Host Jack Rhysider narrates true hacking, breach, and privacy stories from the people involved.
Darknet Diaries makes cybercrime feel human-sized: a cheap gaming PC ships with malware, an old hacker magazine changes a scene, a database clue cracks open an intrusion. The show favors plain explanations, vivid setup, and interviews that turn technical incidents into suspenseful stories.
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Darknet Diaries is hosted and narrated by Jack Rhysider, who frames each episode as a specific, real incident rather than general tech news or commentary. The format alternates between one-on-one interviews with security practitioners recounting their own experiences and narrated historical episodes that reconstruct events using archival material and named sources. Interview episodes have featured an application security specialist describing a botched early pen test and a government data breach she learned about from a journalist, an anonymous IT operations lead managing security across a multi-site European manufacturer, and a Swedish programmer describing his arrest in Ecuador on an anonymous tip tied to the Julian Assange case. Narrated episodes cover topics such as the 1984 AT&T breakup, phone phreaking, bulletin board systems, and the founding of the Legion of Doom, drawing on figures like Lloyd Blankenship, author of the 1986 Hacker Manifesto. Recurring themes include penetration testing, incident response, dark web data sales, hacker history and culture, enterprise security operations, and privacy and digital-rights activism. Guests are generally people directly involved in the story being told — hackers, security engineers, or activists — rather than outside commentators. Some stories run across two episodes, with the second part assuming familiarity with the first. Episodes are sponsored by cybersecurity vendors including ThreatLocker, Vanta, Black Hills Information Security, SpyCloud, and Delete.me, with ad reads worked into the show's framing. The show suits listeners with an existing interest in cybersecurity or hacking history rather than a general true-crime audience. Production combines interview audio with host-narrated scene-setting rather than a panel or roundtable format.
Made for: Cybersecurity and IT professionals and listeners interested in hacking history and first-person breach or incident-response stories.
What sets it apart: Builds each episode around one person's first-person account or a specific historical reconstruction rather than roundup commentary or panel discussion of general security news.
Explore true stories of the dark side of the Internet with host Jack Rhysider as he takes you on a journey through the chilling world of hacking, data breaches, and cyber crime. ¿Hablas español? Escucha en español aquí ➔ https://darknetdiaries.com/es/
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Darknet Diaries makes cybercrime understandable by pairing precise technical explanations with patient accounts of the people facing their consequences.
Darknet Diaries follows computer intrusions from the first technical weakness to the human consequences that follow. Jack Rhysider combines narration with extended guest accounts, moving between security culture, criminal investigations, and the institutions responding to them.
A bad password policy is all Jack needs to escort you from curiosity into consequences.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A quiet permissions failure becomes an unsanctioned test, then a six-year prison sentence.
Darknet Diaries' "Ubiquiti" follows Nick, a remote worker who discovers credentials inside Ubiquiti's systems with access likened to a password vault, or the key to the castle.
A security story where a fake application and weak API expose 80,000 InfraGard members.
Identity theft begins in Albuquerque in 1988, then widens into a sharp look at how borrowed personal information, misplaced trust, and one application form can pry open a security system. The story moves from William Woods at a hot dog stand to U.S.
An 1888 telephone story opens onto a constitutional fight over what one FBI letter made possible to challenge.
A story that begins in 1888, with an undertaker and telephone operators, widens into a clear account of hidden access, government power, and the FBI letter that made a secretive practice possible to contest.
A scam spotted on the wires gives this cybersecurity story a clear human hook.
The episode finds its footing with Liam at Symantec, watching activity on the wires and catching the shape of a scam inside the network. That point of view gives the story a clean human scale: someone paying close attention, seeing trouble emerge, and giving the host a way into…
A Sophos firewall investigation uses a specialist kernel implant to reveal what sat around the attacker.
Darknet Diaries frames a 2018 cyber attack as a careful lesson in what defenders can learn when an intruder's own environment comes partly into view.
A tense setup for the Legion of Doom story, where hacker myth gives way to institutional panic.
Darknet Diaries' "LoD" follows the Legion of Doom out of hacker folklore and into the panic around a phone-system outage. It opens with the charged language of hacker identity, then settles into the messier history: Frack, bulletin board systems, trashing at telco offices, LOD…
A patient Darknet Diaries case about SQL injection, database logs, and Tanya noticing the strange pattern inside the noise.
Darknet Diaries' "Tanya" starts in the dry world of corporate security policy, then slides into the kind of case this show does best: an investigation built from logs, small anomalies, and one person refusing to shrug off a pattern that feels wrong.
A tense Darknet Diaries episode about Ola Binney's Ecuador arrest and the bureaucratic machinery that kept him in the dark.
Ola Binney's story turns Darknet Diaries into a legal trapdoor. Jack opens with a teenage lesson in rotten password policy, then the episode drops into something colder: a technical person arrested in Ecuador, treated as dangerous, and left trying to work out what anyone thought…
David Pierce and Verge staffers cover AI industry news, gadgets, and tech policy weekly.
Aria Knight breaks down one AI case study per episode, from Amazon's biased hiring tool to TikTok's voice cloning.
Season-long reported deep dives into one giant company at a time, from Disney to Tesla.
Brian McCullough's daily tech news digest, mixing solo rundowns with reporter interviews.
Darknet Diaries: “Ubiquiti” follows Nicholas Sharp, a Ubiquiti cloud engineer earning $250,000 a year who used company access to download more than 100 private repositories.
Darknet Diaries’ “National Public Data” connects Matthew Kieran’s 31-year impersonation of William Woods to a later breach involving 2.9 billion lines of personal data.
Darknet Diaries: NSL follows host Jack Recider's interview with internet provider Nick Merrill about receiving a secret FBI National Security Letter.
Darknet Diaries’ “Bayrob” follows Symantec malware analyst Liam Amarku as he investigates software that intercepted eBay sessions and displayed fraudulent auctions.
Darknet Diaries: Pacific Rim follows Andrew Brandt and Craig Jones as Sophos investigates attackers who moved from an Intel NUC behind a sales-office TV to CyberRome firewall source code.
Darknet Diaries' “Tarjeteros” follows Alberto Yussi Lajud Pena and seven Yonkers associates who use cloned prepaid debit cards in a coordinated New York ATM operation.
Darknet Diaries “MoD” is only represented here by the show’s opening, which says this is part two of a story that started in the previous episode.
Darknet Diaries host Jack Recider traces the origins of hacker culture through the 1980s freaker movement, the 1984 AT&T breakup, and the formation of the Legion of Doom — one of the earliest organized hacker groups.
Darknet Diaries: ThreatLocker opens with Jack Recider saying the episode is "brought to you by ThreatLocker" and framing the segment as "true stories from the dark side of the internet." The first guest is kept anonymous, but says they are the group head of IT operations for a manufacturing company with 1,000 employees across 17 sites in the UK and Europe.
The episode tells the story of the Cardiff Giant, a famous 19th-century hoax where a fake petrified giant was created and displayed for profit.
Darknet Diaries host Jack Recider interviews application security specialist Tanya Jenka, who traces her career from software developer to security leader through a series of specific incidents.
Host Jack Rhysider interviews a hacker named Nathan who shares his story of cyber crimes, starting from a Twitter DM and leading to a deep investigation.
Jack Recider of Darknet Diaries interviews Ola Bini, a Swedish programmer and privacy activist living in Ecuador, about his arrest on April 11, 2019 at Quito's airport.
An interview with a hacker who started stealing internet dial-up accounts as a teenager in Vietnam.
Host Jack Rhysider previews DEF CON hacking conference and introduces true stories from the dark side of the Internet.
Host Jack Rhysider calls his father to verify a forgotten story from his senior year of high school about taking a typing class.
This episode features an interview with BBC cyber correspondent Joe Tidy, discussing his expertise in hacking and cybercrime, including his background and the 2014 Sony PlayStation Network and Xbox Live DDoS attack.
The host is excited.
DEF CON starts the whole thing.
A narrator recounts a Las Vegas craps game encounter with an old man who employs a bodyguard not for actual protection but as a deterrent, revealing a clever deception.
The host visits Joe Grand in his workshop-like office to discuss his projects, tools, and stories related to hacking and electronics.
This episode discusses a real kidnapping case in Toronto involving cryptocurrency and introduces K&R insurance as protection against such threats.
The narrator describes their experience riding unlocked company bikes at tech campuses in Silicon Valley and questions why these bikes aren't stolen despite being freely accessible.
Host Jack Rhysider shares a personal story about his obsession with buying an expensive camera he couldn't afford, leading to a change in his photography habits.
Host Jack Rhysider interviews a security researcher who admits to engaging in black hat hacking, including robbing banks and hacking governments.
Host Jack Rhysider shares a personal story about learning from online feedback and corrects a past mistake in this episode about true stories from the dark side of the internet.
Host Jack Rhysider tells the story of legendary con artist Victor Lustig, who famously sold the Eiffel Tower in a scam.
Host Jack Rhysider introduces the concept of devoted fans using the Apple Scruffs as an analogy before transitioning to the show's theme of dark Internet stories.
This episode explores insider trading in the stock market, using a clip from the film Wall Street to introduce the concept, then transitions into true stories of cyber crime.
This episode explores insider threats in physical venues and transitions into a true story about hacking and data breaches.
This episode recounts how a phishing email tricked Barbara Corcoran's bookkeeper into wiring $400,000, illustrating the vulnerability of humans to social engineering attacks.
Host Jack Rhysider introduces two stories: a podcast episode about a mysterious hack on a major security company, and a short, gross story later.
A network security engineer recounts how he used packet capture to uncover the identities of toxic players in a mobile game's chat.
The episode discusses the shift from physical heists to cyber heists, using cryptocurrency and hacking as the new tools for large-scale theft.
Host Jack Rhysider shares a personal story about using a Perl program to simulate craps betting strategies, leading to a flawed discovery and a lesson about the house edge.
A five-year-old bypasses Xbox parental controls by exploiting a password vulnerability, illustrating a real-world hacking incident.
A CIA operation uses a dog disguise to infiltrate a high-security compound.
Host Jack Rhysider recounts visiting DEF CON's Roots village where a 10-year-old girl hacked a farming game by manipulating her phone's clock and Wi-Fi.