Digital Dependence EXPOSED--A Billion Dollar MELTDOWN & AI SECRETS

When Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure crashed, half a billion dollars vanished overnight.

 In this episode, David Mauro, Dr. Sergio Sanchez, and Zack Moscow uncover the ethics surrounding AI and the need for tech awareness, highlighting the importance of digital detox in maintaining a healthy balance.

We break down:
 💥 The $550M AWS outage & how it spread chaos
 🧩 Why our phones prove digital dependence is real
 🤖 Amazon’s leaked plan to cut 600,000 jobs via automation
 ⚔️ How AI could redefine modern warfare & national security

👉 Subscribe to Cyber Crime Junkies for real stories at the intersection of technology, cybercrime, and survival.

Chapters

00:00 – Intro: When the Cloud Crashed
02:00 – AWS & Azure Outages Explained

05:00-The Impact of Major Service Outages
 08:22 – Home vs Work: The Blurred Cyber Lines
14:48 – Automation and the Future of Jobs
18:00 – Amazon’s 600,000 Job Cuts Leak
22:37 – Rise of Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI)
25:56 – AI as the Next Global Arms Race
28:01 – Cyber Warfare & National Security Risks
31:00 – The Stuxnet Lesson: Cyber Weapons Are Real
34:23 – TikTok, Data Privacy, and Digital Espionage
37:56 – Final Thoughts: The Human Firewall

#CyberSecurity #AI #CyberCrimeJunkies #CloudOutage #Automation #DigitalDependence #NationalSecurity #CyberAwareness #AIArmsRace

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Transcript

Digital Dependence EXPOSED--A Billion Dollar MELTDOWN & AI SECRETS

TAGS: AI, machine learning, tech awareness, digital detox, artificial intelligence, AWS, cybersecurity, AWS outage, cloud computing, IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, cyber crime, AI, artificial intelligence, AWS outage, Azure outage, cloud security, automation, digital dependence, cyber warfare, data privacy, AI arms race, national security, continuity planning, cybercrime podcast, cybercrimejunkies, ransomware, cloud crash, AI automation, tech news, hacking, digital transformation

When Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure crashed, half a billion dollars vanished overnight.
In this episode, David Mauro, Dr. Sergio Sanchez, and Zack Moscow uncover the ethics surrounding AI and the need for tech awareness, highlighting the importance of digital detox in maintaining a healthy balance.

We break down:
 💥 The $550M AWS outage & how it spread chaos
 🧩 Why our phones prove digital dependence is real
 🤖 Amazon’s leaked plan to cut 600,000 jobs via automation
 ⚔️ How AI could redefine modern warfare & national security

👉 Subscribe to Cyber Crime Junkies for real stories at the intersection of technology, cybercrime, and survival.

#CyberSecurity #AI #CyberCrimeJunkies #CloudOutage #Automation #DigitalDependence #NationalSecurity #CyberAwareness #AIArmsRace

Chapters

00:00 – Intro: When the Cloud Crashed
02:00 – AWS & Azure Outages Explained

05:00-The Impact of Major Service Outages
 08:22 – Home vs Work: The Blurred Cyber Lines
14:48 – Automation and the Future of Jobs
18:00 – Amazon’s 600,000 Job Cuts Leak
22:37 – Rise of Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI)
25:56 – AI as the Next Global Arms Race
28:01 – Cyber Warfare & National Security Risks
31:00 – The Stuxnet Lesson: Cyber Weapons Are Real
34:23 – TikTok, Data Privacy, and Digital Espionage
37:56 – Final Thoughts: The Human Firewal

Speaker 2 (00:09.198)
It starts with a flicker. One data center went dark and the world froze. Within hours, airlines stalled. Hospitals went silent. CRMs, logins and lifelines gone. Half a billion dollars lost in 12 hours.

All because the cloud, the invisible backbone of modern life, coughed once. We were promised redundancy, failover, safety nets. But when two of the three tech giants powering the planet go down in the same month, you start to wonder who's really in control. Because the outage wasn't the problem. It was the warning. The truth is we've become digitally dependent.

We check our phones 260 times a day and call it productivity. Our homes are micro data centers. Our identities are just cash sessions on someone else's server. And while we scroll automation advances inside Amazon leaked documents predict 600,000 jobs to be replaced by machines before 2033. Faster picking, cheaper shipping, humans optional.

Meanwhile, another race begins, not for land or oil, but for intelligence, artificial super intelligence systems that no longer assist us. They replace us. They learn, adapt, and one day might not ask permission.

It sounds like science fiction until you realize it's already here. Clouds collapsing, jobs disappearing, AI learning faster than we can legislate. This isn't about technology anymore. It's about survival. In a world where the next outage might not be an accident. This is the new battlefield. Cloud. Code. Continuity.

Speaker 2 (02:26.998)
And if we don't rebuild resistance now, the next digital blackout won't just crash our systems. It'll crash us.

This is Cybercrime Junkies, let's get into it.

Speaker 2 (02:55.424)
All right. Well, welcome everybody. Cybercrime Junkies podcast. I am your host, David Molley, and in the studio today are three blind mice. have, no, it's my cohost, Zach Moskow and cohost, Dr. Sergio Sanchez. Gentlemen, welcome.

Thank you so much. How are you? Ask everything.

Things are going okay. So what we want to cover today are, you know, what is bubbling up to the top in your worlds? What are you seeing in terms of, you know, evolutions in artificial intelligence and AI, things that we're seeing from, you know, cyber security, cyber risks, cyber crime, anything that is really pressing that we can summarize it in a nice, succinct way.

The thought is that each one of us kind of brings one of those to the table and shares them. We can all kind of add some color commentary and talk it through and talk, you know, what does this mean to business leaders, people in the technology space, people in other industries that just want to be kept abreast of this stuff. So let's, I will start with either one of you gentlemen who wants to go first. Anybody?

Please go ahead.

Speaker 2 (04:14.136)
The consummate gentleman, the consummate gentleman always offers.

Thank you, Dr. Sanchez for that. Yeah, I I think I want to start with probably the one event or two events in the last couple of weeks that probably everybody, even folks who aren't in our world, are experiencing, right? And that is what happened last week.

our experience.

Speaker 3 (04:37.152)
with Amazon Web Services, AWS going down and throwing chaos into so many platforms and services that we've all come to rely on. And then you may be aware of what happened with Azure, Microsoft's competitor to AWS yesterday. And I think we can, we could talk about the technical reasons of why and how it happened, but I think from a broader scope, I'm more interested in just this reality that we've got three

major companies or services that are handling so much of our digital world, right? And that's AWS, it's Azure, and it's Google. And two of the three in the last two weeks have had outages with ripple effects across pretty much any industry that you can think of. just a sobering reminder of how vulnerable and exposed our daily lives are to outages that hit one of these three major.

Yeah, mean, it's brutal. It's one of the problems with monopolies, right? It's one of the problems when any organization corners a market. America is built on free trade, but there are restrictions for commerce so that we can...

you know, stop certain monopolies from, you know, from this exact scenario. This is to me, this is exactly the reason there are antitrust cases and, and, you know, rules against organizations having monopolies because they go down and every major vendor that we all use has their servers or part of their infrastructure at least connected to one of these, you know,

or Microsoft's.

Speaker 3 (06:25.774)
I think a lot of these companies, there's consolidation happening everywhere, right? And the justification for this is that there's economies of scale involved and...

Yeah, of course.

Speaker 3 (06:38.478)
Consolidation allows us to be more efficient and more effective. Amazon and Microsoft and Google have all said, even though we've got this market share, the way that we've structured these centers, these regions allows for lot of failover capability too. So that we're protected when an issue hits one of these sites. And in Amazon's case, was just, I believe it was just one of their data centers in Northern Virginia, but that obviously had worldwide effects. So it's not as simple as just.

failing over to one of their other locations too, which I think is really, I don't want to call it an indictment on the system or the philosophy, but in practice it very well may be.

yeah, absolutely. And then, mean, just think of the unexpected downtime and what that costs to businesses.

I was just looking this up. The estimate is somewhere around $550 million and

Is that from the Azure one?

Speaker 3 (07:35.35)
No, that's from AWS.

from AWS. yeah, absolutely.

We're talking less than 24 hours before the problem was mitigated. Obviously, there were trickles well after that. Amazon is talking about actually paying out organizations that were affected based on that downtime and then attempt to restrict their exposure from further litigation, which I think is really smart and good damage control. But obviously, some organizations are going to be more hit harder than others in the financial implications.

or is really for, for them to decide. But yeah, top level estimate was, yeah, I'm a half a billion dollars for 12 hours of outage. Just crazy.

Right. Isn't that that's just crazy. And then that's not the is is that the estimate that's including all of the organizations that were relying on or is that just their loss?

Speaker 3 (08:30.686)
No, that is that is the projection. What is a third party? This loss for everybody, every US business that had impact from the AWS sandwich. That may be derivative. I don't know.

The projection, that's what I figured.

Speaker 2 (08:45.934)
and yes

Yeah. And then yesterday we've got October 30th as your experience. Well, today's the 30th. So it actually happened yesterday. So yesterday it affected Azure's front door, which is AFD, Azure's front door and all of the dependent services from that. And what was the cause of this one? That was the, the Azure one look like just, it just says unplanned downtime. They mitigated it pretty good.

is a configuration change, is a configuration issue.

And go ahead, sorry.

Yeah, that that trigger latency is timeouts connection failures across all of these services. And I think the extent wasn't as wasn't as bad. And it's not because Microsoft isn't as critical. It's just it seemed to be more minor in scope, whereas Amazon's was this this DNS failure. So all of these databases that all of these applications relied on for AWS, those connections were broken. Right. This was just a minor configuration change that still impacted. I mean, it impacted tools that

Speaker 3 (09:51.81)
that we use in our business. mean, HubSpot.

that we used yeah everything from how to spot to outlook

for a day. Outlook was messed up. Intra ID, way they verify and sign into things. a minor configuration issue, right, impacted all of these things. again, that's

Let me tell you something, Zach. I had three meetings via Zoom that day and I couldn't connect.

Right, zoom was effective. Zero.

Speaker 2 (10:24.642)
Yeah, I mean, it's really unbelievable. And then the AWS, the Amazon one, that was from a DNS error, right? So DNS is basically where the websites point to. And when there's a misconfiguration or an error in the DNS, the websites, all those servers don't know where to point to. They don't know where to send the data out to.

basic quiz the yellow pages.

Yeah, it's like the yellow pages. Right. They're like, who are we supposed to call? Going through like, dude, Bob's not home. I don't know. And they're like looking through. Yeah.

the complete failure of the DNS, it was really restricted to how these platforms and websites were accessing databases, what they could pull from. And just that little piece got impacted, but still, who's not relying on a database for their platform service these days?

Well, that feeds into, if you don't mind, I'll go second because that all feeds into mine. Right. So let me find where mine is. So we talk about this a lot and that is the, used to have two worlds, right? And today there's these massive blurred lines between what we do at home and what we do at work. There's an enormous amount of

Speaker 2 (11:44.812)
data breaches and risks that occur from people using stuff at home, not using best practices, because they just think cybersecurity is something I have to worry about at work when I'm at work and for my work computer. Meanwhile, we all have these phones that have both our work and our home applications on it, right? And what's happened is there's more dependence on technology than ever before in human history. I think that's just a

It's a new reality for all of us because when we think about it, it was absolutely just crazy that these big companies like half the company, like I would venture most organizations that have all of their data sitting on their servers, AWS, Azure, et cetera. They have no idea where this data is. They don't know where those servers are. They don't know where the data warehouses are, right? They used to always know.

They had a box at their office, right? And it was there and they knew where everything was. If that thing went down, a human would like literally walk over to it and fix it. And now it's just so ethereal that the impact just, it impacts us at scale, right? And just now there's just so much more digital dependence. I mean, when we think about the

Recent studies show we on average we pick up our phones, we check our phones 264 times a day. That is a lot. That is way more than digital transformation. That's like digital dependence. That's an addiction. Right?

In that table also you are now looking really of how connected we are.

Speaker 2 (13:35.97)
Yeah, everything from the smart refrigerators to all that stuff, right? And it just shows that all of us have to pay attention to this stuff more just for ourselves, just for our personal lives, right? We keep reusing passwords and doing all that stuff. But my story has to do with yesterday. Alaska Airlines, it came here's the post. It came from.

John Spiegel on LinkedIn and he's like, he witnessed a textbook case of organizations that have good continuity plans. Continuity plans means what in English guys? Like it means look, when stuff goes down, when you're still gonna, yeah, you're still gonna have, you're still gonna be able to function. Like the thing I keep hoping on is

Do your business.

Speaker 2 (14:29.614)
10, 15 years ago, we had two worlds. We had our physical processes with credit cards and processes and paper, and we had computers around. When the computers went down, yeah, it might have been a little inconvenient, but we weren't stopped from working. We weren't stopped from producing or rendering medical care. Today, we've gone through this so that when it does break down, we have no other option, right? Alaska Airlines.

I've never flown the last airlines. don't know if you guys have. Have you either one of you guys ever? Yeah, I have never never flown it. Their website and mobile app went offline. Part of the broader Azure outage. No panic, no chaos. Everybody just continued in line and they immediately had paper tickets, pen and paper to write down everything. They validated everybody's ID manually and flights were not delayed. It

I like Alaska Airlines.

Speaker 2 (15:28.44)
just continued to roll, even though none of their mobile app wasn't working. Their websites weren't working. Everything like that is a great. That's a great flex, in my opinion. Like that's a great pivot that they that they demonstrated. You know, I mean, digital channels are critical, but you still have to have the manual fallback processes, paper tickets, human ticket agents, everything else.

And that's the type of thing that as we become more and more dependent on technology, AI is never going to be able to replace that. Right. Because we want to do business with organizations that have resilience.

It's a good case study to talk through continuity planning and the human cost of being able to execute in that situation and obviously have the plan.

100%.

It's impressive that they're able to do it. I think surely that investment seems justified today. I feel like that would be a pretty, feel like continuity planning and physical backups are probably processes that a lot of companies have just chosen to ignore in this day and age because

Speaker 2 (16:46.55)
I think so too, because I think there's a there's a myth like they feel over falling behind. If we still have paper around, we're falling behind and they get told this from vendors, right? Like, you still have those paper files. You still have those. We'll do scanning. We'll get all that in a server and everything else. Realizing that that might not be the best thing. Right. It really might not be the best thing for your organization. Having it available digitally.

clearly there's benefits, right? Productivity, being able to find things faster, all of that. Optimization for sure. But getting away completely from the kinetic physical processes. I don't think that that's the best one. I think of rural healthcare. There was another one that I had heard of. There was a rural hospital that still had all of the medical records and paper records. They had an EHR, they had everything digital.

But when that got attacked by a ransomware, they still had all the physical things so that way they could still render medical care. That was part of their continuity plan. And to me, that's brilliant. That's like the best of both worlds. Like we're ready to go. We might be slower when the stuff's down. It might not be the way you want to operate every day. But should something like that happen, people don't die. People don't get sick or they don't. There's not lawsuits from the

from the misdiagnosis and things like that. So that was mine. thought I was just really impressed. It kind of fits in right with what we've been talking about lately.

Here's a non sequitur. My son is still learning how to do long division in school, even though he knows how to use a calculator, right? So if we're really teaching at every level, there is this technological solution here, but you need to understand, you need to have the ability to function without it.

Speaker 2 (18:42.83)
yeah.

That will teach you, that will tell, teach him the reasoning behind it. What is, you know, what means adding, what it means in subtracting, what is a division or a multiplication? All these concepts, you can have a computer, can have a calculator and still don't know what you're doing.

The reasoning

Speaker 3 (19:03.938)
Well, then you're just dependent, right? You're totally dependent.

Yes.

Yep. No, that's a really good point. All right, Sergio, bring us home.

Well, you know, we are in a spooky season. Tomorrow is Halloween. So now I hope you have this effect like, you know, the Addams family or the monsters with bats flying behind me. But I'm going to tell you about something that is a little bit scary here. And I am going back to Amazon.

Like Zach was saying in the beginning of the week, we have issues with Amazon services. Now Amazon actually has problems with the New York Times. The New York Times got a leak a document from Amazon where Amazon is saying that they are going to cancel 600,000 jobs.

Speaker 1 (20:10.214)
United States that they are expecting by yes more than half a million jobs in United States

Speaker 1 (20:25.518)
projecting that. Yeah, for and they already start. They are expecting that by the year 2033, they accomplished that by basically automatizing everything they have, increasing the amount of robots that they have. Just to tell you by the year 2027, they're expecting to ditch 160,000 jobs in United States.

And this is in like the logistics.

That's the logistic. Yeah. And it's so funny. Yeah. Now this will sound like, my God, just 30 cents. Suppose they are going to save 30 cents on every item that they sell. But as you know,

cost you warehouses.

Speaker 2 (21:13.154)
my sword. Amortize that. Right. Amortize that toward.

Yeah, they send every day to millions of people. So they're expecting to save from this year to 2027 around $12.6 billion.

The scary part here is a lot of people, they are going to lose the job or some of people they are expecting to get a job with Amazon, probably no anymore. The funny thing about also the documents is that they are trying now to look like the good corporate citizen that they are going to do, you know, a Toys for Toys, Toys for Toys.

yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:01.806)
things like that like a helping people blah blah blah just to be in the good side until this news come out of completely in the public that's the first one the second one

Real quick Sergio, sorry. think I saw that they didn't Amazon layoff 10 or 11,000 workers in the last week. On the software side, on the engineering side. there was, my understanding is there was a very large Amazon engineering technical layoff this week.

Yes, something like that.

Speaker 2 (22:34.254)
Wow. What does that mean? for people that are listening, like what does that mean? Is AI coming for jobs? We've always heard they're not really going to come for jobs. It's going to come from, you know, other people that might be leveraging AI. That's why you need to learn it. But I don't know. What do you what do you guys think?

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:58.102)
Let me quote the winner of the Nobel Prize of Economics last year. Darren Asimoglu is the name. says, nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find a way to automate. Once they work out how to do this, it will spread to others. So that is scary.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:16.333)
Right.

Speaker 2 (23:23.714)
Yeah, that's a major concern. Yes. I mean, I do see why Amazon, you can see the logical thought process with Amazon, right?

They've got millions and millions of product up on shelves. They need to pick it fast. People that I've known that have worked in the warehouses, it's very physically demanding. They have to work very quickly. You know, if a machine could do it, it's like a big Pez dispenser, right? Or a big vending machine. If you could just ship it here, pull it out, get it faster. I mean, that does seem like something that automation would.

help with. But I would still think there's still a lot of jobs that are going to have higher level reasoning or greater skills for managing all of that. Right? I mean, there's still people that have to run these things and monitor and manage them and things like that. Not as many though. as many. Yeah, that's that's concerning. That's concerning. I mean,

They talk about it affecting the legal practice and things like that. I mean, it just kind of depends on.

to be a radiologist.

Speaker 2 (24:41.534)
yeah, that's a good point, right? Because it could analyze things. Right? You might be able to, I mean, it's not like you can get away from the radiologist role because somebody still has to have oversight that knows what to look for because AI still misses some things. But one person might be able to take the role of five of them, right? Like one might be able to take the role of five of them because five people analyzing it.

And I could see it affecting certain practices like in the theory of, you know, in the practice of law, there were people that were essentially full-time researchers working at these big firms, like manually going through or online going through and comparing and contrasting. I could see AI doing all that. Right.

Sergio, Sergio, was number two? Sorry,

Number two.

you think that was scary, wait for the next one. Have you ever heard about somebody called Eliza Joukowsky?

Speaker 3 (25:43.15)
a

Speaker 3 (25:49.152)
What? Yeah, he isn't he the guy who is like the doomsayer that AI is gonna, he's gonna destroy the world and that's gonna be the of it, right? He's that guy.

Yes, exactly that guy. Well, that guy just wrote a book called If Anyone Builded, Everybody Dies.

Really?

Really

A little

Speaker 2 (26:11.746)
makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

Yeah, and he's talking about when AI get to be ASI. Which is basically is artificial super intelligence.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:23.788)
What?

Speaker 2 (26:31.274)
sure. yeah.

Yes, sorry. Yes. Right now, actually, we have one in between, see, is the artificial general intelligence that people was thinking we will get there in 50 years. Well, actually, no, we're getting faster. And this is the AI that basically is thinking

Right.

Speaker 1 (27:02.926)
the same level or faster level that humans and the one that he's talking the super artificial intelligence is The one that we will not need of human interaction and in his book the thing that he's scared off is that in some way this AI become sentience that he

this sentience AI. No capacity to actually do things.

Recognize itself. Yes. Well, they recognize itself. It's like when you put that, you know, your cell in the mirror, you know, that is you. You put, you know, an animal, sometimes some animals, yes, recognize themselves in front of a mirror. The same way with the super intelligent that he or she or it, whatever it is, discover I'm alive. Just like a Rene de Cale. Like if I think

I exist. So that intelligence, that artificial intelligence, the probability that see us humans like a threat to it, like a, hey, these guys are consuming the energy that actually I need. Well, let me eliminate them. So this sounds a little bit like a science fiction movie, kind of like a Terminator or The Matrix. But this character,

Or worse.

Speaker 1 (28:32.866)
This Eliza Joukowsky actually wrote a letter that 350 people related to artificial intelligence sign it. And we are talking top notch, know, scientists people. So that is what we need to keep looking at and see how probable that happened.

Yeah, we need to keep monitoring that.

A lot of people says well, you know, we can put restrictions just like we did with the nuclear armament.

We have people checking for weapons of mass destruction. We have, you know, the UN, et cetera, et cetera. And then somebody says, yes, what about China? What about North Korea?

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:22.034)
And basically, basically you think about AI is in our time, the next arms race.

100.

Oh, 100%. It absolutely is.

So, and talking about what you were saying in the beginning, Dave, everything is connected. We saw like Zach mentioned in the beginning, how Amazon basically was down and took over just like a domino. A lot. We are so much connected between each other via digital systems that

so many

Speaker 1 (30:05.388)
What will take now, you know, another state, another country, enemies of United States or enemy of anybody that is in NATO to just release evil, a terrorist AI on us. So hospitals, electrical, you know, sources, power sources, water, gas.

Like, yeah, I mean, I think that's the big concern, right? When, when they found evidence through the department of Homeland security found evidence of China integrating our critical infrastructure this past year, right? And they could actually change the levels in water treatment plants to poison the water. That's a real thing. Like that's a real capability. They were able to stop them and catch them, which is good.

But that's the time they caught him like we have to be right every single time don't

They weren't even trying to really do anything yet. That was...

I don't know you

Speaker 2 (31:12.066)
We were just testing the waters, right? Because they're they're not in the position now to engage in global conflict and stuff. But if we're in global conflict, because of some other reason, right? Now they know they can. Right.

Now they can. That's it.

Well, think about this too. You're talking about water, but if we are in a global war conflict, what is stopping them to attack our radar system, our own mice?

Well, we saw that with Russia and Ukraine, right? We saw that in different battles, was preemptively prior to certain bombings and certain land advancements from both sides. Both sides were engaging in cyber first. Yep.

Yeah. So, well, I don't know you remember, and this was probably, I think it was between 10, six years ago that the Iran nuclear projects was destroyed because somebody, and they don't want to say it was the Israelis or the CIA, introduced a virus to the centrifuge machine. Exactly.

Speaker 2 (32:22.924)
next

This is Stuxnet, messed up their centrifuge.

But physically, physically destroy the centrifuge. They make it rotate faster than they were able to. But in the dashboard, in the computers of the people looking at them was normal. They didn't see anything. So

And I think I'm like a super hacker because I can get my my robo vacuum cleaner to like spin around and stuff just by throwing code on there. And I think that's really cool. Can you imagine like, but here's the thing too, is I don't think you know, we talk about this because this is the news that we have. I've got to think that we have the same capabilities. I've got to think that the US probably has been caught or

Maybe not. Maybe they haven't been caught, but I'm sure we have the similar capabilities to do the same things there. We wouldn't hear about it, right? Like it's not going to make the news here.

Speaker 2 (33:24.214)
Right? Like there's still a lot of let's not kid ourselves. There's a lot of propaganda that we get fed on both sides, regardless of political, regardless of whether it's Fox or CNN, right? Yeah, those the in all of their sister companies. But I still think that there's a bunch that we might do that they that we don't hear about. Of course, I don't know. There's got to

competency on our side and certainly we're all, you know, hoping and anticipating that we've got a lot of resources and expertise on the defense side too. And I'm sure we are learning so much in practice from what China is attempting to do in their infiltration of U.S. and their infiltration of utilities, what other state actors are doing. Yeah, I think it's probably a pretty safe bet that we're quite sophisticated.

on offense and defense.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, but meanwhile, there, you know, I

I will share this as we're wrapping up is when I was presenting over the HIMSS thing, one of the HIMSS conferences over in Wichita earlier this year, there was a gentleman from the Fusion Center in Kansas City. Fusion Center is with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security. It's all of the different agencies kind of in the same center. And he gave everybody like a history lesson and he explained

Speaker 2 (34:56.595)
in the late 90s, early 2000 timeline, China had redefined what the term war was and they expanded it to include societal impact.

degrading of societal values and gathering up of mass information. And there were discussions back then, 25 years ago, of creating mobile devices and apps that people would voluntarily give up privacy and information. Like why send over human spies if we could get them to give it to us, right? And this was publicized back then.

And then you hear in his position was, why do you think we feel things like TikTok are a national security threat? Right. Because he goes, because that's a perfect example of it. Right. It's a perfect example of it. When you download TikTok on your phone, like

the way it is now. Now, I'm sure Tic will stay alive. I'm sure they will figure something out, change the ownership and then have the data be more managed and more monitored by us. But until then, like when you download it on your phone, like it records everything you type on your phone and all that data goes over to China, like servers in China. Like that's what the T's and C's say. Right. So when you're

doing face impressions and you're typing in a password for another app. Everything on that phone after you download and you have that app on there, even when you're not using the app, it's recording that and it's sending that. Now it's a separate company, but the ownership there and in a totalitarian state, if they want the data, they can get it. I don't think that they have needed to or do that, but that's just something that is a conspiracy theory or is it like

Speaker 2 (37:00.232)
actual like this guy is not a conspiracy theorist. He was like the head director of the FBI. Like he was like, this is what we're literally seeing. And I'm like, well, that's shocking. That makes you feel uneasy. Because meanwhile, all of us are a lot of us Americans are curating our lives online. Yeah. Right. Or we think Yeah, or we think

man.

because it's Snapchat, it deletes off our device, so we think it disappears. It's not gone. It's sitting over on a server right there. Everything is sitting on a server. could all be recreated because we've seen when you go buy a dossier on somebody on the dark web, you get all those Snapchat stuff. Like it's saved somewhere and it's for sale.

to me.

Speaker 1 (37:48.844)
Well, let me tell you again, going back to China, remember that they have a manual for making war from the fifth century BCE, you know, Tutsu, the art of war. So they have a couple of years in advance of what to do in cases like this. So that's the scary part.

Yeah, our country is like brand spanking new. We're still new, right? Very. Whenever we go, whenever we go visit other countries, we're always reminded of that. Yes. Because you're walking by a building and you're like, this building is from like 1250 and I'm like 1250. Like our whole country is just from 1776, right? Or maybe the 1600s, 1500s. But yeah, it's crazy. It's amazing. So.

yes, compare to China

Speaker 1 (38:34.528)
in 20.

Speaker 2 (38:40.846)
Guys, thanks. So let's get together in a couple of weeks, find another one. Let's all bring one. I think I want to talk about AI browsers next time. For me, I think that's the one I'm going to bring in. I've been doing a lot of research on them because they seem amazing. Atlas. And yet they just seem so, like, and there's so much out there in the security world that's like, they are so dangerous. Don't use them.

And I'm like, well, it's so cool though.

Well, think about it. That's another console wars for video games. Now this is like a AI browsers war between What is the another one? Osmos. Right. One that I read that has a very weird name. Mitra.

They talk about yeah, I've got I've got them all on a spreadsheet here. And and what what they're talking about is you can still use these things. You just have to use a different browser and use that for just that. Yes. And I like or on a separate device like you have to just set once again, you to separate work from that. Right?

I'm going to grab like a kid's Chromebook or something that's got nothing on it and then go use it and see what I can do. Right. And because if they get if they get in there, there's nothing. There's some Skylander games on there. Like there's nothing on there. Right. There's nothing that like can really hurt us. But because they seem incredible. But that's going to be my thing, I think. But we'll see.

Speaker 1 (40:15.764)
Good. And talking about incredible, let me tell you, and I want to make this public. Dave, everybody loves your talk here in my company. Everybody likes it. So that's amazing. Everybody love it. Love it. Love it. it. So now it's actually our is part of curriculum that whoever comes to work, new employees,

I ran it by you guys first.

Speaker 1 (40:44.846)
They had to see that video.

I did that from a hotel, like sitting right by a, you know, I'm used to being in my studio. I did that from a hotel and I was like, I was like, there's a bed right here. There's a sandwich right here. I'm trying to look professional, but I'm telling you, yeah, but I'm just telling you it's I.

We did end up in...

Speaker 3 (41:06.336)
It's necessary, man. That's it.

I don't, you know, it's not my content. It's just stuff that we all see. We all gather up. I run it by a whole bunch of people. So it's really good to hear that.

And it's incredible. you know, it's, again, we are racing against already people that when you discover how to prevent, how to defend yourself, how to patch that hole, they already have idea how to open a new one. So.

Right. And I think we all have to just get used to AI and I think your phrase was perfect. I you both said it and it was the AI arms race because that's what it feels like. Like every week or two something new evolves and we just all have to just kind of stay up to date on it and figure out how to prompt better, how to get what we want safely out of it. It's really cool. I appreciate your time.

You know, it's

Speaker 2 (42:09.078)
Yeah, any parting thoughts? Zach, parting thought? Anything you want to say?

No, I think we've covered a lot. Yeah. Here's one. Take TikTok off your phone.

I don't disagree with that. we have the you know, we've had on the show Darren Mott and he's a former FBI guy. He's a former high school teacher who then went into the FBI.

and he's been the TikTok town crier for years. Ever since it got popular, he's like, what are you guys doing? Like this is China. And even me in the beginning, I had it on my phone and I was like, dude, what do you sound like a conspiracy theorist? What are you doing, man? Relax like easy, Mr. FBI guy. And he was like, no, David, he's like, and then he started telling me all this stuff. And then they had the congressional hearings and I watched that and I'm like, man, they

have no control over this thing. They had no control over this thing and all that data was over in China. I'm like that is not good. That's just not cool. So I I'm with you Zach. Gotta gotta gotta remove that app. Great app. The algorithm is outstanding. But put it on a burner phone. You know what I mean? Like go get a cheap phone and use it for that. But

Speaker 3 (43:25.996)
Not worth it.

Yeah, don't have it on the same phone that you your email on. That's for sure. Sergio, what's your parting thought? Sergio, any parting thoughts?

Yeah, have a...

Well guys, I hope I didn't scare you too much, I Halloween everybody.

Yeah, that was really kind of frightening.

Speaker 1 (43:44.8)
I will be asking you know, Chad GPT now, what do I dress tomorrow like? What, what these guys will get me more candies.

Yeah. Unbelievable. Well, I thank you guys both for your time. My parting thought is the same thing I've been saying for 16 years and that is quit reusing passwords and nobody listens to me. this is why we're in the state of we're in and why we got stories to tell. So keep reusing passwords because then we can keep talking.

Yeah, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Yes, yeah, and use passwords as a password. Nobody will guess that. Yeah. So I thank you both. We will talk to you guys again soon. Next couple of weeks. All right. See you.

Thank you. Bye.

Speaker 2 (44:35.288)
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