Can computer hackers get inside your mind?

This message comes from Insperity, providing HR services and technology from payroll, benefits, and HR compliance to talent development. Learn more at insperity.com/hrmatters. This is Planet Money from NPR. On Friday, if all goes according to plan, representatives from The US and Iran will meet in Geneva to sign another sixty day ceasefire agreement. But the two sides still have not come to an agreement on what's been at the heart of this war and decades of conflict, Iran's development of nuclear weapons. Right. This conflict has been on again, off again for years. And while the most recent iteration has been very violent with bombs and blockades, there is a whole other almost entirely invisible war that The US and allies have been waging with Iran using cyber espionage or more accurately cyber sabotage, you know, computer viruses, malware. Recently, we heard a story about a piece of malware that might have been used in this invisible war that was diabolically cunning because it exploited weaknesses in computers, yes, but also maybe in the human psyche. The more I think about it, the more I think this must have driven people insane. But it also might have saved the world from nuclear destruction. We heard about this hack from someone whose job it is to identify computer hacks that could be a threat to all of us. What's your name? What do you do? My name is Juan Andres Guerrero Sade, which is why everybody calls me Jags. J a g s, Jags. His initials are shorter and cooler. Yeah. Actually, he is a pretty cool guy. He's got a faux hawk, sleeves of tattoos. He was on track to go get a PhD in philosophy, but now? I'm a security researcher, who I think would be the simplest term. I think some folks would say cyberpaleontologist. Cyber paleontologist. Like, he digs for the remnants of cyberattacks. JAGS works for a cybersecurity company called SentinelOne. It helps big companies like Samsung and the Golden State Warriors and the government protect their computers and networks. Yeah. Hacking is a whole industry. And defending against hacks is this whole other industry. JAGS just so happens to have the raddest job of all, which is dusting off old malware files buried deep on servers and reverse engineering how hackers got into systems in the first place and what they did when they got there so we can figure out how to defend against similar attacks in the future. And JAGS is kind of a big deal. There are actually a couple of pieces in the International Spy Museum in DC based on his cyber paleontology work. This is a little crude, but in the Jurassic Park movie, which paleontologist are you? As long as you you don't immediately default to Jeff Goldblum, and then you I was gonna go Jeff Goldblum. I But I think that he is like a chaos theory mathematician, which I I I think fits the bill. Right? …