"if one site is hacked you can just unleash all health we have stumbled into this new era of mutually assured digital destruction how far are people willing to go you can capture their location you can..."

"the following is a conversation with nicole pearl roth cyber security journalist and author of this is how they tell me the world ends the cyber weapons arm race this is the lex friedman podcast to su..."

"a zero day exploit or attack so at the most basic level let's say i'm a hacker and i find a bug in your iphone ios software that no one else knows about especially apple that's called a zero day becau..."

"can see why that capability that zero day exploit would have immense value for a spy agency or a government that wants to monitor its critics or dissidents and so there's a very lucrative market now f..."

"android remote zero day exploit something that can get you into android phones is actually higher the value of that is now higher on this underground market for zero day exploits than an iphone ios ex..."

"and that it might actually be easier to find an ios zero-day exploit than find an android zero-day exploit the other thing is market share there are just more people around the world that use android ..."

"populations like uyghurs so a couple years ago there was a watering hole attack okay it's a watering hole attack there's a website it was actually it had information aimed at uyghurs and you could acc..."

"zero day exploit they just sold to a broker is being used to basically make someone's life a living hell and what i found was there's kind of this long sordid history to this question you know it star..."

"information online now when you go back and interview people from those early days they all tell a very similar story which is they're curious they're tinkers you know they remind me of like the kid d..."

"espionage but as we started baking the software windows software schneider electric siemens industrial software into our nuclear plants and our factories and our power grid and our petrochemical facil..."

"continue to profit off that software so why shouldn't i profit off my labor too and one of the things that has happened which is i think a positive development over the last 10 years are bug bounty pr..."

"so you would create a perverse incentive and i didn't i didn't think about that until i started this research and i realized okay yeah that makes sense you don't want to incentivize offense so much th..."

"in your sense so my my belief is all the ultra competent people or very very high percentage of ultra competent people are also ethical people that's been my experience but then again my experience is..."

"they say like it's really like a macgyver culture you know you have to figure out how to break into something with wire and tape and that means that there are a lot of really good hackers in argentina..."

"like wow you know he's like we'll just sell to whoever brings us the biggest bag of cash have you checked into our inflation situation recently so you know i had some some of those like reality checks..."

"it's always the guy who's behind the shadows whose voice has been altered you know when they've gotten someone on camera that's usually how they do it you know very very few people talk in the space a..."

"sources yeah and i think you know what hacker one has told me was okay let's just put away the people that are finding and developing zero day exploits all day long let's put that aside what about the..."

"and the zero day factor is a big one you know that their qnap right now is trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with their system that would let this in and even if they pay if they still don't..."

"from scratch and so a lot of residents in baltimore were like why the hell didn't you pay the 76 000 so it's not obvious you know it's easy to say don't pay because why you're funding their rnd for th..."

"had even a single employee working remotely in ukraine so it hit maersk the shipping company but hit pfizer hit fedex but the one i will never forget is merck it paralyzed merck's factories i mean it ..."

"to it the department of justice recently declassified a report that said china's been hacking into our pipelines and it's not for intellectual property theft it's to get a foothold so that if things e..."

"and for the most part there is nothing out there legislating that those companies share the fact they've been breached they don't even have to tell the government they've been hit there's nothing mand..."

"[Music] a lot of those were nation states you know we live in a world with a lot of geopolitical hot points right now and where those geopolitical hot points are are places where countries have been i..."

"that's the super power you know and i and i always say like every country now with the exception of antarctica someone added the vatican to my list is trying to find uh offensive hacking tools and zer..."

"like there's been there's been a push from brad smith at microsoft we need a digital geneva convention and on its face it sounds like a no-brainer yeah why wouldn't we all agree to stop hacking into e..."

"and you know a couple years ago i remember i can't remember if it was before or after not pecha but putin said hackers are like artists who wake up in the morning in a good mood and start painting in ..."

"in terms of on the security side technologically speaking you mentioned there's no regulation on companies united states um what if you could just uh fix with the snap of a finger what would you fix t..."

"give up and move along and you know maybe if you are a target for an advanced nation state or the svr you know you're going to get hacked no matter what but you can make cyber criminal groups deadbolt..."

"what did hackers take they took the credentials they took the passwords they can make a pretty penny selling them on the dark web and people reuse their passwords so you get one from you know god know..."

"there yeah it feels like friction in our frictionless society it feels like friction it's annoying that's security's biggest problem it's annoying you know we need the steve jobs of security to come a..."

"it's a really hard problem though yeah and ultimately it's very difficult to beat the password in terms of security well there's a company that i actually will call out and that's abnormal security so..."

"in a really seamless way because it doesn't matter if you have the perfect security solution if no one uses it i mean when i started at the times when i was trying to be really good about protecting s..."

"you know social engineering we work from home now i saw this this woman posted online about how her husband it went viral today but it was her husband had this problem at work they hired a guy named j..."

"suspicious i keep putting the touring test in front no um no i have a friend who worked inside nsa and was one of their top hackers and he's like every time i go to russia i get hit on by these tens y..."

"but if people will tend towards manipulation and malevolent behavior in search of power then we're screwed so i i don't know if you can comment on how to keep the metaverse secure yeah i mean i all i ..."

"tie us up in our own politics so that we're so paralyzed we can't get anything done we can't make any progress and we definitely can't handle our adversaries and their long-term thinking um it really ..."

"and you know that is that's that's the blockchain right now like when i was covering all of these ransomware attacks i thought okay this is gonna be it for cryptocurrency you know governments are gonn..."

"to get to it so it's a it's a curse in some ways and that it's an enabler but it's also a blessing and they said that same thing to me that i just said to you they said we've never shut down a promisi..."

"you know i think that's the way the world's gonna go we have enough is enough sort of losing our personal information everywhere um letting data marketing companies track our every move you know they ..."

"i have so many opinions on this just the friction and the sign up and all those kinds of things i should be able to this has to do with everything this has to do with payment too as the payment should..."

"well spam is getting better and maybe uh i need to as a side note make a public announcement please clip this out which is um if you get an email or a message from lex friedman saying how much i lex y..."

"education it's telling people to be skeptical on stuff they click uh it's that's that balance with the technology solution of creating a um maybe like two-factor authentication and maybe helping ident..."

"with all of our intellectual property and russia's been hacking into our energy infrastructure and they've been using the same methods to spy on track and in many cases kill their own journalists and ..."

"and you just sort of wish that there had been a little bit more thought into what was released because i think a lot of the impact from sewing was just the volume of the reporting but i but i think yo..."

"torn about how to feel about that whistleblower because from a company perspective that's an open culture how can you operate successfully if you have an open culture where any one whistleblower can c..."

"it's hard to know what to do with that because then um that forces facebook and meta and governments to be much more conservative much more secretive it's like a race to the the bottom i i don't know ..."

"zero day broker probably has some voodoo doll of me out there and you know you never you're never gonna get it 100 um but i really applaud whistleblowers like you know the whistleblower who who blew t..."

"again this is a touchy subject i suppose but there's a lot of conspiracy theories about intelligence agencies from your understanding of intelligence agencies cie nsa and the equivalent of in other co..."

"what what's your sense do these conspiracy theories have kind of any truth to them or are intelligence agencies for the most part good for society okay well that's an easy one is it no i think you kno..."

"is not like the pound your chest patriot that you see on you know the beach on the 4th of july a lot of them have complicated feelings about their former employers well at least at the nsa reminded me..."

"i will probably get you know accused of my western bias here again but i think you can you can almost barely compare um some of these western intelligence agencies to china for instance and the survei..."

"just as ukraine has been to russia in terms of a test kitchen for its cyber attacks the uyghurs are china's test kitchen for surveillance and there's no doubt in my mind that they're testing them on t..."

"uh why because that was still considered fair game to china it wasn't ip theft they were after they wanted to know who was staying in this city at this time when chinese citizens were staying there so..."

"and you don't even know how to operate a gun i mean he had been beaten up every time he tried to go somewhere his passport had been confiscated by that point it turned out they'd already hacked into h..."

"within cia and they may have power and to me there's levels of evil to me personally this is the stuff of conspiracy theories is um the things you've mentioned as evil are more direct attacks but ther..."

"obviously jeffrey epstein is the front for intelligence and i just um i struggle to see that level of competence and malevolence but you know who the hell am i and i i guess i was trying to get to tha..."

"with hacking this has to do with manipulating people attacking people doing evil onto people psychological warfare and stuff like that i don't know i believe that most people are good and um i don't t..."

"you have investigated some of the most powerful organizations and people in the world of cyber warfare cyber security are you ever afraid for your own life your own well-being digital or physical i me..."

"you know create an alias um or i could just do the best i can and live in this new digital world we're living in and what does that look like for me i mean what what are my crown jewels this is what i..."

"don't go crazy because then that's like the ultimate hack then they've hacked your mind whoever they is for you um but just do the best you can now my whole risk model changed when i had a kid you kno..."

"and he says that's how you should operate in in the digital world know that there are probably people following you sometimes they'll make a little bit of noise but one thing you need to know is that ..."

"under the previous administration and you know i don't i don't really know what to think of my invisible shield anymore like you said that really worries me on the journalism side that people would be..."

"just be be like a good person because then i i see this actually with social media in general uh just present yourself in the most authentic way possible meaning be the same person online as you are p..."

"and um you know that's that that is on a very micro level um and that's something i think about a lot and that's actually something that tim cook um has talked about a lot and why he has you know said..."

"maybe somebody in high school and college thinking about what they're going to do be a hacker you know if you have any interest become a hacker and apply yourself to defense you know every time like w..."

"same way i mean in some ways the the cyber security defense are the soldiers of the future yeah and you know it's interesting i mean in cyber security the difference is oftentimes you see the more int..."

"um so you know go go be a hacker and or go be a journalist [Laughter] so uh you wrote the book this is how they tell me the world ends as we've been talking about of course referring to cyber war cybe..."

"and sometimes and this is why the metaverse scares me to death but when i'm reminded of that is not online like online i get the opposite you know you start to lose hope and humanity when you're on tw..."

"because i grew up without without the internet and without social media but i'm native to it so i know the good and i know the bad and that's true on so many different things you know i grew up withou..."

"solutions and lead so i whenever like uh politicians or leaders that are older like you said are acting shitty i see that as a positive they're inspiring a large number of young people to replace them..."

"but we're going to have to come around to this view that we're all human and we're going to have to be a little bit more forgiving and a little bit more tolerant when people mess up and we're going to..."