The US Government's Response to the Maui Ransomware Campaign

Defensive Security Podcast Episode 267

 

Links:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/aerojet-rocketdyne-agrees-pay-9-million-resolve-false-claims-act-allegations-cybersecurity

https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/alerts/aa22-187a

https://www.zdnet.com/article/these-are-the-cybersecurity-threats-of-tomorrow-that-you-should-be-thinking-about-today/

jerry: [00:00:00] Alright, here we go. Today is Sunday, July 10th, 2022. And this is episode 267 of the defensive security podcast. My name is Jerry Bell and joining me tonight as always. Is Mr. Andrew Kellett.

Andy: Good evening, Jerry, how are you? Good, sir.

jerry: I’m doing great. How are you doing?

Andy: I’m good man. It’s hot and steamy in Atlanta. Tell you that much.

jerry: Yeah. I ‘ve been back for a month from my beach place. And I think today’s the first day that we’ve not had a heat advisory. [00:01:00]

Andy: Yeah, that’s crazy.

jerry: which it has been brutally hot here.

Andy: Now, when you say beach place, you might have to be more specific, cause you’ve got one like seven beach houses now.

jerry: Well, the Southern most beach house. Yes.

Andy: Yeah. One is the Chateau. One’s technically a compound.

jerry: One’s an island,

Andy: that’s.

Andy: We’re going to have to probably name them because. They’re tough to keep straight.

jerry: They definitely are. Yup.

Andy: But, I, for one. Appreciate your new land barronness activities. And look forward to.

Andy: Jerry Landia being launched and seceding from the United States.

jerry: Hell. Yeah. That’s right.

Andy: I’ll start applying for citizenship whenever I can.

jerry: Good plan. Good plan. All right. A reminder. We should probably already said this, but the thoughts and opinions we expressed on the show are ours and do not represent those of our employers.

Andy: But for enough money, they could

jerry: yeah. Everything is negotiable. [00:02:00] All right. Couple of really interesting stories crossed my desk. Recently and the first one comes from the US department of justice of all places. And the title here is Aerojet , Rocketdyne agrees to pay $9 million to resolve false claims act allegations.

jerry: Of cybersecurity violations in federal government contracts. So the story here is that there’s this act, as you could probably tell by the title called the false claims act that permits an employee of a company who specifically does business with the US government to Sue the company under the false claims act claiming that the company is misrepresenting itself in the execution of its contracts. And if that [00:03:00] lawsuit is successful, the person making the allegation, basically it’s a whistleblower kind of arrangement. The person making the allegation gets a cut of the settlement. And so in this particular case the whistleblower received $2.61 million dollars of the $9 million.

Andy: Wow. So his company. In theory was lying on their security controls. And he found out about it or knew about it. And was a whistleblower. About it is getting 2.61 million.

jerry: Correct. Correct.

Andy: Have to go check everything in my company. I’ll be right back.

jerry: I’m guessing that his lawyers will probably take about 2 million of the 2.61, but, Hey, it’s still.

jerry: still. money, right?

Andy: That’s crazy. It reminds me, it’s probably a lot of our listeners are too young for this, but. The days of the business software Alliance about turning in your employer for using pirated software, that you could get a cut of that, but not in the you [00:04:00] know seven figure range.

jerry: Yeah, this is really quite interesting. And what’s more interesting is that there is apparently some indication that the US government may expand the scope of this to include non government contracts and including. Perhaps even like public companies. Under the jurisdiction of the securities and exchange commission. I don’t think that’s ah codified yet.

jerry: Probably just ah hyperbole at this point, but holy moly. It really really drives home the point that we need to, do what we say and say what we do.

Andy: So what were the gaps or what were the misses that they said they had.

jerry: have done a little bit of searching around. I didn’t go through all of the details in that case. Because it was a settlement, there may not be an actual Details available, but I’ve not been able to find the specific details of of what they were not doing.

Andy: Yeah. did [00:05:00] go and I cause. I was very curious about this and did do a bunch of searching and found some summaries of the case and some of the legal documentations, and it looks like. The best I was able to get into is there was a matrix of 56 security controls. Or something around those lines, don’t quote me on that and that the company only had satisfactory coverage of five to 10 of them.

jerry: Oh, wow.

Andy: And there was another one where they did a third-party pen tests who got into the company in four hours. It looks like there’s a bunch of Unpatched vulnerabilities. So it’s in legalese, right? So it’s a little tough to translate into our world at times.

Andy: But I’m actually quite curious and I might want to do some more research trying to figure out what exactly were the gaps and I guess at the end of the day, they agreed to these things contractually. And just didn’t do them.

jerry: Correct. That’s the net of it.

Andy: This is primarily if you’re doing business with the government, the us government.

jerry: Correct. Do you have a government contract?

jerry: Yeah for now. And I do think that over time, like I said, my [00:06:00] understanding is that the scope of this may make increase.

Andy: This is, I really feel like this is huge. This could open the door.

Andy: I mean because you and I both know how often those contractual obligations and the way you answer those questions is a little squishy.

jerry: Yeah. Yeah. Optimistic, I think. I think optimistic might be.

Andy: That’s fair. That’s fair. But it’s also interesting trying to have, federal judges navigate this very complex world. Yeah, that’s it. That’s a crazy story. We’ll see where that goes.

jerry: So anyway, it really highlights the point about being very honest and upfront with with what we’re doing. And if we commit to doing something, we need to do it.

Andy: Yeah, it just gets fuzzy when there’s business deals on the back end of that answer.

jerry: No, I could completely agree.

jerry: All right. The the next story also pretty interesting. Also comes from a us government agency. This one comes [00:07:00] from CISA the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. I hate the name. I really wish they come up with a different name. It’s the word security way too many times. Anyway that the title here is North Korea state-sponsored cyber actors use Maui ransomware to target the healthcare and public health sectors.

jerry: That from a, from a actual actor standpoint or threat actor standpoint, there’s not a ton a ton of innovation here. They’re not doing anything super sophisticated that we don’t see in a lot of other campaigns, but what is most interesting is that the government, the US government has attributed this particular campaign to North Korea. And North Korea is, one of the most, perhaps the most heavily sanctioned country in the world for the us government. And so if you, as a an entity in the US somehow support an [00:08:00] organization or a person or entity in North Korea, you can be subject to penalties from the U S government.

jerry: And the point here is if you are a victim of this ransomware campaign and you pay the ransom, you may run a foul of those sanctions and that could end in addition to whatever penalties you might come into as a result of of the breach you may actually run into some pretty significant additional penalties as a result of supporting the north Korean government.

Andy: Well, that is an interesting little problem isn’t it?

jerry: Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Andy: What you need is a shell company. To run your ransomware payment through.

jerry: I have a feeling is a lot of that going on in the world.

Andy: we saw some shenanigans with like lawyers doing it as a proxy and with using. In essence [00:09:00] privileged communications to hide it. At least allegedly in some previous stories we’ve covered. But that’s an interesting problem. Yeah. I can see how that would be a challenge. Maybe if you only paid the ransomware, like in bulk wheat shipments.

jerry: a barter system.

Andy: Because we send them food.

jerry: That’s true.

Andy: That’s allowed.

jerry: so you recover your data by paying in humanitarian aid.

Andy: I think Twinkies for data is a perfect campaign. We should launch.

jerry: I don’t even know what to say.

Andy: Either pay three Bitcoin, which is now probably worth like 30 bucks. I don’t know, I haven’t checked lately or.

Andy: Two semis full of Twinkies.

jerry: But how are you going to get to Twinkies to them? That’s what I want to know.

Andy: They have ships. They make ships that they go on and they go across the sea and then they take them off the ships. Did you not read the books I gave you?

jerry: Oh, geez. Showing my ignorance. I will say that there are some recommendations down at the bottom. Some [00:10:00] of them are interesting and things that you haven’t seen a lot of recommended before. But a lot of them are just the normal run of the mill platitudes. Only use secured networks and avoid using public wifi networks. Consider you using an installing a VPN.

jerry: No, I get so tired of the, you should consider doing X. Well, okay. I considered it.

jerry: You should consider not using administrative rights for your users. Okay. I considered it.

Andy: Well, and the real problem here is that ransomware is not one threat. It is the outcome of.

jerry: Exactly.

Andy: Yeah. That’s why the ransomware defense is an interesting problem. Unless you’re actually just trying to stop the. Pure encryption component of it. How that ransomware starts could be highly varied.

jerry: It’s the end link in the chain, right? Because as, they talk about earlier in the [00:11:00] advisory here. This particular Maui ransomware is actually pretty manual. It actually has to be, apparently be launched. By hand. With the command line. So whoever is whoever the threat actor is, they found some way into the system and you can infer. Assuming that the CISA actually has that kind of insight. You can infer by reading through their recommendations, how they think the north Koreans are getting in there using RDP that’s exposed to the internet and then moving laterally using user credentials who have administrative rights and so on. So you can infer based on what they’re saying not to do to see probably how it’s being propagated, but sometimes it’s a little difficult to understand, with these kinds of recommendations how much of it is the result of actual observations and just yeah, we have this list [00:12:00] of good hygiene practices. And we think this is what you should be doing.

Andy: Yeah. I think the problem is that. True. Ransomware defense is highly varied based on the. Individual company’s stance platform, environment, situation. And it’s very difficult to roll that into a couple paragraphs in a generic article.

jerry: Yeah. Yep. Absolutely.

jerry: So anyway don’t get ransomwared and if you do. Don’t pay off the north Koreans because you’re going to get a double whammy.

Andy: I still don’t quite understand how the north Koreans are launching these from their Commodore 64s. But maybe we’ll talk about that in another show.

jerry: It is a fair question, how they’re coming into possession, but I would expect it’s coming in via countries like China and Russia where they may not have that sanction in place. .

jerry: Which by the way, I think is how there, cause you, you would ask the same question. Well, how are they getting internet access? My, my understanding is it. It is [00:13:00] coming through China.

jerry: So the last story today comes from ZD net and the title here is these are the cybersecurity threats of tomorrow that you should be thinking about today.

Andy: Well, hold on. If I’m thinking about tomorrow’s threats today, thinking about today’s threats today.

jerry: Well, you were supposed to think about today’s threats yesterday.

Andy: Oh,

jerry: And you were supposed to think about yesterday’s threats last week.

Andy: I’m gonna have to start over.

jerry: Yeah, well, Look, this isn’t this career. It’s not meant for everybody.

Andy: Is this what they mean by thought leaders?

jerry: I think it is.

jerry: I think it is.

jerry: So the first threat of tomorrow that you need to worry about today. Is quantum threats. And that’s not like the James Bond quantum, right? This is more like the. The quantum computing. Hacking all your public key crypto. Which by the way is going to be here probably sooner than anybody really wants to [00:14:00] admit.

jerry: The world of quantum computing is advancing quite. Quite rapidly. And. I think that the interesting thing to consider is that we’re, we are creating just massive amounts of encrypted data. On a daily basis today. And presumably it’s infeasible to decrypt almost all of it. Because of the complexity.

jerry: But in the near future that won’t be the case. The things that we’re creating today could be relatively easily decrypted using things like quantum computing. So presumably there is enterprising companies and state actors and whatnot, and squirreling away encrypted data. Today.

jerry: That will be encrypted. Somewhere down the line. So at some point. It makes sense for us, like we’re going to have to, I think even before. Quantum crypto because quantum Attacks against cryptography. Becomes [00:15:00] technically feasible. We’re going to have to shift to quantum resistant. Crypto, which is going to be interesting because there it’s you going out on a limb and saying that.

jerry: The quantum resistant crypto that we’re making actually will be quantum resistant because we don’t have the kind of quantum computers that can verify that hypothesis.

Andy: In fact NIST, just put out the beginning of the process to solicit and evaluate. For quantum resistant public key cryptography algorithms.

jerry: Yeah.

Andy: Which I mean, by the way is not a quick process. I think the last time they updated. It took three or four or five years of review. So it’s not a quick. Quick endeavor typically, but yeah. It’s an odd one. And I guess the theory behind this is that quantum computers just do math differently. So all of the time variables.

Andy: Of how long it would take to break a standard encryption today don’t apply or apply very differently to quantum computing than they do to our standard type of computing today.

jerry: Yeah. [00:16:00] Correct. Conceivably a. A well. In properly skilled quantum computer could. Take a, contemporary. Public key crypto and break it, in, in very short time.

Andy: In essence by brute forcing it just much, much, much faster.

jerry: It’s not actually brute forcing. It’s just solving the math.

Andy: Yeah, I. Well, I guess what I’m saying is there’s. There’s nothing inherently weak in the encryption algorithm. It’s the speed of the computing that’s changing.

jerry: It’s the approach.

Andy: You could break it. You could break today’s encryption as well. It just takes a very long time.

jerry: Well, the. The strength in the encryption today comes from the fact that we have to basically just brute force you know trying to factor. Numbers. But in the world. When you get it. To the quantum computing.

jerry: You don’t have to actually brute force. The

Andy: Hmm.

jerry: can just, you can just solve it. Like you don’t. You don’t even, you don’t even have to brute force, so solve it. It [00:17:00] is.

Andy: I gotta be honest. I feel woefully ignorant and naive of these issues, and I clearly need to educate myself because I. I did not understand that.

jerry: It’s well, It’s. It is a

jerry: It’s just very different. It’s a very different thing. It’s not a, like you can’t take a binary computer.

jerry: And compare it to a quantum computer.

jerry: It’s almost like an analog computer. Anyway, it’s very interesting. It’s a, I actually think it’s more closely aligned to. What had been described as the DNA computers, where you can arrange, you can break. Segments of the DNA up and have it have it assemble itself into the answer to a complicated question that you would have a really hard time, answering with a traditional computer. I think it’s closer to that.

jerry: Than it is to like a, an actual binary computer. The concepts are difficult to translate, which says to me like That is by the way, the concern I have as we approach. You creating these [00:18:00] quantum safe algorithms? Like we were like hypothesizing, how. Quantum computing is going to evolve once it the.

jerry: Anyway, that’s.

Andy: Yeah, before we move on to the last thing I’ll say is this feels like the magic black box. That is a bit of a boogeyman because a lot of people don’t understand it. But

jerry: Totally. But it is. it is.

jerry: a practical thing, and it is a responsible thing for us to go and create this, these quantum safe algorithms and start migrating to them.

jerry: With as soon as practical. So I’m just concerned that like how confident can we be that? They’re actually quantum safe. So the next future threat, which I don’t think is actually a future threat, I think it’s like already here is software supply chain attacks. This is, obviously things like what happened with solar winds and Microsoft exchange. And.

jerry: Many others where the threat actors, I think are finding it a lot easier to attack. Purveyors of [00:19:00] software and software as a service companies and in and whatnot. Because if you do that you you can not just attack one company you can conceivably, with one attack yet.

jerry: Access to many different organizations as we saw with Kaseya. And solar winds as well. So yeah, I, I definitely think this is. On the upswing. I fear is it is an industry. Our response to this threat is like more spreadsheets.

jerry: I

Andy: And answer more questions.

jerry: Yeah. I

Andy: no. We have to live off. Look, we need to go back to the pioneer times and we code all of our own software. That’s the only solution Jerry.

jerry: It’s like the Hyundai version of

Andy: Look.

jerry: We have to build it .

Andy: Yeah, I think, yeah. And you can’t download anybody else’s code because you don’t know what’s in it. You have to code it yourself. the only option.

jerry: It’s true. And by the way, building your own encryption is it still irresponsible? So try to figure that one out.

Andy: [00:20:00] I’m kidding. Of course. Yeah, it’s a tough. It’s a tough problem. There’s so much inherent trust that you establish if we’d look back at solar winds and Yeah how many times have you and I said, Hey, upgrades and patches are important. And then that became the attack. Vector. Let’s just hope that becomes a rarity.

Andy: And let’s also hope that. Somebody else gets hit by that before you do, and you have time to react.

jerry: Yeah we just, we have to find a more mature way as an industry of handling this. Threat. There’s some there’s some approaches evolving, like salsa and.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: And whatnot, but. Still the. From a consumer side, it’s still little more than spreadsheetware are you, or are you not. Salsa. Well, we already know from the first story that people are apt to lie.

Andy: Yeah. To defend yourself from this, I think you could do a lot of threat modeling of, and I’ll go back to the whole concept of least privilege as best you can, but some of these. Software. [00:21:00] Supply chain risks happened because you have no choice, but to have a massive amount of trust granted to some.

Andy: Third-party software.

Andy: Just to function.

jerry: Completely agree, open sources adds another add s another level of complexity there, because. What we see with open sources. And by the way I have no particular aversion to open source thing. The problem we have is that. It’s. It’s apt to be abandoned. It’s easy for it to get handed off from a quote good person to a quote, bad person. It’s.

jerry: Conceivable that a quote, good person goes bad.

jerry: In, in, in many other permutations in it, like they’re so stacked on top of each other some of these open source applications. The feed and even the commercial applications. There’s like tens of thousands of packages. Like how do you.

jerry: How you get your hands around that.

Andy: Yeah, that is crazy.

Andy: You brought up up something that reminded me,’ve even seen some very [00:22:00] popular well-known.

Andy: Packages be turned into protest where

jerry: Yeah.

Andy: purposes, by the maintainers for various reasons, it’s rare, but we’ve seen it a couple of times and it’s.

jerry: Over the years we’ve seen. Browser plugins being sold by their.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: Their author and maintainer to, Malicious. Quasi malicious companies. So it, it happens. And it’s a really difficult. Problem to solve, but we’re going to have to reconcile how to how to solve it eventually.

jerry: The next one is internet of things, making us more vulnerable. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. More devices you have on your network. Created by, I think it’s this, it’s a flavor of the same. That same thing, you have these embedded devices, typically lower costs, whether it’s a copier.

jerry: I don’t know a thermometer or whatever. They have crappy firmware. And they get abandoned and they’re still on your network and they become a launching point. And then, they point out in the [00:23:00] article the super famous. I guess infamous story about the Las Vegas casino that was hacked through their.

jerry: Their aquarium thermometer, which is. I don’t know. Something’s wrong there. If that can happen, but I mean there’s stories about, people getting in the wireless networks through Through a smart light bulbs. There’s a lot of stories like that and,

jerry: But I think it’s a similar kind of thing we have to. We have to figure out how to handle that. The one that makes me the most concerned though. Is a deep fakes powering business, email compromise attacks.

jerry: So I actually as a. Kind of an experiment. And I’m recording it with this software now. You can easily buy. You have access, like the average person has access to technology that allows you. Pretty easily to do deep, fake type stuff. And if you think about that in the context of what we’ve seen [00:24:00] with

jerry: The business email compromise where somebody’s parading as the CFO. Asking to transfer money or to change the bank account information. This opens up a whole new world. And especially when you add the layer of a video deep fakes, holy crap. Like having a WebEx. With the person who you think is your boss. And by all means, by all appearances, it is.

jerry: And here you’re talking face to face, virtually face to face with who you think is your boss, giving you an instruction on how to do something or to do something. And it’s. It’s not real.

Andy: Yeah. In fact, Jerry’s, not even here I deep faked jerry’s entire portion of this podcast.

jerry: That’s true. That’s true. I was never real by the way.

Andy: That’s actually not true. Jerry has evolved into a llama. it’s been replaced by a deep fake AI. I’m kidding. No, I don’t mean to make light of this because I think it’s absolutely [00:25:00] legitimate. We, as humans. Have evolved to trust our senses. And identify people visually and audibly. Withreat level. Like we don’t have any built in skepticism that we just inherently trust it.

Andy: And this problem. Is playing on that psychological concept of, we trust our senses when we identify somebody because we’re very good at identifying things. And so the fact that. We have now moved to this digital environment and digital comms, and we can deep, fake this successfully. Is really powerful and dangerous.

Andy: And I can see this wreaking a lot of havoc. Absolutely.

jerry: Yeah, it’s. It, it seems a little scary to me to be honest. And I think we’re going to have to come up with. Better processes.

jerry: Well, you’re gonna have to have a multifactor, like you’re I think we’re going to get to a point. you just can’t trust. [00:26:00]

jerry: just can’t trust.

jerry: that. And by the way, scares the crap out of me. When you think about things like evidence submitted in the court from surveillance cameras. There’s like the, your mind can go in lots of problematic places. But from a, just narrowly from a business.

jerry: Resisting business, email, compromise type things. It really puts on what’s the focus back on having a robust process.

jerry: Where even if you have your boss, the CFO, whoever call you up on a WebEx.

jerry: Like you still have to have some systematic way.

jerry: That requires authentication and whatnot.

jerry: That.

jerry: The person has to prove who they are.

jerry: We just have to do that.

Andy: Yeah, no.

Andy: No matter what you can’t violate the process that.

Andy: Authenticates at multiple levels that this person is who they say they are, and that they’re authorized to do it. Which is difficult, especially for small companies. It’s a lot [00:27:00] of discipline and bureaucratic red tape, but. Otherwise, I just it’s going to get too trivially easy. To fake a phone call from the CEO.

Andy: With a perfect voice representation.

jerry: alone a perfect ah video.

Andy: Right.

jerry: Yeah. Anyway, that’s Something to keep you awake at night. Destructive malware attacks is next. Again I think we’ve we’ve seen this. Quite a lot. We had WannaCry NotPetya. Yeah. And candidly. Like the scourge of the internet right now is ransomware, which I think they’re thinking more like physically damaging, candidly ransomware is I think in this category already.

jerry: So I think we’re, I think we’re already living in this one.

jerry: And then finally the skills crisis. Although I guess I’ll go back one, we’ve talked to in the past about. Some of the forward-looking innovations in [00:28:00] malware, probably moving into firmware.

jerry: And in that may be where we where we see this going next is it does get more destructive for the average organization, but it’s by means of attacking firmware. Like where you can’t recover. Your hardware, you just, you can’t just wipe a system and.

Andy: Yeah. Just bricks, the entire.

Andy: Whatever.

jerry: Right.

Andy: Motherboard level or hard drive level

jerry: Or it’s it. Or it’s it’s infected at a, in a way that just you can’t clean it. You just, you can never reestablish trust.

Andy: You mean like installing windows.

jerry: For instance.

Andy: Sorry. I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

jerry: Yeah. Although I have to on that funny point. So the the author of systemd, for those of you who ah who are Linux nerds like me, the author of systemD recently left Red Hat and moved to Microsoft.

Andy: Aye.

jerry: And so system D has been pretty controversial thing and, cause it’s starting, my, my view is it’s starting [00:29:00] to move Linux into kind of a windows windows mode of operation. And so I think like the next plan. Like order 66.

Andy: Oh,

jerry: right. And system D was like the clones.

jerry: In order 66 is. They’re going to, we’re going to, they’re going to rename systemD to be SVC host.

Andy: So who are the Jedi in this example? Exactly.

jerry: I don’t know, everybody’s bad.

jerry: So there’s no, there’s there’s no. There’s no light side of the force is like the dark and the darker side of

Andy: But with order 66, like they kill all the Jedi. So who are they going to like.

jerry: Oh, that’s the Linux. That’s the Linux people. That’s the people who are using. Using Linux.

Andy: I see.

jerry: Yeah.

Andy: Yeah.

jerry: The only thing left will be ah, will be the windows? Yeah.

Andy: And my one lone copy of OS2 warp that I’m running still.

jerry: That is very true

jerry: Yup.

Andy: It’s a dangerous world. My friend.

jerry: So the the final frontier of risks that we will have to worry about [00:30:00] tomorrow. Is the skills crisis.

jerry: I am. I will sayit a little bit differently. I’m not sure that is the skills crisis so much as. The ability to pay for the skills we need.

Andy: So you think there’s plenty of people out there we’re just not paying in a form.

jerry: I think, yeah, I think so. I think it’s probably naive of me to say there’s plenty of people out there, but there are people out there. My observation is. A lot of organizations have lots and lots of of job openings and they moan and complain about the. The lack of people, but it’s the lack of people who were willing to take the job at the.

jerry: Rate that they’re offering.

Andy: Okay. So is that a. Is that a supply demand problem as well. If there was more supply. To meet that demand. It would. down the pricing.

jerry: yes. I think so. I think [00:31:00] that’s, what’s. To be honest, like one, one of the ways to look at this is, a lot of organizations are.

jerry: Trying to dramatically increase the supply to get the cost to go down. The reality is that there’s a. Like, we’re just don’t have the level of the number of people. We, most organizations don’t have the number of people in the skill level of people they need. But at the same time, I think there’s.

jerry: That’s a symptom. Of a bigger problem that I don’t think that most companies invest the amount of money they need to invest in securing and operating their IT like, I think we’ve just. Like we’re over. We’re overextended. We’re over leveraged. In it, and we’re trying to figure out how to fix it without fixing that.

jerry: Over leveraged situation. That’s just, Jerry’s macroeconomic. Baloney.

Andy: Yeah, see some truth in there though that we.

Andy: We also have [00:32:00] probably a lot of bad practices. And failure to follow best practices for various reasons that were. Compensating for, with other security controls, as opposed to just. things more inherently secure.

jerry: Oh a hundred percent.

jerry: A hundred percent

Andy: Now that’s a complicated thing, there may be very good reasons why we do that. And I’m not saying. I’m trying not to be dogmatic about there’s only one way to do things. I think that’s true. I also think a lot of legacy businesses have so much tech debt. And the cost to say rebuild with best practices are so high.

Andy: I think probably don’t have much choice.

jerry: Absolutely.

Andy: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s interesting problem.

Andy: I do wonder.

Andy: I do wonder if it’s.

Andy: Going to stabilize or we’re always going to be in this scenario.

jerry: It is.

jerry: On the one hand

jerry: There’s a lot of peril in thinking that the patent office is going to close. But on the other hand how much more innovation, like how many more features does your Your word processor need? .

Andy: [00:33:00] Apparently lots.

jerry: Well, I guess I’m like there will always be innovation, but I think the rate of innovation is going to. You’ll start to flatten out a bit. And

Andy: we’ve been saying that for years and.

jerry: Yeah, well, it’s

Andy: law has proved us wrong over and over again. But I hear you like how word process spreadsheets pretty mature, pretty commodity. Like how much more tech do you need in them, but. Heck we’re still debating whether or not macros should be on or off in office by default.

jerry: Oh, gosh, that’s right. Yep.

Andy: No, I hear ya. I just, I also feel like it’s going to slow down soon and feel two old guys talking about getting off their lawns.

jerry: Well, I think it’s, I think the complexity will probably shift around and I think to some extent, what. What might end up happening is we see. We see the devices people have move away. The device’s employees have move away from being kind of general purpose computers to more specialized.

jerry: Like iPad type [00:34:00] devices. Not. Not not like green-screen terminals but less so in less a wave. Or less general computing and more. Specialized, which I think are easier to secure. That just shifts. A lot of the complexity into other parts of the environment your infrastructure.

Andy: Well, going to specialized isn’t that like being more like an IOT. Problem, which also we can’t seem to keep updated and secure.

jerry: Well, that’s true. I guess were.

jerry: Pretty bad all the way around,

Andy: yeah. Sorry, clearly there’s no hope for any of us.

Andy: We’re doomed.

jerry: Yeah.

jerry: All right. Well, I guess we’ll just just keep milking the the machine for awhile. And then we all retire to our private island,

Andy: jerry Landia.

jerry: Anyway I thought this was. Pretty interesting list of things to be thinking about. The most interesting one I thought by far was the was the deep fake threat.

jerry: I wanted to call that out. Anyhow, that is [00:35:00] the show for today. Thank you all for for listening. Sorry. It’s been so long. Life continues. To get in the way of making podcasts. And I, every time I think it’s going to level out and I will be less busy. Something happens.

jerry: Hopefully. Fingers crossed.

Andy: Fair enough, but Hey, I I, we appreciate you guys sticking with us and hopefully still finding some value in the podcast and we enjoy making them when we can.

jerry: Take care, everyone.

Andy: Have a great week.

Andy: Buh-bye.

jerry: Bye.