Computer skills, you have a gentleman in china, a gentleman in russia who have very good computer skills, but you see them going to work often on both sides of the equation, so someone can be a hacker for bad and be a criminal, but sometimes they can put those skills to good use. Sometimes, they just go all the way down the bad path and you see certain people who have a bit of a bent toward sociopathy going that way, as we see with our friend in russia, but in the end, you have people who are curious, interesting, and people we can learn from, which is what i was really going for here. Host how much money did those people literally steal . Kate thats an interesting question. I dont think i have an actual figure for anyone, and without giving away too many details, we do see one of the characters make a milliondollar ransomware demand in one shot. It is not because this character knows a lot about Cyber Security or technology, or engineering, but she happens to be innovative enough and creative enough to on the spot come up with an idea that works and then you see the company criminal enterprise she is working for immediately pivot and put those skills to good use to make similar amounts. Host how did they get into hacking . All three of these people . Kate thats an interesting question. You have three completely different trajectories. You have this woman from romania. Her name is renee in the book. Of course, everyones names have been changed. These are people who didnt want to have their identities known for what will become obvious reasons, but you have renee, who is growing up in a typical suburban Countryside Village in romania, and what ends up happening is, as has happened across eastern europe, many of these what we sometimes refer to as cybercrime villages have actually popped up and you have entire economies that are being basically run on these illicit schemes, whether it is stealing of credit card information or ransomware, which we have now seen in a bunch of u. S. Cities, and she sort of wants to have a more glamorous life. She wants a more glamorous job. She gets this sort of impossible offer and in a lot of ways, finally finds out what is going on in her town, why everyone has a lot more money and stumbles on this criminal enterprise. Shes not someone with a background in computers. She has a background in communications, essentially shes a waitress. Shes working as a waitress, shes in college, but shes a very good talker and as it turns out, being a very good talker and being able to convince people of something is one of the primary skill sets at being very good at being a criminal hacker. Host what about bo chan . Kate bo is a former hacker for the Peoples Liberation army in china. As a lot of your watchers certainly no, china has certainly know, china has a very large military operation with a lot of investment in cybersecurity and he is one of those people. He starts out his career, as it were, as somebody doing work for the government. This of course raises a lot of interesting questions because when we think about people who are bad people and they are bad guys, they are hackers, they are attacking our companies, he is doing that, but is he doing it because like renee, he is bored and wants to make his life more interesting . No. Hes doing it because he works for the government. He believes hes doing something for his country, and so this individual leaves the military, goes to work for a hotel and finds that he can put some of those skills to use in a kind of not in kind of, a truly criminal way. That is what he ends up going into and making a lot of money, but ultimately, he tries to make a different decision, and then you have our friend in vladivostok. You have this very criminal hacker who is kind of a criminal from beginning to end who had a difficult upbringing. He is somebody who, as many in russia are, are steeped in mathematics and Computer Science from a young age and he feels like he has nothing to lose. Hes very impoverished growing thisd kind of falls into he sees a lot of how american rock culture and pop culture is filled with these big, beautiful cars and huge houses and he wants to be a part of that. He is a part of that until it comes crumbling down. Host kate fazzini, in your book kingdom of lies, and i will quote it. You is from yourself when were with the wall street journal, this reporter has learned a lesson through these conversations that the significant Cyber Incidents in deed dont happen without a person behind the scenes who has a deeply felt reason for inflicting pain. People need reasons to do what they do and hackers are people. Kate yes. Justs something and maybe even to backtrack a little think the term hacker it self, we think of that as referring to criminals and bad guys but as you see in the book, i also look at the people who have hacking skills, they are hackers themselves but on the good side of the equation, and some of those have a lot of trouble always doing the right thing. Ifike to make the point that we want to understand why all of these things are happening to us, whether it is the of the algorithms that run twitter and facebook in order to help the Russian Intelligence Agency influence an election or ransomware that has taken down big cities like baltimore and atlanta, we have to understand the people who are behind these things and all of them are different. Host another quote from kingdom of lies. Works innyone who cybersecurity, criminal, good guy, or in between can see the russians are more than active. They are so busy they cant train their hackers fast enough. Kate that is a very interesting observation because what weve seen, especially through 2015 and beyond in the case of russia is that you have a russian government and i talk about this and little bit, how early on, vladimir putin, in the early 2000s, was well aware of the power of being able to control the cyber skier and the fact that you dont necessarily need volume to do it. In aave people who do it country with a population of can door even iran who damage at the scale of the country like china that has the numbers. Realized that in order to get the very best people, those people are going to work on a government salary. If you are really good at hacking, if you dont have a lot of scruples and you live in russia, you can make a great numberre money doing any activities,t selling things on the dark web, laundering money for cyber criminals, the list goes on and on. What the government has realized have these really good people who are good at what they do be on their side, they Work Together with these criminals and you have a situation where the government is willing to bring in people who are doing criminal activities they are aware of into the fold to help them and as a comparison, we dont do that in the United States. He wont see the fbi going out and recruiting people who are doing major crimes against retailers. Instead, youll see them arresting those people. That means that you have criminals who are sort of allowed to do what they do as long as when it comes time for the russian government to call them, they are willing to pay the price, pay the tax for being allowed to do those criminal activities and what you have is this beautiful plausible is takingy so russia part in some major action against the ukraine or the United States. It is very easy for the russian government to say we didnt tell these people to do this stuff, they are not parts of the government. Maybe they were just patriotic russians, which is the line putin has used but they arent actually working for us. It has set them up with a situation that is hard to fight from our point of view. Host kate fazzini, dont u. S. Intelligence services hire hackers . Kate oh, they do. They do and the difference here is that there are a lot of restrictions. As far as whether you have a criminal record. Not letinitely would somebody continue taking part in criminal activity and it is really rare for somebody who has committed a significant crime. Has many of the Russian Hackers who were actually named in the indictment of 12 Russian Hackers that was passed down last year weour attorney general, would never hire people who would continue doing that kind of activity or what actually make millions of dollars on those crimes. We arrest those people, we put them in jail. Every month or so, the fbi or department of justice released indictments of people who have taken part in criminal activity, including a great number of russians. Some of them have been arrested in the United States, but we are never going to do the level of collaboration with the criminal element that the government in russia does. Host one of the things you noting your book is that in the digital world, boundaries become a little muddy. Kate they become very muddy. One of the big issues right now is whether companies and Government Agencies should have the right to what is called a hack bag, or do offensive cybersecurity attack against somebody who has broken into their system. That problematic . If we have Something Like a citigroup, one of the major u. S. Banks, and they are getting attacked by china, and they have wonderful investigators at citigroup who determine that these individuals are sending their packets from shenzhen in china, and they decide to go on the offensive and either get back the information that was stolen or do something to stop this from happening, there is all kinds of Collateral Damage in between there. The companies that run the technology between the two places. The fact that you might actually have a scenario where the a. And an american banker going to war with completely different place because they were sending the signal from somewhere else. There are a lot of issues and the boundaries, international boundaries, who people are, their identity, much of this stuff becomes really mixed up. Host kate fazzini, can you do most of what you describe in your book with your iphone or your android . That is ano interesting question. Very technical a person but much of what i describe in the book can be accomplished by really most people. Hand, there is a lot of what is called social engineering going on. My ability to make you do something quickly that is going to give me what i want. Email that can compromise you in some way and i , yout with an urgent need to open this. Its your boss, you need to do a couple of tasks immediately, s forend me all the w2 all the employees, it is an emergency. That is social engineering. Anybody can do that. Salespeople do that. A lot of people have good skills and use those for good purposes. Many of the people in my book d software, Malicious Software they have bought online and maybe tweaked it a little bit but it is delivered from a usb stick, they bought it from the dark web, stick it into a usb stick and they have access to the device. That is a little more complicated but a lot of people have the ability to do that, as well. A lot of this stuff is very accessible to the average person. How sophisticated is using a usb stick in todays hacking world . Not it is almost its sophisticated at all. I always like to talk about how tired i am of the word sophisticated because there are really very few attacks today that are genuinely sophisticated, and when i see one, im really impressed. Using a usb stick is almost da ted at this point. A lot of companies have put restrictions in place over whether the devices you plug usb sticks into can even read them. Many of these devices just dont read the sticks anymore because they are so dangerous, but for the average person, its very, very simple. Just like sending ransomware might be for the average person. A couple of terms or items that come into play in your book, i want to start with two. Vpns and wifi. Should i just describe . A vpn is a Virtual Private Network. Vpns have kind of an interesting, they have an interesting trajectory right now because for a long time, they were mainly used by corporations. Youou are traveling and might be using public wifi somewhere, wifi in your hotel, you can logon and log onto a Virtual Private Network which gives you a way to read your information securely so it cant be seen. Its encrypted and it cant be seen over that wifi network. Really interesting because in the United States, most people who use vpns pay for them in some way. Comparatively, in places like china and russia where the internet is very heavily restricted and very heavily used by many,are many more people. Often there are Free Products they can use to get around the restrictions over having their communications monitored and also get around the fact that they cant use facebook and they in some casesl and google product because those are banned. Become a very interesting phenomenon as people in the u. S. Pay for the service. They are just enormously popular, far more popular overseas than the United States for a different reason. Host when it comes to wifi, do you use public wifi . Do you have wifi at home . Kate i do. I have wifi at home. It is a lot easier to control your home wifi and in the settings to get on it. , i thinkfi with a vpn im pretty confident in using a combination. I dont use public wifi without a Virtual Private Network. That i have to travel for work. There are times when i have to get online. Im actually headed tonight, in fact, to a hacking conference in las vegas called black hat and death con defcon. Thisl not use the wifi at conference because it will be filled with people who are trying to exploit it. I am going to find alternatives and maybe even stay off the internet entirely while i am there. That is a different situation, though. Host its been recommended in to leave and defcon your phone in your room, dont use an atm post by, etc. . There are always tricks that are coming up. Im going to be following 18 teamd shellfish, a called shellfish. They have games called capture the flag where they have the premier hackers in the United States and they tried to capture virtual flags from one another as a contest. These guys win fairly frequently, so i will be tracking them and i will leave all my electronics in the room, i think, when i am on that. I will have a notebook and a pencil. Host back to kingdom of lies, two other items that come into play throughout the stories you telling your book. Paypal and bitcoin. What are their goals when it comes to hacking . Kate paypal, i think the events of this book and in 2017 approximately and go from 2013 to 2017. Way forad long been a some cyber criminals to keep being able to establish an account quickly and move money, but bitcoin was much more influential in terms of giving people a way to have these transactions illicit transactions, so the way it works is, you can have a Bitcoin Wallet and someone else can hold it but your identity is essentially private, and as long as you know the account number, you can move money without it being traceable. For criminal activities, this has been one of the premier ways they move money kate a lot of people are skeptical about bitcoin because it is so volatile and the price is always going up and down. Theres a lot of speculation as to where people investing . And why are you buying bitcoin unless you want to hide something. I do not this is really think that is true. That it has been a major driver of significant criminal activity , not just cybercrime but every thing from sex trafficking to terrorism, to other sorts of illicit transactions. So bitcoin has been a real revolution in the criminal underworld. Kate fazzini do you need to be a stem student to become an internet cybersecurity person . No. E in fact i do often talk to people about their jobs because i do a lot of reporting on Career Prospects in cybersecurity. One of the biggest contingents that comes my way is people in law enforcement. I often get a lot of people who are just police officers, they might be really young police officers, and they are really interested in cybersecurity. Or they might be in some other level of security, like a secure regard. Things, cybersecurity is two things, technology and also security. The security part, people can understand no matter how old or young they are. You know that when you have a big event, it you will put a perimeter around it, right . You might have physical barriers, you might have cops, you might have some checkpoints, where people can give their ids, the way Information Security actually works is pretty similar to that. , multiplells firewalls of different kinds and sizes. You make sure people have the right username and password to get in. And then they need another username and password to get anything further. So people who come from a security background like that, totallyr even if it was all physical security, often have a nice basic of knowledge to then learn a couple of skills, learn how to use some software, learn a little but of technology and be really astounding cybersecurity people. Are so many different disciplines within cybersecurity. The u. S. Government and banks, and all these Big Companies are just desperate for these people. So if youre considering it, is a really good time. As my big pitch. What are the positives and negatives of brute hiring retired military personnel. Raykoffracter bob does not necessarily come across so well. Yes, bob. I did go out of my way to differentiate between people who have been highranking members of the military and of the political class, versus soldiers who often make often amazing cybersecurity folks. There a lot of people at a high rank ive been working in a government agency, or the military for very long time, who tried to make the transition to cybersecurity in the private sector, and had a very, very tickle time. For a couple of different recent death difficult time for couple of reasons. Time forvery difficult a couple of different reasons. Existsf hierarchy that in the military does not exist in most private companies. You do not have a hundred hands were going to help you do a variety of tasks. A lot of times youre doing many things at once with a small staff. Also, in a private company, profit comes first. That often involves having to overseas inople foreign countries, that if youre in the military, had been your anime for very long time. It and that your enemy for a long time. It involves having to take direction from somebody who might have brought in more money last year than you did, and someone who is very highranking in the military might have a little bit of a problem with that. Of, say ararchy financial institution, the person who brings in the most amount of money is often the person who has the most say in what happens. Abrasive,have a real around 2014 and 2015 there a bunch of nationstate attacks against u. S. Banks and another companies. You saw a lot of companies doing this, hiring top ranking military people. A lot of cases it did not work out for those reasons. Host heres the book cover. It is called kingdom of live, lies, they still your identity, growing your life, take your money. Welcome to kingdom of lies or the author is kate fazzini of cnbc, formerly of the wall street journal. Thanks for being on the communicators. This program and all other communicators are available as podcasts. In 1979, a Small Network with an unusual name rolled out a big idea. Viewers make up their own minds. Cspan opened the doors for policy for all to see, bringing you unfiltered content from congress and beyond. A lot has changed in 40 years, but today that big ideas more relevant than ever. On television and online, cspan is your unfiltered view of government. So you can make up your own mind. Brought to you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. Announcer earlier today the Supreme Court announced in a press release that Justice Ruth Bader ginsburg finished three weeks of Radiation Therapy for tumor that was detected in july. She will not continue with periodic blood tests and scans, but no further treatment is needed. 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