its key suppliers—one weak link in a global chain. Plants shut down. Workers were sent home. Production lines froze. By the end of the quarter, JLR reported more than £196 million in losses (over $220 million) turning what should have been a profitable period into a financial crater. The situation grew so severe the UK government had to step in with a £1.5 billion loan guarantee just to stabilize operations.

This is the new reality: you can spend millions defending your own network, but if a partner, vendor, or supplier leaves a door unlocked, attackers don’t need to breach you directly. They just slip in through the weakest point and let the dominoes fall. It’s exactly why supply-chain attacks have become the weapon of choice for cybercriminals and nation-state spies. With one well-placed hit, they can force chaos across an entire industry.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

Thanks to all of you, my book, Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, is an instant national bestseller and an Amazon #1 Bestseller.

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It makes a perfect holiday gift for anyone you want to protect from cyber scams.

Please share! Forward this email to your friends and family. Here's an easy-to-post cover graphic, here's a Linkedin post, here's an IG reel and a post.

📚 Get the book: https://ericoneill.net/books/spies_and_lies/

📺 Review the Book: https://www.amazon.com/Spies-Lies-Cybercrime-Cybersecurity-Outsmart/dp/0063398176/

📖 Get a Signed copy: https://www.kensingtonrowbookshop.com

🎤 Book me to speak at your next event: https://www.bigspeak.com/speakers/eric-oneill

Appearance of the Week

I join Major Garrett on CBS Evening News on "The Takeout" to discuss exceptions to the order to release the Epstein files. Unfortunately, we all need to manage expectations about the Epstein files release.

AI Trend of the Week

If you are worried about travel during the Thanksgiving holiday, the great team at Diaper Diplomacy has a brilliant AI recreation of President Trump’s press conference about our air traffic system. This AI recreation is exceptional, funny and the best way to turn often contentious politics light-hearted.

Because we are nonpartisan here at Spies, Lies & Cybercrime, here’s one from everyone’s favorite independent congressman.

Please give our advertisers a click to show them love and help out the newsletter.

Realtime User Onboarding, Zero Engineering

Quarterzip delivers realtime, AI-led onboarding for every user with zero engineering effort.

✨ Dynamic Voice guides users in the moment
✨ Picture-in-Picture stay visible across your site and others
✨ Guardrails keep things accurate with smooth handoffs if needed

No code. No engineering. Just onboarding that adapts as you grow.

See how it works

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Let's make sure my emails land straight in your inbox.

Gmail users: Move this email to your primary inbox

On your phone? Hit the 3 dots at top right corner, click "Move to" then "Primary."

On desktop? Close this email then drag and drop this email into the "Primary" tab near the top left of your screen

Apple mail users: Tap on our email address at the top of this email (next to "From:" on mobile) and click “Add to VIPs”

For everyone else: follow these instructions

Title Story

Is Your Phone Listening to You?

I spent years hunting spies—people who lived in the shadows and listened for a living. They were deliberate, patient, and skilled. Today, we’ve built devices that do the same thing, only faster, cheaper, and with better battery life.

We’ve all had the same experience: say the word “vacation” near your phone and suddenly Instagram thinks you’re dying to snorkel with turtles in Maui. Mention a weird product near your Alexa—dog wheelchairs, artisanal lawn gnomes—and, like magic, the ads appear on your Amazon feed. It feels like espionage. And in a way, it is.

Let’s start with the truth: your devices are listening. Not in the Hollywood sense where a bored tech analyst monitors your breakfast conversations. Instead, your phone, Alexa, Google Home, and even apps you barely remember downloading constantly scan for what they call wake words. “Alexa.” “Hey Google.” “Siri.” These systems monitor audio streams in real time, using AI to detect when they should pay attention. That means the microphone is open. Always.

Companies have spent real money perfecting this.

Amazon received patent number US8798995B1 for a “voice-sniffing algorithm” that detects keywords in ambient conversation and US10096319B1 that uses voice input to infer physical and emotional traits (e.g., sore throat, sickness, excited vs. sad mood). Google patented US8138930B1, a system to analyze background audio to target ads and US 2022/0246140 A1 that keeps a device in a continuous listening state to detect not only fixed but context-specific wake words. Facebook holds a patent (US 10,075,767) for technology that lets your phone record ambient audio during TV shows and ads, match it to hidden ultrasonic signals, and determine what you’re watching for ad targeting.

And then came the whistleblowers.

Bloomberg, The Guardian, Business Insider, and others reported that Amazon, Apple, and Google all used human contractors to review snippets of audio captured from their devices. Apple eventually suspended the program after public backlash. The recordings were supposed to activate only after wake words. They didn’t. Contractors allegedly heard fights, intimate moments, private medical issues. In the intelligence world, this is what we call “collateral collection”—the stuff you weren’t aiming for but scooped up anyway.

Then there’s a lesser-known trick: sonic beacons. These are high-frequency audio signals, inaudible to humans, that your phone can hear. Some apps use them to track whether your device has been near a specific TV commercial, store speaker system, or even another app. You’ll never know they were triggered. But your ad feed will.

And yes, apps absolutely use AI to scan for spoken keywords. You talk about “flights,” “deals,” “kayaks,” “back pain,” or “new boots,” and within hours, your digital world nudges you toward a purchase. Surveillance, not magic.

In 2018, a Northeastern University study tried to confirm whether phones secretly recorded audio without permission. They found no hard evidence of true “covert eavesdropping,” but they did find thousands of instances of apps sending screenshots, screen recordings, location data, and usage behavior without the user knowing.

Run your own countermeasures.

The 48-Hour Test: Pick a bizarre product you’ve never searched for. Say it aloud near your phone 10–15 times over two days. Don’t type it. Don’t search it. Just talk about it. Then see what pops up in your ads. Plenty of people have done this and watched the results roll in like clockwork.

So is your phone listening? Let’s put it this way: if an FBI operative behaved the way your apps do, we’d call it surveillance. And you gave them permission.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

THINK LIKE A SPY: Your 60-Second Microphone Lockdown

During my years running Ghost surveillance operations for the FBI, I learned that If there’s a microphone in the room, assume someone can turn it against you. Here’s how you protect yourself.

iPhone

• Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone

  Kill access for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, shopping apps, and any app that doesn’t need your voice.

• App Privacy Report

  Turn it on. Check who’s touching your mic.

• Siri

  If you don’t use hands-free, disable “Listen for ‘Hey Siri.’”

Android

• Settings → Privacy → Permission Manager → Microphone

  Revoke mic rights from anything nonessential.

• Use the global mic kill switch in Quick Settings when you want real silence.

Browsers

• Chrome / Firefox / Edge → Site Settings → Microphone

  Default to Block. Clear any “Allowed” sites.

Smart Speakers

• Use the physical mute button when the discussion isn’t for public consumption.

• Review and delete voice history in the Alexa or Google Home app.

Locking down your microphones makes you harder to profile, harder to track, and a far less predictable data point. In my old line of work, that’s how you stay alive.

In your digital life, it’s how you stay private.

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime.

Cybersecurity Breach of the Week

North Korea’s Remote-Work Infiltration

North Korea has refined a new form of espionage: remote imposters. This week, the DOJ announced guilty pleas from five people who helped North Korean operatives infiltrate 136 U.S. companies by posing as ordinary IT workers. The facilitators supplied clean identities—some stolen, some real—and even hosted company-issued laptops in their homes so it appeared the workers lived inside the United States.

Once inside, the imposters performed just enough work to stay credible. In many cases, they used AI tools to complete tasks, allowing them to remain embedded longer while they quietly siphoned data, stole secrets, and collected U.S. paychecks. The scheme generated $2.2 million for the regime.

One participant was an active-duty Army service-member. Another ran a fake staffing company specializing in “certified” remote IT talent. A Ukrainian accomplice stole and sold U.S. identities to North Korean operatives, who used them to secure jobs at more than 40 firms.

In a world built on remote work, the weakest link might be your hiring pipeline. The fix isn’t complicated: strong background checks, real identity verification, and a second look at anyone who seems “too perfect” on paper.

A little diligence can stop a spy in sheep’s clothing.

Get the Book: Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

Thanks to all of you, my book, Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, is an instant national bestseller and an Amazon #1 Bestseller.

If you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It makes a perfect holiday gift for anyone you want to protect from cyber scams.

Please share! Forward this email to your friends and family. Here's an easy-to-post cover graphic, here's a Linkedin post, here's an IG reel and a post.

📚 Get the book: https://ericoneill.net/books/spies_and_lies/

📺 Review the Book: https://www.amazon.com/Spies-Lies-Cybercrime-Cybersecurity-Outsmart/dp/0063398176/

📖 Get a Signed copy: https://www.kensingtonrowbookshop.com

🎤 Book me to speak at your next event: https://www.bigspeak.com/speakers/eric-oneill

Appearance of the Week

I joined host David Puner on the Cyberark Podcast to take a deep dive into the mindset and tactics needed to defend against today’s sophisticated cyber threats. We discussed how thinking like an attacker can help organizations and individuals stay ahead. The episode covers actionable frameworks, real-world stories, and practical advice for building cyber resilience in an age of AI-driven scams and industrialized ransomware.

EP 19 - Trust under attack: Spies, lies, and the new face of cybercrime

Eric O’Neill, former FBI ghost and author of “Spies, Lies & Cybercrime,” joins host David Puner to take a deep dive into the mindset and tactics needed to defend against today’s sophisticated cyber threats. Drawing...

www.cyberark.com/podcasts/ep-19-trust-under-attack-spies-lies-and-the-new-face-of-cybercrime

AI Trend of the Week

I have to admit enjoying the newest AI tend that remixes iconic songs into a 1950s Motown Soul AI Cover. This remix of Eminem’s Without Me has got to be my favorite. And while you’re at it, join me over on Instagram.

Instagram post

Please support our sponsors by clicking below and giving them a look.

Realtime User Onboarding, Zero Engineering

Quarterzip delivers realtime, AI-led onboarding for every user with zero engineering effort.

✨ Dynamic Voice guides users in the moment
✨ Picture-in-Picture stay visible across your site and others
✨ Guardrails keep things accurate with smooth handoffs if needed

No code. No engineering. Just onboarding that adapts as you grow.

See how it works

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Let's make sure my emails land straight in your inbox.

Gmail users: Move this email to your primary inbox

On your phone? Hit the 3 dots at top right corner, click "Move to" then "Primary."

On desktop? Close this email then drag and drop this email into the "Primary" tab near the top left of your screen

Apple mail users: Tap on our email address at the top of this email (next to "From:" on mobile) and click “Add to VIPs”

For everyone else: follow these instructions

Honoring Our United States Veterans Today

I never served in the U.S. military, though I was supposed to. Instead, I served by joining the FBI and defending the country from within. My father served in the Navy on submarines. His father was a gunnery officer. My mother’s father served in the Army. I have uncles, brothers, cousins, and extended family who have worn the uniform, and an O’Neill has fought in every U.S. war since the Civil War.

Today, I honor them all — and every man and woman who has served. Here’s hoping the federal government honors them too… preferably by paying them!

Veterans Day is the perfect time to support a group that supports veterans. One I have supported for years is run by my friends TJ and Peggylee Wright in Huntsville, Alabama. The Huntsville SOF Network. Check them out. Now on to the Newsletter!

Saying Goodbye to the Future’s Past

For the past two weeks, we’ve been deep in the weeds of progress—how technology changes faster than we can say “update required.” Last week, we looked ahead to what’s coming. This week, we’re looking back—at what’s leaving.

The march of innovation doesn’t just build new things; it quietly buries the old ones. By 2030, many of today’s everyday tools will join the fax machine, floppy disk, and Blockbuster membership card in the great tech graveyard. So, pour one out for the analog comforts of the past—then get ready to delete them from your life.

Title Story

The Ghosts of Our Gadgets

Summers on the beach were simpler when I was a kid. My dad would pull out his Betamax video camera—roughly the size and weight of a bazooka—and aim it at my brothers and me running into the surf. We’d wave, dive, and laugh, completely unaware he was filming our childhood on a format already losing the war to VHS.

We built soundtracks for our lives one song at a time, fingers hovering over the record button on the boombox, praying the DJ wouldn’t talk over the intro. Rolls of quarters vanished into arcade machines like Gauntlet, where “Elf has stolen the food (again)” became the first harsh lesson in teamwork.

We memorized the planets—nine of them, thank you very much—until some distant committee decided Pluto was expendable. We jogged with Walkmans, then Discmans, running smoothly so the CD didn’t skip. We were human antennas, holding rabbit ears to keep the TV picture clear just long enough for Cal Ripken to hit one out of the park.

And when the day was done, we rushed home from school for G.I. Joe, then stayed up late for Knight Rider and Fantasy Island.

These moments, these relics, are fading into digital dust. But they built us—a generation that grew up between the analog and the algorithm. We didn’t just watch technology change; we lived through its awkward adolescence. And maybe that’s why we appreciate it differently. We remember what it felt like to press play.

Technologies That Will Disappear by 2030

The everyday relics we’ll soon leave behind

Passwords

Passkeys and biometrics are ending the era of memorized credentials. 🔗 Learn more — The Verge: The End of Passwords

Physical credit cards

Contactless and wearable payments already dominate; some banks now issue virtual-only cards. 🔗 Learn more — Reuters: Banks Phase Out Plastic Cards

Remote controls

Voice, motion, and AI context make pressing buttons obsolete—your home already knows what you want. 🔗 Learn more — CNET: The Smart Home Without Remotes

Cables

Wireless charging and ultra-wideband data transfer are freeing us from tangled cords for good. 🔗 Learn more — IEEE Spectrum: The Cable-Free Future

Traditional keys

Smart locks and facial recognition are replacing metal keys with mobile credentials. 🔗 Learn more — Wired: The Death of the Door Key

Paper receipts

Digital invoices and NFC billing are phasing out printed slips—some cities now make them “opt-in” only. 🔗 Learn more — Bloomberg: The Last Paper Receipt

Television channels

Streaming has killed the channel; AI-curated feeds now deliver personalized programming on demand. 🔗 Learn more — Variety: The Fall of Linear TV

Cash

Physical money is below 10% of transactions in most economies; digital currencies are next. 🔗 Learn more — BBC: The Slow Death of Cash

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Top 10 Useless Things from Growing Up Gen-X

We grew up rewinding tapes with pencils, blowing dust out of Nintendo cartridges, and memorizing phone numbers like it was a survival skill. Now, most of what once felt essential wouldn’t last a day in the 2030s. Here’s a look back at the relics Gen-X perfected, and the future has politely deleted.

1. Pluto was a planet

We memorized nine planets, made dioramas, and then—poof—science demoted our tiny frozen friend. Turns out even space isn’t safe from layoffs.

2. The Dewey Decimal System

We spent hours deciphering decimals to find books; now you just type “AI” and get an existential crisis on Google.

3. The food pyramid

Apparently, carbs aren’t a food group after all. Who knew that an entire childhood of white bread was a bad idea?

4. Microfiche

Nothing said “cutting-edge research” like squinting into a glowing box at blurry newspaper scans. Now, it’s all in your pocket.

5. Learning to type on a typewriter

You hit a wrong key, and it was permanent—no backspace, just shame. Now autocorrect saves us from our own thumbs.

6. Writing cursive

We were told it was a vital life skill. Turns out, no one’s written a check or love letter in cursive since 1999.

7. Writing checks

Standing in line while someone balanced their checkbook was a national pastime. Venmo killed that—and thank God.

8. Your math teacher: “You won’t always have a calculator!”

We now have a calculator, GPS, and the sum of human knowledge in our pockets—and still use it mostly for memes.

9. Learning to drive a manual transmission

It built character and calf muscles, but good luck finding a car—or a hill—that still cares. On a side note, my family recently visited Germany, land of manual transmission cars. I made certain that my brother-in-law taught my teenagers how to drive stick…to a great deal of creative cursing in Deutsch! 

10. Mixtape + VHS tape + CD collections

When I was a child my grandfather’s hobby was taping the Sunday TV matinee over onto VHS tapes. My brother and I would watch all the Universal monster classics on his grand TV, ignoring the jumps where grandpa was a bit slow on the pause button to skip the commercial. His hundreds of tapes, meticulously labeled and stored disappeared shortly after he passed away, a legacy no descendant wanted to curate. Like my grandpa, we spent hours recording the perfect playlist or taping over “MacGyver.” Now everything lives in the cloud, except the nostalgia.

We grew up in an analog world, where the hum of a VHS rewind or the click of a typewriter meant progress. Those sounds have faded, replaced by silent swipes and invisible clouds that somehow hold our lives. As we say goodbye to the tools that shaped us, we can’t help but wonder if the future will ever feel as tangible—or as human—as the world we left behind.

Order the Book the Launched the Newsletter

I hope you love the book as much as I loved writing it for you! Please leave a review. Great reviews help others find the book.

📚 Get the book: https://ericoneill.net/books/spies_and_lies/

📺 Please review the Book. Reviews are the secret weapon that triggers Amazon’s algorithm to share the book with thousands of new readers who might not otherwise find it — and might otherwise fall prey to an attack. https://www.amazon.com/Spies-Lies-Cybercrime-Cybersecurity-Outsmart/dp/0063398176/

 🙏 Please share! Forward this email to your friends and family. Here's an easy-to-post cover graphic, here's a Linkedin post, here's an IG reel and a post.

📚 Want a SIGNED COPY? Get one here.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

The Season of Scams

As the holiday sales start flooding your feed, so do the scammers. Fake online stores and “too good to be true” Black Friday deals are everywhere—especially on social media. That jaw-dropping 70% off ad for a gaming console or limited-edition toy? It might just be a phantom storefront waiting to take your payment and vanish.

Stay one step ahead: skip the ad and go directly to the retailer’s site. Use a credit card (not debit) for extra protection, and do a quick web search like “[retailer name] scam” before buying. And beware of fake charity or GoFundMe campaigns tugging at holiday heartstrings—verify before you give. This season, shop smart, scroll slow, and think twice before you click.

Appearances of the Week

Highlights from the Spies, Lies & Cybercrime book tour — national TV interviews detailing steps you can take to protect yourself from holiday scams.

Fox Chicago – “Cybersecurity Author Warns of Holiday Scams” Live from Chicago, Eric breaks down the latest holiday scams targeting shoppers and explains how to spot—and stop—them before it’s too late.

Spies, lies, and cybercrime

Eric O’Neill is a former FBI counterintelligence operative, famously helped capture Robert Hanssen, the most damaging spy in U.S. history. Now he’s turning his decades of insider expertise to one of today’s biggest threats that affects us all - cybercrime.

www.fox32chicago.com/video/1730697

NBC Austin – “Cybersecurity Expert on Holiday Scams” From fake charity drives to cloned retail sites, this NBC Austin segment explores the surge in seasonal scams and the practical defenses every consumer needs.

Cybersecurity expert on holiday scams

Cybersecurity expert, Eric O'Neill, sits down with KXAN to talk about the increased risk of online scams during the holiday season, and how you can protect yourself.

www.kxan.com/video/cybersecurity-expert-on-holiday-scams/11228477

CBS Minneapolis – “How to Avoid Being Scammed by AI” Eric joins CBS to discuss the dark side of generative AI — from deepfake fraud to impersonation scams — and what it means for trust in the digital age.

How to avoid being scammed by AI

Former FBI and cybersecurity expert Eric O'Neill says emails are still the number one way cyber attacks happen, but attackers are finding new ways.

www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/video/how-to-avoid-being-scammed-by-ai

ABC Fresno – “Tips to Avoid Cyber Scams During Holiday Shopping” Practical steps to protect your data, your wallet, and your holiday cheer while shopping online this season.

Tips to avoid cyber scams while holiday shopping

While many of us may be filling out our holiday wish lists, online scammers and spies are also hard at work.

abc30.com/post/tips-avoid-cyber-scams-holiday-shopping/18109278

Technology never says goodbye—it just replaces itself while you’re sleeping. The gadgets and habits that once defined us are quietly being erased by convenience. But maybe that’s progress: every generation thinks their tech was the last real one.

So, while the next upgrade steals your remote, your keys, and probably your wallet, take a moment to remember how far we’ve come—and how much we’ve let go.

Then, like a true Gen-Xer, shrug, grab a black coffee, and move on.

Stay Safe,

Eric

Me in the 80s.

Please give some love to our sponsor.

Realtime User Onboarding, Zero Engineering

Quarterzip delivers realtime, AI-led onboarding for every user with zero engineering effort.

✨ Dynamic Voice guides users in the moment
✨ Picture-in-Picture stay visible across your site and others
✨ Guardrails keep things accurate with smooth handoffs if needed

No code. No engineering. Just onboarding that adapts as you grow.

See how it works

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Let's make sure my emails land straight in your inbox.

Gmail users: Move this email to your primary inbox

On your phone? Hit the 3 dots at top right corner, click "Move to" then "Primary."

On desktop? Close this email then drag and drop this email into the "Primary" tab near the top left of your screen

Apple mail users: Tap on our email address at the top of this email (next to "From:" on mobile) and click “Add to VIPs”

For everyone else: follow these instructions

The Age of the Almost-Impossible

The future rarely arrives with a bang. It slips quietly through labs, algorithms, and prototypes until one day it’s ordinary.

Some technologies once dismissed as science fiction are already here. Others hover just beyond the horizon. And a few that once defined modern life are fading fast.

Here’s what’s emerging, what’s coming, and what’s vanishing.

Title Story

The Night Earth Found a Second Moon

It started as a blip.

At 3:12 a.m., high on Mauna Kea, a graduate researcher noticed something odd in the telescope data — a slow-moving object that shouldn’t have been there. Too steady to be space junk, too dim to be a passing satellite.

Hours later, astronomers confirmed it: a skyscraper-sized asteroid, cataloged as 2025 PN7, had slipped into a gravitational dance with Earth. For the next sixty years, it will circle the Sun in near-perfect sync with our planet — a celestial hitchhiker that, from our vantage point, seems to orbit us. A “quasi-moon.”

It won’t cause tidal shifts or eclipse the night sky. Most of us will never see it without a powerful telescope. But it’s there — trailing our world in quiet synchrony, like a ghost reflection of the Earth we know.

To scientists, it’s a rare orbital alignment.

To storytellers, it’s something more: a symbol of this strange era we’re entering — where the familiar world gains digital shadows, artificial doubles, and parallel versions that orbit just beyond sight.

In this special issue of Spies, Lies & Cybercrime, we’re stepping away from the covert world of espionage and cybercrime to explore the future itself — the technologies transforming what it means to be human… and the relics of the modern age that will soon fade into history.

A second moon. A second world.

Maybe the universe has been trying to tell us something all along.

Just as Earth has found its quiet twin in the sky, humanity is discovering new reflections of itself here on the ground — machines that think, devices that feel, and technologies that learn faster than we can adapt. The future is no longer a distant frontier; it’s orbiting closer every day.

In this issue, we’ll explore the breakthroughs already transforming our world, the innovations that will define the next century, and the technologies we’ll soon leave behind — a guided tour through our near future.

New Technologies of Today

Where science fiction has already crossed into daily life.

Breakthrough brain chip helps the blind see again

Stanford researchers have restored sight to patients with advanced macular degeneration using an implanted micro-chip paired with smart glasses—27 of 32 participants regained the ability to read within a year. The device, called PRIMA, converts infrared images into electrical signals that mimic natural vision, with some users achieving acuity as sharp as 20/42. 🔗 Learn more — Stanford Medicine: Restoring Sight with the PRIMA Implant

Retina E-Paper makes virtual reality indistinguishable from life

A Swedish team has created displays with 25,000 pixels per inch, exceeding what the human eye can discern. Using tungsten-oxide nanoparticle metapixels, the display reflects ambient light like e-paper but refreshes fast enough for video—offering VR so lifelike it’s hard to tell what’s real. 🔗 Learn more — Interesting Engineering: Retina E-Paper Breakthrough

Tesla’s synthetic driving worlds

Tesla now trains its self-driving AI inside simulated universes, driving millions of virtual miles per day. These synthetic environments expose the system to rare hazards—from black ice to kangaroos—without a single fender bender. 🔗 Learn more — MIT Technology Review: Inside Tesla’s Simulation Engine

Nike’s robotic shoes turn running into a cakewalk

Nike’s Project Amplify introduces the world’s first powered running system — shoes that act like a “second set of calf muscles,” propelling recreational runners up hills as if they were on flat ground. Designed for the 10–12 minute mile crowd, the tech blends biomechanics with robotics to reduce strain and boost endurance — though it may be years before this futuristic footwear hits store shelves. 🔗 Learn more — Fast Company: Inside Nike’s Project Amplify Robotic Running Shoes

Image Source: Nike

Amazon’s robotic revolution leaks

Internal documents reveal Amazon aims to automate up to 75% of its U.S. operations, replacing roughly 600,000 warehouse workers with mobile robots capable of real-time object recognition and navigation. 🔗 Learn more — The Information: Amazon’s Automation Ambitions

AI agents take the wheel of your browser

New platforms like ChatGPT’s Browser Atlas and Claude Desktop now browse, click, and schedule tasks for you—turning the web into an active assistant instead of a passive tool. 🔗 Learn more — OpenAI Blog: Custom GPTs and Browser Agents

Quantum supremacy draws closer

IBM’s 120-qubit Cat chip and Google’s Willow processor have demonstrated “verifiable quantum advantage,” completing complex calculations 13,000× faster than supercomputers. 🔗 Learn more — Quantum Computing Report: IBM and Google’s Quantum Leap

The boundary between human and machine, digital and physical, is already dissolving.

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

New Technologies of The Future

Visions in development that could define the next century

Human-level AI

Within 25 years, AI could match human reasoning and creativity. Neuromorphic processors—chips modeled on the brain—promise intelligence that learns, adapts, and consumes a fraction of current power. 🔗 Learn more — InvestorPlace: Neuromorphic Chips and the Future of AI

Fusion power

Fusion reactors are edging toward commercial reality, with experiments achieving net energy gain and new materials capable of surviving Sun-like plasma. Clean, limitless energy may soon be more than theory. 🔗 Learn more — Nature: Progress Toward Fusion Energy

Quantum internet

Entangled particles could transmit unhackable data across the planet. Early prototypes already link labs via quantum key distribution; next come intercontinental “quantum repeaters.” 🔗 Learn more — Scientific American: Building the Quantum Internet

Brain-computer interfaces

Neural chips are decoding inner speech with 74% accuracy and imagined movement in real time. “Telepathic typing” may soon move from experiment to everyday use. 🔗 Learn more — Forbes: AI Can Read Your Thoughts

Image Source: Forbes

Asteroid mining

Private companies are eyeing asteroids containing more platinum and nickel than Earth has ever mined. The next gold rush could happen in orbit. 🔗 Learn more — Space.com: The Coming Asteroid Mining Race

Space elevator

Carbon-nanotube cables may one day lift cargo 36,000 km into orbit—no rockets required. New studies suggest it’s more feasible than once believed. 🔗 Learn more — ScienceDirect: Mechanical Challenges of the Space Elevator

Colonies on Mars

NASA and private partners are testing 3D-printed habitats and in-situ resource use for the first human bases on Mars, expected by the 2040s. 🔗 Learn more — NASA: Mars Habitat Challenge

Tomorrow’s engineering projects aren’t dreams, they’re blueprints for the future.

Get the Book that Started the Newsletter

Thanks to all of you, my book, Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, is an instant national bestseller and an Amazon #1 Bestseller in a dozen categories.

1. f you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It makes a perfect holiday gift for anyone you want to protect from cyber scams.

2. Leave a 5-star review on Amazon. Reviews are the secret weapon that triggers Amazon’s algorithm to share the book with thousands of new readers who might not otherwise find it — and might otherwise fall prey to an attack.

3. Please share! Forward this email to your friends and family. Here's an easy-to-post cover graphic, here's a Linkedin post, here's an IG reel and a post.

4. Want a SIGNED COPY? Get one here.

“An astonishingly up-to-date review of the tools and techniques used by criminal hackers…O’Neill will have you on the edge of your seat.” —Marc Goodman, New York Times bestselling author of Future Crimes

The future isn’t waiting at the horizon anymore—it’s already orbiting us, quietly reshaping how we live, work, and think. Like our newfound “second moon,” these innovations circle closer each year, altering our gravity without fanfare. Some of what we build will illuminate humanity’s brilliance; some will fade into digital dust. But every advance, every vanished relic, and every artificial twin we create brings us closer to answering the question that has followed us since we first looked up at the stars: what kind of world are we choosing to build next?

Stay Safe,

Eric

A quick word from our sponsor. Please click and check them out!

Personalized Onboarding for Every User

Quarterzip makes user onboarding seamless and adaptive. No code required.

✨ Analytics and insights track onboarding progress, sentiment, and revenue opportunities
✨ Branding and personalization match the assistant’s look, tone, and language to your brand.
✨ Guardrails keep things accurate with smooth handoffs if needed

Onboarding that’s personalized, measurable, and built to grow with you.

See how it works

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Let's make sure my emails land straight in your inbox.

Gmail users: Move this email to your primary inbox

On your phone? Hit the 3 dots at top right corner, click "Move to" then "Primary."

On desktop? Close this email then drag and drop this email into the "Primary" tab near the top left of your screen

Apple mail users: Tap on our email address at the top of this email (next to "From:" on mobile) and click “Add to VIPs”

For everyone else: follow these instructions

This week cybercrime has taken an unprecedented backseat to physical crime! The famous Louvre Museum in Paris gets robbed and the mafia has leapt back onto the scene in two shocking, and related stories where NBA basketball, the mafia and poker collide!

Before we get to it, I have a favor to ask. If you’ve read my new book Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, or listened to the audible version (with me reading it!) please leave me a review on Amazon. The more reviews, the more Amazon pushed the book before the eyes (and hopefully into the hands) of other future spy hunters.

Title Story

The Paris Heist, the Mafia’s Comeback, and the Return of the Old World Criminal

Early Sunday morning on October 19, 2025, the doors of the Louvre Museum opened to the public as usual. By around 9:30 a.m., in the stepped halls beneath the glass pyramid, a small team of four intruders struck. They arrived mounted on a basket-lift truck parked outside the Seine façade, climbed into the air, forced a window on the second floor, and entered the gallery that holds France’s remaining crown jewels: the ornate Galerie d’Apollon. 

Map courtesy of the BBC.

Inside, guards were threatened and forced to evacuate. Within minutes, sparks flew as the thieves sliced through two display cases, grabbed eight royal artifacts—including a diamond bow once worn by Empress Eugénie—and fled. By 9:38, they were gone, weaving into Paris traffic on two scooters, their $102 million haul hidden under tool bags.

The Louvre’s director later told French senators that the only exterior camera facing the wall had been angled away, leaving the balcony and window unmonitored. A third of the rooms in that section had no CCTV at all. The heist lasted four minutes in a museum famous for security.

Investigators say the criminals were undeterred by the presence of guards and tourists. They neither used guns nor caused visible bloodshed. Instead, they relied on speed, stealth, and structural access from below—parking the lift, climbing into the gallery early, and slipping out before full security could mobilize. 

Police flooded Paris, collecting DNA, fingerprints, and security footage from nearby streets. One week later, investigators made their first arrests: two men known for jewelry theft, one caught at Charles de Gaulle Airport as he tried to flee the country. Their DNA matched samples lifted from the scene. Both are now in custody, and the hunt for their partners (and the missing jewels) continues.

The backdrop adds weight: much of France’s royal-jewel collection was lost during the Revolution, and surviving pieces were auctioned off in the 19th century, bought in large part by an American jewel magnate. These eight objects were among the last remaining physical links to a monarchy that France renounced—and now they’re stolen again. Security at the Louvre is now under scrutiny. 

A crown worn by French Empress Eugénie was targeted by thieves during a heist at Paris’ Louvre Museum on October 19, but was dropped during their escape.

A jewel-encrusted brooch worn by French Empress Eugénie.

A tiara adorned with pearls worn by French Empress Eugénie.

The Crown Jewels.

The thieves’ choices suggest careful reconnaissance. They picked the gallery where the priceless jewels were on display, timed the entry just after opening, used external access from a construction façade, and left behind tools and the lift truck that still bear forensic marks.

The Louvre reopened its doors, but the Galerie d’Apollon remains sealed. The jewels, relics of kings and emperors, have vanished. Not to war or revolution, but to precision, timing, and someone who knew exactly where the cameras didn’t look.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

How to Spot a Trusted Insider

Every great heist begins with trust. The Louvre thieves may have slipped in through a second-floor window, but it’s likely that someone opened a different kind of door for them. Maybe it was a contractor who knew that the cameras weren’t watching that street. Maybe a staff member shared the security protocols and response time for an armed theft. However it happened, they exploited what every spy and every cybercriminal knows: it’s easier to be invited in than to break in.

The same rule applies in cybersecurity. Most breaches don’t start with a hacker in a hoodie; they start with an insider—an employee, contractor, or partner—who already has access. Sometimes the betrayal is intentional: a disgruntled worker, a spy, or someone offered money by a competitor or foreign actor. More often, it’s unintentional: a person tricked by social engineering, spear-phishing, or simple curiosity.

Insiders leave traces before they leave the building. Watch for the patterns that don’t fit. An employee suddenly working odd hours, accessing systems they normally wouldn’t. Someone downloading large amounts of data “for backup.” Staff who grow defensive when questioned about projects or who seem unreasonably curious about unrelated information. Even small anomalies—a USB drive that keeps reappearing on desks, a badge scan after hours—should trigger a quiet review, not a shrug. Most importantly, build a culture where people aren’t afraid to speak up. Insiders thrive in silence.

The Louvre’s jewels were protected by glass, sensors, and guards. None of it mattered if someone inside shared the map. The same is true in every company that treats cybersecurity as a technology problem instead of a people problem. Spies don’t breach firewalls, they exploit trust.

Crime of the Week

The Mafia Makes a Comeback

Cybercrime has dominated headlines for years—but this week, old-school organized crime muscled its way back into the spotlight. In an FBI sting stretching across 11 states, over 30 people were arrested, including Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups.

The charges: wire fraud, money laundering, extortion, and illegal gambling. Also, a link to the mafia: the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families.

According to the DOJ, two intertwined conspiracies emerged. The first was a sports-betting scheme exploiting insider NBA information. Players would allegedly sit, feign injury, or exit early, allowing insiders to “bet the under” and make a small fortune. The second was a high-tech poker operation where former NBA players (A.K.A. mob-backed “Face Cards”) would entice wealthy VIPS into rigged games of Poker. Unbeknownst to the “Fish,” everyone at the table, including the NGA celebrity and the dealer was in on the scam. They even used wireless cheating devices and Xray machines to rig the game.

The FBI called it “one of the most brazen sports corruption cases since sports betting became legal.”

It’s a reminder that while ransomware may rule the digital world, the analog crooks never retired—they just waited for the odds to swing their way. When sports, tech, and the mob overlap, the house doesn’t win. The house is complicit.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

SpyCraft Insight

Every crime in this issue, from Paris to Portland, turns on one truth: information pays. The Louvre thieves knew the museum’s blind spots. The mafia knew which athletes to reach and how to hook VIP “fishes” with athletes in their pocket. In both cases, the advantage was knowledge, not strength or skill. Spies, hackers, and hustlers all live by the same rule: whoever controls the information controls the outcome.

To turn the tables we need to think like the spies and criminals that seek to deceive us so that we can recognize the threat and respond like Spy Hunters. This begins with knowledge of our own that takes the playbook from the adversary and allows us to know their moves before they make them. Fortunately, there’s a bestselling book for that!

Love the Newsletter? Get the bestselling book!

Thanks to all of you, my book, Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, is an instant national bestseller and an Amazon #1 Bestseller.

1. f you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It makes a perfect holiday gift for anyone you want to protect from cyber scams.

2. Leave a 5-star review on Amazon. Reviews are the secret weapon that triggers Amazon’s algorithm to share the book with thousands of new readers who might not otherwise find it — and might otherwise fall prey to an attack.

3. Please share! Forward this email to your friends and family. Here's an easy-to-post cover graphic, here's a Linkedin post, here's an IG reel and a post.

4. Want a SIGNED COPY? Get one here.

Appearances of the Week

I’ve been busy promoting Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime and informing viewers and readers everywhere to be careful of online threats and the upcoming holiday scams.

Here I am in a Forbes interview discussing the AWS outage that caused mayhem across the internet.

Here I am on NTD News and Fox 32 Chicago speaking about Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime and tips to protect yourself and your family from cybercriminals.

And finally, in an Interview with the New York Post talking about what the CIA’s covert operations in Venezuela might mean.

AI Trend of the Week

Cats. With guns.

It’s the latest AI fever dream—hyper-realistic, cinematic felines armed to the teeth, spreading from Sora to TikTok and Instagram like digital wildfire.

AI keeps blurring the line between creativity and absurdity. So, what do you think—brilliant satire, or the moment we officially lost the plot?

Instagram post

Realtime User Onboarding, Zero Engineering

Quarterzip delivers realtime, AI-led onboarding for every user with zero engineering effort.

✨ Dynamic Voice guides users in the moment
✨ Picture-in-Picture stay visible across your site and others
✨ Guardrails keep things accurate with smooth handoffs if needed

No code. No engineering. Just onboarding that adapts as you grow.

See how it works

Praise for Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime!

"O’Neill deftly attests [that] taking proper precautions can limit, if not halt, the damage wrought by unscrupulous cybercriminals. His masterful book serves as an important guide for individuals and companies committed to avoiding an epic misstep." — Booklist

“One breach can sink a business—or a billion-dollar idea.” —Marc Randolph, Co-Founder and First CEO of Netflix

“A chilling and essential wake-up call that reads like a thriller, but every word is terrifyingly real.” –Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Edge of Honor

Order Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

I hope you love the book as much as I loved writing it for you! Please leave a review. Great reviews help others find the book.

📚 Get the book: https://ericoneill.net/books/spies_and_lies/

📺 Review the Book: https://www.amazon.com/Spies-Lies-Cybercrime-Cybersecurity-Outsmart/dp/0063398176/

🎤 Book me to speak at your next event: https://www.bigspeak.com/speakers/eric-oneill

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Let's make sure my emails land straight in your inbox.

Gmail users: Move this email to your primary inbox

On your phone? Hit the 3 dots at top right corner, click "Move to" then "Primary."

On desktop? Close this email then drag and drop this email into the "Primary" tab near the top left of your screen

Apple mail users: Tap on our email address at the top of this email (next to "From:" on mobile) and click “Add to VIPs”

For everyone else: follow these instructions

Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

Love the Newsletter? Get the bestselling book!

Thanks to all of you, my book, Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime, is an instant national bestseller and an Amazon #1 Bestseller.

1. f you haven’t already, please buy SPIES, LIES, AND CYBERCRIME. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. It makes a perfect holiday gift for anyone you want to protect from cyber scams.

2. Leave a 5-star review on Amazon. Reviews are the secret weapon that triggers Amazon’s algorithm to share the book with thousands of new readers who might not otherwise find it — and might otherwise fall prey to an attack.

3. Please share! Forward this email to your friends and family. Here's an easy-to-post cover graphic, here's a Linkedin post, here's an IG reel and a post.

4. Want a SIGNED COPY? Get one here.

Now back to our regularly scheduled NEWSLETTER!

—Eric

Title Story

Scamtoberfest Vol. 2: The Bitcoin Heist

Jeremy was eighty-one years old and proud of his independence. He balanced his own checkbook, paid his bills at the kitchen table, and visited the same neighborhood bank every Friday. He’d never fallen for a scam—not once.

One morning his phone rang.

“Mr. Whitmore, this is Daniel Foster from your bank’s fraud department,” said the calm, professional voice on the line. “We’ve detected suspicious activity in your account — possible money laundering tied to drug smuggling.”

Jeremy’s heart kicked hard in his chest. “That can’t be right,” he said.

“I believe you, sir,” the man replied. “You’re not under investigation. But your account is. If we don’t act immediately, federal authorities could freeze your funds. I’m going to help you move your money to a secure government wallet while we clear your name. You just have to follow my instructions.”

It sounded official, urgent, and safe.

The man told Jeremy to go straight to his bank and withdraw his entire savings account, all $18,000. “Don’t mention this call to anyone,” he said. “The branch itself could be compromised. If a teller asks questions, say you’re paying for home renovations.”

Jeremy complied. Fear does that.

He kept the “specialist” on speakerphone the entire time—in the car, in the teller line, all the way back home. When he returned, the man asked him to take a photo of the cash and text it to a number for “verification.”

Jeremy did. Within seconds, the man texted back: “Perfect. Now let’s secure those funds. There’s a Bitcoin ATM inside the QuickMart on Route 7. Drive there now. I’ll stay on the line and guide you.”

The voice never wavered. It was calm. Authoritative. Reassuring.

As Jeremy drove, the man explained that traditional wire transfers were unsafe—that hackers could intercept them. Only cryptocurrency, he said, could guarantee protection.

At the QuickMart, Jeremy found the glowing orange kiosk just where the man said it would be. The “specialist” texted him a QR code and told him to scan it. Jeremy followed each instruction exactly: insert the cash, one stack at a time; scan the code; confirm the amount.

The machine beeped. Transaction Complete.

“Excellent,” the man said. “Your funds are now secure. Stay by your phone for confirmation.”

Then the line went dead.

Jeremy waited an hour. Then two. He called back. The number was disconnected.

He finally phoned his real bank. After a long pause, the woman in the fraud department said gently, “Mr. Whitmore, we don’t have anyone named Daniel Foster. And we would never ask you to use a Bitcoin ATM.”

Jeremy didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. He already knew.

He hadn’t secured his money. He’d handed it away. Every dollar.

The Anatomy of a Modern Scam

Jeremy’s story follows the same pattern that’s sweeping the country:

• Create urgency and fear. Scammers claim a bank account is linked to criminal activity or under investigation.

• Control the conversation. They keep victims on the line, feeding instructions and isolating them from anyone who might intervene.

• Direct to a crypto ATM. The victim withdraws cash, drives to a convenience store or gas station, and deposits it into a machine.

• Scan the scammer’s QR code. The funds go directly to an anonymous digital wallet where they are gone forever.

In 2024 alone, the FBI received nearly 11,000 complaints involving crypto ATMs, totaling over $246 million in losses. The FTC reports another $65 million lost in just the first half of the year. Most of it lost by older Americans like Jeremy.

How to Avoid the Crypto ATM Trap

1. No legitimate authority will ask for payment in crypto. If anyone claims to be from your bank, the IRS, or law enforcement and directs you to a Bitcoin ATM, hang up immediately.

2. Don’t act under pressure. Scammers use fear to make you move fast. Real financial institutions don’t threaten arrest or frozen accounts over the phone.

3. Confirm the caller. Hang up and call your bank or agency directly using a known, official number. Not one texted or provided during the call.

4. Don’t scan QR codes from strangers. That “secure wallet” address belongs to the thief.

5. Report it immediately. If you or someone you know falls victim, file a complaint at IC3.gov (FBI) or ReportFraud.FTC.gov. In some states, like Iowa, you may be entitled to a refund from the ATM operator if you act quickly.

Cybersecurity Breach of the Week

Those Toll Texts Aren’t What They Seem

We’ve all gotten them—the “past-due toll,” “USPS delivery fee,” or “unpaid ticket” texts that pop up like digital gnats. Turns out, they’re not random spam but part of a billion-dollar criminal enterprise run out of China.

Over the past three years, investigators say these scams have siphoned off more than $1 billion by tricking victims into handing over their credit card details. The stolen data is loaded into mobile wallets in Asia, bypassing multi-factor authentication, and then shared with gig workers in the U.S. who buy iPhones, luxury goods, and gift cards. Those goods get shipped to China and resold—laundered clean, one fraudulent purchase at a time.

SIM Farm. Source: Wired Magazine

Behind the flood of fake toll messages are “SIM farms,” warehouses stacked with thousands of SIM cards that can send millions of texts a day. DHS investigators have found these setups across U.S. cities, operated remotely but built locally by gig workers recruited over apps like WeChat. It’s an industrial-scale cyber hustle powered by social engineering and clever tech manipulation—one that shows how a simple text can be the front line of global organized cybercrime.

Cybersecurity Tip of the Week

Don’t Pay the Toll Trolls

1. Never click payment links in texts or emails. If you think you owe a toll, open the agency’s official website or app directly.

2. Ignore the “urgency.” Real agencies don’t threaten account suspension over text. Scammers count on panic to override common sense.

3. Lock down your cards. Use banks that offer virtual or single-use card numbers, and enable alerts for every purchase.

4. Protect your digital wallet. If a site ever asks for a one-time password (OTP) outside your bank’s app, stop—that’s a theft in progress.

5. Report and delete. Forward scam texts to 7726 (SPAM) to help carriers block future campaigns.

Are you beginning to see the trends with Scamtoberfest scams? Attackers are using traditional espionage tactics of deception, impersonation and pushing victims into pressure situations that short circuit rational thought. The number one tip I have to avoid these scams is to be aware of them in the first place. Number two? Avoid the pressure situation.

Appearance of the Week

I joined CNN last week to discuss deepfakes, online scams and how to keep yourself safe online. We also discuss how to protect children online from bullying, exploitation and extortion in a connected world.

Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime Gets a Window in Manhattan

I also traveled to New York City last week to sign books at the Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Here are some images from the event, including the window for the book! Cool, right? If you’re in Manhattan, send me pictures of you in front of the window.

Outside the window.

Signing books!

She’s reading about Imposter scams.

Signed by the author 😀

AI Trend of the Week

A quick word about trust by an AI generated video, made from an AI generated image of a hacker using Sora 2.

The Game is Changing

The internet was supposed to make it easier to build and connect. Somewhere along the way, we lost the plot.

beehiiv is changing that once and for all.

On November 13, they’re unveiling what’s next at their first-ever Winter Release Event. For the people shaping the future of content, community, and media, this is an event you can’t miss.

RSVP today

Praise for Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime!

"O’Neill deftly attests [that] taking proper precautions can limit, if not halt, the damage wrought by unscrupulous cybercriminals. His masterful book serves as an important guide for individuals and companies committed to avoiding an epic misstep." — Booklist

“One breach can sink a business—or a billion-dollar idea.” —Marc Randolph, Co-Founder and First CEO of Netflix

“A chilling and essential wake-up call that reads like a thriller, but every word is terrifyingly real.” –Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Edge of Honor

“An astonishingly up-to-date review of the tools and techniques used by criminal hackers…O’Neill will have you on the edge of your seat.” —Marc Goodman, New York Times bestselling author of Future Crimes

Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime is a must-read that will open your eyes and will change how you think about trust, technology, and the threats we face." --Jenn Donahue, Author: Becoming The Warrior, award-winning Engineer, Keynote Speaker, US Navy Captain (ret), Entrepreneur

Order Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime

I hope you love the book as much as I loved writing it for you! Please leave a review. Great reviews help others find the book.

📚 Get the book: https://ericoneill.net/books/spies_and_lies/

📺 Review the Book: https://www.amazon.com/Spies-Lies-Cybercrime-Cybersecurity-Outsmart/dp/0063398176/

🎤 Book me to speak at your next event: https://www.bigspeak.com/speakers/eric-oneill

Like What You're Reading?

Don’t miss a newsletter! Subscribe to Spies, Lies & Cybercrime for our top espionage, cybercrime and security stories delivered right to your inbox. Always weekly, never intrusive, totally secure.

Let's make sure my emails land straight in your inbox.

Gmail users: Move this email to your primary inbox

On your phone? Hit the 3 dots at top right corner, click "Move to" then "Primary."

On desktop? Close this email then drag and drop this email into the "Primary" tab near the top left of your screen

Apple mail users: Tap on our email address at the top of this email (next to "From:" on mobile) and click “Add to VIPs”

For everyone else: follow these instructions