The Cyberattack We’re Not Ready For

If you had asked me, hey, write a sequel and you can make it fiction. Make it science fiction.

“What is the nightmare next chapter of this thing?”

I would have written a book that didn't look that different from the era we are entering right now where AI can essentially find these vulnerabilities and turn them on anyone they choose. Hey everyone from New York Magazine in the vox media podcast network. This is on with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Nicole Pearl Roth, a leading expert on cyber security and cyber conflict.

Nicole spent a decade covering cyber security, digital espnage, and sabotage as a reporter at the New York Times for stepping out to become a founder and managing partner at Silver Buckshot Ventures, a cyber moonshot fund investing in cyber security companies. She's also the author of one of my favorite books. This is how they tell me the world ends about global cyber arms race.

It's a must read. The latest season of our award-winning investigative podcast to catch a thief exposes North Korea's infiltration of American companies via a pipeline of remote IT labor that's sending hundreds of millions of dollars back to the regime and its nuclear weapons program. The season finale is out this week.

I just love Nicole.

“I think she talks in plain English about some very serious and complicated threats to the”

United States and most democracies around misinformation, around cyber security, around the efforts of this administration to undercut our cyber security and more.

And she's just always a straight shooter and I really appreciate it.

Our expert question today comes from Demetri Al-Perovic, co-founder of CrowdStrike, and the chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator Washington D.C. based geopolitical think tank. So stick around. And one more thing before we get started, if you're going to be at Washington D.C. today, July 16th, please join us live at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center for

a taping of on. I'll be talking to Gina Romando, Kammer Secretary under President Biden, and former Rhode Island Governor about what AI means for the workforce. And as a special bonus before that conversation, I'll be speaking with Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels and the University of Notre Dame President, father Robert Dowd, to talk

about how universities are approaching AI and workforce issues. You can get tickets and learn more at voxmedia.com/carotswisherlive. Support for this show comes from Odo. Running a business takes everything you've got, and a lot of the tools out there that are supposed to make your life easier just aren't great at talking to each other, and that

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Try Odo for free at Odo.com, that's Odo.com. Cool. Thanks for coming on on. Thanks so much for having me. It's so good to be back.

When you were on the show just over a year ago, you said you were most concerned about quote, "everything everywhere, all at once, cyber scenario, or multiple simultaneous cyber

attacks on critical infrastructure in a short period of time."

We've experienced more geopolitical instability in rapid advances in AI, but so far, we've avoided this worst case scenario. Is that still your number one worry? Talk a little bit about what's changed in a year. Everything's changed.

Last year I was seeing, we were worried about this quote, "everything everywhere, all at once, cyber scenario, based on what we were actually seeing, Chinese hackers pre-position in," which to jog everyone's memory and it's still happening is water, power, pipeline infrastructure, high-speed rail, aviation, ports, logistics. That's all still happening.

We had to contemplate the nightmare scenario of what would happen if all of these hackers sort of detonated on the access they have all at once, so it won't just be one colonial

pipeline, but hacks on critical infrastructure across the country.

I always thought that it was unlikely that they would detonate on all these things at once, unless they were making a move on Taiwan and they wanted us to think twice about whether we wanted to support this island 7,000 miles away, and that even in that case, they would maybe go for one water treatment facility and a power grid hack here or there, just flicker the lights on and off.

Okay, the problem is now we're in the mythos era and explain what that is for people who don't know. So mythos is this new anthropic model, new ish at this point, anthropic model, that wasn't

It was actually designed to write code, but as a byproduct, it can exploit code, which

“means it can find vulnerabilities in every major operating system, every browser, and chain”

them together into an exploit so it can do things like and by the way, I interviewed the head red teamer at anthropic, so I'm a little bit close to the capability and I said describe the capabilities that this model has in plain English. He said, it's the type of thing where I can direct you to a website and gather all your banking activity.

I can pull the photos off your phone without you unlocking it. We have found exploits using this model in most major operating systems, most browsers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And these are capabilities that I, you know, the expert as a human would never have found

otherwise. The model is finding these. And so the problem is now these models can do what only previously the tier one elite nation state intelligence or their contractors could do. Therefore, and they not have done, just they just using it as a strategic advantage versus

they would do it. And the people that could now do it are kind of crazy people, possibly, or just chaos, monkeys, or whatever. And when I asked this red team around anthropic Nicholas Carlinie, who do you worry about the most, he said, well, on some level, the tier ones already have had this capability.

“You know, obviously, the models will increase their productivity, but you have to worry”

about these sort of tier two tier three nation states, like Iran, like North Korea, that

have never had this capability before, but have done pretty well with just social engineering,

or now going to have the ability to break in essentially anywhere they want. So let's talk about your new season of your investigative podcast to catch a thief, which focuses, speaking of chaos, monkeys, on how North Korean IT workers have successfully infiltrated major US companies. We're going to talk about mythos more later.

But cybercrime is now a key part of the North Korean economy. People may remember the 2014 cyberjack on Saudi pictures, carry up a North Korean government that group, talk about the advancements in North Korea's cybercrime operations in those years. And what way does the DPRK influence other adversaries because they're sort of the out front

group here? Yeah. So, you know, they came on the scene with Sony. And I think if I remember, I think it was all things D that broke that it was the North Korean cyberjack.

Yes, it was me. That was me. Yeah. That was Kara Swisher. Yeah.

That was a report of back in the day when I was a report.

“Most people remember that a talk, but as I say in the podcast, few people remember it”

for what it actually was, because most people remember the leaks and sort of the absurdity of all arguments between the studio heads over stupid things. Exactly. Yeah. But what they don't really remember is that these North Korean hackers decimated 70% of Sony's

server capacity, you know, no one could get on email, no one could get on their devices. People were using fax machines, pen and paper. It was hugely destructive. And what the North Korean's learned from that attack is, okay, we can do this. You know, we can get into an organization with social engineering.

We can basically map their network, find the crown jewels. And then we can decide what to do with those crown jewels for maximum impact. And in this case, it was to embarrass Sony and keep them really seeing this ridiculous movie. Yeah. Yes.

The interview with Seth Rogen, which depicted the assassination of Kim Jong-un. So right after Sony, we saw them basically take those same capabilities and deploy them against banks. And we saw them go after one bank in particular, the bank of Bangladesh, and they were able to using social engineering for the most part, get into the banks' connection to something

called Swift, which is essentially like a messaging protocol. So if you care, I want to send me $10,000, you know, the bank says, okay, send $10,000 from Caras account here over to Nicole's account here. They were able to manipulate it to essentially get $81 million out of the New York Fed.

They were looking for a billion, but they had a few typos, and basically through good

luck, they were only able to get $81 million out of the billion. So they learned a lot from that attack. They learned that they could basically use hacking to evade sanctions, to generate the cash that they needed for their New York's program. And they also learned that there were a lot of choke points in the system.

Then, almost like a gift from above, the world handed them crypto.

“And we have really not paid close attention, I think, I, even someone who like study”

cyber for a living, had not paid very close attention to what North Koreans were doing with crypto, but they have essentially become the masters of the blockchain. We just don't know what yet. What do you mean by that? They started off basically hacking people's private wallets, just by social engineering

and fishing, but then they really started to study the infrastructure of the blockchain. And they started pulling off some ice that to quote Rob Joyce, who used to run the NSA's hacking divisions, are some of the most sophisticated he's seen in his career. They found their way into these bridges that convert, you know, Ethereum into some other

kind of cryptocurrency, and they were able to funnel more than $600 million back to their

own wallets in one case. In the case of Bibet, you know, the second biggest cryptocurrency exchange, they pulled off a heist that was like David Copperfield ask. They got the CEO of Bibet to approve what looked like a routine transfer when underneath the user interface, he was actually approving more than a billion dollars in transfers

to North Korean wallets. So this is now funding about half of North Korea's regime that it's responsible for about half of their total funding. They need the money. And if you read the coverage around Xi Jinping's visit to North Korea this year, the

Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, they all wrote about, hey, like, we don't know why, but North Korea seems to be doing just fine despite being the most sanctioned nation on earth. They're getting better and they're using crypto to do so. They had their usual schemes, the phishing, the hacking, but this is a quantum level up.

“So talk about how did the investigation to North Korean remote IT worker fraud began?”

And just for people in the last year, Amazon said one of its contractors hired a North Korean as its IT systems administrator. Talk about that. Yep. So this is super weird.

And I started hearing about this about two years ago, some CISO, some cheap information security officers, started telling me you won't believe what happened. We actually accidentally hired a North Korean who applied as a full stock developer under someone else's identity. I was like, that's kind of weird, what did they do?

The weird thing was, Nicole, they didn't do anything. They were actually just there for the paycheck. So it kind of was just the kind of this bizarre absurd thing. And then I started hearing about major defense contractors having this issue, major ag companies. So North Korean is pretending to be someone else in order to get a job.

Yes. And in some cases, they are stealing identities to get these jobs and other cases they are paying Americans to loan out their identity. They're identity. Yeah.

And pass background checks. Finding Americans to host their corporate laptop. So the employer will ship a laptop to this American who gets $100 a month per laptop. And then that American will download some remote app that lets the North Korean remote in. And the North Korean pays them, you know, some nominal fee.

And then it's basically able to do what they need to do to do their job.

So this is American to operate where a known as laptop farms. Yes, working for the DPRK, but it's the DPRK that's working their laptops that they set up. Exactly. And so I started digging into this and at one point I partnered with a security firm called

Nessos that had been triaging some of these cases for Fortune 100 companies. And then posted a job for an AI developer and ended up getting a response from what they believed was a North Korean.

“So they confirmed it was a North Korean, why did they believe that?”

Oh, it was, you know, all the red flags. It was someone who comes on and there's a slight delay in their answer. And there's clearly a language barrier, but then their answer is spoken in perfect English. And it's clear they're using some kind of AI chatbot to answer these questions. And in this case, they actually, because they sort of suspected as much, they brought

them back for a second interview.

And they asked them questions like, oh, I see you're in Florida, you know, how do you weather hurricane George? And there's this kind of delay. And then they say, oh, you know, we did, we did find a few branches came down here and there, but we were just fine.

And there was no hurricane George. That kind of thing. Yeah. And so that's how you catch a thief. That's how you catch a thief.

Yeah. So they ended up sending them on and having Dodgers.

No, it's a lot of that.

“It's like, that's how you catch these guys.”

Like, what was your university mascot? Was one that was tripping them up? My favorite was say something bad about Kim Jong-un and that usually weeds amount. Yeah. Quite quickly.

But, you know, in this case, they hired him deliberately. And they sent him a laptop that had spyware on it.

And the sky that they hired basically logged into his discord account.

And so they were able to get into his discord account. And it turns out that's where they were managing their whole back end operation. And it was this entire cell. So the guy was in North Korean. This American laptop farm that did it.

Or this was a corporation that they were trying to get into. So the security farm hired a North Korean that was using an American on to host his laptop dot it in Florida. So they could see through the camera that they were sitting in a basically like container store type closet somewhere in Florida.

And then they could, they sent him something that could cut through his VPN and show

“that actually he was logging in from China, which is where a lot of these North Korean”

IT workers are based. And then through this guy's own credentials that he stored in his Gmail account, they were able to get into this discord channel where they organized their whole cell operations.

And it was one cell of 22 people.

But the pertinent thing is they were only able to keep the sky for three months because they couldn't actually pay him because that would be against anxious. And just in those three months that they had access to this discord channel. This one cell of 22 North Korean fake IT workers apply to 160,000 jobs just in the United States.

So they're trying. And that's what I realized. The scale of this. Yeah. The scale of this too.

And the goal is to still buck up or steal. The goal is to make a paycheck. So the goal is initially when the mandients of the world would come in and triage these cases. They would look.

Did they plant malware? Did they steal IP? Did they steal data? And for the most part, and it was really weird, they're just there for the paycheck.

And my understanding was, this is basically a way to get a steady form of funding.

Almost like their ARR to fund these larger hacking crypto ice that can take a year in some cases of careful planning. Right. But that may not be stealing. They want jobs.

And they want to hide themselves. They want jobs. And they're taking like 12 jobs. They could. And that's the thing.

Now that company is like Amazon is talking about this, Peloton Networks is talking about this, SISOs are talking to each other about this because it's really got into the point where as one person at Mandy and told me, I have yet to find a company in the Fortune 500 that hasn't hired a North Korean IT worker. As they're talking to each other, they're looking for these red flags.

And as they find them, they're firing these people. And so these people still have to monetize their access. And we're starting to see some more extortion cases and data theft and that kind of nothing. Right.

And because eventually, that's where it goes. So who are the Americans hosting the laptop farms? Okay. So this was fascinating. I was like, who are these people that are just taking corporate laptops hosting them in

their house? So I wanted to go meet with one of these people. And the only case that we've really heard about publicly as a woman in Arizona named Christina Chapman, who is hosting something like 60 laptops for the North Koreans. And so I was trying to find others and it turns out a lot of these people have serious criminal

records. They're Americans who, for whatever reason, can't get work. They're posting on a Reddit channel, hey, I'm looking for quick cash and that's where the North Koreans are finding them.

“Sometimes they post that they're looking for work on LinkedIn and that's how the North”

Koreans find them. But a lot of them have criminal backgrounds, which is why they can't get work. And maybe why they're willing to accept laptops from a total stranger. Yeah. And so for the podcast investigation, I wanted to go meet with one of these people, but

they're background checks were a little terrifying. But we found one woman in Cincinnati and I did fly out to Cincinnati and knock on her door and they let me in. And it's not like they ever tell these people, hey, we're North Koreans. You know, they make up an identity in some ways these people are being scammed themselves.

But they come up with some reason why they can't be in the US and they need this person to host their laptop. And some of these Americans that are hosting laptops are vets. Like some of them are just people who think they're running a legitimate business. One of them had essentially the words laptop farm on their resumes.

But they're just not asking questions about these people who are willing to send them, you know, quick cash, quick crypto to host these laptops. Yeah.

is only going to get bigger and bigger as we start seeing more job losses from China. Yeah, because it's easy money, it's easy money. So just be us, just let's buy your identity essentially.

“We're going to talk a little bit about China in the air, right?”

Since cyber threats in a second.

But what was your conclusion from catching these essentially thieves? But really catching these employees, right? Because they're not thieves yet, they're employees. I think I was a few things. I think one of them is we just take our eye off of North Korea.

We caricature them. But we should use them as a case study right now. Because this is the actor that is an early adopter, as they were with crypto and the blockchain, that is quite persistent, you know, really good at social engineering. And I have no doubt they're going to be one of the first nation states that pop up

in an AI power to talk. And we can't take our eye off the ball. This is actually the kind of adversary that we should be paying very close attention to. The other thing is this really isn't a cyber security problem in many ways. It's becoming one now that they're kind of moving towards extortion, et cetera.

It's really an HR problem. And it tells you how little we're actually screening some of these remote workers. Like I want remote work to stay. I love remote work. I think it's wonderful.

I love the flexibility it brings. It's probably going to be one of the costs of this North Korean operation.

“I'm already hearing about companies saying you have to come in.”

You know what, Amazon, they're like basically ending remote work.

There's a lot of companies that said we have to see you and we have to see you for a prolonged amount of time. We have to make sure you're the person we interviewed that you have the skills that you said you had. And we need to see that in person.

And by the way, this playbook was North Korea's, but it's spreading. And this week, we released the episode where we disclose that we're starting to find Iranians are now using this playbook and getting jobs. And they have very different motivations in some cases than the North Koreans. They're more destructive, they're more retaliatory.

So this playbook's spreading and we kind of just we have to talk about this because we have to talk about how to filter for it. We'll be back in a minute. Support for the show comes from Odu, running a business is hard enough so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

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Try Odu for free at Odu.com, that's Odu.com. Let's talk about China, and it's rise in cyber dominance. You mentioned them earlier. For at least the last decade China has targeted US telecom companies, notably the expansive

salt typhoon attacks, China back hackers have also infiltrated critical infrastructure,

including water transport and grid networks. You've talked about this being the era of, quote, mutual, you sure, digital destruction. But it sounds like China's gaining advantage in cyber dominance. Talk a little bit about the cases. This is the argument, of course, all of Silicon Valley is making.

And others say no, it's not as much, but give me your assessment of where we are. And if they have the upper hand and if so, what are the consequences? When I first started covering Chinese cyber attacks against the New York Times, for instance, a decade ago, it was brazen, but it was fishing, you know, it was loud, but it was successful. You know, some people call them the most polite hackers in cyber because it almost

announced their presence. As we started outing some of these campaigns, they really went underground. And I think really the up leveling moment was when they started using their authoritarianism to their advantage. They basically created a series of new laws that said, "Hey, if you find a vulnerability,

you have to give the state right a first refusal."

would show, you know, how to hack into a Tesla or an iPhone or Android, stop showing up on state's orders pretty much. All that knowledge, all that skill started funneling directly to the state. And we started seeing some really significant up leveling and sophistication in some of these Chinese operations, like salt typhoon, like Chinese state operations, it's not exactly.

And these are much harder to defend against, you know, we started seeing them come for security devices. We started seeing them find zero days, you know, vulnerabilities, no one knew about using those in the course of their operations.

And we're catching them in not only our back end telecom infrastructure, but in these critical

entities like water and power. But their capabilities, you know, US and China are locked in this global ARMS race that

“has experts on both sides concerned if the two nations fail to cooperate, right?”

Obviously, anthropic and open-air accusing China of copying their AI systems through distillation and that Trump, she summit in May ended without any meaningful agreements on AI. I mean, the biggest argument from Silicon Valley is we must do all these things without any regulations in order to fight the Chinese, most people that I think are intelligence, they would go to cooperate with them in some way.

But is there a realistic chance of cooperation between the US and China and AI, should it happen? And what do you make of the arguments of people, you know, in Silicon Valley or like, it's, you know, it's the G or me argument, kind of thing. Yeah, I think trying to pull.

You know, we are locked in this very dangerous game of chicken and I wish that we had an entirely new generation of technological diplomats that could sit down with Xi and say, hey, you know, none of us want the world that we're crashing towards, but I am close to people who've had similar conversations with China on hacking for years, on fentanyl, on more

recently on Voltaïfune, these hacks of our critical infrastructure.

At one point, you know, one of the people I interviewed last season on this, when we were focused on China said they were tasked by the Biden administration to go to China and propose that we set up red lines just around hacking water treatment facilities, water systems, civilian water systems, and their counterparts in China said no. So I don't know if it has changed now that we are slightly ahead on AI, but for how long

“are we ahead, I think that, you know, the decision to release deep seek as an open weight”

model was intentional. They really want to be the backbone of AI and AI infrastructure, and there's a really interesting report that came out last week that the New York Times covered from a startup called Alithia where they looked at some of the disinformation campaigns coming out of Russia and China right now, and they are launching on to data centers as an American culture

war.

I think in part in China's case, China wants to basically play up, you know, some of the

fights around Nimbias, um, an environmental concerns, and all of the legitimate concerns we have around data centers in terms of water use, energy use, contamination. They want to use that as a wedge issue so that we don't have the data center infrastructure in the United States that they own that. That's going into space.

That's right. That's right. Yes. Can't wait for that one. I gotta say, I'm with Sam Alman on this one, but anyway, at this moment in time.

All I'm saying is I wish we were living in a different world where we could actually

“sit down with them and have these conversations, and I think hopefully we will once the”

attacks start coming, but right now I am sort of the, you know, you have little faith on this issue. Every episode, we get a question from an outside expert here is yours. I Nicole, your friend to meet you up here, go found off Groudstrike and now Chairman of Sorada Policy Accelerator.

As you know, I spent a good chunk of my career putting names and faces on the hackers behind cyber attacks, because I believe that naming and shaming them would deter them, and mobilize collective government actions against them. From where you sit, do you think that public attribution of cyber intrusion is still important?

Well, have we become so accustomed and numbed to it that it no longer serves any purpose? Thank you. Love to me, Tray. You know, the naming and shaming, I thought, had a big effect, and in some ways it did. We actually saw China go quiet, the Obama administration reached an unprecedented deal with

China for a while that we would cease, or really they would cease hacking for intellectual property and trade secrets, and we saw those drop off for about a period of 18 months,

and we saw that resume. When it resumed, it resumed in a much more sophisticated, well-organized, stealthy way, and so in retrospect, all of that naming and shaming that made them stop, actually I think just sent them further underground. There is, you know, a legitimate question to say, what is the long-term benefit, really

of calling out these operations? I think we have to, you know, I think the fact that China is pre-positioning itself in some

of our most critical infrastructure is worthy of almost daily national press coverage, and

it hasn't gotten that, which is why I'm doing this podcast in the first place.

“I've just decided, okay, I'm going to focus on these issues that I think are super important,”

or not, getting that kind of mainstream coverage. China's hacking of critical infrastructure being one of them. I mean, I think it would be a bizarre world if we were catching these Chinese nation-state hackers inside our civilian water systems, and for whatever reason saying, oh, it's just not worth attributing it to China, but Demetri is a great point, which is, we are sort of

becoming numb to this, and there's been so little action, and there is really no deterrence. You mentioned Methos at the beginning, let's talk about anthropic, and it's ongoing tensions with the U.S. government. Talk about how AI is transformed cyber security. This is something you live written about, some are stuck in it, and everything else.

So talk about how it's transformed for both offensive and defensive purposes. AI in the beginning, you know, it's a really useful social engineering tool. You know, find me a useful target, craft, a message, and perfect English, when some cases create an audio deep fake of someone's voice that this person legitimately knows.

Like a CFO of a major enterprise, and asked them to basically ask someone in their accounting

department to make a wire transfer, all of those things are things that we are seeing. And we are seeing video deepfakes, too, we're seeing North Koreans use deepfakes, and some of these interviews. Now we're entering a new phase, which is AI is giving hackers this tremendous advantage to pull off everything I just mentioned at scale.

It's also giving them the skills that they previously didn't have that previously were just the per view of these tier one nation states like NSA, you know, U.S. is NSA, and GCHQ Israel, China, perhaps, Russia, perhaps. It's throwing those skills in the laps of cyber criminals of these tier three nation states

“like North Korea, like Iran, and I think we are about to enter what is truly the”

everything everywhere, all at once cyber scenario, which is anyone who has any interest in hacking you will now have the tools to do so, whether that is, you know, me pissing off North Korea, because of a podcast or Sony, you know, putting out a movie, or anyone that just has some dark interest in watching the world burn will now have these capabilities. And all of them will come at us at machine speed.

So on offense, I think it's very clear that AI will give the bad guys the advantage, the offensive advantage, the hope is, though, that AI will also help us defensively to do the things

that we with our puny human minds were never able to do before like right secure code, handle

configuration, and sure that we have multifactor authentication turned on at scale, you know, make sure that our vendors, at least interrogate our vendors to make sure that they're not our biggest weak points. These are things where AI could create tremendous upleveling on defense.

“I think it's just a question of, what is the delta between where we are now?”

And of course, there's this infighting. To me, a lot of what has been happening with the drum measure is an inside Silicon Valley beef. But anthropic initially released its mythos modeled in April to a limited group of companies for cyber security testing last month. Trump administration abruptly banned the foreign use of anthropics two most powerful models, mythos in Fable 5, just over two weeks ago that Trump administration and anthropic reached

agreements to restore access, talk a little bit of what's happening here, what's happening internally because it little bit is, again, this beefing among Silicon Valley rivals, really, and an example of that is anthropic, so in the Trump administration after the Pentagon declared it a supply chain risk, I think that was a meal Michael's doing. He's the undersecretary for search and engineering anthropic CEO Darryu Emote went back and forth for months, was a meal over safety guardrails

in the Pentagon's use of AI and meal famously was fired from Uber for a bunch of nefarious actions that he has denied. Talk about what's happening here, overall, and how does it end with the

shit show. I don't dispute anything you just said that I think it comes down to beefing and

who's kissed the ring and who has an adequately kissed the ring, but man, you know, we have real supply chain risks in the United States, many of which I've called out in my reporting, you know,

“TP link routers were one deep seek is one. These are the real supply chain risks, so I think it”

says a lot that this administration went for anthropic, I think, because of these conversations between Pete Hexeth, so I went to college with, and Darryu, how was that? Over, I think they both actually spent some time at my alma mater. Anyway, Pete Hexeth, he was famous when we were in college for being part of this right-wing organization that put out this magazine with an owl in the cover

in crosshairs and owl stood for organization of women leaders, so he's always sort of been like this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anywho, I think, you know, this is why, and you've covered this brilliantly, this is why we saw Tim Cook show up with the golden statue, we saw everyone and their wives and mothers show up to the White House for the inauguration. This is what they're hoping to avoid, and in this case, apparently Darryu didn't play the game and they are where they are. Now, you know, it's amazing to me to have watched Anthropic do what I think was the responsible

action to withhold this model once it saw what its cyber exploitation capabilities were, and then to watch David Sachs sort of disparage it on Twitter, and I think either in an interview with Politico, where he said this is all marketing, essentially. He was our AIsR, he's no longer AIsR, but I had the same question, you know, how much of this is real, how much is this is marketing, which is why I went in an interview Nicholas Kirlini in the red team or at Anthropic.

If you listen to that interview, it's clear this guy doesn't have a marketing bone in his body. He's truly just a hacker's hacker who was testing the models to see what they're capable of and came away, why died at what these models can do, and I think Anthropic did the right thing.

“Now, coming back to the previous question on offense and defense, the best thing we can do”

defensively in this moment is take mythos, take fable, take every model from every major frontier lab, test its exploitation capabilities, including the new chat GPT. Correct? There's a new thing. Exactly. And Gemini, you know, all of these models now have these capabilities and soon, again, the open weight models will too, and our best defense is to take them, aim them at ourselves and see where we are vulnerable and move very quickly to eliminate those inroads and

kill paths. And so when you pull mythos or when you prevent our closest allies from having access to those models from being able to essentially pen test themselves with these models, you know, test where they're weakest, it's a big deal, because this is our sort of our greatest hope right now in terms of cyber defense that we can use these models to test ourselves. And my understanding is that, you know, mythos may still have the best cyber exploitation capabilities,

but these other models are not far behind. And I don't know what the long-term play here is. They're not far behind. They're not far behind. Now, just for people to know, David Sachs, when he was there, is our repeatedly warned, any sort of AI regulation could cost the US and it's lead rates against China. He's accused anthropic of, quote, running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear mongering. And this is what's being, this is what's influencing the Trump administration,

this frenzied approach to lack of AI regulation in any way, or cooperation, which is more what you're saying here. Yeah, that's right. And I think anthropic has sort of done a good job

“doing some quiet education around some of these issues with the administration. Maybe that's why”

they backed off. But I think the big issue here is that, again, we're entering a new era. You know, I wrote a book. It took me seven years about the humans and what it takes to find these zero-day exploit capabilities. These vulnerabilities that only they could find. And the market that existed from governments to buy these from these hackers and use them in their offensive

operations. And these were the best of the best. It was basically, this is how they tell me the

world ends. Correct? Yes. This is how they tell me the world ends. And in retrospect, what that book was about was about scarcity. It was about the few people who could find these vulnerabilities and then create the code to exploit them in, you know, systems like our

bracelets. If you had asked me, hey, write a sequel and you can make it fiction. Make it science fiction. What is the nightmare next chapter of this thing? I would have written a book that didn't look that different from the era we are entering right now where AI can essentially find these vulnerabilities. That again, we're just the purview of these advanced hackers and nation states and turn them on anyone they choose. And that's the era we're walking into. And we can't do this like game.

Yeah, trying to just said that at Z.I. already matched mythos and cybersecurity. And then,

“of course, all the others will match with mythos can do relatively quickly. Right. I think these”

are all sort of like momentary delays toward the end of it. Yeah, they just were the first to get

there to say, oh, do you know where you're all here? Yeah. But to your earlier point, like we don't have time for the beefing. No, we don't have time, but guess who likes to beef people with self interest. I'm not saying David's access to self interest, but I think I just said that David's access to self interest. I think it's all a Silicon Valley beef. And I don't think they're interested in national security at all, at all, at all. In some ways, it's something else happening

here. But it's speaking of which with Carlene, this research scientist andthropic, let's listen to what he has to say about whether we're in for stability or chaos. Let's listen to him talk about it. I think the primary thing that determines how this plays out is how good the models get. And whether or not they favor defenders or attackers more. And I feel like this is mostly a question of nature. And we can try and balance it one way or the other by making sure that

you know, when we put these models out for the first time, we bias them towards defensive capabilities.

But I don't feel like there's any particular action that this week, we can take that will determine what happens here. Are we past the point of policy or an ability to handle these risks that AI

“poses to cyber security? You know, I think that actually what anthropic did with mythos,”

essentially withholding it, they announced this project project last week where they were going to give the model to a certain subset of companies, mostly cyber security companies and banks, so that they could test their own systems and basically get ahead of the threat that was going to come. It's not perfect. There will be jail breaks, et cetera. But I think it's actually a taste of somewhat good policy that we essentially before we kind of throw these capabilities into everyone's

lap. We essentially test them against ourselves and that way at least have a chance of defending ourselves. You know, there are companies coming to market that deploy agents that mimic these adversaries that you can test against your systems and, you know, not just the usual ways, but with social engineering and that kind of a thing. So there are, I think ways to essentially

“uplevel ourselves here. And I think the best way is probably something that looks a lot like last”

swing. And I don't think that it's a bad idea to essentially force the frontier labs to red teamly

systems and give, you know, companies, particularly in critical infrastructure, advance access

to these models so that they can uplevel themselves as well. But I have now been in cyber security for almost 20 years and the state of our cyber security, particularly at critical infrastructure and it is, is terrible. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Odoo. There's an endless supply of software out there that promises to streamline your workflow. That may be true for a specific aspect of your business, but if you need

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cyber security and infrastructure or security agencies, so which Trump established actually in 2018.

“It's responsible for election cyber security among other things. He also shut down an FBI task force”

intended to fight foreign. Influence and elections in New York Times has reported these changed to a part of a larger effort to affect the outcome of midterm elections. Talk about diminished cyber security agencies. We'll impact election officials, voters, and potentially it results. And that's not what the other stuff that they're doing. They're also getting these bipartisan commissions that help elections and give them good information. They're trying to break them down.

Talk a little bit about that state when you're saying it's a shit show, essentially. So I should disclose here that when I left the New York Times, I left in part because I joined the essentially the advisory board at SISA, which is the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency under Biden. They wanted a journalist on that committee. They asked me. I said yes, but of course

“that meant stepping out of journalism because you can't be sort of inside the tent and reporting”

outside the tent at the same time. And it was incredible because I joined just before Russia invaded Ukraine. And a lot of SISA's efforts during that time frame went towards getting American companies to get their shields up and also working with Ukraine's cyber defense entity as another allies to help Ukraine. And it was an incredible effort and one day that should be my next book because it really was a model for how public-private partnerships can come together in a meaningful way.

And I walked into that advisory role with basically zero faith in the federal government doing anything on cybersecurity. And I left truly impressed at what they were able to build in such a short time. So imagine my dismay when, you know, by the way, I got a letter saying due to the misuse of resources, you are no longer on this committee. Like, I don't think I ever got paid a single dollar. In fact, I think I like forgot to expense my, you know, economy back at the plane.

So Elon's always trying to save us money. Elon's always trying to save us money. Mostly so

you can take it from self, but go ahead. So, you know, they eliminated that committee fine. But then they started hollowing out the actual agency. I think in large part because of criss-crubs coming out in the 2020 election and calling it the most secure election in history. But yeah, they took out some of the best. Those were people who were recruited during that time that I

“served on that committee who were probationary, which is just like, that's what happens when you”

take these jobs, you're no matter who you are or how good you are. You're just probationary until one day. Because you're not North Korean. Go ahead. Yes, exactly. We're going to bring us full circle. So anyway, they basically fired all those people. And now we have a hollowed out cyber defense agency and it's kind of free-rain. Now, I should give credit to the FBI that I think has really stepped up and the FBI cyber division is incredible. And they are, you know, still doing what

needs to be done to sort of out some of these Chinese operations on our critical infrastructure

and they're, you know, getting on top of this North Korean issue as well. And those are really good people. I will say that. The people I have met in the FBI cyber division are fantastic. But they are soldering a lot. So Patel doesn't know about them yet. Yeah. And hopefully he doesn't listen to this because I would like to keep it that way. But yeah, it doesn't make any sense. You know, if you truly care about national security, well cyber security is national security.

This is where our adversaries, especially adversaries that know they can never match us militarily, our investing. And, you know, it might be the case that you don't care if Russia tries to interfere with our elections because maybe you think that they're on your side. But they're not the only game in town. You know, there is China. There is Iran. There are other adversaries.

There are a lot of good reasons why we should all care about cyber security, of our critical

infrastructure. And, you know, it's getting to the point where we're just sort of waiting for that everything everywhere all at once attack era to start. But it's coming. I mean, it's coming without human fatigue for machines across all time zones. And it hasn't happened yet. But hopefully once it does, we'll see it just have short sight of these decisions where the other side of that, of course, is there are real threats from China and Russia. And you talked about the

explaining the public debate around data centers is so division through AI generated images on social media. I do think it's a real, it's a real grassroots situation. And it's not being organized by Russian, China people on the ground are really upset about these data centers. But there is an element of foreign influence campaigns everywhere in every aspect of America. Now, how prepared

that's there already. Although some of the misinformation is from the government itself, by the way.

So it's kind of a weird situation we find or something. Yeah, I would say it's the weirdest situation that we've been in since I started studying this stuff. We are in no way prepared is my understanding for some of the coordinated misinformation campaigns that will come out as full throttle in this election. You know, it wasn't just Sissa. It was the state department. You know, their bureau that basically monitored these threats was completely dismantled and we saw

“it happen. I think it was last week where they essentially fired everyone on this election commission”

that their whole job is ensuring free and fair elections at the state level or helping states offer free and fair elections. So I'm pretty concerned, you know, this is coming at us, though. It's not just Russia. What could they do? Give me an example. What could any of these sort of

nefarious entities do? So my nightmare scenario has always been that we saw in 2016 that Russia

got access to the voter rolls. And they didn't do anything, right? It was our understanding, but they got access to them. And it was clear that they were sort of mapping our election infrastructure. And the sort of consolation that I would hear at the time was, well, you know, thank God our elections are so decentralized. They could never hack this thing at scale. But I think what we have all learned over the last 12 years is our elections come down to a few purple states and a few counties

in those purple states. And my nightmare scenario is you would pull off a hack where you essentially go to those voter rolls and mark the people that might vote for the candidate that you don't want to win as not registered. You would change their registration status. So they would show up to vote on election day. And they'd be told, oh, you're not registered. You could think of it like a denial

“of service attack against sort of key people in these key counties in a US election. And when we're”

not paying attention to some of these operations, you know, that's really hacking. That's not disinformation. It's more that we've dismantled disinformation. I'm assuming hoping, but you could use AI to figure out the order of the 300 key people here. Well, it's, you know, what I just described as a hacking campaign, but you could also imagine a disinformation campaign aimed at those people where you wouldn't have to change their registration status or leave those fingerprints. But it would just

send them some kind of notice to say, hey, you're not registered. And maybe they went show up on their own volition. And then how do you go back and track that? And there are all sorts of tools that are being thrown in people in the nation states lapsed to do that. So when you don't have people who's specific job is to track these campaigns at the state department at Sissa, et cetera,

“et cetera, et cetera. That's very troubling. Yeah, it's almost like they want to change elections.”

It's interesting. Anyway, last question, last year on this podcast, you said that cybersecurity remains a bipartisan issue. Despite all this nonsense from Trump, especially, you said it remains a bipartisan issue. Is that still true? Do you feel that or not at this point? Because the Trump administration is trying to put his finger on the scale. It's very obvious through these firings and emotions or, you know, just disintegration of these units that matter. So, you know,

clearly at the White House, it's been politicized. It's no longer a bipartisan issue. Every level below that, though, you know, I've met with staffers for senators, from both sides, same with Congress. There's a lot of collaboration that happens in cybersecurity, thank God. Not just among political parties, but among competitive companies. This is one space where the chief information security officers are constantly talking to each other about the threats

that they're seeing and they're even organized by industry where they get together and talk about the threats that they're seeing and that level of threat intelligence is only increasing now with AI and hopefully we'll continue to scale. Unfortunately, some of these things have become politicized, particularly around the misinformation, disinformation tracking. And, you know,

Elon made it a huge issue. The Twitter files were basically used to validate this conspiracy theory

and validate what happened next, which was sort of the destruction of the teams that track these issues. And even worse, we saw the people who worked on these issues at Twitter, et cetera, become targets for death threats, et cetera. So, it's like, who wants to raise their hand to take these jobs anymore? You know, we saw what happened with Chris Krebs. So, who does? Well, you know,

infinitely qualified to run for Senate and Maine right now. And if he was to stand up and raise his hand

“and say, I'm running, I think he could win. But he won't because, you know, he's looking at past”

data that says there's a narrow path, but more than that, it's just like, if you have a nice life,

why put yourself through that right now? And it is happening on both sides of the aisle. You know,

I also want to call it with my Gallagher. And when he retired from Congress, he said, "I signed up for this, but my family didn't sign up for death threats and swatting." To me,

that's almost like very too bad. Yeah, he left, right? Another guy who was very sharp and bipartisan.

“But you have any hopes for bipartisanship, I guess. At this moment, I think someone”

has to go. And I think until then, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. Well, we get an attack where we get an attack that's, yeah. Well, on that note, I appreciate it. This is a great conversation. I really appreciate it. You bring all this sunshine to our world. Right. Just a ray of sunshine.

“Ray of Cyber Sunshine. Thank you so much before. Oh my gosh, thank you so much, Kara. Good to see you.”

You won't be recruited to join a global hacking crime syndicate. If not, your linen closet would make a great laptop farm. Go wherever you listen to podcasts search for on with Kara's, wish her and hit follow. Thanks for listening to on with Kara's, wish her from podium, media, New York Magazine, the box media podcast network and us will be back on Monday with more. Thanks again to Odoo for supporting this show. Odoo wants to be your ultimate all-in-one fully

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