ROBOT HACKING: Marc Goodman Reveals How Your Devices Could Turn Against You!

Hello there. This is Joe Polish and I'm here with my friend Mark Goodman. How are you?

I'm doing great, Joe. How are you?

I'm doing awesome. Well, first off, I've been really looking forward to doing this interview. You are a very interesting guy because you talk about things in a way that I've never heard another person on the planet talk about. First off, there's so much that you do. Who really is Mark Goodman? I mean, how would you describe yourself to people?

You know, I think that's a pretty good professional description. What I would say is I'm a person who spent his lifetime focused on trying to be of service to the public, protect and serve from my street cop days. And what I've been trying to do is bring that message forward. So, you know, sort of a futurist. That's the Singularity side. So I've got kind of the Silicon Valley technology side, but I bring to the table this street cop, detective, you know, world. So I think pretty grounded in reality, which Silicon Valley sometimes is, sometimes isn't. So I try to bring all that together and just look at what I knew as a cop and as a detective and the technological trends and pull it all together in ways that people can understand.

Well, I've seen you speak several times now. You've spoken at a couple of my events, some of my genius network events, and you work with some very high level people. People and I have been through the Singularity executive programs. Peter Diamandis is both a dear friend of ours and you. I mean, when people watch you speak, you have a TED Talk that has been viewed a bazillion times. And people need to go to TED and watch your TED Talk if they've not seen it. It's Mark Goodman. M A R C Goodman. I mean, you really have an insight. And I consider you the top cyber security cybercrime expert probably in the US and the world. Is that fair to say?

I certainly wouldn't be the one to say that, but there are a lot of really smart people out there. I would say really, there's tremendous people working there. The thing that makes me perhaps a little bit different is I started doing cybercrime investigations back in the early 1990s. Right. So that was really early days. And in the book, actually, I tell the story of how I got started in cybercrime. Might as well tell you two funny things happened. So it was 1995, 96. I was working as a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. As an investigator, actually. And I was A sergeant. My lieutenant screams my name across the squadron. He's like, goodman, get your ass over here. I'm like, uh, oh, I'm in trouble. I walk over to my lieutenant, and he says, hey, do you know how to spell check in word perfect? And I said, yeah, boss. Shift F2. He goes, I knew you were the guy for this case. I got a case for you. So it was a technology case, and it was a hacking case. And the thing that my lieutenant used to see whether or not I was smart enough to handle the case is if I knew how to spell check right. So that was the level of technological expertise in law enforcement back in those early days. And then I went on from that case and later on years later, actually, later, a couple of years, I tried to push for the creation of a cybercrime unit within the lapd. And this time I was talking to a captain. And in those days, it was called Computer Crime. I said, hey, boss, you know, we're seeing a lot of this hacking stuff. This was 97, something like that. I think we need to create a computer crime unit. And he looked at me really hard, and he goes, computer crime. Computer crime. He's like, is that like if you take the monitor and hit somebody on the head with it and kill them? I'm like, no, that's not what I was thinking about when we're talking about computer crime. So I've been doing this for a while, a long way, to answer your question. And so I'd say the thing that separates me out is there are tons of people that are focused on what's going on today. If you listen to the news, you'll hear Home Depot hack, Target hack, JP Morgan hack, Sony PlayStation hacked. That's the extent of the analysis.

What does hacking even mean? I mean, I get it, because there's people talking about hacking. Your time management, hacking, your body hacking, this, hacking. What's your definition of hacking?

I'll tell you that. Let me just finish the last point very quickly. So the thing that's a little bit different about me is I'm less interested in where we've been, and I'm much more interested in where we're going. If you want to know about the history of crime, read Agatha Christie. If you want to know about the future of crime, then that's in this Future Crimes book. Well, yeah, and it's where we're going.

Well, here's what's kind of cool. This book is not yet available at the time we're actually doing this interview, but will Be available soon. It's called Future Crimes. And that's the website also.

Yeah. And it's available for pre sale, so people can go out there and actually buy it now if they're interested.

Yeah. So seriously, go get. And by the way, I have spent a lot of time with Mark, so he has told me stories and I have quite an education about this subject matter that most people, which is why I wanted to do an interview.

Yeah, for sure.

Really need to. I think this is going to blow you away. This may very well be one of the most fascinating things about security and cause you to really think about the world we live in today than you may have ever even considered. So just stay with us here because I can assure you, Mark really knows his stuff. It says here at the top, everything is connected, everyone is vulnerable. And what we can do about it, future crimes. So futurecrimes.com is the website where people can pre order the book, they can get more information about it, that sort of thing. So going back to my question.

Yeah, hacking, actually, it's in the subtitle. Everything is connected, Everyone is vulnerable. So hacking, if you go back to the 70s, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Most of the hackers out there, they were just playing with computers, trying to get them to do fun and interesting things that they weren't meant to do. And some of the earliest hacking actually went on with the telephone system. Right. Used to be really expensive to make telephone calls. Then this guy, Captain Crunch came up with this really cool hack where if you took a whistle that came with the Captain Crunch cereal and blew it into a payphone, the whistle came out at 2600, I think, megahertz, which was enough to trigger the payphone to think that you had put dimes in it so you could make free calls with it. Which back in those days was really amazing. And then people started selling blue boxes, which were these little computer boxes that you could connect to phones to make free phone calls. Long distance was really expensive, you know, a couple of bucks a minute in those days. And two of those hackers were called Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. So they were at Berkeley and they sold these telephone hacking boxes. And actually the proceeds from that actually was part of the founding seed money that they used to go on to launch Apple.

I had no idea.

It's pretty cool, right? Yeah. So most hacking, particularly in those early days, was not malicious. Right. What is hacking? It's getting a system to do something that its designers did not intend it to do. Right. So it's me breaking into your computer, getting access to information that I'm not supposed to see. It's me getting into your mobile phone and turning on your camera without you knowing about it and without your permission. It's getting into an electrical grid and turning it off or screwing with it one way or the other. So it's just getting a system to do something it was not intended or designed to do. And now the big change in hacking is it went from being kind of a fun thing that college kids did. We all have the perception in our head from that movie War Games with Matthew Broderick, 1983, he's playing a game and he accidentally breaks into the Pentagon. It's an awesome movie. If you haven't seen a strong movie.

Oh, I've seen it years ago.

Yeah, it's great. And it still holds up. And so he ends up accidentally launching global thermonuclear war, which is pretty fun. But now what has happened is hacking has become completely professionalized. It's no longer just for mostly the lulz or for the fun of it. It is a business, a completely international money making business. And there are billions, literally billions of dollars that are lost every year as a result. The latest study said 400 billion, according to McAfee's study.

Wow. And so everyone listening to this on the podcast or watching it on the video version of this, pretty much everyone's vulnerable in areas that they could not even fathom. And so the goal of this is not just to scare the crap out of people, although I would like to scare the crap out of people if it helps them pay attention to things that they are aware of, what is going to make them safer. So our goal here is to allow you to be safer, to exist in a place where there are new types of enemies that did not exist 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago. Exactly because of technology, which all of the amazing things that it does, and that you're obviously a big proponent, as am I, about technological advances, there are consequences. If you're not aware of the dark side of all of this, and you are the guy that really explains the dark side and how to protect yourself.

I actually couldn't have said it better myself. You just really summed up the point. There's a lot of people out there that kind of talk about this issue, and they're like, Internet is bad. Computers are dangerous. Don't ever use Facebook, don't use a mobile phone. It's completely impractical. Right. In 2014, 2015, we have to live this sort of plugged in life to partake in the workforce and to even socialize with your friends. Right. So I'm not saying that that's bad. As you just mentioned, through our work at Singularity University, you know that I'm a huge proponent of technology and I see the opportunity for abundance that Peter Diamantes talks about all the time. So technology is going to be awesome. The problem is that it's also subject to abuse. And the difference between the average listener to this podcast or folks that are watching this, the average member of the general public is, is that they know how to use the devices, but they don't understand how any of them work. The people that understand how they work can mess with them in ways that could blow your mind. That's organized criminals, terrorists, rogue governments. We heard about the NSA spying scandal and all the stuff that Snowden talked about. So the people that are taking time to understand how your computer works, how banking website works, how your automobile works, how your mobile phone works, how the baby camera in your bedroom works, once you understand it, you can take it apart in ways and get it to do things that you wouldn't want it to do. So they're using their knowledge and it doesn't take much knowledge because there's actually a ton of YouTube videos out there actually explaining to people how to hack, step by step stuff. It's becoming highly automated. So the goal here is to educate people and at the end we can talk about a bunch of great tips that people can take to protect themselves.

Yeah, so what I like to do is kind of the arc here. Let's talk about some of the things that exist that people didn't know about. And then towards then we'll give people recommendations on what they can do and how they can do it. So what, Future Crimes, that's the title of your book, that's your website. What does that even mean?

Right. So I thought about this long and hard. Actually, titling a book is really difficult. Being a marketer, yeah, you know all about this, but I run the Future Crimes Institute and I'm thinking about it. You asked me about this before. You said, am I one of the top experts who knows there's a lot of smart people in this space. But the thing that I do know is I'm thinking about what's coming next. So rather than focusing on where we are, I'm focused on what's happening. And the thing that would surprise people is of course most people know if you turn on CNN or any of the news stories you know that they're hacking banks and they're hacking your bank account and they're doing identity theft and all that stuff. People know about, and they know that there's some dangers on social media and the like. But what people don't know is that we are about to explode in the number of things that we are connecting to the Internet. It's called the Internet of Things and we've talked about that. That means everything from your blender to your car to your dishwasher, your pets, your kids, everything is going to have an Internet protocol address and online.

Yeah, I remember even the tour to Qualcomm and just everything that is connected, everything.

Because the price of those chips to get something online is dropping towards under a penny. So with RFID and some of these other technologies, that means that we're going to switch not to get too technical, but to something called Internet protocol version 6. We currently use Internet protocol version 4. We've run out of space. So if you think about New York City, Manhattan, the area code 212, eventually they ran out of 212 numbers. They needed to create the 718 area code, 347917. The same thing has happened with the Internet. We're out of space. So they've created more addressable space. What is amazing is how much space that they've created. So if you think about it, today's Internet is kind of relatively small. It can only support about four and a half billion simultaneous connections. But the Internet of tomorrow, the one that will arrive in the next three years, can support 78 octillion connections, which is 78 trillion, trillion, trillion, sorry, 78.

Something you couldn't even comprehend.

Yeah. Put in ways that people can understand. Like there's two ways I like to describe it. Today's Internet is about the size of a golf ball. Tomorrow's is going to be the size of the sun. Like literally that's the difference. We think we have the Internet today. We ain't seen nothing yet. We're in the earliest, earliest stages. We're going to have a sun sized Internet, which means everything will be online but the down. So great things will happen as a result of that. We'll have smart cities, we'll save energy, we'll have better health care through, you know, Internet of the self and all that. But all of that will become hackable. And as you well know, we can't protect the things that we have today at all. So Cisco has predicted that by 2020 we're going to add another 50 billion devices to the Internet. Intel, I think, said it's going to be 200 billion. Whatever the exact number is, it's going to be a huge amount. And as you know from your time with Singularity University, this won't be a linear thing. You know, that happens 30 years from now. This is going to arrive really quickly and seem as if it's arrived overnight. So Future Crimes is all about what's coming next. It's not just hacking the things of today, it's hacking the Internet of tomorrow, which will be here tomorrow. Right. Internet of things, Robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, synthetic biology. I have specific examples in the book. Like, you wouldn't think of the bad guys hacking robots. They're actually doing it. There are robots that are carrying out crimes, that are robots that are carrying out terrorist attacks, crazy things like that.

We even talked last night, we had dinner. You were talking about how kilos of drugs are being delivered via drones and.

All kinds of stuff. Absolutely, yeah. People would be surprised to know that the Cali cartel in Colombia has like a $5 million R&D bud for robotics. So think about it. They're trying to disintermediate all the humans. Humans that can.

You said five billion.

No, five million things. No, five million. Five million dollar budget. Who knows? It may go up. But for the moment. Right, exactly. But for the moment, no. 5 million bucks that they are spending on autonomous robotics so that they can send autonomous submarines carrying hundreds of kilos of cocaine up to the United States. The DEA picks up about 20 of these subs a year. Right. And now they're using drones. So there are like thousands, literally, again, according to DEA and Homeland Security, thousands of kilos that are being flown on unmanned drones over the border from Mexico into the United States with narcotics. So again, people think, well, they think drones, they think the military, they think the U.S. government, you know, killing Al Qaeda. But in fact, bad guys are using these technologies, too. They're using artificial intelligence in just ways that would blow your mind.

Interesting. So fascinating. Yeah. And so here. But the thing is, like you said, this is just the start. Because it's going to get so.

Exactly.

I mean, we're going into this whole new realm that's never existed before.

Exactly. And it's just the start. But it's already begun. That's the really big point that I want people to understand is we call it future crimes. But bad guys are using robots today. Bad guys are using artificial intelligence today. And in the book, I have, like hundreds of cases of crazy stuff that, you know criminals and terrorists are doing with technology.

Yeah, well, let's keep going down this path because what I want to do, like I said, and I want to remind the listener, is that I want to make you aware of this stuff, but we will offer solutions. Because what I hate is when some people do documentaries and they're bitching and complaining about how horrible the world is, but then there's no solution on what are you doing? Kind of how do you do it? Now it's so easy to share online. I mean, obviously we're so interconnected with our phones and there's a website, at least to websites like things like please rob me.com and that sort of thing. So how can people go online and share things and not be minimize the risk?

Yeah, for sure. So this is an other area where technology is being used against you. Remember I said there are people that understand technology, you know how to use it. Other people understand what goes on behind the screen and how it really works. So in the book I try to turn around the screen and give you that other perspective. So there's lots of people that are taking advantage of the information that you're sharing. And I'll talk about companies that are doing it and then I'll talk about bad guys that are doing it. On the company front, I actually have a chapter in the book called you're not the customer, you're the product. So I do polls when I speak all the time and I say, hey, raise your hand if you're a customer of Facebook. And everybody and the audience raises their hand and I'm like, oh, how much do you pay for that? And they're like, pay for that? I don't pay for that. It's like, okay, so you're not. So why have the Internet gods given this to you? I'm like, you're not paying for it because you're the product. You're the thing that Facebook sells to advertisers. And that's why Facebook has a multi billion dollar valuation. And you get free status updates. That's the deal that you've made as long as you understand it. So people share online. And all of these social media sites are just great ways. They provide excellent services. And I'm not saying that in any way they may not be useful. Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, they're all great and there's lots of good reasons to use them. But you just need to understand the bargain that you're making. So that's from the corporate side. On the bad guy side, bad guys are absolutely paying attention to every tweet that you put out there, every Facebook posting. And I'll give you a few specific examples. I always run into people who will post on LinkedIn, I'm going to be at this conference in Orlando or I'm going to. We're going on vacation to Bahamas or Provincetown, whatever it is. And they post it online and everybody else gives it the thumbs up. Hey, that's great. So you mentioned a website called pleaserob me.com and that was based out of Amsterdam. And what they did is they just created spiders, little programs that would pull down everybody's vacation postings, and they aggregated it into one database so that criminals, burglars, could go in there and just put in a postal code and see all the people in the neighborhood that we're going to be on vacation. So you think, well, this is just, you know, nobody will pay attention to this. Or I've set my privacy settings, which Facebook changes all the time. And even if you think you're private, you're probably not another important statistic. Would it surprise you, Joe? You're very plugged into all this. Would it surprise you to know that Facebook is hacked 600,000 times a year?

That probably would not surprise me, considering everything.

Right.

Well, see, the thing, even with hacking, you know how Facebook had the hackathons.

They have all the stuff.

So that's why I even asked you about hacking, because there's a lot of stuff positive. Portrayed as a very. Yeah, positive hack.

Absolutely.

And there's this other side of it, but yeah, I would have not guessed that much. But it doesn't coming from you.

I need to correct that. So I told you that just to gauge it. But actually, it's not 600,000 a year. It's 600,000 accounts a day.

Wow.

There are 600,000 accounts a day hacked on Facebook. That's not me saying that. That statistic was posted on the blog of the chief security officer of Facebook. Right. So these are their own data that are coming out there. So not only. Even if you've got your privacy settings, which they change all the time, kind of screw with you. So you lose out there. Bad guys are breaking into it. There was a study done, which I really want folks to know about in the UK and they interviewed, I think it was 1,000 convicted burglars. And they said to them, when you're going out there and trying to find a home to burglarize, how do you go about it? 70% of burglars, convicted burglars in the UK today say that they're using Facebook and other social media. So before they're choosing your house, 70% of burglars are going in there and doing it. There was a funny article written on what they're calling Zucker burglars that are going out there and using this. And they have, cops have arrested groups of mostly young, teenage or young 20 year old guys that are in New Hampshire and elsewhere that are using this data to go online and burglarize people.

That is, that is nuts. So how do you yourself use social media then knowing this stuff? And of course you know things that the average person doesn't. So I mean a lot of people, they're going to be like, what the hell, what do I do?

Well, I mean the key thing is never to use the Internet or touch a keyboard. It's very dangerous. Don't do that under any circumstances. No. All kidding aside, I think it's just about being in the know. And that's another thing I wanted to do with future crimes. The book is just getting people to understand the risk so that they can make educated choices.

And what I will say we'll go a little bit deeper on this too because the book does tell you kind of what to do. And really if this at all piques your interest and you're following this and you're seeing this is really not sort of like a book you read, although it is, you're a great writer and it's very entertaining and all that. This is really a book. If you're going to pay for insurance, this is some of the best insurance you're ever going to take in terms of knowledge of knowing what to do there. So we'll go deeper than that and.

I will answer your question either now or later about kind of the things that I do. But the bottom line is you just make an informed decision so you understand the risks. So if you do want to go ahead and share, say, you know, rather than posting your vacation pictures of Barbados while you're there, when you come home, post them all so you're already back in your house and people can still see and you can share that window. Simple things like that.

But that is probably post the past, not the future.

Exactly. To avoid future crimes. Right, exactly, exactly.

As I was saying that, I'm thinking I can write headlines for marketing copy in my head here. So the question I have is what's the consequences of everything in the world, including our bodies becoming more computerized and digital? Because there are now even Peter posted.

A. I think it was an RFID chip.

Yeah, that he put into his wrist. I mean, what are the consequences of all this stuff? Can we hack Peter through his wrist.

Now and like, we can track him. We can track him. Yeah. And actually, theoretically, we could hack him. So we are not encouraging that. Let's be clear, we don't want to commit any federal crime. Exactly. Peter, you're safe. And if you're not, look at Joe, because I have nothing to do with this. No, in seriousness. So we talked about the Internet of things, right? So what that means is we're going to have chips in our dining room tables, we're going to have them in our coffee cups. Every shopping cart at the supermarket will track you as you walk around pushing your wagon. But a lot of that technology is coming to the human body. And I have a whole chapter on the book called Hacking you where we kind of talk about this. But, you know, it's breaks down into a broad number of categories. We've got wearables, we've got embeddables, and we've got implantables and ingestibles. So I'll go through all those. You're like, what the hell is that?

Can I even say something? Because as you're saying that it made me think of. Just a couple weeks ago, I went to Legoland with my friend Crystal and her 5 year old daughter and we had a private tour guide and it was awesome. And he was telling us about how Legoland works. I mean, it was worth the private tour guide just even for me to get the business aspects of Legoland. They knew how many people were in the park at any given time per hour, like how many. And these people weren't embedded with codes. It's just the systems of how they track everything.

Well, guess who are Disneyland. So one of the greatest. I mean, when Disney puts its attention on something, you should pay attention. And Disney has now gone to making all guests in their park. When they get like the one day pass or the three day pass, they're getting a bracelet which is a wearable, and inside there is an RFID trip that tracks them throughout the entire park. So Disney knows how many people are in line to the bathroom. They know when the lines are getting long at the Matterhorn. And like they can actually tell. They get alerts. It's like, okay, there's more than 1,000 people in line. Let's get two Mickeys and three goofies and characters, you know, over there to entertain the people in line so that they don't get upset. They know exact. You can pay for your food with these magical bracelets that they have. And so they know what you're spending at what restaurants, at what time. So this is sort of the big data world where they can track you. So for kind of how this may affect you wearables, we all know about things like Fitbits and Nike fuel bands. There have been some interesting things that have come out. So turns out with Fitbit, you can not only does it track how much you move, but you can also log data. I did 100 push ups today or 500 sit ups. And one of the things that you could do with Fitbit is you could actually log sexual activity. Right. So if you're wearing your Fitbit, the accelerometer moves in a certain way, and the Fitbit can tell based upon how it's moving, what's going on. Well, one of the things that happened was you could tie Fitbit to your social media account and would tweet out your friends like, hey, Joe just ran five miles. Well, in an early version, it was tweeting out sexual activity. So Joe just had 45 minutes of rigorous sex. Right. So you're like, oh, maybe you want that to go out, maybe you don't want to go out. But it's kind of an unintended consequence.

It really helps the infidelity industry.

Yes, exactly. Well, your wife is saying, it's like, he wasn't with me at 12:30. What's going on here? So this data does leak. And by the way, divorce attorneys are getting their hands on all of this data too. So Facebook is mentioned in one third of divorce proceedings in the United States.

I did not know that.

Yeah, you see your old girlfriend or boyfriend from high school, you start talking to them, eventually the marriage dissolves and all of that becomes subpoenaed. So going back to Fitbit, it's not just that your sexual data can leak, and I'm just using them as an example. It could happen with any of these wearable devices. But you're also seeing it from an insurance perspective. Right. So if you are, you know, right now, if you go through certain driver's training class, they'll give you reduced insurance. And Progressive is saying to people, hey, if you allow us to put this black box, secret black box in your car where we can monitor how often you hit the brakes, how hard you slam on them, how much you accelerate, how many miles you drive, when you wear your seatbelt, based upon that, we will give you a reduced rate because we can Tell very clearly from a data driven perspective who the good drivers are and who the bad drivers are.

Who'S speeding and who.

Exactly. And they know it. In fact, the head of Ford, I think he was their marketing officer, spoke at a Detroit auto conference. And he's like, oh, yeah, all our cars track that data. We know who the speeders are. We could tell the cops any minute. And he had to backpedal from that because people were like, whoa. But all of this computing is in your car, so they know exactly what's going on. So think about where we are with Progressive today. Today it's optional, but in the future it may not be optional. Or what they'll say is, okay, you can get our regular rate, but if you won't allow us to put in a black box, you'll have to pay three or four times as much. And the same will be true with our Fitbits type devices like these healthcare bans or whatever. Is that okay? Joe only moved 30 steps today. We're not going to give him health insurance or we're not going to give him life insurance. So there will definitely be this technology. And one of the bigger areas that we need to be concerned about, again I mention it in the book, is the concept of implantable computers, right? Because what is a defibrillator? Implantable defibrillator, a pacemaker, a diabetic pump, they're all computers. There are 60,000 pacemakers in the United States today that have an Internet protocol address and connect to the Internet, right? So think about that. It's great. Your physician can monitor your heart at a distance. If you have an arrhythmia, he can shock your heart and save your life. But your heart is online, which means that it can be seen on the network by the pimply kid in his mom's basement next door to your house, Right? So you could actually cause somebody an electronic shock to their heart when they don't need it and kill them. So now, for the first time ever in human history, the human body itself is subject to cyber attacks. That's wild. We've never had this before.

I mean, are there cases of people that have been killed already with this?

So there are no known examples in the wild, as they say, of this happening. But there was a study done by the University of Massachusetts against Medtronics pacemakers that showed it was entirely possible. And at hacker conferences two years ago, one of the big themes was hacking implantable medical devices. And there was a guy called Barnaby Jack who created what he called His Bluetooth Cannon. And from 500ft away, he could aim it at just strangers, like in an airport or in a park. And if anybody had a diabetic pump, which might be filled with like 45 days worth of insulin, with this Bluetooth cannon, he could attack the diabetic pump and release 45 days worth of insulin in just an hour, killing the person from an insulin overdose. So we've seen the proof of concept. Thank God we have not seen it in the wild yet. And the implantable healthcare industry has a lot of work to do to be able to start to catch up and deal with some of these threats.

These are people that would be well served to read your book.

Absolutely, yes.

Wow. What are some of the scariest cyber crimes, future crimes and so on that are coming or are already here that people listening to this need to be aware of?

Yeah, I mean, there are things that are, that I focus on that sort of concern me. So I'm concerned about robotics and where we're going with that. And I'm concerned a little bit about the biological threat too. And I'll talk briefly about them. One is a little bit more further out and one is more immediate. So people are already starting to have robots in their houses, right? Your Roomba vacuum. Right. It turns out. And Rob Nail from Singularity University talks about this. Something like 40% of people have a name for their Roomba. Right. So you have this little vacuum cleaner going around your house and it seems a little pet. A little pet, yeah, they have a name for it. It seems innocuous, but you know, what if there's one in grandma's house and it's docked and she's going to the bathroom and you just move the Roomba and trip her and now she's broken a hip. Right. So, you know, people don't think about that type of thing. What I talk about in the book and I'm a little concerned about is up until now, the cyber threat has been a two dimensional threat. It's hidden behind computer screens. Right. It's isolated. You don't have to worry about it. But we're going to have robots all over the place. You maybe saw the Lows, an event a couple of weeks ago, where Lowe's now has robots in its stores, in its orchard supply warehouses. And you can go up to the robot and ask the robot a question. And that robot is great and super cool. But more broadly, when we have robots all around us, they can be hacked. The US Department of Defense has tons of robots on the battlefield and we have had ground based robot hacks, we've had US drones hacked, we've had a Homeland Security drone hacked. So the challenge is that the threat that used to be two dimensional hidden behind a screen is going to be coming out into physical space. And some of these robots can hit kick, punch, shoot, drag. And so what happens when they get hacked? Right. The cyber threat will morph completely and we have no idea what that world will look like.

You know, there's a story that you have told. I actually asked you to speak about it when you spoke at one of my conferences about the anime porn. And that one always scares the crap out of people. But it really shows the nature of some of the blackmail and the things that is happening. And I know this is always something that when I've heard you tell this story and use this example, people are like, I could never even imagine. So tell that.

Yes, the famous Yamamoto virus. So people don't understand that organized crime is absolutely a business, right? We've all seen the Sopranos, we know what Tony Soprano looks like. And their business model was, you know, going around to pizza parlors and breaking kneecaps for people who didn't buy them off. That was, you know, sort of Organized Crime 1.0. Organized Crime 2.0 is all about automation, right? So they're automating their crime. Just like you would tell people as part of the genius network with their marketing, go out there, script it, have your marketing campaign ready to go. Criminals are doing the same exact thing. And so they're using algorithms, they're using artificial intelligence to go ahead and write computer code that will steal around the clock, that will hack around the clock. If your computer is broken into for the vast majority of the public, 60 to 70% of those are not because a hacker is targeting you. It's because they wrote a computer program that can scour the entire Internet and basically go up and try to open every door. And they're just shaking the lock to see if they can get in. And they can. And so crime has become scripted and has become automated. And that has some really big impact. The first thing is now crime can scale. If you think about crime in the old days, what was it? You get a gun or a knife, you hide in a dark alley and you say, stick them up. But as a robber, you can only rob maybe five or six people a day. That way, technology makes it possible to rob more people. Think about the introduction of the locomotive, right? Locomotive was a really cool technology. Now robbers, instead of robbing one person they could rob 200 people on the train. Like just an unintended consequence. Well, we move forward today to the Internet. And when you look at something like the Target hack or the Sony PlayStation hack, over 100 million accounts were compromised. So that's an exponential order of magnitude.

Can we talk? Because you told me last night how they actually got into Target, and we'll come back to that.

Yeah, we'll come back to Yamamoto virus. Explain the.

Because, I mean, many people may know, but I had no idea until you.

So now you can rob 100 million people. That's a massive change. Crime is exponential. It's an order of magnitude. So crime is not really being committed by individuals going out there and robbing person by person. It's a computer script and it's automated. And what that means is now, for the first time, crime can scale and scale exponentially. Run 24. 7 and earn money for the bad guys. And because everything is connected and everyone is vulnerable, there are so many different ways to go in and get folks. So you were just asking about the Target hack. So many people know, last Christmas 2013, right before the biggest sales season for Target, their point of sale, their computer cash registers, and the places where you swipe your credit cards, those little POS Point of sale terminals all got hacked. The Secret Service came in, they did the investigation. How did the point of sale terminals get hacked, you wonder?

Well, I know.

Yeah, you know, because we talked about it.

I can act smart.

Yes, but you already told me. All right, say it. Give them the answer. The AC unit, it was the air conditioning system, right? It turns out that Target used a third party vendor to manage the air conditioning systems at all of their stores. And it was all online. So from a central location, they could control what the temperature was at the Target store in Minneapolis or Miami or Los Angeles. And this contractor was hacked. An employee there innocently clicked on an email that infected his computer. From that, they were able to get into the air conditioning system, tunnel through the air conditioning system, into the broader Target network, and eventually climb through that network bit by bit until they got to the point of sale terminal. So things are connected. You would never think, oh, my air conditioner might be connected to my cash register. But they are. They're on the same networks often. And that's how they got in. And that's why put it on there, and they could grab all of those transactions.

Well, and this conversation came from me because I'm remodeling a home. And I was asking you about all these different smart Devices that are all interconnected from light bulbs to garage doors, to locks, to window blinds, to music, to lighting, to everything that they're smart light bulbs. And you were literally giving me the smart statistics of how easy it is to light bulbs can be hacked, that garage doors can be hacked. And it made me really rethink the level of smart home technology. I don't know if smart home is the right terminology. It could be vulnerable home technology, and that's what led to hearing about this. But most people could not even fathom that all of these things are connected. And as you're talking about, when it goes from the size of a golf ball to. To the size of the sun, you're talking, everything now has some sort of trail and can lead to something else.

100%.

Okay, so let's go back to the.

Porn example, the Yamamoto virus. So this is another great example of organized crime scripting something in a really powerful way. So we tend to think of hacking. They steal money out of your bank account. That's fairly simple. But you can also use computer algorithms and scripting to do much more sophisticated crimes. And one happened in Japan. So it turns out in Japan, there's something called Hente pornography. It's actually like cartoon pornography, usually depicts young girls in very sexually explicit things. It seems to be very popular in Japan and would be illegal in lots of countries around the world. An organized crime group created a software program where people could download, sign up, pay for the program, and get access to all this child pornography, you know, cartoon hente child pornography that they wanted. So thousands of people downloaded it. And what they didn't know until something happened is that they had a little bit of a problem. Here's what happened. 30 days after they downloaded it and used it, they received an email that said, for example, dear Mr. Yamamoto, thank you so much for downloading our Hente pornography software. We can see that you're really enjoying it based upon the photographs that you can see in the email below. As a loyal customer, we're going to take these photographs and send them to everybody in your address book so that they know what a great program this is. Or you can Pay, you know, $100, and we won't do that. So what happened behind the scenes? Because organized crime created the software. There was a back door in it that when you downloaded the child pornography software, it took over people's computers, put in a hidden back door, and had a keystroke logger. But the other thing that it did was it hacked the person's camera. So as Mr. Yamamoto is sitting there typing, watching, maybe one hand on the keyboard, two hands on the keyboard, the computer, his webcam was surreptitiously taking photos of him. So these criminals were able to get like, you know, 50 photos of Mr. Yamamoto naked, half naked, whatever it was, included him in the email and downloaded his entire address book. So now Mr. Yamamoto was faced with blackmail. Either people are going to know that I look at this gente pornography. They can see pictures of me doing some funky stuff and they're threatening to tell everybody, or I pay $100. So now even something like blackmail can be completely scripted.

Yeah. Which is crazy. You even have this great marketing device which is a postcard of future crimes. And it has a little sticker which I put on my computer.

Yeah, camera patches.

Because I've always used to see. Used to put band aids and stuff over the little camera. Because people can hack into your computer and they can take control of the microphone, they can take control of the camera. And so part of it is just a good measure.

And just so people know, your camera can be hacked and on, and the little green light won't show up. Right. So that's part of the hack. Right. They can turn off that green or red light that you would see there. So it can be on. And you have no idea, which is why I encourage people to cover them up.

This is really, I'm sure, making people really damn paranoid right now, freaking them out. So there we go. So what is your perspective? Because you've done a tremendous amount of work with big, huge organizations on terrorism. So what's your perspective on the future of terrorism in this increasingly digital world?

Yeah, well, terrorists are incredibly fluent in technology. We make the mistake all the time. We think, oh, it's a bunch of people living in caves like Osama bin Laden. They're not sophisticated. And nothing could be further from the truth. So going back to even the first World Trade center bombing, the guy who carried that out back in 1993, used full computer encryption, was very sophisticated. It took the government a year to break his coded messages. So they've been doing this for a long time. After Mr. Snowden went ahead and put out all of his revelations, and in the jihadi chat rooms, you could see people going point by point with Snowden revelations and jihadis created, like al Qaeda training YouTube videos on how to encrypt your drive, how to hide your information and to protect it. So they're paying close attention there. If you look at Al Shabaab and if you look at what went on both in Nairobi or the girls that were kidnapped in Nigeria, they're live tweeting their terrorist attack. So they are like putting out blow by blow of what's going on during a terror attack and kind of messing with the police that way. But I think perhaps the best example of the technological terrorist is what happened in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack. If you remember that incident, you had 10 terrorists from an organization called Lakshar e Taiba based in Pakistan. They came into the city of Mumbai and they blew up the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Oberwa Hotel. They went after a synagogue and a bunch of other places. What was interesting about those guys is of course they had AK47s and bombs and hand grenades, the standard terrorist stuff. But what was amazing is the technology that they had with them. They had satellite telephones, they had night vision goggles, they had encrypted blackberries. They used Skype during the attack. And so in real time, they were able to use this technology. The other amazing thing that they did is they actually had a terrorist war room. So, you know, if you watch any of these spy movies or on television, you always see like the big war room with the military guys or the FBI guys, you know, 10 big blinking screens and all that. The terrorists set that up across the border in Pakistan. And they were monitoring in real time Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN Inn in India. And they were also live monitoring the Internet. So numerous times during the 60 hour siege, the terrorists were accessing satellite communications, satellite imagery and the like. And I'll just share one example, but there were lots of them. There was a man called K.R. ramaphorti who was staying on the top floor at the Taj Mahal Hotel suite. Beautiful hotel. And he heard shooting going on out there. So he was really worried. The terrorists were going room to room, trying to find more people to kill. And they shot his door and came in because it was locked. Then they found him there, they beat him, they stripped him naked, and they said, who are you and what are you doing here? And he said, oh, I'm nobody. I'm just an innocent schoolteacher. Please leave me alone. Well, the terrorists were dumb, but they weren't that dumb. No Indian school teacher could afford to stay in a suite at the Taj Mahal Hotel. So they saw his ID on the bedside table, they saw his name, and they phoned it in to their terrorist operations center and they literally googled the guy and they saw that he was not a schoolteacher as they thought. They came across this picture that they found on Google, and the conversation between the terrorist war room and the terrorist was, hey, we found a picture. Your guy, you know, is he heavyset? Yes. Is he bald in front? Yes. Is he wearing glasses? Yes. Okay. We found him online. Oh, great. The terrorists sent to their war room, you know, what should we do with him? And moments later came the answer. Kill him. Right. So we're talking about sharing on LinkedIn, you have your profile, all this stuff out there, even back in 2008. Right. Five, six years ago, terrorists were able to go out there and use all of this information that we're leaking to see who shall live and who shall die. So they're all over this material. There are other terrorist plots that I'll just mention that were disrupted in Boston back in 2011 using robotic drones. Right. So 9 11.1.0 was about human beings flying planes into buildings and crashing them. But 911 2.0 will be the robotic version of that. And I discuss a case of a guy called Rezwan Firtis, who is an Al Qaeda affiliate in Boston. A young student who was at Northeastern University, and he hatched a plot to go ahead and load a remote controlled jet aircraft that traveled at jet speed like 200 kilometers an hour. And they could each carry kilos and kilos of C4 explosives. And he was going to fly one into the Pentagon and another one into the Capitol building. Wow. So 9 11, 2.0, you can disintermediate the human being and use robotics to carry out these attacks. Yeah.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Well, there's a lot more that's discussed in your book, of course, in this area, but that's just.

Just a few examples.

That's a great perspective to let people know just the reality of the dark side. So. So let's talk about money. So what are some of the ways that currency like Bitcoin can be used or misused as it relates to future crimes? Because I know that's a whole other area for sure.

So, I mean, we're used, you know, we used to be on the gold standard, right? Big pieces of gold that was inconvenient to carry around. Then we switched to paper bills, which in effect was kind of a virtual currency. Right? Paper is a virtual currency. We believe in it because, you know, we have faith in the government. But now things are going even more virtual. So we see all these new payment systems, whether it be like square, where you can swipe your credit card really easily. World of Warcraft has World of Warcraft gold. So it's Like a monetary system you can use in these gaming systems. And of course, bitcoin, as you mentioned, is really increasing in popularity. And the challenge is that criminals are all over this. I actually talk about an example in the book. The same week that Square launched, a friend of mine was in San Francisco in Dolores park and saw a drug dealer, a guy selling crack in the park. And he looked at him and he saw the guy was using a smartphone. And it turns out for all the hipsters in San Francisco who don't carry cash, the drug dealer. The first week that Square came out, we've got a great shot of him accepting credit cards via Square on his smartphone for drugs. So really early adopters, I mean, that's one of the key points, is that criminals are really early adopters of all of this stuff. To Bitcoin, there are kind of two things to be aware of. One is that it is a cryptocurrency. So there's anonymity when you transact, right? It's all recorded in a central ledger. But de anonymizing it is very difficult. So if I send you 10 Bitcoin, it's very hard. They'll know that the bitcoin transaction took place, but who did it and to whom, hard to figure out. So in the organized underground, bitcoin is the currency of choice. There are a million good reasons to use it. I think you can use it on the Dish Network, you can book your ticket on Virgin Galactic, you know, paying in bitcoin and all these things out there. There's lots of great reasons to use it, but obviously for its anonymity purposes, criminals are flocking to it. And so you look at some of the largest criminal websites out there. There was something called the Silk Road. I don't know if you had heard of them. So this is in the hidden, darkest recesses of the Internet using what I call what's called the Tor network, right? So it's. You need a special piece of software. Everything's encrypted. You get into this network and it turns out that this hidden dark web, this deep web, most people don't realize it is 500 times larger than the surface web, right? So when you are searching Google, you're on Amazon, you're posting pictures on Instagram. That's the nice bits of the Internet that everybody sees. But hidden beneath that is a whole other Internet, the deep web or the dark web, that is 500 times larger. And that's where people are selling child pornography. You can buy AK47s all the drugs that you want. And it's. It turns out that one of the largest criminal underground Internet marketplaces was called the Silk Road. Founded allegedly by a 28 year old kid using the name Dread Pirate Roberts. And basically it was the ebay for drugs. The site was up and running for about two and a half years. And in the two and a half years this guy moved $1.2 billion worth of drugs based upon the transactions, all paid for in bitcoin. So huge amounts of money can be transacted. And because he used like an ebay system where he took like a cut of every transaction, his personal net worth was estimated to be $110 million. So he's like a 28 year old kid.

Did they find him?

They found him and they arrested him. And he's on trial. And I tell a story in the book here. He was also accused of hiring hitmen to kill employees that crossed him and did some really crazy stuff there. And he paid his hitman in Bitcoin. So $80,000, 40,000 up front, $40,000 after the proof of death was sent. So they had to send a photograph of the dead guy. And people are hiring hitmen in bitcoin on these sites. So yeah, he made his exit. Right. So think about it. He's a 20 year old entrepreneur, 28 year old entrepreneur, runs a company for two and a half years and has a really successful exit. $110 million completely untaxed. Now he's kind of facing life in prison. So there's a little downside on this exit strategy of his. It wasn't perfect. Right. But that's what you can do. And that was all bitcoin. The other challenge with bitcoin is that's.

The part I've not gotten to in the book yet.

Yeah, that's there. The other challenge with bitcoin is that it can be robbed just like traditional money. The most famous case of a bitcoin robbery was the Mount Gox exchange in Tokyo. They lost $400 million. So people put their money and faith in this system. $400 million was stolen. The average physical bank robbery in the United States is 4300 bucks. So if you walk in with a gun at your local bank of America and carry out a bank robbery a, you face life imprisonment and you walk away with 4300 bucks. These guys doing it, the cyber method. Walk away with 400 million and you'll never be caught. Right. Figure out which way to go.

Exactly. Yeah, it's like high tech crime.

Yeah.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So what role does anonymity and privacy play in all of this? I mean, how do we maintain it?

Right? It's growing increasingly hard. There are so many different things that are narcing on you, for lack of a better term. Every time you log into Facebook, every like all of that is captured, right? You know, terabytes and terabytes of data on each person. When you go to the doctor, when you search, you know, Google, all of that is captured. So it is really hard to do that. There are alternatives out there. For example, there's a search engine called DuckDuckGo. It does everything that Google does, but it doesn't track you. It doesn't report out to third parties. It doesn't sell you to advertisers. There are other social websites, like kind of alternatives to Facebook that you can use that don't monetize you. And there are a bunch of smart steps that you can take yourself in terms of computer settings and what you choose to reveal. But it's growing increasingly difficult, right, because there's just a so much data in our mobile phones, right? There's so much that they can tell about you. They know every location that you go. They can tell all the people that you meet with. So you and I are in this room together. Our cell phones are in the room together. The cell phone carrier and the phone companies know. Oh, Mark and Joe, we're together for an hour meeting, right? They can figure that out. If you have a cell phone on your nightstand six nights a week next to your wife's, they figure out, oh, okay, these people are probably married and they're sleeping together. But if one night a week, your cell phone is on the nightstand next to some other woman's. Oh, okay, what does that mean? Right. If their cell phone tracks you to your gynecologist. That's an interesting data point. If it tracks you into target a few weeks later. And now they're looking at your credit card transaction and you're buying, like, multivitamins or pregnancy tests. Now they have a whole other data point about you, so it's pretty hard.

So try to put this in the context of. For the listeners, who is they, I think I know the answer to this, but I wanted to get your perspective on how much of this is truly being looked at either now or all of this data being collected right now that seems harmless now, but 10 years from now, it's going to be like, man, we had no idea that they would have been able to look back at our lives that way.

Exactly. And that future threat that you just hit on is a great point. So who is the they? The they are what's called the big data industry. Al Gore said that kind of surveillance is the business model of the Internet. Right. Think about how we built our Internet. The Internet that we have today is, I don't pay for anything. I don't pay for Facebook. I don't pay for Pinterest, I don't pay for Android. All of that stuff is free. But as I say in the book, free is often the most expensive thing out there. Right. It turns out that Facebook, to the extent that they monetize you every year, Facebook makes like a few dollars on every American that has a Facebook account every year. Wouldn't it be awesome if I just gave Facebook five bucks and then I could have all the same services and not have it sold out to kind of the data industrial complex? Like, I'd just rather pay for this.

I would, too. Well, and of course, that would ruin their slogan of free and always will.

Be sort of thing, Right? Exactly. But I'd much rather have the choice, and I'm sure that in the future alternatives will develop. So the big data industry, there are companies like Experion, Axacom, things like that. And the challenge is that according to FTC studies, Federal Trade Commission and others, up to one third of all credit reports have errors in them. The good thing about a credit report is you can get a copy of it. There are laws that give you copies of your credit report. But with this big data industry, if you happen to like something, or let's say you like NASCAR and you live in West Virginia, the people that know this, the big data gods, they're making assumptions about you. It's like white, non, upwardly mobile NASCAR lovers. Like, that's actually a category. And they bulk you into these categories, and so they sell that and they parcel it, and people buy data lists. So I want to market. I'm nascar. I want to market to these people. So that's a list that you can buy to the point that you make. What happens if we had all this big data in 1950, right, where we had very different perspectives on civil rights and racism in this country. Everybody who used a bad word to describe an African American or everybody who said something bad against a gay person, you know, stuff that was totally acceptable 50 years ago but is horrible today? Well, if Facebook existed back then, you could go back and say you were a racist back in 1950. We have proof of it. So who knows what that will be? In the future. Right.

That could even be said today with like, you even take Madonna's nude pictures from years ago.

Right.

And then how big of a deal that was when photographs got sold to Penthouse or whatever it was. And that was before the Internet. And then all of a sudden everything is everywhere now. I mean, if you were to go to those people, they would have never realized, you know, 30 years ago they were doing something harmless. And conversations, I mean, with how much we can identify pictures today, 100%. They're going to pick up everything from your voice to mannerisms to everything. And it's going to be searchable and it's going to come up instantaneously, something that you did 20 years ago.

And some of the security systems, they have these CCTV camera networks that are all over London has a ton of them. They have them in lower Manhattan. They're all over China. Cisco just closed a deal for 500,000 camera surveillance network in one city called Chongqing. So all of this is ubiquitous. And now you can actually go in and search in London and say, woman, red hat. And it will pull up every street in London where a woman is walking with a red hat right now. So, yeah, that's the level of artificial intelligence mined with the cameras.

Right. So the point is privacy we've never really much had. If you were a marketer, you would already know that. But it's just getting increasingly.

Yeah, it's a challenge, but there are steps that you can take and it's what you choose to share your settings and where you partake in that. And I'm happy to talk about.

Yeah, and like I said, we will get some solutions. And of course you're going to want. If by now someone doesn't want to buy your book, then I don't even know what to tell them. So what are we going to say? Right, okay. So as cyber crime and future crimes relate to communications like email, texting, cell phones and so on, what should people be aware of that that we've not obviously already discussed?

Yeah, man, I think we've covered this quite a bit. The one thing I would just say is that the cell phone that you have in your pocket or in your purse is the snitch of your life. It's the most intimate device that you have with you. Turns out I forget the exact statistics there in the book, but something like 80% of Americans are always within three feet of their smartphone. Right. Most Americans within 10 minutes of waking up are checking their smartphone. Take it with you everywhere. That records way more data than your laptop or desktop computer. So just be aware of that and we'll talk about some of the things that you can do to protect yourself on the mobile phone too.

Just get rid of a mobile phone and try to be one of those people that's again, you talk about the impractical nature. A lot of people that I just don't know many people that are off the grid that are able to function with so many of the ways that we can function. I'm not saying you can't function as living and surviving. Talking about interacting for sure.

And I will give people tips to do that.

So one thing that's obviously coming, I've been to Google, as have you and I've seen the self driving car, the Google car.

What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah. So someone hacks the car and drives it off a bridge or that sort of crazy stuff. So that's coming.

Yes, for sure.

What are some of the things that you envision or think that people need to be aware of? Preventative measures. I mean, what's the pros and cons of all this?

Right. So again, I'm broadly pro technology. It'll be awesome. Brad Templeton, who teaches at Singularity University, works with that Google self driving car project.

He's a smart dude too.

He's a smart guy and he puts out statistics. Something like 60 or 100,000 people are killed annually. I forget the exact number or because of car accidents and because it turns out human beings are actually really crappy drivers. And so if you automate the network, not only do you get massive efficiencies in how traffic moves, but all of these parking structures that take up to like 1/3 to 40% of the inner city core could be done away with, turned into parklands. Lots of great stuff.

Can I say something to that too? To be Ridley and interrupt you right in the middle of this, you get into this, which I love the aspect. I think it's going to be safer. I think it's awesome. I think it's incredibly effective and efficient in all kinds of different ways. I don't know if it's been 100% proven, but it's been estimated. I don't know if it was Brad talking about it or you or somewhere. At singularity, that 60% of Los Angeles county supposedly is literally the real estate is devoted to cars, garages, parking structures, roads, 60% of that area. So you create a new way to reinvent that whole industry where the cars.

Can self organize and self park themselves. Right. You know, if you had One car in the middle of 500 cars, a human being could never get out. The valet at the restaurant is not going to do that. But the cars can self organize and split themselves so that your car can come out when you need it. So all this amazing stuff becomes possible. The challenge is to talk about some of the downsides is cars today are really nothing more than computers. We ride in, right? We haven't had like mechanical cars since the 70s, and certainly by the 90s, and certainly by 2000, you know, early 2000s, every car that rolled off the assembly line had about a hundred to 200 computer chips in it. These computer chips, right? You know, it's the old fly by wire thing that they use with airplanes. These computer chips control everything from the radio to the airbag, to the ABS braking system, to when your horn goes off, your windshield wipers. Everything is encoded in a computer. And it turns out that it can all be hacked. And we've seen some really amazing examples of this. So your car can literally get a virus. And there are some real interesting ways that cars can be turned off remotely. There was a place in Texas called the Texas Auto center, and they sold cars to kind of folks with really bad credit. And one of the big challenges for them is people would get behind on their payments and they'd have to send out tow trucks to go and find these people. The repo man would get in fights. We had repo men that were killed as a result, stabbed, shot, whatever. And so they were looking for a better model. They actually came up with this black box that they could put in the cars of their low income folks that were buying the cars with poor credit. And if they failed to make their payment, they could just kill it so they could turn off the car remotely. Well, that sounded like a great plan until two years ago when all of a sudden cars all over the city of Austin, Texas started shutting off for reasons that people didn't know. And then their horns started beeping and then their headlights started flashing. What the hell was going on? It turns out they took the one smart kid who understood technology at the auto dealer, some 20 year old kid, and put him in charge of these back doors that were in the car. He got fired. After he got fired, he exacted his revenge and he remotely bricked all of these cars. So some crazy hacker was able to turn off all these cars remotely. That was a few years ago. There was just a story in the New York Times about two months ago that said there are now 2 million cars in the United States that have this same technology in it. And it told the story of a woman who went out with her four kids into upstate New York on a picnic. And she was in an area with no cell phone coverage. They bricked her car. When she was up there with her family, she was out in the middle of a farm forest. She couldn't, you know, she had young kids, she got stuck. They got stuck out there for a few days before somebody started getting looking for them. So the crazy thing is a hacker can literally drive behind you a couple hundred feet and deploy your airbag or kill your brakes. So that stuff is literally possible. So we need to be much more careful about this. And of course, when all the cars are on the network and self driving, it becomes a critical infrastructure attack because you can turn off hundreds, if not thousands.

God, I mean, I could even envision the criminal minds here saying, oh, let's figure out how to make all of these cars dangerous so people will be forced to have self driving cars. I mean, you wouldn't even want to.

Be in a car anymore. Right, Exactly. Well, the FBI, to your point about the self driving car. So when Google came out with its self driving car, the FBI actually issued a bulletin that said that they were concerned about terrorists using these self driving cars as what they call VBIEDs, vehicle based implemented explosive device. Right. So that they could go ahead and create a bomb, put a bunch of explosives in a car, punch in the GPS navigation and just have it drive off into the sunset. So again, you don't need the suicide bomber. And the FBI actually put out a law enforcement bulletin on there.

Wow.

Wild.

Wild. So again, upside and downside to everything. So this question is, what are the consequences? Consequences of cyber crimes being not necessarily a person to person crime, but exponential crime that can be multiplied to millions of people. Similar to what you talked about, for example, stealing someone's wallet versus stealing millions of people's wallets online.

Sure. So it's funny, all the great business books that I know that you read, everything from free to the long tail, criminals study this stuff and they know. So the old model was we're going to steal the Pink Panther diamond, We're going to take two years and study this really big target and we'll create this massive heist and we'll steal the big diamond. Now they don't have to do that anymore. If they just take a penny or a dollar from a million people, they're doing okay. And so it can all be scripted. So we talked about this. Really the big change is that Crime increasingly, is not being committed by human beings. It's being written and carried out by human beings.

But.

But it's a computer program that runs in the background and can carry out crime 24 hours a day.

There's so much more I could talk to you about, and we may actually do a segment two of this. But what areas of cyber crime, technology, future crimes, and so on. Haven't I asked you about? Or is there anything that, you know? What would be the question that I should have asked if you would have been sitting in my space?

Hmm, That's a good question. I would say broadly, you know, the book is called Future Crimes, and I talk about crime, but the one thing that maybe I should explain that we didn't get into is that crime is the structure that I use to talk about technology, right? It's the scaffolding that I hook all the stories to. But ultimately, as cool and as interesting as these sort of scary, crazy crime stories may be, this book is fundamentally about the world that we're building. Right? You know, technology, as we keep on saying it, is awesome and it will do amazing things. But as we keep on plugging more and more stuff into the Internet, the problem is, is that the Internet and the underlying software and protocols are completely insecure. So what does it mean to be plugging in airplanes and cars and pacemakers and roadways into a system that we already know can be hacked? So really, the bigger picture is to put in the mind of people, the society that we're building for our children, our grandchildren and those next generations. There's a battle going on for the soul of technology, really for the soul of what these tools are going to mean for humanity. On the one side, you have amazing technologists and you've got tremendous philanthropists that I discuss in the book, NGOs and the like that are creating amazing technologies that will bring clean water, abundant energy, extended health care, really reduce the infant mortality rates and the like. And that is all awesome, but at the same time, you have this whole other group of folks, whether they be real governments, corporations, criminals, terrorists that understand the technology and they're trying to use it against you to their own advantage, to your detriment, right? So there's this battle afoot between good and evil via our technology, and there's a battle that I think we have to win. The good people have to get organized in the same way that the bad guys are. This amazing future that is out there as a possibility. It's not going to come free, Right? It's going to take work. And I know it's like, oh, work. It sounds horrible, but it's not that hard, right? I mean, we've done amazing things in the past as a species, right? We put a man on the moon, right? Like we did that. Human species did that. And now we're moving towards Mars and you know, space travel and all that stuff. So we've had Manhattan Projects in the past. So when we've had really serious problems, we've come together and solved them. And I guess I really want to highlight to folks that this is a serious, serious problem, one that we've been ignoring because all of the incentives are completely misaligned. We need to get focused on it. We need to use crowdsourcing for the better good. We already have a military reserve, we've got police reserves, we've got boy scouts, we have civil defense, we have all these systems, but none of them have been ported over into cyberspace. Let's get the good people involved and make sure that our technologies, the tools with which we're building our common future in order to the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. And that's really what the heart of the book is about.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about a couple of solutions and things and then I'm going to do another segment with you about just specifically some of the step by step content of stuff. But I want to have you give people recommendations, tell them where they can get the book, where they can get more stuff, watch your TED Talk. Anything else that you recommend will help our listeners or the people that are watching this video, wherever they found it, to feel not only more secure of what they're doing, but to be able to live in this truly abundant, amazing world that we have.

Okay, so off the top, I'll just take a moment to thank you, Joe, for having me here and for this great conversation and our friends. I appreciate that the last two chapters of this book go into some of those solutions, broadly what we can do kind of on the nation state level, what companies can do and the like individual steps that companies can take. So there's a lot of great stuff in there and we can talk about that. But just on a real practical front, I wanted people to know that there are steps that they can take to help them. With this, I have created something I call the Update method. In Update, each word stands for, for something and I will explain it. But using the update protocol, it's been proven through a study by the Australian government that you could actually avoid 85% of the threats out there in cyberspace today, which is awesome, they're really basic, simple steps. And if you think about, like, if you did certain things, you could cut your cancer rate by 85%, we would all do it. So these are really simple steps that you can take. They're not really difficult to cut and reduce your risk online from identity theft, hacking and the like by 85%. So update. The first U is for update. You need to keep your software up to date. That's your operating system, your computer programs, and your phone. And most of those, you know, software tools have automatic updates in there. You should just always keep your stuff up to date. And if you do that, it'll be hugely helpful because when Apple issues an update or Android issues an update, that means that there's been a massive security flaw in there that is still open. And if you don't update, the criminals monitor very closely what those guys are doing. And so as soon as they figure out what this vulnerability is, they're going in for it. So the sooner you update, the more you will decrease your risk. The second up P is for password. Okay? Passwords are a pain in the butt. Nobody likes them. You know, uppercase, lowercase, you know, write a hieroglyphic, what was the name of your, your third grade teacher? All that stuff is really annoying. But the fact of the matter is the longer your password, and if you do play all those games of uppercase, lowercase more than 20 characters, I'm talking 20, 25 characters. You actually make your password nearly impossible to hack through what's called a brute force attack, trying one thing after another. The other thing is 20 characters, 20 characters or more. But there's good news. I can tell you how to do this. The other big thing mistake that people make with their passwords is they use the same password for Facebook and Gmail and bank of America and Wells Fargo and all of that stuff. Do not use the same password for any of those. Let's go back to the target hack. If you use the same password and email address for your target account that you do for bank of America or Citibank, once Target gets hacked, the first thing that criminals do is they take those and they'll take all those stolen names, logons and passwords and they'll try them at every possible bank just to see if they can get in. So I strongly recommend that you not do single sign on or have the same accounts for everywhere. How do you do this? There's something called a password wallet. Okay? It's a specific software program that you can use that will manage and hold all of your passwords through encryption. And there's a few of them that I recommend. One is called One Password, the number one and Password. The other one is called Dashlane, which is also very good. There's one called Keepass and another one called LastPass. Normally I don't recommend specific companies, but I wanted to mention those because as it turns out, organized crime have created their own password wallets with really good sounding names. Put them into the Android Store and you're downloading it thinking it's a password wallet and all of your passwords are going in the background to organize crime. So that's why I recommend those four, so people will know where to go.

Is Android more vulnerable than.

I'm afraid to say, vastly more vulnerable? It turns out numerous studies have shown this 99% of all the mobile phone attacks occur against the Android network. And it's not that Android is fundamentally less secure. It's a difference in how they're updated. If you think about it, Apple controls the hardware and the software. When they push out an Update, something like 80% of the people remembering the U from update. 80% of the people will update within the first month in the Android world. I forget the exact number. It's in the book. I think only 6% of Android users are using the latest version of the software. So all those vulnerabilities are out there. And it's not economically feasible for Android to go ahead and fix all this because Android is a free operating system. They give it away to Samsung, they give it away to HTC and Motorola, and it's up to those companies to customize your mobile phone with the Android system. But they don't really want you to hold onto your old phone forever because they make money when you buy a new handset. So they're not incentivized. This is what I was talking about earlier, poor incentives. They're not incentivized to have you have the latest and greatest stuff without opening up your wallet and buying more money. So that's the challenge in the Android ecosystem. Other thing with password, so have a password wallet and make sure that it's one of the recommended ones. Also there's something called two factor authentication which can be hugely helpful. Now, for those of those who don't know today, we currently authenticate, in other words, log on with one piece of information, our email address and our password. But there's something called two factor authentication where I can get a little program that every time I Want to log on to Gmail? Gmail will send me a text message with a one time six or ten digit password. So this way even if your account is compromised at Target and somebody has it, they won't be able to log on with this second authentication factor. And it's absolutely free. So for Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, WordPress, all of these sites offer absolutely free two factor authentication. And this way, even if your stuff is compromised, the bad guys won't be able to get on unless they have that SMS message which will be on your phone. So definitely recommend that update D is for download. Okay? A lot of people get in trouble because they download software from a friend who gives them a CD to copy. Or they go into the torrents, the peer to peer networks, to download free movies, free software, free whatever it may be. Many, many if not most of those programs are riddled with viruses. Right? Why would organized crime put out the free movies? Because they want you to download them and infect your machine. So only download your software from authorized sites, from the official Apple Store or from the official Microsoft Store.

So for all the criminals out there that are already stealing materials and stuff like, you know, I have a lawyer on retainer that just goes after different torrent sites and different things that are always uploading my materials and trying to give away. I mean they do it to everyone. But the point is you're not. A lot of times there are other risks as well. You know, sometimes free is the most expensive.

Absolutely.

You know, I've always said in the marketing world and the advice world is the most expensive information in the world is bad information. Sometimes the most expensive movie or whatever you're going to get on your computer.

Is the free one. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that's download. The next one is A. So Upda A is for administrator. So if you're on a Mac or if you're on a PC, you'll notice that you can have different folks with accounts on your computer. You can have one, your wife can have one, your kids can have one. And each one of those counts has what are called privileges. That is a series of things that they can do. So the broadest and highest level of privilege is called the administrator account or root access. These are people who can install new software, put in new printers, delete programs. They can do anything they want. Then they have general, what are called user accounts and they even have accounts for kids. 99% of the people who are using a PC or a Mac are running their computer as administrator. There's one account right you'll have the Joe Polish account on your computer. And if there's just one account, it has to have administrator privileges. One of the biggest things you can do to protect yourself is never, ever, ever run your account in administrator mode. Your computer needs to have an administrator account, but that should not be the account that you use to log on to check your email to surf the web. Why? Because if you're logged in as an administrator and you download a movie that has a virus on it, in order for that virus to change your computer operating system, it needs administrative access. Okay? If you're already logged in as administrator and get a virus now, the virus can execute just like that, and there is nothing to stop it. If you're logged in as a user and you download a virus, the virus has to say, I need permission to run. The fact that you're seeing your virus saying, I need access to all of this stuff, you'll say, wait a minute, I don't know what this is. Program is right? And it's a clue that there's a problem. If you say, no, I don't grant access to this virus to run or this Trojan, you've now stopped the problem. So never log in in administrator mode unless you need to specifically administer your box for a specific purpose. Do all of your computing from a user account without administrative privileges. It'll make a huge difference. Updat the next T and the update protocol is for turn off. It's really simple, but it makes a big difference. We keep on our computers 24 hours a day, right? What does that mean? That means that they are connected to the Internet and hackers can access them from anywhere on the planet 24 hours a day. But we don't stay up 24 hours a day, right? We go to sleep. If you just turned off your computer for the eight hours that you sleep, you would cut your wrists by 33%, right? Just by having the computer off. So turn off your computers when you're not using it. Not only is it good for your energy bills, but it's also good for security. And there's one other thing you should definitely be turning off. If you look at your average smartphone, it will have a Bluetooth channel, it will have WI fi, it will have near field communication, it may have a hotspot. There are all these ports on our phones that most people keep open all the time. If you're sitting in an airport with your Bluetooth port open, you are a sitting duck. I can launch a virus, a Bluetooth Trojan, what's called Bluetooth snarfing and get into your phone. Right. If you're on a public WI FI network, then I can go ahead and get into that information. So if you're not using Bluetooth, keep it off. If you're not using WI Fi, keep it off. Right. Turn off the services that you're not using. This also will help. We were talking before. You were asking me for tips on privacy stores like Nordstrom's and Nordstrom's Rack, the Nordstrom's company, they had a little teeny itty bitty little sign in there that said, attention Nordstrom shoppers. We've implemented a new way of tracking customers in our store. And so you will be monitored with your smartphone in Nordstrom's. So Nordstrom's wants to know how much time are you spending in the ladies underwear department or in the cooking or sheets department. They track all of that stuff, and they do it based upon your WI fi. Okay. Your WI fi has a unique identifier called a Mac address. And so Nordstrom knows exactly who you are. Right? So that data can come back to bite you again in a divorce investigation. Somehow that could come up. So just turn off your WI FI port and you'll be safe. By the way, Nordstrom gave you two choices as you walked in their store. So we all know about shrink wrap, right? If you open up this software, you agree to our terms of service. Click here. You agree to our terms of service. Nordstrom did that in the physical world. By entering our store, you consent to being monitored. If you do not wish to be monitored, do not enter our store or turn off your phone. Customers really got pissed off about that, and they ended up changing the policy. But you'll see more and more of this. So if you just turn off your ports, not only will you be protected from viruses, but you'll also be protected from a privacy perspective. And the very last thing to mention is either for encryption. So U P D A T E E is for encryption. Your data should be encrypted. What does that mean? Encryption means that you use big mathematical algorithms to scramble your data so that it can cannot be read unless you have the secret key to decrypt and read that data. Okay, There are two different things that you can encrypt. You can encrypt data at rest. That is the data on your smartphone or the data on the hard drive or your computer or data as it's in transit. That means as it leaves your computer and goes through the WI FI network or through the Ethernet network. Okay. Good news is that both Apple and Windows have built in programs for absolutely free that will encrypt your hard drive. The benefit of having your hard drive encrypted is that if your computer is stolen, people cannot read your data. They can't read your financial records, they can't read your customer accounts. Right? Those naked selfies that the Hollywood actresses take, all that stuff will be protected. Okay? On the Windows front, it's called BitLocker. Just look for a program called BitLocker. In Windows, you can run that. It will encrypt your drive. In the Mac environment, it's called filevault. And you can turn that on and it will protect your data at rest. Also, with the latest iPhones and the soon to be coming out Android devices, if you go ahead and set a password on your phone, not only does it mean that the bad guys can't break into your phone because you've got a password, or it makes it harder, but it automatically encrypts all of the data on your phone. So if it's lost or stolen, bad guys can't get to it. And the encryption is so good, the FBI was actually complaining to Tim was the founder of Apple, or, sorry, the guy who's running Apple now. Tim Cook.

Oh, Tim Cook.

Yeah. So the FBI was actually complaining to Tim Cook, saying that encryption's too good. The FBI can't break it. So just merely setting a password on your iPhone will really encrypt it very, very well. That's data at rest, data at transit. This means the data leaving your computer. There's something called a vpn, a virtual private network. Okay? If you're sitting at Starbucks, if you're sitting at an airport, if you're sitting at a university at a big conference and everybody at the hotel is using the same WI fi network, my computer is connected to your computer. I can go in there and I can see what you're doing on Facebook. I can go ahead and read all the songs and see the songs that you have on itunes. I can actually play songs on your computer on your itunes account. So a virtual private network. They're really cheap. You can go out there, it's like maybe 50 bucks a year. And what that does is encrypt all of the data leaving your computer. So that when you're in an airport or you're in one of those places, by the way, airports is where bad guys hang out the most, right? And they've actually put out fake WI fi spots. So you'll see at the Airport. It'll say airport, WI fi. Free airport, WI fi. Make sure that you're actually using the WI fi for JFK or SFO San Francisco Airport. Because what bad guys do is they'll just sit there, put up their own WI fi and capture all the data that comes across it. So if you connect to the right network and you use a vpn, you'll be protected. So that is the update protocol. I talk about it in the book. And just by taking those simple steps, you can remove 85% of the risk.

That was awesome. I mean, lots of incredibly useful, valuable advice. And there's a danger in, in what Mark has said was a lot of dangers in some of the things he said, but a danger in just how valuable. Even the update messaging that you just delivered was where people are like, oh, I'm going to do all of that stuff. Get Mark's book, read his book clearly, because the book has not even come out yet. I have not had an opportunity to thoroughly go through your book. The beauty is I know your material pretty well, but just a smidget of everything that you've put in and you've spent the last year writing and putting together this book. And plus, you've got how many years of experience you've been doing this?

20 years. 20 years.

So, I mean, you're talking about the best, most recent, most updated version of the future and where it's going to go. And if you read Mark's book and you go into his materials, if you watch his TED Talk, if you go to his website, I mean, if you just stay up to be with what Mark is doing, and this is just a starting point, he is the cutting edge guy, the top people in the world, in technology, when it comes to cybercrime and future crimes, this is the guy that they go to. I mean, you're the man. So it's been a real pleasure just to do this interview with you. And I always learn so much when I talk with you. Not just about how to protect myself, but just it really helps me think about the opportunities for the future. Because if you're an entrepreneur, listen, listening to this, this will give you some insight on how to better set things up to protect your clients. And there's going to be so much opportunity for new businesses as a result of the dark side.

Absolutely.

And how you can add tremendous value to people's lives. And so the danger I was referring to is a lot of times if you just do such a great job of teaching people and you're such a Good teacher. People are like, oh, I don't think I need that. But yeah, you absolutely need to get Mark's book. So where do they get your book? And anything else that you recommend that people should watch, read that you're doing or anything else that you recommend that people look at?

Awesome. Well, people can find me personally@markgoodman.net, so M A R C G-O-O-M A N.net and we're transitioning that to dot com in the near future. But there's also futurecrimes.com there you'll find links to Amazon and independent booksellers, ibooks, Barnes and Noble, all of the major players there. So you can definitely get it. It is available for pre order. It would be awesome if people got it this way they could get it fresh the first day that it comes out.

And they should get it for other people too. I mean, you've got, if you work for a company, get it for your employer. If you work for any sort of.

Organizations, children, weddings, bar mitzvahs, it's good for anything that you could possibly imagine. Bachelor parties, bachelor parties, bachelorette parties. Yeah. Well, you do talk about business, which is actually a really great point. And I do have tips in there, particularly for some startups. Right. If you're a young entrepreneur or even a more senior entrepreneur, you're running so fast, trying to keep your business up and running. But what you don't realize is most businesses say it's all about the intellectual property. It's the documents that you have on your computer, it's your customer list, it's your financial transactions. All of that is hackable. And there's a statistic, I have a whole section in the book for small business and there's some statistic that something like 65% of small businesses that are hacked are out of business within a year. So you really need to consider this stuff.

Yeah, there's. At the last Genius Network meeting that I had here in my office in the same room where we're doing this interview, there was one of the top heart doctors that spoke and he was given a 10 minute talk about things you can do to protect your heart. He, he had this one portion of his talk where he said, it's what you eat. You want to eat healthy, nutritious foods. I know all the arguments. People are like, I don't like the taste of vegetables and I like these sort of foods. He goes, well, if you don't like the taste of vegetables, I wonder if you're going to like the taste of cancer. I wonder if you're going to like the taste of chemotherapy. Do you like the taste of diabetes? It was an interesting analogy you when he said it, but when you went through your whole update thing, all of these things that are quote unquote protective measures, like we were talking about last night. Being in the marketing business, it's a lot easier to sell cure than it is to sell prevention. Someone looks for a security system not before they get robbed, but after they get robbed. And to the best of our abilities, for mine to persuade everyone listening to this, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when this stuff happens to you or someone that you know. And so by having a book like this, it will be the cheapest insurance and best knowledge and protective measurements you could ever take, not only for yourself, but for your family. Because not only if you don't understand this can you be very vulnerable in ways that are very simple to protect yourself from most of them, but also it could save your life, it could save your finances, it could save your business, like what you said. So this is a really important subject. So I hope we not only scared the crap out of people so that they actually really pay attention to stuff that a lot of people ignore, but I really hope we provided a tremendous amount of knowledge that you didn't have. And if you think about a lot of the stuff 90 minutes ago, if you've gone through this whole thing, because I may turn this into a two part episode, we'll have to determine that. But this is, you know, this is good stuff. So futurecrimes.com, mark Goodman, he's the man and this is awesome. Awesome.

So thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.