Bob Sullivan’s podcast projects

Bob is currently the host of AARP’s The Perfect Scam podcast. Listeners ride along weekly as scam victims and professional con artists tell their stories. A 2023 Webby award winner

Debugger is a podcast about technology and democracy, produced with help from Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

Breach is a deep-dive audio documentary that investigates history’s biggest hackers. Bob is co-host with Alia Tavakolian of Spoke Media. Season 1 uncovers the role of Russia in the massive Yahoo hack; Season 2 examines the comedy of errors that led to the Equifax breach. Sponsored by Carbonite. A Shorty Award finalist.

No Place to Hide is a 6-episode miniseries examining the state of privacy in America, from abusive digital police tactics to abusive romantic partners who hunt down victims through cyberspace. Bob co-hosts with Spoke Media’s Alia Tavakolian. Part fiction, part non-fiction. Sponsored by Intel.

“So, Bob?” is a weekly investigation of the unintended consequences of technology.

LATEST EPISODES

Breach podcast: Equifax’s (bungled) response

April 8, 2019 Bob Sullivan 1

Everyone makes mistakes. And every company might suffer a data breach. After years of examples, two things should be obvious to every company: 1) You will likely be hacked and 2) You should have an airtight, lock-solid plan for dealing with the aftermath of such an inevitable hack. Obvious, apparently, [Keep reading]

Breach podcast: The 76 days that changed America’s conversation about privacy forever (that’s how long hackers were inside Equifax)

March 19, 2019 Bob Sullivan 8

Now, we’re getting into the nitty-gritty. How did criminals get inside Equifax, and what were all the missteps inside the company that led to the hack? In episode three, we hear from the GAO investigators who actually got inside Equifax and interviewed the principals involved. We find out that it [Keep reading]

BREACH PODCAST: ‘The worst password ever created’ — and possibly the worst business model, too

March 11, 2019 Bob Sullivan 0

There are some things you can do in a podcast you can’t do with the written word. Here’s one: For this episode of Breach, we tracked down audio of the CEO of Equifax speaking at a business school in 2017. His words are tough to take knowing what we know [Keep reading]

Equifax security team gives itself good grades during breach; ‘shreds’ some internal documents

March 7, 2019 Bob Sullivan 1

Congress once again hauled Equifax in front of a committee to testify about its 2017 hack on Thursday, and issued yet another report outlining a cascade of errors at the firm which led to the incident. The Equifax hack is the subject of our 6-week investigative podcast, Breach. Click here [Keep reading]

Bob Sullivan's podcast projects

Equifax: ‘This is … the big one we’ve all been waiting for’ — Breach podcast season 2, episode 1, drops today

March 4, 2019 Bob Sullivan 0

“This is, potentially, the motherload. The big one we’ve all been waiting for.” — Ron Lieber, The New York Times “Your Money” columnist. So begins our second season of Breach, which just dropped today. We begin with an episode titled “Why, Equifax?” — which means all the things you think [Keep reading]

BREACH PODCAST: The Equifax hack — this time it’s personal.

February 27, 2019 Bob Sullivan 0

Why was Equifax hacked? Who was behind it? Who deserves the blame? And what should you do now? We’re asking all those questions, and providing most of the answers, in the second season of the Breach cast, dropping March 4. Six months in the making, it’s *almost* here. Together with [Keep reading]

Is Facebook the next Yahoo? Russian hackers were there, too, in 2014

November 27, 2018 Bob Sullivan 0

Internal Facebook documents seized by a member of British Parliament suggest Facebook was under siege from Russian hackers in late 2014. I can tell you Russian hackers were busy that year (as were Chinese hackers, and North Korean hackers, etc..) I spent months researching the hack of Yahoo — history’s [Keep reading]

Breach podcast, step 6: Accepting the result, or being a good loser

November 13, 2018 Bob Sullivan 0

Even after the vote is over, it’s not over. A critical element of democracy is that the losing side accepts the results. Think back to step 1: If an enemy of democracy could foment enough disenchantment that a sizable set of the population refuses to accept the legitimacy [Keep reading]

Humidity-caused paper jams, missing power cords, even foreclosure blamed for voting failures

November 6, 2018 Bob Sullivan 0

Across America, some citizens are waiting patiently an hour or more to vote. Their voting machines aren’t working nearly as hard for them. America’s fragile voting infrastructure is showing its warts yet again this election day. In North Carolina, state officials announced that high humidity was causing some ballot scanners [Keep reading]

Breach podcast: Step 5, election hacking — announcing the wrong results

November 5, 2018 Bob Sullivan 0

It’s easy to overlook, but perhaps the prime election hacking opportunity might also be the easiest – skip the James-Bond-esque vote-flipping efforts, and just hack a secretary of state’s website to cause confusion. “We know that the Russians have hacked websites that announce election results in the past,” said [Keep reading]

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