Cybersecurity Analyst
Appearances
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
China has launched large scale military drills in the waters around Taiwan to deter the self-governing island from seeking independence.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
One of the strange things about this space is that you are fighting the next cyber war now, regardless of how far along it is to the actual game time, right? You have to do it now because when the big conflict comes, it's too late to root out these adversaries and it's too late for them to get access.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
The reality is, is most adversaries want to be in place in advance so that they're prepared where they are digging in for contingency.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
In the summer of 2017, Russian hackers launched a more brazen and potentially much more dangerous attack, this time on Petro-Rabig, a massive oil refinery along the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. On a Friday night in August, a safety system triggered the whole plant to shut down.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
The hackers made a small coding mistake and they ended up shutting down the refinery instead of triggering a deadly explosion.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
There's some question over whether those are signaling things, right? They want us to know that they can get access, right? And then they sort of hold that access over our heads and maybe change our calculus. Or if these are very practical targets that they expect to have military effects, right? Or essentially potentially slow a military response or change our ability to respond in any conflict.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
The weird thing about almost all the critical infrastructure stuff I've covered in my career is a lot of it wasn't about practical effects. A lot of it was probably about just undermining the adversary, like trust in the adversary. Your power goes out for a few hours, power outages happen, whatever.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
But you recognize now that the foreign power did it, and suddenly you distrust the government's ability to secure you.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
But I'll tell you what, we did a hackathon, a security AI hackathon to see how some of the security engineers at Google could use AI. And there are 43 teams competing to just show us what cool thing you could do with AI for security. Nicole, if you sat in that room and you were a VC, you could have walked away with 20 new companies.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
Like it is massively powerful for what security practitioners do because it's really good at finding anomalies, finding efficiencies. There's just a lot of really cool applications for what we do every day that are really exciting. And I actually think it's going to be ultimately a better tool for us than them.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
because what we're really lacking against them is efficient means to hunt them and essentially track them and ai is really good at a lot of those pieces and i i was blown away like i was shaking my bosses like arm like i can't believe this this is incredible it's really powerful tool so i'm excited i think it's going to be a game changer for defenders you know we talk about the defender's dilemma or the
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 9: The New Frontline
adversary advantage and let me tell you like I'm a military history nerd there was a time when they said the same thing about the cavalry dudes on horses would roll through you know a formation and that was it there was the offensive advantage and then the machine gun came and the game changed like that it is completely possible that we could shift the game here and I'm hoping that this will do it but we're not there yet we're very much in the experimental phase of this whole thing so we'll see how a lot of this shakes out
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
They said publicly that the reason for these hacks was in order to disable our critical infrastructure, is that these were essentially pre-operational activities.