Perhaps you remember Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, the 34-year-old twin brothers we profiled earlier this week. Although they had the tech chops to commit years of petty crimes (like stealing airline miles), what landed them in truly serious trouble was deleting 96 US government databases in the hour after both were fired last year by the same federal IT contractor, Opexus. (Opexus had just found out that both brothers had previously been in prison for cyberfraud.)

The pair come off less as cybercriminal masterminds than as galumphing galoots—that is to say, a pair of bumbling oafs who thought that asking AI how to cover their tracks was going to keep them out of federal prison.

One of the minor mysteries I encountered while writing the piece was that the government had a verbatim transcript of everything the brothers said to each other during their hour-long deletion spree. The two men lived together in Arlington, Virginia, so it made sense that they might be chatting in the same room rather than by text or instant message. But how the heck had the government gotten access to the audio? Supersecret software bugging? Crazy corporate spyware running on their company laptops? FBI agent in the bushes with a microphone?

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