Criminals offer reporter money to hack BBC

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Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

You're listening to the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

Hello, I'm Oliver Conway.

This edition is published at 16 hours GMT on Monday, the 29th of September.

Hackers have tried to recruit our cyber correspondent, offering him a share of the ransom in return for access to the BBC computer systems.

We'll have the story.

As we record this podcast, President Trump is due to meet the Israeli Prime Minister to discuss a new US plan to end the war in Gaza.

And can Europe stop Russia's drones?

Also in the podcast.

This variation which gives a stripey colour, it looks a bit like a sunrise or a sunset, that relates to the vitamin D content, which is because it's called the sunshine vitamin.

Could genetically modified tomatoes boost our health?

Now, if you want to hack into an organization's computer network, is it a good idea to target their cyber specialist?

Well, our cyber correspondent, Joe Tidy, has recently been contacted by criminals hoping to get into the BBC system.

They promised him a large cut of any ransom if he gave them his login details, as Joe Tidy himself explains.

They offered me quite a deal.

So this was a random message that I received from someone calling themselves syndicate on the encrypted chat app signal.

And they said, we would like you to hand over your password, login and security codes, and we'll give you a share of the ransom that we will extract from the BBC.

So they wanted an in and they hoped that I would be it.

And they were hoping to basically steal as much private data as they could or install some malicious software, maybe ransomware, and then get the BBC to pay them tens of millions of pounds in a ransom.

And I would get a decent chunk of that.

They offered me 25% of the ransom.

Obviously, I had no intention of selling out the BBC, but I sort of played along for a few days to try and find out how these things work because this is a thing.

The insider threat is something that we talk about in cybersecurity, but it's very rare to kind of have that first-hand insight of it.

And so did at any point these criminals get close to getting into the BBC systems?

Well, no, I mean, I was in control the whole time, but there was this very troubling moment at the end, which was quite, well, genuinely quite chilling for me because after about three days of playing along with these criminals, they wanted me to run a piece of code on my laptop to see what kind of IT access I had in order for them to kind of work out their next steps of once I hand over my password and login, what would they do?

How would they go about hacking the BBC?

And I didn't want to do that because I was sort of worried that it might actually give them some sort of information that could put the BBC in jeopardy.

So I sort of stalled for time and tried to get the IT team to

talk to me about it on Monday.

This was Sunday afternoon, but they ran out of patience, these hackers.

They're from a gang called Medusa, and they bombarded my phone with login requests through our authenticator app.

So, you know, when you try and log into your BBC account or any accounts, I suppose people listening will have this as well.

It comes up with a, is this you trying to log in?

And you click accept.

So I had every minute for about an hour, I had these pop-ups coming on my phone.

And it was, and again, this is a technique I know about.

This is something I've reported on called multi-factor

bombing, an MFA bomb.

And I knew not to do anything.

I knew basically to leave my phone alone and don't open it because, you know, I could accidentally let the criminals in.

But

it was a very troubling thing to be on the other, on the receiving end of.

I would liken it to kind of like you're talking to a criminal on the phone, and then suddenly they're at your front door and they're banging quite aggressively on your door.

Joe Tidy talking to Rob Young.

From hacking to another kind of scam and President Trump has posted a now deleted video promoting fake news about something called med beds.

The footage appears to have been generated by AI and describes what would be an extraordinary innovation in healthcare if it were real.

It shows space age pods which are quote designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength.

The claim that these can restore lost limbs or reverse aging is popular among QAnon conspiracy theorists.

I heard more about the video from our correspondent, Mike Wendling.

It is all fake, the report that Donald Trump posted is fake, and the idea of med beds, which there's various different strands, but basically it's a miracle cure that people posit has been hidden from the public by the government, by big pharma, and that these med beds, you lie in in them and it can cure, like you said in the intro, all sorts of different things, but it's complete fiction.

And you've actually visited a med bed facility.

What did you make of it?

I did.

It was quite a sad place.

It was an old hotel.

Some of the signage of the hotel chain that had owned the building was still visible.

But the skeleton medical staff

that was in the hotel sort of led me to a room.

Underneath the bed in that room, there were a bunch of canisters filled with, as far as I could tell, sort of inert material.

And they said, lie down and you will feel rejuvenated and restored in about an hour.

I talked to some of the people who used these in a more, I guess, credulous way.

And, you know, I have to say that they were people who

were fed up with the American health care system and had some very serious illnesses and they couldn't find help.

So that's the kind of people who are being preyed upon, honestly, by some of these medbed care providers.

Yeah, so what will be the impact of President Trump posting this video?

Well, he has deleted it.

And I don't think this will be more than a blip.

It is a message to his followers, a message to the people who believe in these things and believe in QAnon type things.

But I don't think it's going to have a very long-lasting impact, if I'm honest, on American healthcare policy.

But Monty's deleted it.

Others could, of course, have already reposted it.

Oh, absolutely.

And there was a a fair amount of chatter about it yesterday when it did appear.

You know, if you believe in these kinds of things, you see this as a secret symbol, you know, a secret message to you endorsing your beliefs.

If you think it's bunk, then you're likely to just ignore it and it'll become another in the long sort of stream of Donald Trump's social media output.

As we record this podcast, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to meet the U.S.

President at the White House, his fourth visit this year.

Donald Trump will be trying to convince the Israeli leader to sign up to a new 21-point peace plan for Gaza.

If he did so, it would represent a big turnaround for Mr.

Netanyahu.

Less than three weeks ago, he authorized a failed attempt to wipe out Hamas's negotiating team in Qatar.

But President Trump is optimistic, posting, we will get it done on Truth Social.

The families of Israeli hostages are desperate for an agreement and have called on the U.S.

leader to reject any efforts to sabotage the deal.

On Sunday, Hamas called for a 24-hour pause in Israeli attacks to protect the lives of two hostages it said it had lost contact with.

Yehuda Cohen, whose son Nimrod is still being held in Gaza, gave us his reaction to that.

Antonio's government call it psychologic terror.

The fact that families had to go through this after two years of suffrage.

to go through it again in the last moment when there's a agreement reach

i put the blame on Etaniel's government.

And I hope President Trump will put down the heel on Etaniel and force him to end the war, get a hostage deal, and move on.

We have to fight to end my son, my innocent son's suffering.

But how is the Israeli prime minister likely to respond to the 21-point plan?

Yaakov Katz is an Israeli political commentator.

The main sticking point here is going to be what role does the Palestinian Authority play?

He has said that that is a red line for him, that he will not allow the Palestinian Authority to control Gaza.

And the other one is any declaration by Israel that it's now embarking on some sort of track or process towards a Palestinian state.

But I think in the bigger picture here is that if there is in fact a window to get back all of the hostages, it's going to be almost impossible for Netanyahu to reject a deal deal that would see all the hostages return home.

So, after many false dawns, could there really be a deal this time?

I got more from our Jerusalem correspondent, Yoland Nell.

According to Israeli media, things are looking quite positive for that.

They're saying that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of his key aides, have been meeting both Steve Witkoff, President Trump's Middle East envoy, and Jared Kushner, in the past day or so.

They have supposedly ironed out many of the differences of opinion and agreed on revisions to this 21-point plan that the White House has already put to Arab leaders and the leaders of Muslim-majority countries.

And there's a White House official being quoted saying that the US and Israel are very close to an agreement on the Trump plan for ending the war.

And looking through just in the headlines, the Israeli media are picking up from Arab media, Hamas sources saying that they welcome the Trump proposal.

They haven't seen it in any detail yet, but but they're looking for guarantees Israel will honour commitments, that they want a timetable for the implementation of the plan.

An advisor to the Palestinian Authority saying that they view these efforts very seriously and positively as well, but they're just also making these comments based on leaks that they've seen to the media.

Yeah, I mean, what do we know about the plan so far?

We have just a very sort of general outline of what it contains from these different leaks that there have been and some journalists claiming to have seen the draft, but we know that it's a work in progress, too.

So, headlines are this idea that Hamas would release all the hostages in the first 48 hours after an agreement's reached, that there would be a phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

You would have Hamas having no future role in governance.

That is something that it has accepted, but what it hasn't is this idea that it would disarm.

You would have, apparently, according to this plan, two levels of governance for a kind of interim period.

And the different outlines don't give full details of a timeline for this, but they're saying there would be an international body and a committee of Palestinian technocrats.

Crucially, for a lot of Palestinians, this is not talking about forced displacement of the Palestinian population as a previous White House plan did, or the previous White House plan envisaged Palestinians, all 2 million of them, leaving the Gaza Strip for President Trump's Riviera plan.

That now seems to have gone off the table.

vitamin D deficiency, which can cause problems with bone and muscle development.

But scientists in the UK think they've come up with a way of boosting vitamin D levels via genetically edited tomatoes.

They've been carrying out the first clinical trial of its kind in Britain and are recruiting volunteers to taste the fruit.

Here's our health correspondent, Nikki Fox.

On the outside and on the inside, tomatoes at the John Linnis Centre look and taste like any other.

But in the Norfolk greenhouses, they've been bred to contain something that many lack, vitamin D.

Researchers believe there's enough in four to meet an adult's daily requirement.

Professor Cathy Martin is leading the project.

Why tomatoes?

Because it's relatively easy to do it.

It wouldn't have worked in other vegetables, such as broccoli or cabbage.

And lots and lots of people eat tomatoes, even tomato pastes and pizzas and ketchup.

Gene editing switches individual genes on and off by snipping out a section of DNA.

Doing this in the tomato means a substance can build up because the gene that stops it is turned off.

It's that substance or provitamin that when exposed to light turns into vitamin D.

For the first time in the UK, 76 people are on clinical trials to test genetically edited food.

The tomatoes are frozen, then freeze-dried and added to soup.

So what's the problem they're trying to solve?

Professor Martin Warren from the Quadrum Institute explains.

In summertime, just through exposure to sunlight, we can make enough of our own vitamin D.

But in wintertime, when the sun is lower, we don't get the UV rays coming through, and you don't make enough of your own vitamin D.

And you've got to get it from a food source.

source.

Traditionally, that food source would be oily fish, eggs, but of course a lot of those foods are not necessarily palatable to everybody.

Participants wear a UV necklace to check it's the tomatoes, not the sun, giving them vitamin D.

The results go straight to researchers.

Scientists in Norwich say they do want people to know what they're eating, so we're breeding a new type of tomato.

We kind of want them labelled so that consumers have a choice.

And we think that this variation, which gives a stripey colour, it looks a bit like a sunrise or a sunset and

that relates to the vitamin D content, which is because it's called the sunshine vitamin.

Campaigners say genetically edited food won't be traceable if something goes wrong but the government argues it can boost food security and improve disease resistance.

It's backing the technology with a multi-million pound investment.

Nikki Fox reporting.

And still to come on the Global News podcast.

Rembrandt would have probably rather loved the idea of being launched on the stock market in some way.

Art fans are invited to buy a share of a masterpiece, but is it really worth it?

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Norway, Denmark, Germany, Romania and Poland have all reported drone incursions around their airspace in recent days and weeks, prompting suspicions that Russia is pursuing a deliberate policy of testing NATO defences.

Now, the Danish government has temporarily banned civilians from flying drones as it prepares to host an EU summit this week.

Elrika Franker is a specialist on the use of drones at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Some of them can be picked up by radar, but that doesn't give you anything more than, well, there's something flying there.

What we don't have is proper identification that tells you much about, you know, the model, the type.

It certainly doesn't tell you who flies them.

For that kind of information, usually you need to down the drone to find out more.

I think the number one information you want to gather is: can European countries respond?

Do they have systems in place?

How do they do they respond?

Are they shooting them down?

Can they figure out where these drones are coming from?

What's their reaction?

And so, so far, quite honestly, on these drone sightings, our reaction hasn't been great because, again, we haven't been able to down them and we are a little bit panicky.

I mean, for good reason, I want to say, but so, in terms of the kind of information Russia, if it is Russia, is gathering here, that's quite useful for them.

No, unfortunately, because one of the things that Russia, I think, wants to achieve is to increase the cost of defending Europe on the basis that every pound that goes to defending Europe is something that doesn't go to Ukraine.

So it's a success for the Russians regardless.

They're trying to get us to have to spend money.

They're trying to get us to defend themselves.

And their calculation is that populations won't want to do that.

They say, why are we even opposing Russia's wishes?

The calculation is, would you just let your adversary, and Russia is undoubtedly our closest adversary within Europe and the really tangible threat, would you just allow them to fly over your territory with impunity with drones?

Well, you can't really allow that.

So you've got to stop them, frankly.

And I think it's better to be thinking about how we'd stop a threat like this than doing nothing and actually looking even more weak.

Russia will keep the pressure on.

We've seen that mount over 10 years.

I'm afraid it'll accelerate over the coming years, but at least we are we are reacting, we are doing something, we're doing something proactive to defend ourselves.

Justin Crump of the private intelligence firm Sibiline.

A week after Typhoon Wooloi swept through the Philippines, Vietnam has felt the full force of the storm.

At least 13 people have been killed and rescuers are searching for dozens of fishermen after their boats were hit by huge waves.

Vietnam is still recovering from a powerful typhoon that struck two months ago.

Wooloi has now moved into neighboring Laos where it's since weakened.

Journalist Nga Pham spoke to the BBC from the Vietnamese capital.

It's quite scary actually because we had a power cut and we are in central Hanoi.

But the most dangerous situation is in Nguyen and Hating provinces where communication is totally disrupted and they've they've been experiencing such isolation that nobody can actually access mountainous areas to verify the damage.

What kind of action happened before landfall to prepare for it and particularly protect or help the places that are most vulnerable?

Last week, when Ragaza, the typhoon, the biggest typhoon that hit South China Sea in many years, happened, the Vietnamese authorities have already mobilized the military and warned people out of the areas that are prone to disasters.

However, Ragasa didn't hit that hard.

It damaged more Taiwan, not Vietnam.

But this typhoon actually is more unpredictable, faster and actually causing much more concern.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been moved to higher locations from the coastal areas of Vietnam.

So they're being sheltered in schools and community halls to wait for the typhoon to pass.

So I think the preparation was quite good because people have been very mindful about disasters and typhoons this season.

Yet the intensity and the danger, the risk of the typhoons actually is still very high because as I said, it's unpredictable and the speed is quite high.

What about the intensity of a typhoon like this?

Is this something that Vietnam is familiar with?

It's very unusual because, you know, normally when I was growing up in Vietnam, we experience maximum nine typhoons per year.

So typhoon number nine is already like the end of typhoon season.

Yeah, this is number 10, and we still see no end of it.

So weather is changing very, very fast.

So we just can only be prepared, you know, do our best actually to cope with the situation right now.

Vietnamese journalist Nga Pham talking to Priya Rai.

16 members of an online crime syndicate operating in Myanmar have been sentenced to death in China.

23 others have been given prison sentences.

China has been trying to crack down on scam centers located over the border in Shan State, in Myanmar, where tens of thousands of Chinese and other nationalities were forced to work against their will.

The syndicate includes many members of one notorious family, as I heard from our Southeast Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head.

They're the Ming family, and they became notorious because of an event in one of the scam centers.

Now, China sort of greenlighted an insurgent operation in this far northeastern corner of Shan State, specifically because of its concern about the scam centers and the fact that the Myanmar military was doing nothing about shutting them down.

And by the end of 2023, at the beginning of last year, these insurgents had taken control of this border town.

And this family was running one compound called Crouching Tiger Villa, in which in particular, really appears...

appalling abuses were alleged and we believe there was an incident where a number of people were shot dead.

We think among those were four undercover Chinese police officers which probably was the last straw for China.

So once that town was taken over the insurgents who'd taken over handed over the leaders of the clans who ran this town and ran the scam centers to China and the Ming family were perhaps the most notorious.

In fact the patriarch supposedly committed suicide when he was captured but the others have been in Chinese custody since the end of 2023 and now China has imposed these very harsh sentences I think sending a signal to anybody else who might be involved in the scam industry that this is the kind of treatment you will get if you get handed back to China.

Now this particular border town is very close to China, it's on the border and a large numbers of the people both working in it, forced to work in it, many of them, and victims, the ones who have been defrauded with online fraud operations, were Chinese.

So it was a big concern to China.

It's not the first action we've seen China take.

They put pressure on the Thais earlier this year to take action on their border with Myanmar.

So there's a pattern here of China trying to show its own citizens that it is determined to stamp out this international crime, even though it takes place technically in another country.

Yeah, and has this action by China stopped this activity on its border?

No, it hasn't.

I mean, it has in Lao Kai, as far as we know.

That town is now under the control of the same insurgent group who captured it, and they say they've stamped it out.

And we think along China's border with Myanmar, it's largely been stamped out or pushed right underground.

But on the Thai Myanmar border, despite Thailand's actions, there are still tens of thousands of people working in scam centers that have proliferated there.

And huge numbers of scam centers are operating in Cambodia.

That's a country that's closely allied to China, and yet the scams seem to be going on there without any real control.

So China's actions haven't stopped it.

Our Southeast Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head.

Finally, is it worth taking a share in a painting by one of the old masters, Rembrandt, say, or Vermeer?

On the one hand, you get to own a piece of something remarkable, but you'd never get to hang it on your wall.

The owner of the world's largest collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings thinks it's a scheme that could catch on.

Thomas Kaplan is offering investors a chance to take a stake in his 220-work art collection using a strategy called fractionalization.

We heard from Rachel Campbell Johnson, former chief art critic of the Times newspaper, and first of all, art historian Dr.

Bender Grosvenor.

I'm not sure what we're getting.

I think we're getting just a little kind of digital slither, which we can never see.

So we don't even own a fraction of the pictures themselves, because I understand the collection is not going to be sold or broken up.

I'm totally with Bendor.

I have no idea how this is going to work.

But I suppose what you could do is you could have a little slip that maybe would give you permission to go in and see your painting if you happened to be in the country where it was being shown.

Or it could work a bit like racehorse ownership when people buy a leg or syndicates buy a part of it.

And that rather than sort of buying the painting you're buying the fun around the painting.

So maybe you get invited to all the posh private views when it's being on show or you get to hobnob with the sort of people that you'd rather like to hobnob with in the art world.

It's just a new, it's a new take on the commerciality of it.

Rembrandt's students apparently used to enjoy sticking a golden gilder to the floor of his studio to watch that avaricious master bend down and try and scrabble it up even though it was glued to the floor.

So Rembrandt would have probably rather loved the idea of being launched on the stock market in some way.

If this tokenisation got me a little fraction of a picture, which Tom might sell one day, because he's a brilliant businessman, and I know that I would probably make a little bit of money as well as enjoying my slice of Rembrandt, then I'm straight in there.

But if it's just a sort of attempt to say, oh, I'm increasing accessibility to the old masters, then I would say, honestly, you can go to the National Gallery because in the UK, we collectively publicly own more than 50 Rembrandts already.

So, we do already own a slice of a Rembrandt.

And if you're really keen, you know,

you can buy an original Rembrandt engraving or a print made shortly after he died for really not much money these days.

If you think about the acquisition of something, we're all so acquisitive.

It's one of the ways, when I go into a gallery with a child, a way to make them look at this fantastic collection we have is to say, which one would you like to take home?

It appeals to a...

fundamentally acquisitive part of us and people go in and look very differently.

So maybe just this chance that we might own a little bit will make us look harder and better.

And sometimes coming up with new ideas like this, which old stick in the mud like me might think is a little bit eccentric.

But we've got to try these things, I suppose, to get us talking about great artists like Rembrandt, Dr.

Bender Grosvenor, and Rachel Campbell Johnson.

And that is all from us for now, but there'll be a new edition of the Global News podcast later.

If you want to comment on this podcast or anything in it, send an email to globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk or find us on x at bbc world service and use the hashtag global newspod.

This edition was mixed by Abby Wilcher and produced by Alison Davis and Stephanie Zacherson.

Our editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Oliver Conway.

Until next time, goodbye.

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