Recorded Future

[electronic sounds] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here.

[whoosh] Hey there.

It's Dina.

If you want to find it in the archives, it's entitled Generative AI: Is it Creative or Just Copying the Rest of Us? You can hear the full conversation with Jen White at wamu.org.

This is Click Here.

Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and PRX.

Today's show was written and produced by Megan Ditre, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, and Maya Fawaz.

It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cravedo and fact-checked by Darren Ancrobe.

Tachin turns cybercrime into marketplace.

Recorded Future says it's mapped Tachin Group, a Chinese-speaking vendor selling phishing, payment card theft, and money laundering services through Telegram guarantee marketplaces.

The group apparently moved from Dabai guarantee to Xinbi guarantee around May, and claims a 208,848 USDT or Tether deposit.

That's far above the usual vendor stake.

They offer some Telegram stuff, et cetera.

Um, uh, if you're interested in this, uh, I'll drop a link in chat.

Recorded Fu- I will say this, Recorded Future is excellent at, um, threat intelligence and information security, uh, intelligence research.

I have, uh, I, I...

[electronic sounds] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here.

[gentle music] Back in August, Meta agreed to pay seventeen billion dollars to settle claims that its platforms, Facebook and Instagram, harmed kids.

Seventeen billion dollars.

We've grown up online.

You want to protect teenagers, you wanna protect children, but you should let us have a voice.

[upbeat music] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here, a show about how technology is changing everything.

I'm Dina Temple-Raston.

Everybody seems to have an idea on how to protect kids from the internet.

[electronic sounds] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here.

[electronic sounds] Late last month, Meta agreed to pay seventeen billion dollars to settle claims that its platforms harmed kids.

Seventeen billion dollars.

By Arturo's telling, it was a lot harder than it should have been.

He told us that story, too.

[upbeat music] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here, a show about how technology is changing everything.

I'm Dina Temple-Raston.

And today on the show, Arturo's story.

[electronic sounds] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here.

[whooshing] [gentle music] There are places in America you'd expect a foreign government to be interested in, the Pentagon, defense contractors, even a power grid.

And then there are places you would not, like a small utility in Massachusetts, the kind of place most of us would never think about.

When we first brought you this story, we focused on China and its campaign to quietly get inside the systems that keep American towns humming.

But recently, Iranian hackers have been getting into US critical infrastructure too, specifically local water systems, which makes this return to the Littleton, Massachusetts story feel less like an anomaly and more like a preview.

[upbeat music] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here, a show about how technology is changing everything.

I'm Dina Temple-Raston.

So is it a little mind-blowing when you think that a Chinese state hacker came after little, tiny Littleton? What does that make you feel like?

[upbeat music] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here.

[gentle music] Last month, President Donald Trump signed a memo that could change one of the basic rules of cybersecurity.

For years, if someone hacked your company, you could defend yourself.

Like, like, holy shit, like, like, like, uh, I was just targeted by a nation state.

[upbeat music]

From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here, the show about how technology is changing everything.

I'm Dina Temple-Raston.

And today, the story of Alejandro Caceres, an American who got hacked by North Korea and then responded by doing something no one was expecting.

[electronic sounds] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here.

[gentle music] Jason Rezaian is an Iranian American, and he grew up in northern California, a couple of towns over from where I did, actually.

We didn't know each other back then, but Iran had always been this other place in his life, a place he knew through family, a place he wanted to know on his own terms.

These days, Jason spends a lot of time trying to convince policymakers that internet access in Iran isn't just about letting the rest of us see what's happening there.

It's about whether Iranians can actually reach each other.

[upbeat music] From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here, the show about how technology is changing everything.

I'm Dena Temple-Raston.

For years, the United States has said it wants Iranians to be able to shape their own future.

This is something that has become a catchphrase the last several years.

Um, so in FIMI news, a report by Recorded Future, a US-based cybersecurity and threat intelligence company, says a Russian-linked influence network has been targeting the Firebird AI data center, uh, that was just recently opened in Hrazdan.

The joint US-Armenian project has become a symbol of Armenia's westward geopolitical pivot, making it a target in a broader campaign to undermine that realignment.

The group documented three impersonation campaigns between late June and mid-July.

Uh, the first was [laughs] we, we, we were talking about this earlier, Rubina, a fake TechCrunch report warning of an imminent earthquake near the facility, a fabricated Gizmodo piece claiming power grid instability made the investment financially unsustainable, and a video posting as authentic Iranian military messaging that framed the data center as a legitimate strike target over alleged US ceasefire violations.

The report situates this campaign within a longer pattern, having previously targeted Armenia's 2026 parliamentary elections and the TRIP project.

Recorded Future frames this as evidence that Moscow is increasingly relying on influence operations to counter its declining conventional leverage over Armenia.

And separately, Armenia has been identified as an emerging target of Russian influence operations in Meta's latest adversarial threat report covering the first half of 2026.