If you were to visit the office of Joe Carrigan, a senior security engineer at Johns Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute (ISI), you’d notice a television screen displaying a looping slideshow. Among the featured content in the loop is a 2022 article from The New York Times, which recognizes his podcast for delving into discussions about the “dark side of the internet.”
That podcast is Hacking Humans, cohosted by Dave Bittner, who is also a producer for the pod by way of CyberWire, a B2B cybersecurity audio network. Hacking Humans focuses on the human side of cybersecurity problems.
“The idea of the Hacking Humans podcast is that it’s not a very technical podcast,” Carrigan said. We don’t talk about vulnerabilities, you know — we mention them tangentially, we mention them as necessary.”
According to Carrigan, a University of Maryland Global Campus computer science program alum, many people believe hackers are only interested in high-profile targets like nation-state actors or penetration testers. But anyone can become a target if they don’t protect themselves.
The Columbia, Maryland resident cited a country-by-county pay gap as a possible influence for those who might be employed by “scam centers” in countries like India and Nigeria — both known contributors to cyber crime, he said.
