Can true crime stories about the internet keep individuals safe from cybercrime?

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.

“If you look at the two countries, the average American makes around 73 times what the people in Nigeria and India make per year,” Carrigan told Technical.ly. “… If these guys [scammers] can scam somebody out of 25 bucks every day, seven days or six or seven days a week, in a year, they make three to four times what the average income is in their country, and they’re doing well.”

The podcast aims to bridge the gap between more technical cybersecurity discussions and the general public.

On a recent episode of the podcast (Season 6, Episode 262), for instance, Bittner — who is also an alumnus of the University of Maryland system — sounds surprised as Carrigan presents findings from a survey about people’s understanding of cybersecurity, including the jargon commonly used in the field. The survey was conducted by ISI and commissioned by…