Nicole Perlroth: Cybersecurity and the Weapons of Cyberwar | Lex Fridman Podcast #266
if one site is hacked you can just unleash all health we have stumbled into this new era of mutually assured digital destruction how far are people willing to go you can capture their location you can capture their contacts that record their telephone calls record their camera without them knowing about it basically you can put an invisible ankle bracelet on someone without them knowing you could sell that to a zero-day broker for two million dollars the following is a conversation with nicole pearl roth cyber security journalist and author of this is how they tell me the world ends the cyber weapons arm race this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's nicole paul roth you've interviewed hundreds of cyber security hackers activists dissidents computer scientists government officials forensic investigators and uh mercenaries so let's talk about cyber security and cyber war start with the basics what is a zero day vulnerability and then a zero day exploit or attack so at the most basic level let's say i'm a hacker and i find a bug in your iphone ios software that no one else knows about especially apple that's called a zero day because the minute it's discovered engineers have had zero days to fix it if i can study that zero day i could potentially write a program to exploit it and that program would be called a zero day exploit and for ios the dream is that you craft a zero day exploit that can remotely exploit someone else's iphone without them ever knowing about it and you can capture their location you can capture their contacts that record their telephone calls record their camera without them knowing about it basically you can put an invisible ankle bracelet on someone without them knowing and you can see why that capability that zero day exploit would have immense value for a spy agency or a government that wants to monitor its critics or dissidents and so there's a very lucrative market now for zero day exploits so you said a few things there one is ios why ios which operating system which one is the sexier thing to try to get to or the most impactful thing and uh the other thing you mentioned is remote versus like having to actually come in physical contact with it is that the distinction so iphone exploits have just been a government's number one priority recently actually the price of an android remote zero day exploit something that can get you into android phones is actually higher the value of that is now higher on this underground market for zero day exploits than an iphone ios exploit so things are changing so the there's probably more android devices so that's why it's better but then the iphone side if i so i'm an android person because i'm a man of the people but it seems like all the elites use iphone all the people at nice dinner parties so uh is that is that the reason that like the more powerful people use iphones is that why i don't think so i actually so it was about two years ago that the prices flipped it used to be that if you could craft a remote zero click exploit for ios then that was about as good as it gets you could sell that to a zero day broker for two million dollars the caveat is you can never tell anyone about it because the minute you tell someone about it apple learns about it they patch it and that 2.5 million dollar investment that that zero day broker just made goes to dust so a couple years ago and don't quote me on the prices but an android zero click remote exploit for the first time topped the ios and actually a lot of people's read on that was that it might be a sign that apple security was falling and that it might actually be easier to find an ios zero-day exploit than find an android zero-day exploit the other thing is market share there are just more people around the world that use android and a lot of governments that are paying top dollar for zero day exploits these days are deep pocketed governments in the gulf that want to use these exploits to monitor their own citizens monitor their critics and so it's not necessarily that they're trying to find elites it's that they want to find out who these people are that are criticizing them or perhaps planning the next arab spring so in your experience are most of these attack targeted to cover a large population or is there attacks that are targeted towards specific individuals so i think it's both some of the zero day exploits that have fetched top dollar that i've heard of in my reporting in the united states were highly targeted you know there was a potential terrorist attack they wanted to get into this person's phone it had to be done in the next 24 hours they approached hackers and say we'll pay you x millions of dollars if you can do this but then you look at when we've discovered ios zero day exploits in the wild some of them have been targeting large populations like uyghurs so a couple years ago there was a watering hole attack okay it's a watering hole attack there's a website it was actually it had information aimed at uyghurs and you could access it all over the world and if you visited this website it would drop an ios zero to exploit onto your phone and so anyone that visited this website that was about uyghurs anywhere i mean uyghurs uyghurs living abroad basically the uyghur diaspora would have gotten infected with this zero-day exploit so in that case you know they were targeting huge swaths of this one population or people interested in this one population basically in real time who are these attackers from the individual level to the group level psychologically speaking what's their motivation is it purely money is it the challenge are they malevolent is it power these are big philosophical human questions i guess so these are the questions i set out to answer for my book i wanted to know are these people that are just after money if they're just after money how do they sleep at night not knowing whether that zero day exploit they just sold to a broker is being used to basically make someone's life a living hell and what i found was there's kind of this long sordid history to this question you know it started out in the 80s and 90s when hackers were just finding holes and bugs and software for curiosity's sake really as a hobby and some of them would go to the tech companies like microsoft or sun microsystems at the time or oracle and they'd say hey i just found this zero day in your software and i can use it to break into nasa and the general response at the time wasn't thank you so much for pointing out this flaw and our software we'll get it fixed as soon as possible it was don't ever poke around our software ever again or we'll stick our general counsel on you and that was really sort of the common thread for years and so hackers who set out to do the right thing were basically told to shut up and stop doing what you're doing and what happened next was they basically started trading this information online now when you go back and interview people from those early days they all tell a very similar story which is they're curious they're tinkers you know they remind me of like the kid down the block that was constantly poking around the hood of his dad's car you know they just couldn't help themselves they wanted to figure out how a system is designed and how they could potentially exploit it for some other purpose it doesn't have to be good or bad but they were basically kind of beat down for so long by these big tech companies that they started just silently trading them with other hackers and that's how you got these really heated debates in the 90s about disclosure should you just dump these things online because any script kitty can pick them up and use it for all kinds of mischief but you know don't you want to just stick a middle finger to all these companies that are basically threatening you all the time so there was this really interesting dynamic at play and what i learned in the course of doing my book was that government agencies and their contractors sort of tapped into that frustration and that resentment and they started quietly reaching out to hackers on these forums and they said hey you know that zero day you just dropped online could you could you come up with something custom for me and i'll pay you six figures for it so long as you shut up and never tell anyone that we that i paid you for this and that's what happened so throughout the 90s there was a bunch of boutique contractors that started reaching out to hackers on these forums and saying hey i'll pay you six figures for that bug you were trying to get microsoft to fix for free and sort of so began or so catalyzed this market where governments and their intermediaries started reaching out to these hackers and buying their bugs for free and in those early days i think a lot of it was just for quiet counterintelligence traditional espionage but as we started baking the software windows software schneider electric siemens industrial software into our nuclear plants and our factories and our power grid and our petrochemical facilities and our pipelines those same zero days came to be just as valuable for sabotage and war planning does the fact that the market sprung up and you cannot make a lot of money change the nature of the attackers that came to the table or grow the number of attackers i mean what is i guess you told the psychology of the hackers uh in the 90s what is the culture today and where is it heading so i think there are people who will tell you they would never sell a zero day to a zero day broker or a government one because they don't know how it's going to get used when they throw it over the fence you know most of these get rolled into classified programs and you don't know how they get used if you sell it to a zero day broker you don't even know which nation state might use it or potentially which criminal group might use it if you sell it on the dark web the other thing that they say is that they want to be able to sleep at night and they lose a lot of sleep if they found out their zero day was being used to you know make a dissidence life living hell but there are a lot of people good people who also say no this is not my problem this is the technology company's problem if they weren't writing new bugs into their software every day then there wouldn't be a market you know then there wouldn't be a problem but they continue to write bugs into their software all the time and they continue to profit off that software so why shouldn't i profit off my labor too and one of the things that has happened which is i think a positive development over the last 10 years are bug bounty programs you know companies like google and facebook and then microsoft and finally apple which resisted it for a really long time i've said okay we are going to shift our perspective about hackers we're no longer going to treat them as the enemy here we're going to start paying them for what it's essentially free quality assurance and we're going to pay them good money in some cases you know six figures in some cases we're never going to be able to bid against a zero-day broker who sells to government agencies but we can reward them and hopefully get that to that bug earlier where we can neutralize it so that they don't have to spend another year developing the zero day exploit and in that way we can keep our software more secure but every week i get messages from some hacker that says you know i tried to see this zero day exploit that was just found in the wild you know being used by this nation state i tried to tell microsoft about this two years ago and they were gonna pay me peanuts so it never got fixed you know there are all sorts of those stories that can continue on and you know i think just generally hackers are not very good at diplomacy you know they tend to be pretty snipey technical crowd um and very philosophical in my experience but you know diplomacy is not their strong suit well there almost has to be a broker between companies and hackers where you can translate effectively just like you have a zero-day broker between governments and hackers yes you have to speak their language yeah and there have been some of those companies who've risen up to meet that demand and hacker one is one of them bug crowd is another synac has an interesting model so that's a company that you pay for a private bug bounty program essentially so you pay this company they tap hackers all over the world to come hack your software hack your system and then they'll quietly tell you what they found and i think that's a really positive development and actually the department of defense hired all three of those uh companies i just mentioned to help secure their systems now i think they're still a little timid in terms of letting those hackers into the really sensitive high side classified stuff but you know baby steps just to understand what you were saying you think it's some impossible for companies to financially compete with the zero day brokers with governments so like the defense can't outpay the um the hackers it's interesting you know they they shouldn't out pay them because what would happen if they started offering 2.5 million dollars at apple for any you know zero day exploit that governments would pay that much for is their own engineers would say why the hell am i working you know for less than that and and doing my nine to five every day so you would create a perverse incentive and i didn't i didn't think about that until i started this research and i realized okay yeah that makes sense you don't want to incentivize offense so much that it's to your own detriment and so i think what they have though what the companies have on government agencies is if they pay you you get to talk about it you know you get the street cred you get to brag about the fact you just found that 2.5 million dollar you know ios zero day that no one else did and if you sell it to a broker you never get to talk about it and i think that really does eat at people can i see a big philosophical question about human nature here so if you have in what you've seen if a human being has a zero day they've found a zero day vulnerability that can um hack into i don't know what's the worst thing you can hack into something that could launch nuclear weapons which percentage of the people in the world that have the skill would not share that with anyone um with any bad party i guess how many people are completely devoid of ethical concerns in your in your sense so my my belief is all the ultra competent people or very very high percentage of ultra competent people are also ethical people that's been my experience but then again my experience is narrow what's what's what's your experience been like so this was another question i wanted to answer you know who are these people who would sell a zero day exploit that would neutralize a schneider electric safety lock at a petrochemical plant basically the last thing you would need to neutralize before you trigger some kind of explosion who would sell that um and i got my answer well the answer was different a lot of people said i would never even look there because i don't even want to know i don't even want to have that capability i don't like i don't even want to have to make that decision about whether i'm going to profit off of that knowledge i went down to argentina and this whole kind of moral calculus i had in my head was completely flipped around so just to back up for a moment so argentina actually is a real hacker's paradise people grew up in argentina and you know i went down there i guess i was there around 2015 2016 but you still couldn't get an iphone you know you they didn't have amazon prime you couldn't get access to any of the apps we all take for granted to get those things in argentina as a kid you have to find a way to hack them you know and it's the whole culture is really like a hacker culture they say like it's really like a macgyver culture you know you have to figure out how to break into something with wire and tape and that means that there are a lot of really good hackers in argentina who are who specialize in developing zero day exploits and i went down to this argentina conference called echo party and i asked the organizer okay can you introduce me to someone who's selling zero-day exploits to governments and he was like just throw a stone [Laughter] at throw stone anywhere and you're gonna hit someone and all over this conference you saw these guys who were clearly from these gulf states who only spoke arabic you know what are they doing at a young hacking conference in buenos aires and so i went out to lunch with kind of this godfather of the hacking scene there and i asked this really dumb question and i'm still embarrassed about how i phrased it but i said so you know will these guys only sell these zero-day exploits to good western governments and he said nicole last time i checked the united states wasn't a good western government you know the last country that bombed another country into oblivion wasn't china or iran it was the united states so if we're going to go by your whole moral calculus you know just know that we have a very different calculus down here and we'd actually rather sell to iran or russia or china maybe than the united states and that just blew me away like wow you know he's like we'll just sell to whoever brings us the biggest bag of cash have you checked into our inflation situation recently so you know i had some some of those like reality checks along the way you know we tend to think of things as is this moral you know is this ethical especially as journalists you know we kind of sit on our high horse sometimes and um write about a lot of things that seem to push the moral bounds but in this market which is essentially an underground market that you know the one rule is like fight club you know no one talks about fight club first rule of the zero day market nobody talks about the zero-day market on both sides because the hacker doesn't want to lose their 2.5 million dollar bounty and governments roll these into classified programs and they don't want anyone to know what they have so no one talks about this thing and when you're operating in the dark like that it's really easy to put aside your morals sometimes can i a small tangent ask you by way of advice you must have done some incredible interviews and you've also spoken about how serious you take protecting your sources if you were to give me advice for interviewing when you're recording on mic with a video camera how is it possible to get into this world like uh is it basically impossible so you've you've spoken with a few people uh what is it like the godfather of uh cyber war cyber security so people that are already out and they still have to be pretty brave to speak publicly um but is it virtually impossible to really talk to anybody who's a current hacker you're always like 10 20 years behind it's a good question and this is why i'm a print journalist but you know a lot when i've seen people do it it's always the guy who's behind the shadows whose voice has been altered you know when they've gotten someone on camera that's usually how they do it you know very very few people talk in the space and there's actually a pretty well-known case study and why you don't talk publicly in the space and you don't get photographed and that's the gruck so you know the gruck is or was this zero day broker south african guy lives in thailand and right when i was starting on this subject at the new york times he'd given an interview to forbes and he talked about being a zero day broker and he even posed next to this giant duffle bag filled with cash ostensibly and later he would say he was speaking off the record he didn't understand the rules of the game but what i heard from people who did business with him was that the minute that that story came out he became png'd no one did business with him you know his business plummeted by at least half no one wants to do business with anyone who's gonna get on camera and talk about how they're selling zero days to governments you know it's it puts you at danger and i did hear that he got some visits from some security folks and you know it's another thing for these people to consider you know if they have those zero-day exploits at their disposal they become a huge target for nation-states all over the world you know talk about having perfect opsec you know you better have some perfect opsec if people know that you have access to those zero-day exploits which sucks because um i mean transparency here would um be really powerful for educating the world and also inspiring other engineers to do good it just feels like when you operate in the shadows um it doesn't help us move in the positive direction in terms of like getting more people on the defense side versus on the attack side right but of course what can you do i mean the best you can possibly do is have great journalists uh just like you did interview and write books about it and integrate the information you get while hiring the sources yeah and i think you know what hacker one has told me was okay let's just put away the people that are finding and developing zero day exploits all day long let's put that aside what about the you know however many millions of programmers all over the world who've never even heard of a zero to exploit why not tap into them and say hey we'll start paying you if you can find a bug in united airlines software or in schneider electric or in ford or tesla and i think that is a really smart approach let's go find this untapped army of programmers to neutralize these bugs before the people who will continue to sell these to governments can find them and exploit them okay i have to ask you about this uh from a personal side of it's funny enough after we agreed to to talk i've gotten for the first time in my life was a victim of a cyber attack um so this is ransomware it's called deadbolt people can look it up i have a qnap device for basically kind of coldish storage so it's about 60 terabytes with 50 terabytes of data on it in raid 5 and apparently about four to five thousand qnap devices were hacked and taken over with this ransomware and what what ransomware does there is it goes file by file almost all the files on the qnap storage device and encrypts them and then there's this very eloquently and politely written page that pops up you know it describes what happened all your files have been encrypted this includes but is not limited to photos documents and spreadsheets why me this is uh a lot of people commented about how friendly and eloquent this is and i have to commend them it is and it's pretty user friendly uh why me this is not a personal attack you have been targeted because of the inadequate security provided by your vendor qnap what now you can make a payment of exactly 0.03 bitcoin which is about a thousand dollars to the following address once the payment has been made we'll follow up with transaction to the same address blah blah blah they give you instructions of uh what happens next and they'll give you a decryption key that you can then use and then there's another message for qnap that says all your affected customers have been targeted using a zero-day vulnerability in your product we offer you two options to mitigate this and future damage one make a bitcoin payment of five bitcoin to the following address and that will reveal to qnap the uh i'm summarizing things here what what the actual vulnerability is or you can make a bitcoin payment of 50 bitcoin to get a master decryption key for your customers 50 bitcoins about 1.8 million dollars okay so first of all on a personal level this one hurt for me um there's i mean i learned a lot because i wasn't for the most part backing up much of that data because i thought i can afford to lose that data it's not like horrible i mean i think you've spoken about uh the crown jewels like making sure there's things you really protect and i have thing i have you know i'm very conscious security wise on the crown jewels but there's a bunch of stuff like you know personal videos they're not like i don't know anything creepy but just like fun things i did that because they're very large or 4k or something like that i kept them on there thinking raid 5 will protect it you know just i lost a bunch of stuff including raw um footage from interviews and all that kind of stuff so it's painful and i'm sure there's a lot of painful stuff like that for the four to five thousand people that use qnap and there's a lot of interesting ethical questions here do you pay them does qnap pay them do the individuals pay them especially when you don't know if it's going to work or not do you wait so qnap said that please don't pay them we're working very hard day and night to solve this mm-hmm it's so philosophically interesting to me because i also project onto them thinking what is their motivation because the way they phrased it on purpose perhaps but i'm not sure if that actually reflects their real motivation is um maybe they're trying to help themselves sleep at night basically saying this is not about you this is about the company with the vulnerabilities just like you mentioned this is the justification they have but they're hurting real people they hurt me but i'm sure there's a few others that are really hurt and the zero day factor is a big one you know that their qnap right now is trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with their system that would let this in and even if they pay if they still don't know where the zero day is what's to say that they won't just hit them again and hit you again so that really complicates thing and things and that is a huge advancement for ransomware it's really only been i think in the last 18 months that we've ever really seen ransomware exploit zero days to pull these off usually 80 of them i think the data shows 80 of them come down to a lack of two-factor authentication you know so when someone gets hit by it by a ransomware attack they don't have two-factor authentication on you know their employees were using stupid passwords like you can mitigate that in the future this one they don't know they probably don't know yeah and it was uh i guess it's zero click because i didn't have to do anything the only thing i i'm well you know here's the thing i did you know basics of you know i put it behind a firewall i follow the instructions but like i wasn't i didn't really pay attention so maybe there's like maybe there's a misconfiguration of some sort that's easy to make it's it's difficult when you have a personal nas on i so i don't i i'm not willing to sort of uh say that i did everything i possibly could um but i did a lot of reasonable stuff and they still hit it with zero clicks i didn't have to do anything yeah well it's like a zero day and it's a supply chain attack you know you're getting hit from your supplier you're you're getting hit because of your vendor and it's also a new thing for ransomware groups to go to the individuals to pressure them to pay there was this really interesting case i think it was in norway where there was a mental health clinic that got hit and the cyber criminals were going to the patients themselves to say pay this or we're going to release your psychiatric records i mean talk about hell um in terms of whether to pay you know that is on the cheaper end of the spectrum from the individual from the company both you know we've seen uh for instance there was an apple supplier in taiwan they got hit and the ransom demand was 50 million you know i'm surprised it's only 1.8 million i'm sure it's gonna go up um and it's hard you know there's obviously governments and maybe in this case the company are going to tell you we recommend you don't pay or please don't pay but the reality on the ground is that some businesses can't operate some countries can't function i mean the under-reported storyline of colonial pipeline was after the company got hit and took the pre-emptive step of shutting down the pipeline because they their billing systems were frozen they couldn't charge customers downstream my colleague david sanger and i got our hands on a classified assessment that said that as a country we could have only afforded two to three more days of colonial pipeline being down and it was really interesting i thought it was the gas and the jet fuel but it wasn't you know we were sort of prepared for that it was the diesel without the diesel the refineries couldn't function and it would have totally screwed up the economy and so there was almost this like national security economic impetus for them to pay this ransom and the other one i always think about is baltimore you know when the city of baltimore got hit i think the initial ransom demand was something around 76 000 it may have even started smaller than that and baltimore stood its ground and didn't pay but ultimately the cost to remediate was 18 million dollars it's a lot for the city of baltimore that's money that could have gone to public school education and roads and you know public health and instead it just went to rebuilding these systems from scratch and so a lot of residents in baltimore were like why the hell didn't you pay the 76 000 so it's not obvious you know it's easy to say don't pay because why you're funding their rnd for the next go round um but it's too often it's too complicated so on the individual level just like you know the way i feel personally from this attack have you talked to people that were kind of victims in the same way i was but maybe more dramatic ways or so on you know the same way that violence hurts people yeah how much does this hurt people in your sense in the way you researched it the worst ransomware attack i've covered on a personal level was an attack on a hospital in vermont and you know you think of this as like okay it's hitting their i.t networks they should still be able to treat patients but it turns out that cancer patients couldn't get their chemo anymore because the protocol of who gets what is very complicated and without it the nurses and doctors couldn't access it so they were turning chemo patients away cancer patients away one nurse told us i don't know why people aren't screaming about this the only thing i've seen that even compares to what we're seeing at this hospital right now was when i worked in the burn unit after the boston marathon bombing you know they really put it in these super dramatic terms and last year there was a report in the wall street journal where they attributed an infant death to a ransomware attack because a mom came in and whatever device they were using to monitor the fetus wasn't working because of the ransomware attack and so they attributed this infant death um to the ransomware attack now on a bigger scale but less personal when there was the not pecha attack so this was an attack by russia on ukraine um that came at them through a supplier attacks uh software company in that case that didn't just hit any um government agency or business in ukraine that used this tax software it actually hit any business all over the world that had even a single employee working remotely in ukraine so it hit maersk the shipping company but hit pfizer hit fedex but the one i will never forget is merck it paralyzed merck's factories i mean it really created an existential crisis for the company merck had to tap into the cdc's emergency supplies of the gardasil vaccine that year because their whole vaccine production line had been paralyzed in that attack imagine if that was going to happen right now to pfizer or madarina or johnson and johnson you know imagine i mean that would really create a global cyber terrorist attack essentially and that's almost unintentional i thought for a long time i always labeled it as collateral damage but actually just today there was a really impressive threat researcher at cisco which has this threat intelligence division called talos who said stop calling it collateral damage they could see who was going to get hit before they deployed that malware it wasn't collateral damage it was intentional they meant to hit any business that did business with ukraine it was it was to send a message to them too so i don't know if that's accurate i i always thought of it as sort of the sloppy collateral damage but it definitely made me think so how much of this between states is going to be a part of war this kind of these kinds of attacks on ukraine between russia and u.s russia and china china and us let's look at china and u.s do you think china and u.s are going to escalate something that would be called the war purely in the space of cyber i believe any geopolitical conflict from now on is guaranteed to have some cyber element to it the department of justice recently declassified a report that said china's been hacking into our pipelines and it's not for intellectual property theft it's to get a foothold so that if things escalate in taiwan for example they are where they need to be to shut our pipelines down and we just got a little glimpse of what that looked like with colonial pipeline and the panic buying and the jet fuel shortages and that assessment i just mentioned about the diesel so they're there you know they've got in there anytime i read a report about new aggression from fighter jets chinese fighter jets in taiwan or what's happening right now with russia's buildup on the ukraine border or india pakistan i'm always looking at it through a cyber lens and it really bothers me that other people aren't because there is no way that these governments in these nation states are not going to use their access to gain some advantage in those conflicts and you know i'm now in a position where i'm an advisor to the cyber security uh infrastructure security agency at the dhs so i'm not saying anything classified here but i just think that it's really important to understand just generally what the collateral damage could be for american businesses and critical infrastructure in any of these escalated conflicts around the world because just generally our adversaries have learned that they might never be able to match us in terms of our traditional military spending on traditional weapons and fighter jets but we have a very soft underbelly when it comes to cyber 80 percent or more of america's critical infrastructure so pipelines power grid nuclear plants water systems is owned and operated by the private sector and for the most part there is nothing out there legislating that those companies share the fact they've been breached they don't even have to tell the government they've been hit there's nothing mandating that they even meet a bare minimum standard of cyber security and that's it so even when there are these attacks most of the time we don't even know about it so that is you know if you were going to design a system to be as blind and vulnerable as possible that's that is pretty pretty good that's what it looks like is what we have here in the united states and everyone here is just operating like let's just keep hooking up everything for convenience you know software eats the world um let's just keep going for cost for convenience sake just because we can and when you study these issues and you study these attacks and you study the advancement and the the uptick in frequency and the the lower barrier to entry that we see every single year you realize just how dumb software eats world is and no one has ever stopped to pause and think should we be hooking up these systems to the internet they've just been saying can we let's do it and that's a real problem and this and just in the last year you know we've seen a record number of zero-day attacks i think there were 80 last year which is probably more than double what it was in 2019. [Music] a lot of those were nation states you know we live in a world with a lot of geopolitical hot points right now and where those geopolitical hot points are are places where countries have been investing heavily in offensive cyber tools if you're a nation state the goal would be to maximize the footprint of zero day like super secret zero day that nobody's aware of and whenever war is initiated the huge negative effects of shutting down infrastructure or any kind of zero day is the chaos it creates so if you just there's a certain threshold when you create the chaos the the markets plummet just everything goes it goes to hell so it's not just zero days you know we make it so easy for for threat actors i mean we're not using two-factor authentication we're not patching um there was the shell shock vulnerability that was discovered a couple years ago it's still being exploited no because so many people haven't fixed it um so you know the zero days are really the sexy stuff and what really got drew me to the zero day market was the moral calculus we talked about particularly from you know the u.s government's point of view how do they justify leaving these systems so vulnerable when we use them here and we're baking more of our critical infrastructure with this vulnerable software you know it's not like we're using one set of technology and russia's using another and china's using this we're all using the same technology so when you find a zero day in windows you know you're not just leaving it open so you can spy on russia or implant yourself in the russian grid you're leaving americans vulnerable too but you know but zero days are like that is the secret sauce you know that's the that's the super power you know and i and i always say like every country now with the exception of antarctica someone added the vatican to my list is trying to find uh offensive hacking tools and zero days to make them work and those that don't have the skills now have this market that they can tap into where you know 2.5 million dollars that's chump change for a lot of these nation states it's a hell of a lot less than trying to build the next fighter jet um but yeah the goal is chaos i mean why did russia turn off the lights twice in ukraine you know i think part of it is chaos i think part of it is to to sow the seeds of doubt in their current government your government can't even keep your lights on why are you sticking with them you know come over here and we'll keep your lights on at least you know there's like a little bit of that nuclear weapons seems to have helped prevent nuclear war is it possible that we have so many vulnerabilities and so many attack vectors on each other that it will kind of uh achieve the same kind of equilibrium like mutually shared destruction yeah that's one hopeful solution to this do you have any hope for this particular solution you know nuclear analogies always tend to fall apart when it comes to cyber mainly because you don't need fissile material you know you just need a laptop and the skills and you're in the game so it's a really low barrier to entry the other thing is attribution's harder and we've seen countries muck around with attribution we've seen you know nation states piggyback on other countries spy operations and just sit there and siphon out whatever they're getting we learned some of that from the snowden documents we've seen russia hack into iran's command and control attack servers we've seen them hit a saudi petrochemical plant where they did neutralize the safety locks at the plan and everyone assumed that it was iran given iran had been targeting saudi oil companies forever but nope it turned out that it was a graduate research institute outside moscow so you see countries kind of playing around with attribution why i think because they think okay if i do this like how am i going to cover up that it came for me because i don't want to risk the response so people are sort of dancing around this it's just in a very different way and you know at the times i'd covered the chinese hacks of infrastructure companies like pipelines i'd covered the russian probes of nuclear plants i'd covered covered the russian attacks on on the ukraine grid and then in 2018 my colleague david sanger and i covered the fact that u.s cyber command had been hacking into the russian grid and making a pretty loud show of it and when we went to the national security council because that's what journalists do before they publish a story they give the other side a chance to respond i assumed we would be in for that really awkward painful conversation where they would say you will have blood on your hands if you publish this story and instead they gave us the opposite answer they said we have no problem with you publishing this story why well they didn't say it out loud but it was pretty obvious they wanted russia to know that we're hacking into their power grid too and they better think twice before they do to us what they've done to ukraine so yeah you know we have stumbled into this new era of mutually assured digital destruction um i think another sort of quasi norm we've we've stumbled into is proportional responses you know there's this idea that if you get hit you're allowed to respond proportionally at a time and place of your choosing you know that is how the language always goes that's what obama said after north korea hit sony we will respond at a time and place of our choosing um but no one really knows like what that response looks like and so what you see a lot of the time are just these like just short of war attacks you know russia turned off the power in ukraine but it wasn't like it stayed off for a week you know it stayed off for a number of hours um you know not pecha hit those companies pretty hard um but no one died you know and the question is what's going to happen when someone dies and can a nation state masquerade as a cyber criminal group as a ransomware group and that's what really complicates coming to some sort of digital geneva convention like there's been there's been a push from brad smith at microsoft we need a digital geneva convention and on its face it sounds like a no-brainer yeah why wouldn't we all agree to stop hacking into each other's civilian hospital systems elections power grid uh pipelines but when you talk to people in the west officials in the west they'll say we would never we'd love to agree to it but we'd never do it when you're dealing with she or putin or kim jong-un because a lot of times they outsource these operations to cyber criminals in china we see a lot of these attacks come from this loose satellite network of private citizens that work at the behest of the ministry of state security so how do you come to some sort of state to state agreement when you're dealing with transnational actors and cyber criminals where it's really hard to pin down whether that person was acting alone or whether they were acting at the behest of the mss or the fsb and you know a couple years ago i remember i can't remember if it was before or after not pecha but putin said hackers are like artists who wake up in the morning in a good mood and start painting in other words i have no say over what they do or don't do so how do you how do you come to some kind of norm when that's that's how he's talking about these issues and he's just decimated merck and you know pfizer and another you know however many thousand companies that is the fundamental difference between nuclear weapons and and cyber attacks is the attribution or one of the fundamental differences if you can fix one thing in the world in terms of cyber security that would make the world a better place what would you fix so you're not allowed to fix like authoritarian regimes and you can't right you have to you have to keep that you have to keep human nature as it is in terms of on the security side technologically speaking you mentioned there's no regulation on companies united states um what if you could just uh fix with the snap of a finger what would you fix two-factor authentication multi-factor authentication it's it's ridiculous how many of these attacks come in because someone didn't turn on multi-factor authentication i mean colonial pipeline okay they took down the biggest conduit for gas jet fuel and diesel to the east coast of the united states of america how because they forgot to deactivate an old employee account whose password had been traded on the dark web and they'd never turned on two-factor authentication this water treatment facility outside florida was hacked last year how did it happen they were using windows xp from like a decade ago that can't even get patches if you wanted to and they didn't have two-factor authentication time and time again if they just switched on two-factor authentication some of these attacks wouldn't have been possible now if i could snap my fingers that's the thing i would do right now but of course you know this is a cat and mouse game and then the attackers on to the next thing but i think right now that is like bar none that is just that is the easiest simplest way to deflect the most attacks and you know the name of the game right now isn't perfect security perfect security is impossible they will always find a way in the name of the game right now is make yourself a little bit harder to attack than your competitor than anyone else out there so that they just give up and move along and you know maybe if you are a target for an advanced nation state or the svr you know you're going to get hacked no matter what but you can make cyber criminal groups deadbolt is it you can make their jobs a lot harder um simply by doing the bare basics and the other thing is stop reusing your passwords but if i only get one then two-factor authentication so what is two-factor authentication factor one is what logging in with a password and factor two is like have another device or another channel through which you can confirm yeah that's me yes you know usually this happens through some kind of text you know you get your one-time code from bank of america or from google and the better way to do it is spend twenty dollars buying yourself a fido key on amazon that's a hardware device and if you don't have that hardware device with you then you're not going to get in and the whole goal is i mean basically you know my first half of my decade at the times was spent covering like the cop beat it was like home depot got breached news at 11 you know target neiman marcus like who wasn't hacked over the course of those five years and a lot of those companies that got hacked what did hackers take they took the credentials they took the passwords they can make a pretty penny selling them on the dark web and people reuse their passwords so you get one from you know god knows who i don't know lastpass the worst case example actually lastpass but you get one and then you go test it on their email account and you go test it on their brokerage account and you test it on their cold storage account yeah you know that's how it works but if you have multi-factor authentication then they can't get in because they might have your password but they don't have your phone they don't have your fido key you know and and so you keep them out and you know i get a lot of alerts that tell me someone is trying to get into your instagram account or your twitter account or your email account and i don't worry because i use multi-factor authentication they can try all day um okay i worry a little bit but you know there it's it's the simplest thing to do and we don't even do it well there's an interface aspect to it because it's pretty annoying if it's implemented poorly yeah so uh so actually bad implementation of two-factor authentication not just bad but just something that adds friction is a security vulnerability i guess because it's really annoying like uh i think mit for a while had two-factor authentication it was really annoying i just like though the time the number of times it pings you like uh it re it asks to re-authenticate across multiple sub-domains like it just feels like a pain i don't know what the right balance there yeah it feels like friction in our frictionless society it feels like friction it's annoying that's security's biggest problem it's annoying you know we need the steve jobs of security to come along and we need to make it painless and actually you know on that point apple has probably done more for security than anyone else simply by introducing biometric authentication first with the fingerprint and then with face id it's not perfect but you know if you think just eight years ago everyone was running around with either no passcode an optional passcode or four-digit passcode on their phone that anyone you know think of what you can get when you get someone's iphone if you steal someone's iphone and you know props to them for introducing the fingerprint and face id and again it wasn't perfect but it was a huge step forward now it's time to make another huge step forward um i want to see the password die i mean it's gotten us as far as it was ever going to get us and i hope whatever we come up with next is not going to be annoying is going to be seamless when i was at google that's what we worked on is and there's a lot of ways to call this active authentication or passive authentication so basically use biometric data not just like a fingerprint but everything from your body to identify who you are like movement patterns so basically create a lot of layers of protection where it's very difficult to fake including um like face unlock checking that it's your actual face like the liveness tests so like from video so unlocking it with video yeah voice the way you move the the the phone um the way you take it out of the pocket that kind of thing all of those factors it's a really hard problem though yeah and ultimately it's very difficult to beat the password in terms of security well there's a company that i actually will call out and that's abnormal security so they work on email attacks and it was started by a couple guys who were doing i think ad tech at twitter so you know ad technology now like it's a joke how much they know about us you know you always hear the conspiracy theories that you know you saw someone's shoes and next thing you know it's on your phone it's amazing what they know about you um and they're basically taking that and they're applying it to attacks so they're saying okay you know if you're this is what your email patterns are it might be different for you and me because we're emailing strangers all the time um but for most people their email patterns are pretty predictable and if something strays from that pattern that's abnormal and they'll block it they'll investigate it you know and and that's great you know let's start using that kind of targeted ad technology to protect people and yeah i mean it's not going to get us away from the password and using multi-factor authentication but you know the technology is out there and we just have to figure out how to use it in a really seamless way because it doesn't matter if you have the perfect security solution if no one uses it i mean when i started at the times when i was trying to be really good about protecting sources i was trying to use pgp encryption and it's like it didn't work you know the number of mistakes i would probably make just trying to email someone with pgp just wasn't worth it um and then signal came along and and signal made it wicker you know they made it a lot easier to send someone an encrypted text message so we we we have to start investing in creative minds um in good security design you know i really think that's the hack that's going to get us out of where we are today what about social engineering do you worry about this sort of hacking people yes i mean this is the worst nightmare of every chief information security officer out there um you know social engineering we work from home now i saw this this woman posted online about how her husband it went viral today but it was her husband had this problem at work they hired a guy named john and now the guy that shows up for work every day doesn't act like john [Laughter] i mean think about that like think about the potential for social engineering in that context you know you apply for a job and you put on a pretty face you hire an actor or something and then you just get inside the organization and get access to all that organization's data a couple years ago saudi arabia planted spies inside twitter you know why probably because they were trying to figure out who these people were who were criticizing the regime on twitter you know they couldn't do it with a hack from the outside so why not plant people on the inside and that's like the worst nightmare and also unfortunately creates all kinds of xenophobia at a lot of these organizations i mean if you're going to have to take that into consideration then organizations are going to start looking really skeptically and suspiciously at someone who applies for that job from china and we've seen that go really badly at places like the department of commerce where they basically accuse people of being spies that aren't spies so it is the hardest problem to solve and it's never been harder to solve than right at this very moment when there's so much pressure for companies to let people work remotely that's actually why i'm single i'm suspicious china and russia every time i meet somebody are trying to plant uh and get insider information so i'm very very suspicious i keep putting the touring test in front no um no i have a friend who worked inside nsa and was one of their top hackers and he's like every time i go to russia i get hit on by these tens yeah and i come home my friends are like i'm sorry you're not a 10. like yeah yeah the common story i mean it's difficult to trust to trust humans in this day and age online you know because so we're working remotely that's one thing but just interacting with people on on the internet it sounds ridiculous but you know i've because of this podcast in part i've gotten to meet some incredible people but it you know it makes you nervous to trust folks and i don't know how to solve that problem so i'm uh talking with mark zuckerberg who dreams about creating the metaverse what do you do about that world where more and more our lives is in the digital sphere like um one way to phrase it is most of our meaningful experiences at some point will be online like falling in love getting a job or experiencing a moment of happiness with a friend with a new friend made online all of those things like more and more the fun we do the things that make us love life will happen online and if those things have an avatar that's digital that's like a way to hack into people's minds whether it's with aiai or kind of troll farms or something like that i don't know if there's a way to protect against that that that uh that might fundamentally rely on our faith in you know how good human nature is so if most people are good we're going to be okay but if people will tend towards manipulation and malevolent behavior in search of power then we're screwed so i i don't know if you can comment on how to keep the metaverse secure yeah i mean i all i thought about when you were talking just now is my three-year-old son yeah you know he asked me the other day what's the internet mom and i just almost wanted to cry you know i don't want that for him i don't want all of his most meaningful experiences to be online you know by the time that happens um how do you know that person's human that avatar is human you know i believe in free speech i don't believe in free speech for robots and bots and like look what just happened over the last six years you know we had bots pretending to be black lives matter activists just to sew some division or you know texas secessionists or um you know organizing anti-hillary protests or just to sew more division to tie us up in our own politics so that we're so paralyzed we can't get anything done we can't make any progress and we definitely can't handle our adversaries and their long-term thinking um it really scares me and here's where i just come back to just because we can create the metaverse you know just because it sounds like the next logical step in our digital revolution i do i really want my my child's most significant moments to be online they weren't for me you know so maybe i'm just stuck in that old school thinking or maybe i've seen too much and i'm really sick of being the guinea pig parent generation for these things i mean it's hard enough with screen time like thinking about how to manage the metaverse as a parent to a young boy like i can't even let my head go there that's so terrifying for me but we've never stopped any new technology just because it introduces risks we've always said okay the promise of this technology means we should keep going keep pressing ahead we just need to figure out new ways to manage that risk and you know that is that's that's the blockchain right now like when i was covering all of these ransomware attacks i thought okay this is gonna be it for cryptocurrency you know governments are gonna put the kibosh down they're gonna put the hammer down and say enough is enough like we have to put this genie back in the bottle because it's enabled ransomware i mean five years ago they would hijack your pc and they'd say go to the local pharmacy get a e-gift card and tell us what the pin is and then we'll get your two hundred dollars now it's pay us you know five bitcoin um and so there's no doubt cryptocurrencies enabled ransomware attacks but after the colonial pipeline ransom was seized because if you remember the fbi was actually able to go in and claw some of it back from dark side which was the ransomware group that hit it and i spoke to these guys at trm labs so they're they're one of these blockchain intelligence companies and a lot of people that work there used to work at the treasury and what they said to me was yeah cryptocurrency has enabled ransomware but to track down that ransom payment would have taken you know if we were dealing with fiat currency would have taken us years to get to that one bank account or belonging to that one front company in the seychelles and now thanks to the blockchain we can track the movement of those funds in real time and you know what you know these payments are not as anonymous as people think like we still can use our old hacking ways and zero days and you know old school intelligence methods to find out who owns that private wallet and how to get to it so it's a it's a curse in some ways and that it's an enabler but it's also a blessing and they said that same thing to me that i just said to you they said we've never shut down a promising new technology because it introduced risk we just figured out how to manage that risk and i think that's where the conversation unfortunately has to go is how do we in the metaverse use technology to uh to fix things so maybe we'll finally be able to not finally but figure out a way to solve the identity problem on the internet meaning like a blue check mark for actual human and connect it to identity like a fingerprint so you can prove your you and yet do it in a way that doesn't involve the company having all your data so giving you allowing you to maintain control over your data or if you don't then there's a complete transparency of how that data is being used all those kinds of things and maybe as you educate more and more people they would demand in a capitalist society that the companies that they give their data to will respect that data yeah i mean there is this company and i hope they succeed their names p i i know piano and they want to create a vault for your personal information inside every organization and ultimately if i'm going to call delta airlines to book a flight they don't need to know my my social security number they don't need to know my birth date they're just gonna send me a one-time token to my phone my phone's gonna say or my you know fido key is going to say yep it's it's her and then we're going to talk about my identity like a token you know some random token they don't need to know exactly who i am they just need to know i am you know the system trusts that i am who i say i am but they don't get access to my pii data they don't get access to my social security number my location um or the fact i'm a times journalist you know i think that's the way the world's gonna go we have enough is enough sort of losing our personal information everywhere um letting data marketing companies track our every move you know they don't need to know who i am you know okay i get it you know we're stuck in this world where the internet runs on ads so ads are not going to go away but they don't need to know i'm nicole perlera they can they can know that i am token number you know x x 5 6 7. and they can let you know what they know and give you control about removing the things they know yeah right to be forgotten to me you should be able to walk away with a single press of a button and i also believe that most people given the choice to walk away won't walk away they'll just feel better about having the option to walk away when they understand the trade-offs if you walk away you're not going to get some of the personalized experiences that you would otherwise get like a personalized feed and all those kinds of things but the freedom to walk away is is um i think really powerful and obviously what you're saying it's definitely there's all these html forms where you have to enter your phone number and email and private information from delta every single airline new york times i have so many opinions on this just the friction and the sign up and all those kinds of things i should be able to this has to do with everything this has to do with payment too as the payment should be trivial it should be one click and and one click to unsubscribe and subscribe and one click to provide all of your information that's necessary for the subscription service for the transaction service whatever that is getting a ticket as opposed to i have all these fake phone numbers and emails that i use not to sign up because you know you never know if one site is hacked then it's just going to propagate to everything else yeah and you know there's low-hanging fruit and i hope congress does something and frankly i think it's negligent they haven't on the fact that elderly people are getting spammed to death on their phones these days with fake car warranty scams and i mean my dad was in the hospital last year and i was in the hospital room and his phone kept buzzing and i look at it and it's just spam attack after spam attack people non-stop calling about his freaking car warranty why they're trying to get a social security number they're trying to get us pii they're trying to get this information we need to figure out how to put those people in jail for life and we need to figure out why in the hell we are being required or asked to hand over our social security number and our home address and our passport you know all of that information to every retailer who asks i mean that's that's insanity um and there's no question they're not protecting it uh because it keeps showing up in you know spam or identity theft or credit cards afterwards well spam is getting better and maybe uh i need to as a side note make a public announcement please clip this out which is um if you get an email or a message from lex friedman saying how much i lex you know appreciate you and love you and so on and please connect with me on my whatsapp number and i will give you bitcoin or something like that please do not click and i i'm aware that there's a lot of this going on a very large amount i can't do anything about it this is on every single platform it's happening more and more and more uh which i've been recently informed that they're not emailing so it's cross-platform they're taking people's they're somehow this is fascinating to me because they are taking people who comment on various social platforms and they somehow reverse engineer they figure out what their email is and they send an email to that person saying from lex friedman and it's like a heartfelt email with links it's fascinating because it's cross-platform now it's not just a spam bot that's messaging us and a comment that in a reply they are saying okay this person cares about this other person on social media so i'm going to find another channel which in their mind probably increases and then does the likelihood that they'll get uh the people to click and they do i don't know what to do about that it makes me really really sad especially with podcasting there's an intimacy that people feel connected and they get really excited oh okay cool like let's i want to talk to lex and they click and like i i get angry at the people that do this i mean you're um it's like the john that gets hired uh the fake employee i mean i don't know what to do about that i mean i suppose that's the i suppose the solution is education it's telling people to be skeptical on stuff they click uh it's that's that balance with the technology solution of creating a um maybe like two-factor authentication and maybe helping identify things that are likely to be spam i don't know but then the machine learning there is tricky because you don't want to add a lot of extra friction that just annoys people because they'll turn it off because you have the accept cookies thing right that everybody has to click on now so now they completely ignore they accept cookies this is very difficult um to find that frictionless security you mentioned snowden you talked about looking through the nsa documents he leaked and doing the hard work of that what do you make of edward snowden what did you learn from those documents what do you think of him in the long arc of history is edward snowden a hero or a villain i think he's neither i have really complicated feelings about edward snowden um on the one hand i'm a journalist at heart and more transparency is good and i'm grateful for the conversations that we had in the post-snowden era about the limits to surveillance and how critical privacy is and when you have no transparency and you don't really know in that case what our secret courts were doing how can you truly believe that our country is taking our civil liberties seriously um so on one on the one hand i'm grateful that he cracked open these debates on the other hand when i walked into this storage closet of classified nsa secrets i had just spent two years covering chinese cyber espionage almost every day and this sort of advancement of russian attacks they were just getting worse and worse and more destructive and there were no limits to chinese cyber espionage and chinese surveillance of its own citizens and there seemed to be no limit to what russia was willing to do in terms of cyber attacks and also in some cases assassinating journalists so when i walked into that room there was a part of me quite honestly that was relieved to know that the nsa was as good as i hoped they were and we weren't using that knowledge to as far as i know assassinate journalists uh we weren't using our access to you know take out pharmaceutical companies for the most part we were using it for traditional espionage now that set of documents also set me on the journey of my book because to me the american people's reaction to the snowden documents was a little bit misplaced you know they were upset about the phone call metadata collection program angela merkel i think rightfully was upset that we were hacking her cell phone um but in sort of the spy eat spy world hacking world leaders cell phones is pretty much what most spy agencies do and there wasn't a lot that i saw in those documents that was beyond what i thought a spy agency does and i think if there was another 9 11 tomorrow god forbid we would all say how did the nsa miss this why weren't they spying on those terrorists why weren't they spying on those world leaders you know there's some of that too but i think that there was great damage done to um the us's reputation um i think we really lost our halo in terms of a protector of civil liberties um and i think a lot of what was reported was unfortunately reported in a vacuum that was my biggest gripe that we were always reporting the nsa has this program and here's what it does and the nsa is in angela merkel's cell phone and the nsa can do this and uh no one was saying and by the way china has been hacking into our pipelines and they've been making off with all of our intellectual property and russia's been hacking into our energy infrastructure and they've been using the same methods to spy on track and in many cases kill their own journalists and the saudis have been doing this to their own critics and dissidents and so you can't talk about any of these countries in isolation it is really like spite spy out there and uh so i just have complicated feelings you know and the other thing is and i'm sorry it's a little bit of a tangent but the amount of documents that we had like thousands of documents most of which were just crap but had people's names on them you know part of me wishes that those documents had been released in a much more targeted limited way it's just a lot of it just felt like a powerpoint that was taken out of context um and you just sort of wish that there had been a little bit more thought into what was released because i think a lot of the impact from sewing was just the volume of the reporting but i but i think you know based on what i saw personally um there was a lot of stuff that i just i don't know why that that particular thing got released as a whistleblower what's the better way to do it because i mean there's fear there's it takes a lot of effort to do a more targeted release you know if there's proper channels you're afraid that those channels will be manipulated like who do you trust what's a better way to do this do you think as a journalist this almost like a journalistic question reveal some fundamental flaw in the system without destroying the system i i bring up you know again mark zuckerberg and meta there was a whistleblower that came out about instagram internal studies and i also torn about how to feel about that whistleblower because from a company perspective that's an open culture how can you operate successfully if you have an open culture where any one whistleblower can come out out of context take a study whether it represents a larger context or not and the press eats it up and then that creates a narrative that is just like with the nsa you said it's out of context very targeted to where while facebook is evil clearly because of this one leak it's really hard to know what to do there because we're now in a society that's deeply distrust institutions and so narratives by whistleblowers make that whistleblower and their forthcoming book very popular and so there's a huge incentive to take stuff out of context and to tell stories that don't represent the full context the full truth it's hard to know what to do with that because then um that forces facebook and meta and governments to be much more conservative much more secretive it's like a race to the the bottom i i don't know i don't know if you can comment on any of that how to be a whistleblower ethically and properly i don't know i mean these are hard questions and you know even for myself like in some ways i think of my book as sort of blowing the whistle on the underground zero day market but you know it's not like i was in the market myself it's not like i had access to classified data when i was reporting out that book you know as i say in the book like listen i'm just trying to scrape the surface here so we can have these conversations before it's too late and um you know i'm sure there's plenty in there that someone who's you know the u.s intelligence agency's preeminent zero day broker probably has some voodoo doll of me out there and you know you never you're never gonna get it 100 um but i really applaud whistleblowers like you know the whistleblower who who blew the whistle on the trump call with zelensky i mean people needed to know about that that we were basically in some ways blackmailing an ally to try to influence an election i mean they went through the proper channels they weren't trying to profit off of it right there was no book that came out afterwards from that whistleblower um that whistleblower's not like they went through the channels they're not living in moscow you know let's put it that way i can ask you a question you mentioned nsa one of the things that showed is they're pretty good at what they do again this is a touchy subject i suppose but there's a lot of conspiracy theories about intelligence agencies from your understanding of intelligence agencies cie nsa and the equivalent of in other countries are they one question this could be a dangerous question are they competent are they good at what they do and two are they malevolent in any way sort of i recently had a conversation about uh tobacco companies that kind of see their customers as dupes like they can just play games with with people conspiracy theories tell that similar story about intelligence agencies that they're interested in manipulating the populace for whatever ends the powerful in dark rooms cigarettes smoke cigar smoke filled rooms what what's your sense do these conspiracy theories have kind of any truth to them or are intelligence agencies for the most part good for society okay well that's an easy one is it no i think you know depends which intelligence agency think about the mossad you know they're killing every um iranian nuclear scientist they can over the years you know but have they delayed the time horizon before iran gets the bomb yeah um have they probably staved off terror attacks on their own citizens yeah um you know none of these intelli intelligence is intelligence you know you can't just say like they're malevolent or they're heroes you know everyone i have met in this space is not like the pound your chest patriot that you see on you know the beach on the 4th of july a lot of them have complicated feelings about their former employers well at least at the nsa reminded me to do what we were accused of doing after snowden to spy on americans you have no idea the amount of red tape and paperwork and bureaucracy it would have taken to do what everyone thinks that we were supposedly doing um but then you know we find out in the course of the snowden reporting about a program called loven where a couple of the nsa analysts were using their access to spy on their ex-girlfriends so you know there's an exception to every case um generally i will probably get you know accused of my western bias here again but i think you can you can almost barely compare um some of these western intelligence agencies to china for instance and the surveillance that they're deploying on the uyghurs to the level they're deploying it and the surveillance they're starting to export abroad with some of the programs like the watering hole attack i mentioned earlier where it's not just hitting the uyghurs inside china it's hitting anyone interested in the uyghur plight outside china i mean it could be an american high school student writing a paper on the uyghurs they want to spy on that person too you know there's no rules in china really limiting the extent of that surveillance and we all better be pay attention to what's happening with the uyghurs because just as ukraine has been to russia in terms of a test kitchen for its cyber attacks the uyghurs are china's test kitchen for surveillance and there's no doubt in my mind that they're testing them on the uyghurs uyghurs or their petri dish and eventually they will export that level of surveillance overseas i mean in 2015 [Music] obama and xi jinping reached a deal where basically the white house said you better cut it out on intellectual property theft and so they made this agreement that they would not hack each other for commercial benefit and for a period of about 18 months we saw this huge drop off in in chinese cyber attacks on american companies but some of them continued where did they continue they continued on aviation companies on hospitality companies like marriott uh why because that was still considered fair game to china it wasn't ip theft they were after they wanted to know who was staying in this city at this time when chinese citizens were staying there so they could cross match for counterintelligence who might be a likely chinese spy i'm sure we're doing some of that too counterintelligence is counterintelligence it's considered fair game but where i think it gets evil is when you use it for censorship you know to suppress any descent to do what i've seen the uae do to its citizens where people who've gone on twitter just to advocate for better voting rights more enfranchisement suddenly find their passports confiscated you know i talked to one critic ahmed mansoor and he told me you know you might find yourself a terrorist labeled a terrorist one day and you don't even know how to operate a gun i mean he had been beaten up every time he tried to go somewhere his passport had been confiscated by that point it turned out they'd already hacked into his phone so they were listening to us talking they'd hacked into his baby monitor so they're spying on his child um and they stole his car and then they created a new law that you couldn't criticize the the ruling family or the ruling party on twitter and he's been in solitary confinement every day um since on hunger strike so that's evil you know that's evil and we still we don't do that here you know we we have rules here we don't cross that line um so yeah in some cases like i won't go to dubai you know i won't go to abu dhabi if i ever want to go to the maldives like too bad like most of the flights go through dubai so there's some lines we're not willing to cross but then again just like you said there's individuals within nsa within cia and they may have power and to me there's levels of evil to me personally this is the stuff of conspiracy theories is um the things you've mentioned as evil are more direct attacks but there's also psychological warfare so blackmail so what is um what does spying allow you to do allow you to collect information if you have something that's embarrassing or if you have like jeffrey epstein conspiracy theories active what is it manufacturer of embarrassing things and then use blackmail to manipulate the population or all the powerful people involved it troubles me deeply that mit allowed somebody like jeffrey epstein in their midst especially some of the uh scientists i admire that they would hang out with that person at all and so you know i'll talk about it sometimes and then a lot of people tell me well obviously jeffrey epstein is the front for intelligence and i just um i struggle to see that level of competence and malevolence but you know who the hell am i and i i guess i was trying to get to that point you said that there's bureaucracy and so on which makes some of these things very difficult i wonder how much malevolence how much competence there is in these institutions like how far this takes us back to the hacking question how far are people willing to go if they have the power this has to do with social engineering this has to do with hacking this has to do with manipulating people attacking people doing evil onto people psychological warfare and stuff like that i don't know i believe that most people are good and um i don't think that's possible in a free society there's something that happens when you have a centralized government where power corrupts over time and you start you know surveillance programs kind of um it's like a slippery slope that over time starts to to uh both use fear and direct manipulation to control the populace but in a free society i just um it's difficult for me to imagine you can have like something like a jeffrey epstein a front for intelligence i don't know what i'm asking you but i'm just i have a hope that for the most part intelligence agencies are trying to do good and are actually doing good for the world when you view it in the full context of the complexities of the world but then again if they're not would we know that's why edward snowden might be a good thing let me ask you on a personal question you have investigated some of the most powerful organizations and people in the world of cyber warfare cyber security are you ever afraid for your own life your own well-being digital or physical i mean i've had my moments you know i've had um our security team at the times called me at one point and said someone's on the dark web offering you know good money to anyone who can hack your your phone or your laptop um i describe in my book how when i was at that hacking conference in argentina i came back and i brought a burner laptop with me but i'd kept it in the safe anyway and it didn't have anything on it but someone had broken in and it was moved um you know i've had als all sorts of sort of scary moments um and then i've had moments where i think i went just way too far into the paranoid side i mean i remember writing about the times hack by china and i just covered a number of chinese cyber attacks where they'd gotten into the thermostat at someone's corporate apartment and um you know they've gotten into all sorts of stuff and i was living by myself i was single in san francisco and my cable box on my television started making some weird noises in the middle of the night and i got up and i ripped it out of the wall and i think i said something like embarrassing like fuck you china you know [Laughter] and then i went back to bed and i woke up and like this like beautiful morning like i mean i'll never forget it like this is like glimmering morning light shining on my cable box which has now been ripped out and is sitting on my floor in like the morning light and i was just like no no no like i'm not going down that road like you basically i i came to to a you know a fork in the road where i could either go full tinfoil hat go live off the grid never have a car with navigation never use google maps never own an iphone never order diapers off amazon you know create an alias um or i could just do the best i can and live in this new digital world we're living in and what does that look like for me i mean what what are my crown jewels this is what i tell people what are your crown jewels because just focus on that you can't protect everything but you can protect your crown jewels for me for the longest time my crown jewels were my sources i was nothing without my sources so i had some sources i would meet the same dim sum place or maybe it was a different restaurant on the same date you know every quarter um and we would never drive there we would never uber there we wouldn't bring any devices i could bring a pencil and a notepad and if someone wasn't in town like there were a couple times where i'd show up and the source never came but we never communicated digitally and those were the lengths i was willing to go to protect that source but you can't do it for everyone so for everyone else you know it signal using two-factor authentication you know keeping my devices up to date not clicking on phishing emails using a password manager all the things that you know we know we're supposed to do and that's what i tell everyone like don't go crazy because then that's like the ultimate hack then they've hacked your mind whoever they is for you um but just do the best you can now my whole risk model changed when i had a kid you know now it's oh god you know if anyone threatened my family god help them but it's uh it it changes you and you know unfortunately there are some things like i was really scared to go deep on like russian cyber crime you know like putin himself you know and and it's interesting like i have a mentor who's an incredible person who was the times moscow bureau chief during the cold war and after i wrote a series of stories about chinese cyber espionage he took me out to lunch and he told me that when he was living in moscow he would drop his kids off at preschool when they were my son's age now and the kgb would follow him and they would make a really like loud show of it um you know they'd tail them they'd you know honk they'd just be a wreck make a ruckus and he said you know what they never actually did anything but they wanted me to know that they were following me and i operated accordingly and he says that's how you should operate in in the digital world know that there are probably people following you sometimes they'll make a little bit of noise but one thing you need to know is that while you're at the new york times you have a little bit of an invisible shield on you you know if something were to happen to you that would be a really big deal that would be an international incident so i kind of carried that invisible shield with me for years and then uh jamal khashoggi happened and that destroyed my vision of my invisible shield you know sure you know he was a saudi but he was a washington post columnist you know for the most part he was living in the united states he was a journalist and for them to do what they did to him pretty much in the open and get away with it um and for for the united states to let them get away with it because we wanted to preserve diplomatic relations with the saudis that really threw my world view upside down and you know i think that sent a message to a lot of countries that it was sort of open season on journalists and to me that was one of the most destructive things that happened under the previous administration and you know i don't i don't really know what to think of my invisible shield anymore like you said that really worries me on the journalism side that people would be afraid to dig deep on fascinating topics and you know i have my own that's part of the reason that i i would love to have kids i would love to have a family part of the reason i'm a little bit afraid there's many ways to phrase this but the loss of freedom in the way of doing all the crazy shit that i naturally do which i would say the ethic of journalism is kind of not is doing crazy shit without really thinking about it this is letting your curiosity really allow you to be free and explore it's i mean whether it's stupidity or fearlessness whatever it is that's what great journalism is and all the concerns about security risks have made me like become a better person the way i approach it is uh just make sure you don't have anything to hide i know this is not a thing this is not a this is not an approach to security i'm just this is like a motivational speech or something it's just like if you can lose you can be hacked at any moment just don't be a douchebag secretly just be be like a good person because then i i see this actually with social media in general uh just present yourself in the most authentic way possible meaning be the same person online as you are privately have nothing to hide that's one not the only but one of the ways to achieve security i maybe i'm totally wrong on this but don't be um secretly weird if you're weird be publicly weird so it's impossible to blackmail you that's my approach to yeah well they call it the new york times front page uh phenomenon you know don't put anything in email or i guess social media these days that um you wouldn't want to read on the front page of the new york times and that works but you know sometimes i even get carrie i mean i i have i don't know not as many followers as you but a lot of followers and sometimes even i get carried away to be emotional yeah yeah i mean just the cortisol um response on twitter you know twitter is basically like designed to elicit those responses i mean every day i turn on my computer i look at my phone i look at what's trending on twitter and it's like what are the topics that are gonna make people the most angry today [Laughter] and you know it's easy to get carried away but it's also just that sucks too that you have to be constantly censoring yourself and maybe it's for the better maybe you can't be a secret asshole and we can put that in the good bucket but at the same time you know there is a danger to that other voice to creativity you know to being weird there is a danger to that little whispered voice that was that's like well how would people read that you know how could that be manipulated how could that be used against you and that stifles creativity and innovation and three free thought and um you know that's that that is on a very micro level um and that's something i think about a lot and that's actually something that tim cook um has talked about a lot and why he has you know said he goes full force on privacy is it's just that little voice that is at some level censoring you and what what is sort of the long-term impact of that little voice over time i think there's a ways i think that self-censorship is an attack factory that there are solutions to the way i'm really inspired by elon musk the solution to that is just be privately and publicly the same person and be ridiculous embrace the full weirdness and show it more and more so it you know that's that's memes that has like ridiculous humor and i think uh and if there is something you really want to hide deeply consider if that you want to be that like why are you hiding it what exactly are you afraid of because i think my hopeful vision for the internet is the internet loves authenticity they want to see you weird so be that and like live that fully because i think that gray area where you're kind of censoring yourself that that's where the destruction is you have to go all the way step over be weird be weird and then it feels it can be painful because people can attack you and so on but just ride it i mean that's just like a skill on the social psychological level that ends up being a um an approach to security which is like remove the attack vector of having private information by being your full weird self publicly what um what advice would you give to young folks today you know operating in um in this complicated space about how to have a successful life a life they can be proud of a career they can be proud of maybe somebody in high school and college thinking about what they're going to do be a hacker you know if you have any interest become a hacker and apply yourself to defense you know every time like we do have these these amazing scholarship programs for instance where you know they find you early they'll pay your college as long as you commit to some kind of federal commitment to sort of help federal agencies with cyber security and where does everyone want to go every year from the scholarship program they want to go work at the nsa or cyber command you know they want to go work on offense they want to go do the sexy stuff it's really hard to get people to work on defense it's just it's always been more fun to be a pirate than being the coast guard you know and so we have a huge deficit when it comes to filling those roles there's 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity positions around the world i mean talk about job security like be a hacker and work on cyber security you will always have a job and we're actually at a huge deficit and disadvantage as a free market economy because we can't match cyber security salaries at palantir or facebook or google or microsoft and so it's really hard for the united states to fill those roles um and you know other countries have had this workaround where they basically have forced conscription on some level you know china tells people like you do whatever you're gonna do during the day work at alibaba you know if you need to do some ransomware okay but the minute we tap you on the shoulder and ask you to come do this sensitive operation for us the answer is yes um you know same with russia you know a couple years ago when yahoo was hacked and they laid it all out in an indictment it came down to two cyber criminals and two guys from the fsb cyber criminals were allowed to have their fun but the minute they came across the username and password for someone's personal yahoo account that worked at the white house or the state department or military they were expected to pass that over to the fsb so we don't do that here and it's it's even worse on defense we really can't fill these positions so you know be if if you are a hacker if you're interested in code if you're a tinkerer you know learn how to hack um there are all sorts of amazing hacking competitions you can do through the sans org for example s-a-n-s uh and then use those skills for good you know neuter the bugs in that code that get used by autocratic regimes to make people's life you know a living prison um you know plug those holes you know defend industrial systems defend our water treatment facilities from hacks where people are trying to come in and poison the water you know that i think is just an amazing um it's an amazing job on so many levels it's intellectually stimulating you can tell yourself you're serving your country you can tell yourself you're saving lives and keeping people safe and you'll always have amazing job security and if you need to go get that job that pays you you know two million bucks a year you can do that too and you can have a public profile more so of a public profile you could be a public rock star i mean it's the same thing as uh sort of the military and there's a lot of um there's a lot of uh well-known sort of people commenting on the fact that veterans are not treated as well as they should be but it's still the fact that soldiers are deeply respected for for uh defending the country the freedoms the the ideals that we stand for and in the same way i mean in some ways the the cyber security defense are the soldiers of the future yeah and you know it's interesting i mean in cyber security the difference is oftentimes you see the more interesting threats in the private sector because that's where the attacks come you know when when cyber criminals and nation-state adversaries come for the united states they don't go directly for cyber command or the nsa no they go for banks they go for google they go for microsoft they go for critical infrastructure and so those companies those private sector companies get to see some of the most advanced sophisticated attacks out there and you know if you're working at fireeye and you're calling out the solarwinds attack for instance i mean you just saved god knows how many systems from you know that compromise turning into something that more closely resembles sabotage um so you know go go be a hacker and or go be a journalist [Laughter] so uh you wrote the book this is how they tell me the world ends as we've been talking about of course referring to cyber war cyber security uh what gives you hope about the future of our world if it doesn't end how will it not end that's a good question i mean i have to have hope right because i have a kid and i'm another on the way and if i didn't have hope i wouldn't be having kids um but it's a scary time to be having kids and and now it's like pandemic climate change disinformation increasingly advanced perhaps deadly cyber attacks what gives me hope is that i share your world view that i think people are fundamentally good and sometimes and this is why the metaverse scares me to death but when i'm reminded of that is not online like online i get the opposite you know you start to lose hope and humanity when you're on twitter half your day um it's like when i go to the grocery store or i go on a hike or like someone smiles at me or you know or someone just says something nice um you know people are fundamentally good we just don't hear from those people enough and my hope is you know i just think our our current political climate like we've hit rock bottom you know this is as bad as it gets we can't do anything don't jinx it well but i think it's a generational thing you know i think baby boomers like it's time to move along i think it's it's time for a new generation to come in and i actually have a lot of hope when i look at you know i'm sort of like this i guess they call it me a geriatric millennial or a young gen x but like we have this unique responsibility because i grew up without without the internet and without social media but i'm native to it so i know the good and i know the bad and that's true on so many different things you know i grew up without climate change anxiety and now i'm feeling it and i know it's not a given we don't have to just resign ourselves to climate change um you know same with disinformation and i think a lot of the problems we face today have just exposed the sort of inertia that there's been on so many of these issues and i really think it's a generational shift that has to happen and i think this next generation is gonna come in and say like we're not doing business like you guys did it anymore you know we're not just gonna like rape and pillage the earth and try and turn everyone against each other and play dirty tricks and let lobbyists dictate you know what what we do or don't do as a country anymore and that's really where i see the hope it feels like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for uh young minds to step up and create solutions and lead so i whenever like uh politicians or leaders that are older like you said are acting shitty i see that as a positive they're inspiring a large number of young people to replace them yeah and so it's i think you're right there's going to be it's almost like you need people to act shitty to remind them oh wow we need good leaders we need great creators and builders and entrepreneurs and scientists and engineers and journalists yeah you know all the discussions about how the journalism is quote unquote broken and so on that's just an inspiration for new institutions to rise up that do journalism better new journalists to step up and do journalism better so i and i've been constantly when i talk to young people i'm constantly impressed um by uh the ones that dream to build solutions and so that's that's that's ultimately why i um i put the hope but the world is a messy place like we've been talking about it's a scary place yeah and i think you hit something hit on something earlier which is authenticity like no one is going to rise above that is plastic anymore you know people are craving authenticity you know the benefit of the internet is it's really hard to hide who you are on every single platform you know on some level it's gonna come out who you really are and so you hope that um you know by the time my kids are grown like no one's gonna care um if they made one mistake online so long as they're authentic you know and and i i used to worry about this my nephew was born the day i graduated from college and i just always that you know he's like born into to facebook and just think like how is a kid like that ever gonna be president of the united states of america because if facebook had been around when i was in college you know like jesus um you know what how is how are those kids gonna ever be present there's gonna be some photo of them at some point making some mistake and that's gonna be all over for them and now i take that back now it's like no everyone's going to make mistakes there's going to be a picture for everyone and we're all going to have to come and grow up to the view that as humans we're going to make huge mistakes and hopefully they're not so big that they're going to ruin the rest of your life but we're going to have to come around to this view that we're all human and we're going to have to be a little bit more forgiving and a little bit more tolerant when people mess up and we're going to have to be a little bit more humble when we do and like keep moving forward otherwise you can't like cancel everyone uh nicole this was an incredible hopeful conversation also um one that reveals that in the shadows there's a lot of challenges to be solved so i really appreciate that you took on this really difficult subject with your book that's journalism is best so i'm really grateful that you did that you took the risk that you took that on and that you plug the cable box back in that means you have hope um and thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me today thank you thanks for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with nicole pearl roth to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from nicole herself here we are entrusting our entire digital lives passwords texts love letters banking records health records credit cards sources and deepest thoughts to this mystery box whose inner circuitry most of us would never vet run by code written in a language most of us will never fully understand thank you for listening and hope to see you next time