Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories
Episode 64May 23, 2018

The case of the Butter Bot

We started following a spam email, and it took us somewhere weirder and scarier than we ever expected.

Download
This is how we like to picture the hacker who contacted us. Either in a ballpit or running a butter-churn. Less scary that way.
This is how we like to picture the hacker who contacted us. Either in a ballpit or running a butter-churn. Less scary that way.
Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Subscribe:

It started with an email about butter. We got it in our listener submission inbox, and it was mostly nonsense with a sketchy link. You probably get spammy emails like this every day. Do you ever wonder who sent them, or what they’re trying to accomplish? Well, reader, we clicked the link. Then we called Jonathon Morgan, CEO of the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge, to help us make sense of what we found. It gets weird, kind of scary and yes, buttery. Special thanks to listener Steffen Spear who started us on this trail.

The case of the Butter Bot