NSA Hacker | Kyle Hanslovan | Ep. 329

Kyle Hanslovan is the co-founder and CEO of Huntress, a sleek cybersecurity operation recently valued at $1.5B; he knows a thing or two about success—or, as he likes to put it, “not failing.” Listed among CRN’s “Top 25 Tech Disruptors” and awarded EY’s “Entrepreneur of the Year 2024,” the serial entrepreneur and ex-military leader sits at the forefront of a revolution in cybersecurity, ruthlessly collecting a host of kickass titles like “award-winning cyberwarfare expert” and “elite NSA operative.” Outside of the office, Kyle is a father of three who follow in his footsteps as restless Florida youth engaged in minor mischief on the internet and inside their middle school and university classrooms. https://www.huntress.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️ https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.com Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured —————————————————————- Today's Sponsors: StopBox USA⬇️ Get firearm security redesigned and save with BOGO the StopBox Pro AND 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code HOUSE at https://www.stopboxusa.com/HOUSE #stopboxpod GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 50% OFF!!! The Perfect Jean⬇️ https://theperfectjean.nyc use code "HOUSE15" at checkout for 15% off & free shipping ____________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— To help support the show and for all bonus content including: https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [email protected] #ufos #6thgeneration Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Jack Murphy?

  These are like saps that like 30 people in the entire world are read on to.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, all special, you know, all the work that we did were special access programs. So not just only you're in a SKIF, not just your top secret, but they are so limited. I mean, we sometimes like, if anybody's done the research on what an ODA is, or an A-team in the special forces world, you're talking 12, you know, 12-person teams that subdivide into six-person teams. I was on programs where sometimes it was six people.

• 0:57Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm.

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• 2:28Speaker 04

  Special Operations.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 2:48Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 329 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. And our guest on tonight's show is Kyle Hansloven. Kyle served in the military with the National Security Agency, and now he works in the cybersecurity realm with Huntress. We're really excited to have him on the show. As I was telling him beforehand, you're somebody who's been on our list for like four or five years. So we're really happy to finally have you here.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Absolutely stoked to be here. It's one of those funny things, right? Of how long sometimes it just takes for good things to go down.

• 3:20Jack Murphy?

  It's totally my fault, you know, just sitting on it, not, uh, not, not doing anything about it. But so Kyle, let's start off at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about how you grew up and what took you towards military service initially.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Got you. Well, I'll try not to like cut onions or anything, but definitely grew up on the poorer side of life. Right? So think of like, uh, single mom, I never hungry poor, but like we always lived with whoever mom was dating at the moment. You know, that type of situation. And, uh, you know, so I got to go bounce between Oregon, which was kind of great for outdoors life. And I eventually moved to Florida. So it was good. But come 17, it was enlistment time. I kind of skipped college. I did really well in high school, but it was a little bit of like, uh, you know, computer thug, I guess, at that time. And it was one of those things that never had a brush in with the law. But, um, it was pretty clear that if I stayed at home, I was probably going to get in trouble. So, yeah.

• 4:16Jack Murphy?

  Is that because you had a, you had an early interest in computers from the get go? And were doing some things that were a little shady?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  I was a super nerd, right? So it wasn't cool back then. Like now, like my kids kind of like marvel of like, yeah, my dad's a hacker. That was not cool in the late 90s. But yeah, a lot of AOL, a lot of, I mean, when you're poor, like. I hacked myself to free internet, probably most of my childhood, all the way through probably like the very early 2000s. So, yeah, a lot of unscrupulous, but maybe not quite, you know, jail time worthy offenses.

• 4:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, so late, you said late 90s or late 90s is around that time, like what was your first?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably 97 all the way to probably 2003.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  What was your first computer or what was the first computer you had access to, whether it was a public computer or whatever?

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of public computer. I remember I built like a broke down Commodore once that kind of got me in, taught me a lot of the basics. So I'm in this like weird generation for the geeks out there from like, I can go as old school as like 70s style tech, very analog, know all that old school programming.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  All the way to the most modern like technical stuff. So I'm kind of like this tweener, right? Late millennial aged kind of just like this bourbon, right?

• 5:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Like a fine bourbon.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, that is, you know, that is because it's, it's, it's post like Commodore 64, BB, the BBS, right? All the like that, it's. Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  So yeah, I had the bulletin board days, but immediately went to IRC and then it became AOL and a lot of those like, it's just really lucky, you know? It's because I was so poor, I got to do the old stuff because that's all I could afford.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  And then obviously the world kind of changed when like dial up cable modems and then everything became available. So yeah, it was a good time.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  And was there like, there was an online community, I'm sure, but did you know other people in person that were like you?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Not, not so much in person, right? Everybody like back in those days, IRC kind of is like a modern day chat group, right? Slack, a Discord server.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  And so I spent most of my time back there, like reverse engineering software, you know, getting around like the activation codes, getting around, you know, kind of piracy type things.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Also, you know. Alleged, I mean, I think what's nice is when I joined the military, the polygraph, they said, you got to answer all the questions, but only go to your 18th birthday. And I'm a 17, so it made the polygraph really easy.

• 6:44Speaker 05

  That's funny.

• 6:45Jack Murphy?

  So, time to enlist before you get into too much trouble. What branch did you join MOS? Where did you go?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so even though I was Navy Junior ROTC and I had a ride to Annapolis, there was no way I was gonna make it. Like, I graduated really early out of high school. And you had to be roughly, you know, seventeen and a half or so by the time my birthday fell for me to be able to start the year. And so I changed and I went, I got an uncle that was in the Marines and he said, "Look, Kyle, you're too damn soft for any other service. You need to go to the Air Force." And I did. I scored good on the ASVAB, so I got guaranteed at the time, I think they, it was Communication Systems, 3COX-1 was my first AFSC in the, you know, in the Air Force.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  So in the late 90s, was Communication Systems, was that still just, was it just radio tech? Was it like setting up communication packages and stuff like that?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  So I had both. I had both the analog side of the house, so I actually got to do like Combat Com and do some more of the like proper encrypted radio, a lot of point-to-point systems. But I also got to do IT. And my first job was like regular base comms. So think about maintaining the email servers. I got to do a BlackBerry server. Like, I don't even know those things, you know, I'm sure they don't exist anymore. But it was a good time. And like I said, my first duty station was all regular just comms.

• 8:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, that's fascinating because, you know, where cyber is a career field now, back then, you know, it was like, it, the military needed it, but didn't really have it.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. When you said cyber back in like the early 2000s, that meant like something dirty you're doing in a chat room. It definitely didn't mean what it means now.

• 8:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, for me, it still means the dirty stuff in chat rooms, but no, I'm just kidding.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  But yeah, old habits die hard, right?

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cyber, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 8:39Jack Murphy?

  So how was, how was the Air Force treating you at that point? I mean, it sounds like you were probably enjoying it.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could imagine like being seventeen, I did real well in like basics since I had already done like years of ROTC or Junior ROTC. And so that part was kind of a breeze. And what was really lucky is this was right at the cusp that...

• 8:59Speaker 02

  You know, people were already doing offensive cyber operations. They weren't calling it that. It was called a lot of like, you know, info security. There was information operations, but really, nobody knew what that meant. And it kind of gave me the benefit of, because my rank was enlisted and I had a lot of technical potential, it kind of had a lot of parallels where nobody really held you down because of your rank. It was your ability to execute kind of was like where they would cap you. So for me, that first duty station was in England. I actually did end up two tours in England. And that was just great because it opened up my whole like life from moving from just basic security. And that's when I started getting to work with GCHQ and NSA. So this was like really good timing.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  And, and you know, for like NSA was like sigget, like that was their, and they still are, but that was their bread. You know, everybody was sitting there wearing their cans. Was the NSA sort of on the cutting edge of what was going on in, you know, in this kind of cyberspace? Or were they trying to catch up with kids reading 2600 every month?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, General Hayden at the time running, you know, as the Director of NSA, was definitely on the cutting edge of realizing that like these basic things that we were already, you know, listening on just about anything, right? Is it a cable? Is it, you know, overhead? Anything along those lines? We really started realizing there was this whole new domain that if we couldn't master it quick, somebody else was, especially like nation state adversaries. So, uh, early 2000s all of a sudden blossomed, even though nobody knew what these names were, right? They were trying to figure out like, how do we stand up organizations that aren't really? Cause at that time, my MOS was a three series, right? It wasn't a one. It wasn't an operator.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  Right.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Uh, AFSC. And it kind of mimics, you know, MOSs and other ratings where we were looked at as support.

• 10:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  And so you can imagine, there was a lot of folks on the outside that actually had substantially better skills on the inside. However, there was pockets always from the beginning, like.

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• 12:35Speaker 02

  TV postgraduate school. They have always had amazing offensive cybersecurity talent and they kind of had both, like that 2,600 early hacking vibe.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  But definitely with the government espionage flair. So it's pretty cool.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  That's fascinating. Was, how did these commands, overall commands look at you? Because hacker at the time was a bad word, right? And so...

• 13:04Speaker 02

  I would call myself a hacker, but people kind of like shamed. There was no concept of ethical hacker. It was just like, oh, you know, immediately it's like, you know, some skinny dude in his basement with a hacker hoodie, right? That's what it invokes. It doesn't invoke military at all.

• 13:18Speaker 05

  Right, right. So like, how would, you know, this is a new technology, this new space that, you know, a bunch of old fuddies don't understand, you know, we're going to drop bombs or we're going to, you know, send tanks. And how are you guys selling this? There is a new domain that needs to...

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could you could imagine the human world has been vibrant since humans were humans, right? Just trying to be able to gather and all sudden this world that de-risks. Wait, you could gather intelligence from somebody completely remote. And remember, we've always been doing, you know, whether it's radio, just good old fashioned RF. So there was a lot of these parallel analogies that from my interpretation as a very young airman, I don't think I appreciated how many of those parallels that some of these real early, you know, early, sorry, late 90s, early 2000s officers that at that time, the military, right? If you think about the Air Force, they were run by pilots. The Navy admirals were commanding, you know, a fleet, right? And of course, you know, instead of regular

• 14:22Speaker 02

  legs or stuff like that in the army, you actually had folks that might have been tank commanders also now thrust into this brand new domain. And I just totally missed how far ahead some of these people were. But I'm willing to bet that like finances came into it. Do a really expensive human operation doing all this crazy stuff? Or put some geeks in the basement with some shady software and get it a lot cheaper at low risk? That had to been part of it. I don't know for certain, but it had to played into it.

• 14:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, that is code red mountain or like Mountain Dew and pizza or yeah, to get the job done. Or

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I definitely was that. I was the skinny nerd that give me pizza, get back code.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's funny.

• 15:03Jack Murphy?

  So it sounds like you started off your military career more on like the IT side, but then you got exposed to some of these other career fields. What was that sort of like as you, you know, progressed in your Air Force career?

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, my first pivot was not straight into cyber writing software for espionage. It was actually a mission security. So think about gathering like signals that would, you know, leak from those big old monitors, right? That would ride over top of cables. That type of stuff was a real big threat, right? Especially when we had, for instance, like embassies in other countries. So I got exposed to that. I got to do a lot of that work and a lot of stuff that was overhead related to, right? Think of like satellite things. But it wasn't really for me, the real cyber side of my career didn't really take off till probably. 2008, 2009, I happened to be deployed when, you know, that's now very much publicly talked

• 16:00Speaker 02

  about the buckshot Yankee incident, and I happened to be in theater. I was attached to third group, being just support, you know, I'm the furthest thing from an operator, but it was just kind of a wild time where all of a sudden these whole worlds collide, a very physical, everybody's in the AOR and the area of responsibility, and now all of a sudden cyber is being used to gather intelligence on like some of our highest, you know, sensitive assets.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  What was buckshot Yankee for, for the squares out there, like myself?

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you go read Wikipedia, we'll, we'll use that as our official source, the inside scoop. Buckshot Yankee is acclaimed nation-state actor, developed some software that rumor had it, got into not only systems in the military that were unclassified, but even to classified networks. As somebody who was there on ground, and one of the only offensive cyber guys on ground, it was just kind of a really cool moment, a luck, purely by luck, to, during the first days of this, to get to be able to do the forensics, and it kind of was some of the first truly tying what other adversaries could do to our war fighting capability and the importance of cyber, so.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  Was, was this when the whole USB controversy, like when they started taking away our USBs? Was that, that timeframe?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  So you're nailing it there. You're absolutely nailing. The USB drives themselves were definitely one of these things of like, where did they come from? The software, they called it Agent BTZ, is the malware name for any of the super nerds, but it's just a piece of software that when you put a USB or put a CD in a drive, it would auto run.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  Right.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  It would literally automatically start running, and next thing you know, bad stuff. And so that was a kind of wild time for the US military.

• 17:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I, you know, not to, like, whoever the, you know, nation-state actor was, but when you consider like all the SSC that was going on and people throwing, you know, taking CD-ROMs or USBs off targets and, you know, throwing them in, like, we were exposing ourselves to that stuff all the time, just from our everyday activities.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was it was it was life, right? There is a process, by the way, like when you go from these low systems to high, just like anything. You know, it's just like a clearing barrel. You got to be able to, you know, clear your gun. You got to be able to follow these processes to make sure you don't accidentally, you know, bring something nasty. But this is the first time that, for instance, people didn't think that maybe the clearing barrel wasn't enough. So to be able to find something that you're just doing your job and think about when you gather intelligence, like my deployments to Afghanistan, we're all, you know, A-team related, ODA work, gathering human intelligence. Human intelligence doesn't start classified. It starts unclassified, right? And then you bring it up to the systems appropriately.

• 18:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  And this threat actor just really seemed to understand how that system worked and how they could exploit it.

• 18:56Speaker 05

  So I'm curious because, you know, you you are you're an offensive guy. No, you're not an offensive guy.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  I would be an offensive, but also offensive, right?

• 19:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. But but you were, you know, so you're in this cyberspace before you even joined the military. You join the military, you get into sort of the IT track. Do you know, like, are you aware that sort of there is or isn't a cyber capability? You know how to get there? And how are you spending your evenings? Are you like sweating bullets every morning when you go into work going, boy, I hope nobody heard about this?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  So it was already in the IT world, like every day tech was already changing, right? Right. We were moving from these old Novell systems into early Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems. So I was already used to that grind of like every day something was different. But at this time, IT and cyber, what we call it now, were largely blended. Like, most folks wouldn't have called a cyber. It was this maturing. And if you got lucky that you were stationed at a place that only did offense. But my job at a time was just as much defense as it was offense. It was really odd. And then, of course, we got a lot better when some of this started increasing and nation states, right? Started really going after us. We had to get much better and mature because we could see that if not, we were going to be left in the dust.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  Right, right. No, essentially, because like the military is running like most mom and pop businesses right now, right? We need we need an IT guy to make sure our computers are secure.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. So at the some of the work, I was literally the IT guy unlocking accounts and stuff in the early like 2003, 2005 days. By 2007, 2008, I was usually only doing the upper end, but that's how quick it happened. Only in about three years, I would say my whole life changed.

• 20:46Speaker 05

  Were they, were they sort of, were they splitting that off? Were they making the, the commands? Were they making that distinction? Did they see that? That security was not IT?

• 20:58Speaker 02

  The career fields hadn't updated yet, but you could get to certain places that were like, I know it's acronym soup. Nobody likes that military stuff. But JTF GNO, right? The Joint Task Force for doing this started like huddling together some of these offensive minded. And the way I would actually describe it in a lot of ways, it was purely, you know, for those that follow US, it was Title 50, Intelligence and Espionage Gathering Activity. It wasn't Title 10 War Powers type stuff. This is still very, very early, let alone the modern world where it's our offense and support of defense. So you could imagine this timeframe, US doctrine, all on the unclassified side of the house,

• 21:40Speaker 02

  is all about just trying to figure out like, how do I enable espionage?

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• 23:56Speaker 05

  Well, that must have, I think that didn't go to Congress.

• 23:58Jack Murphy?

  You said you did some deployments overseas supporting SOF. I'd be interested to hear a bit more about, about that and like how this like IT security field kind of interfaces with that.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Yep. So for any of the other fans of silent professionals out there, they don't just exist in espionage or, you know, they exist in special forces, right? Human intelligence. And it turned out these A-teams were all about how do I gather intelligence? Right? The old school ways, local, building relationships, things like that. HA, humanitarian assistance. But they need a geek like me to keep some of the systems up, whether it's classified systems, being able to be able to keep the data. You could imagine for how do you covertly record? How do we make sure things aren't bugged? All of that stuff is normal parts of just any sort of espionage doctrine all the way back to the 50s. It's not unique, but there is definitely shortage.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  And so folks like me who are cyber warfare operators, completely different than special forces operators, got attached on the same teams and I was like super grateful to get that.

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Did they, did you basically have to teach them how to utilize you?

• 25:13Speaker 02

  I think in a way, in a lot of it, like when I first got there, the team was actually pretty clear, like reminding me, hey, you know, hey turd, keep the systems up, make sure the morale drive is running, but

• 25:24Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  You know, very similar though, you could imagine like their careers is often defined by their capabilities, which was identical to mine. And so in a lot of ways, I got lucky that my team treated me pretty darn fair. I won't say that there wasn't hazing, like we had an incident that involved diverting a drone one day. And I'll be darned if they didn't. Not only like, after this incident goes down, I get in, they tell me to pack my stuff. They have me fill out a, you know, incident report. I'm thinking I'm going to jail. I'm like crying, you know, filling this out. I get to the last page and it says, remember, you're not a special forces operator. You're an air force tech geek. Sign here puss.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  So these guys let me have it, even though, you know, I got to help them with a lot of great stuff. I was definitely though, still support. So that type of relationship was actually pretty cool. And for me, who'd always been very athletic, not the same style of athleticism, it was a really like kind of humbling experience to get to spend a couple of deployments with these guys.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  So in addition to like telling people what you can do, like, did you have to tell people what you couldn't do based on like misconcept? Like, like enhance a picture, enhance, enhance, but Yeah, exactly.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you could imagine all the TV shows and movies ruined it for, you know, folks that for instance are like, look, uh, you know, I blow things up. I'm a demo guy or you know, I'm the combat medic. Just the same way that people don't understand how transfusions do and don't work. They didn't understand some of the technical stuff. So like wifi hacking, I could do that. That would impress them. Other things, it's just like, yeah, I took this, this camera was on a flip phone or some Nokia on a Roshan network somewhere, enhance this. And I'm like, guys, there's It's not, you know, it's not Minority Report. There's not enhance, enhance, enhance. So you can imagine there was definitely some disappointment. I disappointed at times, guys.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, you can do stuff that's like literal magic to them and then they ask you for something to them that's basic. Hey, enhance this picture. It's like, there's nothing like.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Nothing to enhance.

• 27:32Speaker 05

  There's nothing to enhance. Yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  I like, I literally remember some surveillance stuff that we did that I, I soldered some kit that was very simple pinhole camera to like an existing like cable that was hidden away, very, very far away. And they thought that was magic. And then I'm letting them down on stuff that they felt that was so basic.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  Right.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  It's just a weird dichotomy.

• 27:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. So did, did you do, I mean, were you with them or did you do multiple trips with SF?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Multiple ODAs, but they were like, they would go and do like 12, 13 month rotations and I'd be in and out in like five. Uh, you know, by the time I could actually deploy, go back home and come back and the same team could still be in place. So it was, uh, it's kind of sad actually, if you think about it.

• 28:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. And how do you see like during this time where you're doing these deployments? Um, how do you see technology changing and how the military is or isn't embracing technology?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  So the teams were becoming more technical, like the 18 Echos, right? Who had comms roles. Our team actually also doubled as a team sniper, right? So he was very different than he could have like encrypted comms. And so you could imagine as I could take on some of those responsibilities. It allowed them to take their own specializations and focus on it. So I actually think in many ways it was, you know, I even like today at my current job, the best thing I can do is focus on the skills only I can do. And so this blending started happening in the late, like, you know, late aughts. Think of like 2008 to 2012. All of a sudden you had these geeks that were taking away some of the, I would call it mundane monotonous and allowing like

• 29:17Speaker 02

  real operators to do stuff that only they're trained on, right? And so that was, uh, I think kind of a true, like people use that word force multiplier lightly. This was an actual case where they're like, whoa. I have somebody now that can do this, can run this, is fit enough to do this, and then it enables, you know, an extra body because these, again, these teams are very small. So anyways, it was a cool difference because that from my first time, like even just on small deployments, think about like Tark weight stuff, we were modernizing IT systems, but they weren't impactful, not like this.

• 29:49Speaker 05

  Right, right. Yeah, you're watching people's IP addresses, their MAC addresses and they're going to porn sites, shutting them down.

• 29:56Jack Murphy?

  It's really, really cool that you got to see like the, the blending of these capabilities pretty early on.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. And again, right place, right time. And if you fast forward even just a couple of years later, by 2011, I had left active duty and I started National Guard time. So the typical one week in a month, two weeks a year, and that led me at Fort Meade. And that time, no joke, it within two years, you had going from these type of incidents to things that were like, you know, people publicly claimed, you know, the US and Israel were related to like Stuxnet. So it's such a big difference where you're going from four years earlier scared of like bad USBs to now all of a sudden a world supposedly some nation state actor made some centrifuges spin extra fast to prevent enrichment of uranium. Like that is a crazy difference in four years.

• 30:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. Were there things during this sort of blossoming, were there things that like you just wanted to jump on somebody's desk and tell that, like tell the military that you're missing this, like you, or the government in general that you're not paying enough attention to this particular thing?

• 31:02Speaker 02

  So 2012 was the first time I actually thought, because we have so many flyers running some of these, you know, what a lot of people, we, we call them wings, right? Air Force nonsense. But um, when you have some of these flyers making policy decisions, I would say 60, 70, 80% of them just couldn't get the force multiplier. But there was a rare 20, 30% that kind of at this time had laid the groundwork to create, you could imagine the beginnings of US Cyber Command. Um, some of even the separation because at this time, like NSA is doing what they can do to help. But NSA's mission is foreign adversaries abroad for espionage. And so you

• 31:44Speaker 02

  could imagine in the US, we're watching all the other nation state actors, they're changing their techniques, they're using schools for espionage, they're using commercial entities. So in many ways, like we were both ahead. And learning at the same time everybody else was. So it was, again, I can't tell you like how lucky I am at like right place, right time for all of this stuff to change.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  So you you joined the guard, which exposes you to me. What's your first impression when you like? When you're there?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  So I I wasn't a guard guy. I had deployed with.

• 32:18Speaker 05

  Okay, oh, sorry about that. Okay.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, you were right. But I wasn't at this time. Think about it. I wasn't really a National Guard guy.

• 32:24Speaker 05

  Right.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  I was in the National Guard, but I didn't know what that meant.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Right.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  I thought at this time, guard were kind of like, you know, hey, you'd have like sixty five year old tech sergeants, right? E sixes for us, right? And I thought, oh, man, this isn't the tip of the spear. But it turned out the National Guard and a little bit of the reserves, but really on the National Guard side of the house realized there was gonna be, they're not talking about the word hemorrhage. They called it stem ridge. All the science, technology, engineering and math folks doing cryptography, advanced, for instance, offensive cyber operations, even defense. They were racing to go to support, you know, remember, Google got mass hacked in two thousand nine. So even the industry is now dropping major dollars. I'm talking like four hundred, five hundred thousand dollar salaries a year.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  And this talent was bleeding, but it turned out the National Guard realized this was gonna happen. And our whole goal was let me retain the best talent in the world. So even if we can't have them full time, how do we have that reserve capacity? And it was brilliant. I didn't even know that this was going down and it didn't become apparent to me for probably two or three years later that some good flyers realized this was gonna happen. I guess there's some parallels with flyers. This happened, you know, at the drawdown of like Vietnam. We didn't necessarily have for a while the flying talent to be able to do other air superiority. And it turns out those same type of flyers realized this was gonna happen in cyber. And again, I just happened to be part of the right unit that was trying to be able to not only like retain talent,

• 33:58Speaker 02

  but in case there was ever like a surge capacity, we could step up and support. So you could imagine for me, my perception of the National Guard went from Old, kinda unfit, you know, uh, you know, airmen to all of a sudden like, whoa. It turned out the National Guard actually had in many cases, better talent than active duty had.

• 34:20Speaker 05

  Were they, were they, was there any process at that time in formalizing training and divulging partnership with like SANS? Or any, you know, the, any of the big organizations, were they sending you to Black Hat? Like, how were they, you know, working on your professional skills and things like that? Or how were they supporting that?

• 34:40Speaker 02

  So you could imagine when this hemorrhaging or stammeraging started happening. Everybody started realizing, we're gonna start losing to commercial. They weren't so worried about overseas, they weren't worrying about national threats, although there was some of that. You know, if you think about human, there's always a worry, somebody's gonna go start, you know, mercenary types.

• 34:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  That wasn't really a concern at this time, but you could imagine they're sitting there going, if we can't retain, how do we build this cadre? And it turns out, there's a couple epicenters, right? In the DC area, you look like the National Guard had a handful of units that were trying to retain. But they also were smart enough to realize if we don't set up some sort of commercial training, we are not gonna be able to backfill. It was a pipeline problem.

• 35:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  I mean, still to this day, 2025, I have to build more talent than I can hire.

• 35:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Because they're still that rare. So, yeah, companies like SANS and even other like, uh, research institutes, think about the national labs, had to step up and help grow people.

• 35:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then what, what was the relationship with the government side of this? Whether it's military or NSA or whoever? And, you know, the, the, the kids or the people who are anti the man or whatever, but, but still doing this stuff. You know, and like, you know, I think DEFCON is a funny example, you know, where guys are always like trying to point, you know, pick the Fed and, you know, stuff like that.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Spot the Fed, right?

• 36:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So like, what was that really relationship like? And how has that developed over time?

• 36:16Speaker 02

  So for a guy like me, who I've been going to DEF CON since, I don't, early 2000s. Every year showing up, or Black Hat, I had done presentations. There was always this irony that those, you know, you know, that current statement that the, my Gen Z kids will say, if you know, you know.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  All of us that were sometimes involved in some of these hacking events by kind of like late aughts, you know, 2005, 2007, 2010. A lot of people realized SPOT the Fed was ironic because a lot of people organizing had now become in support of some of the federal side. So there was always this irony of, you know, catch the actual active agent. And I'll, I'll be honest, a lot of people wanted to pick up FBI. There's a very big difference between NSA, who is very much a mission that is going after non-US citizens.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  FBI, that's looking at US citizens, and I won't lie, it wasn't even, it's not a lie to say there wasn't a schism between. Some folks were like, fuck you, stay out of my, you know, US citizens. And so even sometimes some of the, you know, IC guys, or maybe SPOT and the more field agent type guys of like, you know, get out of my, uh, my corner.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  I know everybody was feds.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, take your 5'11s and your polo shirt and get out of here. Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 37:34Speaker 05

  Yeah. But, but that is true because the IC is the IC and the FBI is the man. Like, you know.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  People don't realize that, but you're, you're hitting a culture thing that there will be more books on this. Like, I think, uh, I can't remember that politician, he was out of maybe Texas, but people found out he was an early hacker. I'm, I'm spacing on his name. And, uh, it blew some people's minds that some of these people that didn't seem like they could be from the hacker culture were actually the same guys on bulletin boards and, you know, uh, you know, IRC and stuff like that. But had now held like actual governor or, sorry, that's not correct, congressman positions. So it was a weird time at the, you know, kind of 2010 period where you're the man, but not the man.

• 38:19Speaker 05

  Right, right. But, but, but we're also looking at a time from the time you started when you were a kid, uh, up until this time. You know, there wasn't hack the box, there wasn't, there, there. I'm pretty sure that people who were good at offensive stuff, at the offensive side of the house at some time may have, you know, pushed up against the legal system.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  There is definitely gray. And what's weird is a lot of people don't realize the polygraph is not necessarily to find out who's breaking the laws. It's to figure out who has integrity. And so I remember people that I knew flat out had like done not crazy hard drugs, but admitted they had done drugs and made it through polygraphs just fine. Or some shady level of like now even looking back, there's nothing that I think that as long as I was honest on my polygraph, if it actually asked me about this question.

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• 40:46Speaker 02

  I don't think anything would have precluded me from service. It wasn't, they're not looking for somebody that have you broken a law or do you, you know, dip into the gray? They're making sure that when they ask you, they know you're gonna be honest and integrity is worth a hell of a lot more than occasional bad judgment.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  I think the actual US government had to change their mind a little bit.

• 41:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  I mean, I've been tiptoeing this line my whole career. You cannot, you know, you have to obey laws, period.

• 41:14Speaker 05

  Right.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  You know, the intelligence communities, you obey laws. If you're, you know, forward deployed, uh, you know, soldier, airman, marine, you know, sailor, you obey the laws. But there's always this level of gray that I noticed that the offensive cyber world, you know, they're even to this day, some people will say, ah, I use my offense in support of defense. And somewhere there's a little lit level of understanding, just don't go too far, right?

• 41:41Speaker 05

  Right. But, but in order, like I said, before all these, you know, cool little sites, you can go on and learn this stuff.

• 41:51Speaker 05

  You know, when you're 13 or 14,

• 41:56Speaker 05

  and there are, there aren't sites like Hack the Box or whatever, uh, you know, or pen testing sites or whatever. Like, how do you learn how to hack into a network?

• 42:06Speaker 02

  You know, for me, it was these capture the flag competitions, you know, they weren't, um, physical capture the flag like the sports game. They were the hack into other systems. And it turned out there was a lot of these. They were actually hack the box and a lot of these modern training systems started from kind of war games type events. And I don't even think people knew, like the year that, you know, uh, for those that don't know what I'm talking about, these capture the flags. Think of, um, possibly 15 to 20, eight-person teams of stinky pasty nerds, creating exploits and hacking each other to steal data. That's they're stealing the flag.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  They then submit the flag, bring it back to base and they get a point. That's kind of how this worked and these competitions were kind of the breeding grounds that at one time I remember playing capture the flag at DEF CON where all the nerds get together in Vegas every year that I remember looking and going nation state, nation state, US school that probably supports offensive cyber operations, defense contractor, we were a team that were just as guilty. A lot of us were five eyes, right?

• 43:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  US and some of our closest allies. And it was wild. This was almost like, you know, you can't train publicly. So the next best thing you could do is make a game out of it. And that's kind of what happened for, I would say even still to this date, there's capture the flag runs every year at DEF CON.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  So there was capture the flag events like as young for you as young as like 17? I thought that was a more recent type of thing.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  So back then they were called crack me's or reverse me's. So people would make fake software to teach reverse engineering. So they would make like a fake software that had like a fake digital rights or like key code that you had to pay for. And so they would actually teach you and that's what I grew up on was

• 43:59Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  learning how to reverse engineer. So I could get free software back to my broke days.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  But that's how it started. People then started training by creating fake software and fake activations and giving these tutorials, toots is what they were called, right? And you would actually use these tutorials to reverse engineer and that turned into a whole game. So you're right. It didn't just go straight from the IRC channels into this full on war games.

• 44:24Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  There was these kind of minor trainings that kept getting bigger.

• 44:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  And bigger, all the way to hundreds person events, right?

• 44:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:32Jack Murphy?

  So let's jump into, you know, you're in the National Guard and now you it sounded like at a certain point, you make the jump over to the three letter side of the house or actually have a foot in both. Explain to us a little bit about like how that comes about and how that works.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So a lot of my life, you can tell, is still kind of recovering from. You know, it's hard growing up broke, right? And so you turn to, you know, you make decisions based on money and what, you know, gives fun. And I realized as a, you know, an E6, I was not going to have the stability for my family at this time. I have two kids. Mm hmm. Um, you know, I had my first one at 18 years old. So you can imagine like a little bit of my psyche of trying to learn while raising kids while being a kid. Mm hmm. And I needed that. So I'm now six, seven, eight years into the military and I decide I'm going to become a contractor. And so I'm using my skills full time at NSA. Mm hmm. As a contractor for most of my time.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  And that just means I can do most of the stuff that a government civilian can do. But there is some rules that they wouldn't let me do. And at this time, my job turned into creating, um, they called it computer network operations. It's creating these things called implants that gather software. If you were on the receiving end of an implant, you'd call it malware. So that was my job at night or sorry, during the day. I'm creating malware professionally to support intelligence gathering. And one week in a month, two weeks a year, I'm using those cyber capabilities to actually gather intelligence or to support offensive cyber operations.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  That's pretty interesting. So I mean, literally dual headed in a sense. I remember some meetings where, again, you're limited as a contractor. You're getting paid better, so you kind of like it. But with me having both feet in this world, there were times where I would actually have to remove myself because it wasn't appropriate being a contractor. And there were some times I'd have to literally flip my badge to have the right badge color and step in and say, I want to tell you this on behalf of me in this role. I'm no longer a contractor, Kyle, but this is how we're going to use this for not espionage, but attack. Computer network attack. And that was a real different role that I could actually use my National Guard time to often now benefit people who were only able to do espionage.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  So if I won't bore the audience with like all the laws, but there's a big difference between Title 50 espionage and Title 10, which allows you to truly do attack, deny, degrade. Yeah, destroy. They didn't use deface, it was destroy, disrupt. But that type of actual effects. And I will tell you, being able to have both badges, um, it was a, again, I used this word earlier. Force multiplier, seeking these opportunities to use my experience and again, right place, right time, super thing.

• 47:22Jack Murphy?

  Well, you spoke a little bit earlier about like these blended teams and blending these capabilities. And I mean, you continue doing that. I mean, do you think that is that something that this line of work is sort of institutionalized or is it still sort of like a stovepipe there?

• 47:37Speaker 02

  I think it's getting better. This is the stuff that like, if you hear people in the like deployments in the AOR saying, we're going to use total forces. That means usually they're secure in the sky, right? With air power. They're maybe jamming the signals with electronic warfare. They've got human intelligence on the ground. They've got infantry pushing up, you know, doing the hard work and then all the support that goes into it. When you use total force, we've known that using all domain warfare is very powerful if you can coordinate it. At this time, people are trying to figure out not only how to, you know, add cyber to that story. They're trying to figure out, oh my gosh, even within cyber, there's all these different domains, right? It's an inch deep and a mile wide of skillsets. So I'll

• 48:20Speaker 02

  tell you by this time, probably 2013, 2015, they're just starting to figure out what are all the blended skillsets? And they're learning this by accident, right? The civilian world, by the way, starts calling this purple teaming. What they mean is blue teaming was always defense. Red teaming was always aggression, assessing. And they start realizing you can use your red team offense to improve your blue team defense and vice versa. You can use your offense to deliver effects. So you never have to defend. So this world all of a sudden is completely learning. The whole thing is changing and it's kind of like what we're seeing right now in Ukraine where warfare is completely changed to drones, autonomous systems. This same effect was going down.

• 49:06Jack Murphy?

  Just out of curiosity, if you can answer in a roundabout way even, how many different tools do you think you used on a daily basis when you went into work?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  I don't want to be cliche, but it was definitely maybe sometime in a day, it might be a half dozen to a dozen, but in a month, it could be 100. It was really the, the old school, you know, folks that were lucky enough like me to grow up and learn. Remember those early computer programming languages like assembly? And then blend them with modern programming languages like, uh, you know, Python and then stuff in between like CNC plus plus. There wasn't many of us who could do this. So you could imagine this was a time where they were really trying to do everything they could, whether it was retaining people on the active duty side

• 49:58Speaker 02

  or National Guard side, because once you lose this to the tech world, getting them back into these spaces was pretty hard. So I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It was a cluster for a really long time. And it's definitely maturing now. It's maturing to the level that some of these teams not only understand what manpower needs to look like, they can forecast it, they can grow it and they know. But again, this is still mid 2015, 2013, and this stuff isn't figured out yet.

• 50:27Speaker 05

  Can you, can you tell us a little bit? And I don't want to get into anything too sensitive. So I'll say like, if we think of, you know, you mentioned espionage and attack. And if we think of espionage as intelligence collection, right? That we're collecting information and you know, and a lot of times there's probably, I imagine is the attack and espionage often shares similar entry points, right?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's a fancy word, unclassified word, but it's talking about the preparation of an environment, right? Think about the difference between when you deliver an effect. Oh, let's make up one in this room. Maybe the light that's above my hair, right? Give me this fancy hair light. The difference of me being able to turn that on and off is often like flipping a switch. Right. However, this is the time that all of a sudden we start realizing our legal frameworks. It's all about following laws, period. I know there's a lot of disinformation. There's a lot of BS, especially post Snowden. But the most law-abiding organizations I've ever worked at, military, NSA, plenty of examples of where it didn't happen. But it's kind of crazy. And where I'm going with this is you started learning our laws might not have let us prepare to get in. Right.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Just in case you have to flip that switch. So I'm telling you, when you start getting into this time period, 2015, 2017, we're realizing things have to change quick because our adversaries are not hung up on laws. Right, yeah. And if you think about people that aren't nation-state, let's start talking about the emergence of cybercrime. They give no shits about what the laws are. They are just moving faster than anybody to innovate. So we actually got caught up in a world in the US for a little while that the real heroes were actually the policy wonks. The lawyers, the legal folks actually realizing that if we're going to obey the laws, we need to make sure the laws not only protect US citizens' rights, we have to be able to handle all the murky situations.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  Right. What if a US citizen goes abroad and you accidentally do something and collect? How do you like all this stuff? Because no offense, like my mom is my best, you know, supporter. She's also the first tinfoil hatter who's like, are you listening to my calls? And I'm like, mom, I no cares what you're talking about in your calls. Right. But that crap can happen by accident. So you could imagine lawyers had to allow us to get in place, gather intelligence, so you don't have this 9/11 event where you had the info but couldn't action it. And so this time period, again, we as the US are still trying to make sure we follow laws. But we can't get caught flat-footed, right? We are a nation-state power that stays in power by projecting power. Right.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  And if we hamstring ourselves by being perfect. You can sometimes let perfect be the enemy of good and good enough sometimes gets, you know, get shit done.

• 53:16Jack Murphy?

  There was that example just a couple of years ago. If you remember Tucker Carlson making a big stink about how somebody illegally leaked to him that he had been caught up in an intercept. It turns out, yes, he was contacting the Russian government and talking to them. So if you do that, no shit, you're gonna get, your comms are gonna get intercepted.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  And what's wild, and this is some of the stuff that I think many government agencies realize that we were caught flat footed during the Snowden era because there was a lot of things that people just zip their lips, right? No such agency type world where we weren't gonna talk about this stuff. And what it did is when you have the absence of a narrative, people will be more than happy to fill it in for you. And so this is the stuff that, to be honest, the armed services, I would generally say gets it done. We don't overclassify. We have a mission and that's because I think we realize and we cherish loss of life. But when you work in this world where it's all secrets and it takes it away from loss of

• 54:17Speaker 02

  life, you sometimes let some of this perfection get in the way. And I'll tell you, like, nobody wants to collect, but I'll be darned, you'll find cases of people abusing, just like, think about any employee. You probably hired somebody that seemed legit when you hired them. They turn out to be a turd. This stuff happens.

• 54:35Jack Murphy?

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• 55:02Jack Murphy?

  And you can change the combination, by the way. So you have these actuators on the side. And in this case, for demonstration purposes, the code is to hold down the index finger and pointer finger and then come over and there's a thumb. Hit that and it opens up. So that's the code. And this thing is proudly made in the U.S. of A. So they keep the quality very high. It's also TSA compliant, so you can throw this in a bag and travel with it. And StopBox also offers a range of other innovative products, including their vehicle safe, chamber lock, and other essential gear designed to keep you prepared and protected wherever you are. For a limited time only, our listeners are getting a crazy deal.

• 55:45Jack Murphy?

  Not only do you get 10% off your entire order when you use the code HOUSE at StopBoxUSA.com, but they are also giving you a buy one, get one free for their StopBox Pro. That's 10% off and a free StopBox Pro when you use the code HOUSE at StopBoxUSA.com. Discover a better way to balance security and readiness with StopBox. I think he's touched on something that's like really interesting, I think, especially around like the Snowden period. Because there really was not a public interface between NSA and the public. I'm sure they had a public affairs office, no offense.

• 56:25Speaker 05

  But it was the House of Glass, right? I mean, you know, see no evils.

• 56:29Jack Murphy?

  So when that scandal broke, it was a little bit different, I think, than the military because people can see their soldiers, they can hear their soldiers, they can get to know them a little bit, and it kind of takes away the mystery of it. Whereas with the NSA, we can, if it's a black box, we can project all sorts of notorious things upon what you're actually doing.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, no offense, when somebody doesn't tell me how something works. I have survived by being very pessimistic, right?

• 56:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  As humans evolved, right? Bad stuff outside of the cave. And if you make something seem shady in the dark, I'm not going to assume positivity happens in the dark, right?

• 57:08Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  That's literally how we evolved as a species. So I can't wait. If you do the math right, you've got some of the Snowden era type stuff, 2010 to 2015. Usually US has a lot of like declassification things that happen in 25 years for some of this. I cannot wait to fast forward to, you know, our equivalent of 2040, when some of these stories start to become declassified. Maybe governments and officials declassify these things early. And tell the real story of how some of this stuff happened. Because I will say, remember that word stemrage I used? If we thought it was bad in this kind of 2010, when you don't give somebody a voice and you don't defend somebody who's working hard every day, I'll just go take Google's $500,000 a year.

• 57:52Speaker 05

  Right.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Thanks, because my civilian pay at $96,000 a year ain't cutting it, right?

• 57:57Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah, and you know, and both the CIA and the NSA have this problem of not, you know, they don't, they'll never talk about their victories. They'll never talk about their victories. They'll never, you know, air out like things that they've accomplished. But when they, when somebody does go rogue or somebody does something bad or an op fails, you hear about that. So it's easy to see these shady evil organizations that are secretly, you know, pulling strings all over the world.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'll tell you, it's what's weird is you work at a spy agency for about 13 years and now I appreciate my privacy and transparency more than I've ever appreciated.

• 58:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  But there's also this like, again, this level of like, the black and white is always easy. It's the gray where things get dicey.

• 58:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  It's that I think about like AI and autonomous cars these days. Do I go and, you know, make the decision right? Do I take a right and run over three or four people? Or do I take a left and run over one person? How do you make that decision and value life? And it could be, you know, one child or three 90-year-old people, all this logic. And the reason I'm giving this example is National security is not won in the black and white. It's won on interpreting the gray and trying your best during a crappy situation to make the best decision and not regret it for the rest of your short life.

• 59:24Jack Murphy?

  Right. So back to the, the notion of like lifting the veil or clearing the fog a little bit. I'd love to ask you, since you were there for a hot minute. I think a lot of people, including myself, don't really understand, like, what is the culture of the NSA? What is it like to actually work there? Who are your colleagues, the type of people that you're working around?

• 59:44Speaker 02

  So, I mean, this is the fun stuff about these big agencies, right? And we haven't even talked, people forget that the US has like, I don't know, what is it? 16, 18 different intelligence agencies, right?

• 59:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Even Treasury has like some type, you know, of work. But the part that I'm getting at is that the big ones, you get the whole spectrum, right? You get some people that are top level operators and you get some people at NSA who are janitors, right? They, they'll go out and tout and, you know, stolen valor and everything else about how cool they were at NSA. But it's like, you weren't in the thick of it. And so you can imagine, you get all shapes, just like in life, just like any type of, you know, career. But the one thing that seemed to drive everybody together was understanding that like, if you mess up, the things that we appreciate, right? True freedom, true just being good to people. Screw politics and how you lean. Like, I don't care which way you lean, people love the smell of a neighbor's good smelling barbecue.

• 1:00:37Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  We also hate paying taxes, I hate getting a red light ticket. We all share way more that like unites us than divides us. And I would actually describe, that was the era that I got to grow up in the intelligence community. Didn't matter whether it was political, it was just, oh my gosh, democracy is fragile. People forget the US is only a couple hundred years old. Like, we are a footnote. Like, I remember the first place that I lived in England in my duty station. The house that I lived in was 100 years older than the US. That's a perplexing thing. And I think people forget, like, if you don't just unite behind the like, you know, I'm not talking about DEI stuff, but like belonging, just caring around a mission that this thing that we love, which is freedom could go away, like, it'll disappear. And so I liked it.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  I really was, felt good. And all the different things that outside of work divided people at work, it was just like, mission, mission, mission, get shit done.

• 1:01:32Jack Murphy?

  I've heard, well, first off, I've heard stories about D and D games down in the cafeteria.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Oh, so you you've done some digging here. And then the question is what cafeteria, right?

• 1:01:44Jack Murphy?

  I don't know.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Ops two has a different cafeteria than R and E. So this is for anybody who's been in the buildings knows that there's a different level of geek, right? Are you the neck beard geek?

• 1:01:56Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  That does math?

• 1:01:57Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Or are you more of like the modern cyber? Like, there's different levels of, you know, geek versus nerd. So but you are right. It's a pretty broad spectrum from your type A personalities. I used to be a lot quieter. Turns out you can't be a very good CEO if you can't story tell. I had to learn that skill. And so what I'm talking about is all walks of life, all race, all nationality, spicy to very timid. And it turns out some of the people that you expect, like, some of the biggest badasses I ever worked with, I can think of, I only had probably two or three women coworkers. But I think they had like something to prove, like they really had their whole career to prove. So some of the most competent people I worked with were actually like hardcore math and computer science women. And that was sometimes intimidating.

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• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  You don't have that in the physical, like, you know, if you think of like operator life, you guys are going to be able to drag somebody heavier most of the time, 90% of the time, just because of like physicality. It's a little intimidating when you have someone five foot two crush your soul because they're just that much better because this is about mental mind power and not the physicality that like testosterone and stuff separates. So I'll tell you, it was a cool place to even be humbled real fricking quick because I have a cool resume. I will tell you, I still only, you know, fit in probably the top 80%. There's about another 20% who could wreck me. They probably can't communicate the same way I can.

• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  But from skill to skill, they'll wreck me.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

  Right. And, you know, and that's, I think that is one of the interesting things about, you know, like in Ranger Battalion, they should say there are smart Rangers and there are strong Rangers, right? So, you know, the, this idea. And it's interesting that in, in this cyber world and this, you know, that, like you say, there's, there's this percent that they, their, their ability to interact with other humans, like

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  It's limited.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  Like it's, it's best if they have like a translator a lot of times, probably, right? Somebody who gets what they're saying and, you know, gets this.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Being a true nerd, we used to call it a middleware. That a middle layer that like, okay, people that need to understand what they're talking and a translation layer between, you know, geek to chic, right? You sometimes need that.

• 1:05:44Speaker 05

  But, but you know, the, the idea that there is this place in our government's security structure for these very brilliant people who, again,

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  May not, you know, be great at dealing with people, but they're really good at their job.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  And they care, which is funny. Like, it's so weird when you hear about like, I'm not a big polarizing fan of anything. Um, and the reason for it is there's always something bigger. There's a bigger mission.

• 1:06:11Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  I think that's a dope place, though, when you're like, whoa, this person that I probably on the outside would never go like, drink beers with or whatever, is literally in the same trenches with me, fighting the same war. It's a, again, coming from military that had deployment skills, coming into the intelligence community where it comes in all shapes and forms. It was like both, I said earlier, humbling, but also kind of like, um, it definitely helped me be a better dad to understand like kids come in all shapes and forms as well. And it made me maybe a little bit more appreciative of like, you better watch out because somebody, for instance, that might not, you know, be able to take me in a game of beer pong, or be able to run sprints with me, might just run me under the, the ground because their brain is like a 10 pound brain.

• 1:06:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  They'll turn your lights off at night.

• 1:07:00Jack Murphy?

  I've met a few of those, those 500 pound brains. And yeah, it's interesting you, you put it like that, um, because I, I thank God that there are these people out there who are so much smarter than I am. But they're also super patriotic, like they're on our side. I'm like, thank God for that.

• 1:07:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. What, what is, you know, could you mention this, this idea of this, this evolution into the, this attack mentality? And, and I'm sure that there are people who were like, well, if we have the espionage, if we have the placement, why are we gonna, why are we gonna attack and let them know we have the placement? But, but then there are other people probably like, hey, like.

• 1:07:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, and espionage, there's that whole thing of like, then they'll know that we know that they know that we.

• 1:07:45Speaker 05

  Right. Like, like, what are the pros and cons of attack?

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, David, one of the best cases I remember, and this was again, humbling, and it was more human actually than cyber, but it's the same mentality. I remember us having intel. That was IED related, you know, roadside bomb type scenario. And exposing the roadside bomb that could save, not necessarily US, but maybe like it could be second, third party ally, definitely civilians. And if you gave that up, could prevent us from, you know, at the time it was always bin Laden related.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  That math is like, it's like, I don't know, like today, I don't have, I've been really lucky not to have any form of PTSD. But the closest thing that I had was that type of scenario where you're literally measuring trade offs and whose life is more valuable. And I'll tell you, it also like, when you create attack tools that you were talking about, this new world. I remember the first person, the first time somebody said, okay, I appreciate you doing your work with the espionage. You don't have to create an uninstaller. And I thought, I have to uninstall my malware, right? And they said, no, don't worry, it's going to be kinetically uninstalled. That's a moment that humbled the shit out of me.

• 1:09:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Cause you starting to realize that, oh, because of me doing my job, just like anywhere else, bombs on bad guys get dropped. It's kind of similar to like, you know, the folks in Las Vegas that are flying drones, right? That still get PTSD, even though they're thousands of miles away from any sort of battlefield in combat. And I didn't have anything like that, but I remember those moments that I thought, oh, I didn't gather the intelligence and people blew up that day. Like, that's also like a really-

• 1:09:33Jack Murphy?

  That's, that's the analyst PTSD that those folks get.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:37Jack Murphy?

  Why, why didn't I see that?

• 1:09:38Speaker 05

  Well, and it's like, it's like when you have, you know, when you have a low level, uh, you know, you, you have this, you've identified this low level AQ guy. And you're like, all right, if we roll him up, we lose access to anything he has. But if we leave him out there, he might kill innocent people and it's that dilemma.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  And I don't think, I mean, I really don't think enough actually gets talked about that because I think in the movies, right, you watch any Bourne Identity type. You just think that it's go, go, go. But like, people don't realize there's a lot of like calculated risk. And even worse than the calculated risk, sometimes you just have to make a decision very quick and hope that when you're not in the black or in the white, those are easy decisions. You later have to hope you got it right in this like semi dark shade of gray. I just, I again, I think that some of the better side of stories that will come out like, you know, growing up, I idolized the Black Hawk Down stories and the things that were very physical. I was a big fan of like Platoon, right? The, you know, the military stories that were all, you know, all testosterone.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  And I think the stories that probably need to come out, especially as we're starting to realize like mental health directly has a relation to like people's peak performance.

• 1:10:52Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  I don't think people normalize these things well enough. I don't think that we normalize like how much goes down, like you called it the analyst trauma, right? But even just things in, in, in business, right? People forget there's like real good humans behind these things. Then go home and have to like smile to their family because it's no such agency and like, how was work? I was good.

• 1:11:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Speaking of that, um, you know, I know you, you had mentioned to us before the show, I think that you put some things through public review and so on to make sure they're

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Jack Murphy?

  good to go. Are there any like war stories from NSA that you're allowed to tell?

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  I will tell you some of the best NSA stories that, you know, the thing about NSA, right? Is there's a lot that can make it through pre-publication. It's usually how was it collected? Who was it collected by? And what the overall measurable effect? And it turns out some of the moments like, I'll tell you like NSA stories, we were so compartmented. People don't realize how compartmented truly tailored operations are. I would like my co-founders, all three of us worked at NSA together. I remember we were all on different access programs. None of us knew what we did. And I remember a moment, I still to this day don't know if it's classified, unclassified, just completely happenstance. But all three of my co-founders and I are sitting at a bar, we're BSing and we look

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  and it has like a country that has a nationwide internet outage. And all three of us look at each other, trying to see if anybody will give a

• 1:12:21Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Nobody breaks anything. And to this day, I still don't know, did like some cable come unplugged? Did they have a power outage? Or was this an accidental like intelligence gathering operation that took down like a core router? I still don't know to these days.

• 1:12:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  So I think those are the best stories of like, not what you did, but people don't realize to truly protect secrets. You need to keep small amounts of people knowing them. And the downfall of that is I, my best friends in life, I still don't know to this day, they could have been directly responsible or just as clueless as I. And I think those are probably the best stories that maybe when 40, 50 years gets done and people start declassifying, we'll go back and read these things. But I think that's actually the camaraderie that I love is the sometimes not knowing.

• 1:13:09Jack Murphy?

  These are, these, these are like saps that like 30 people in the entire world are read on to.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  All special, you know, all the work that we did were special access programs. So not just only you're in a skiff, not just your top secret, but they are so limited. I mean, we sometimes like, if anybody's done the research on what an ODA is, or an A-team in the special forces world, you're talking 12 sometime, you know, 12 person teams that subdivide into six person teams. I was on programs where sometimes it was six people.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  That's intense when you like, you know, I even think to this day of like, how do these stories, will they ever get told? Like, what if people pass?

• 1:13:47Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  I'm not saying all stories need to be told, but I think nowadays there's a lot of maybe even over classification that Yeah. I learned a lot from what we used to do with like espionage in Vietnam. And even during like Desert Storm, Desert Shield. And I don't know if those stories will be told fast forward in 25 years, because sometimes they're so limited and so targeted. The people just might not be around to tell them.

• 1:14:12Jack Murphy?

  Do you think that leads to another type of stress? We talked about it a little bit, but I I've kind of noticed on the military side of things. When you have these saps, like you mentioned, only six people on the program. There's only six people in the entire world that can do that very important job. One of them gets sick, one of them goes to, you know, his wife is having a baby. Then you're even more shorthanded. I mean, does that lead to a different type of like stress like and burnout really is what I'm getting at?

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think these type of things like you're just asking people to do unnatural things, right? If you, you know, think about a sports team, right? Any, we just had the Super Bowl in the U.S. not long ago, right? For NFL football, American football. There's always two or three strings of, you know, quarterbacks, receivers. When you don't have that, not only do you have to have like that depth to be able to still get the mission done. It's just asking a lot. I actually think some of my most unhealthy work life balance was during these times where I just now look at it, you know, my company's now 500 people. I pride not having tiny, you know, people who can't do it. I call it the bus factor, right?

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  How many people at my company can get hit and the mission still gets going, you know, run over by the bus?

• 1:15:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  And I actually think in some of these places that we were so small, we didn't even know we were creating stress because we were having to do the jobs of not just one, but like, oh, if this falls, I better be able to do at least 60, 80% of that. So the mission still gets done. So I don't think I've ever heard anybody publicly talk about that, but I bet that happens. I know I felt it. Overextended is what I felt.

• 1:15:49Jack Murphy?

  You know, the the other thing in addition to that, because you've talked about post traumatic stress and you've talked about the camaraderie. But in addition to that is that, you know, our our friends, the camaraderie that we build,

• 1:16:04Jack Murphy?

  those ties that bind us, when you walk out of that sat, when you get read off.

• 1:16:11Speaker 05

  You lose something with those friends. Like you can still hang out, you can still barbecue, but you know, you're not gonna, there, there are, there are limits now. There's, there's, there's a barrier. And when you leave, especially when you leave a service, whether it's the military, the intelligence community, whatever, and you're out in this world where there's not that purpose, um, and the post-traumatic stress, or the operator syndrome and all this stuff. And now you're also isolated and you can't even really be that close to people who are your best friends. I used to be close to them, but there's, but those, those walls go up. Once you leave, you're gone.

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  So my co-founder Chris, right? He was Navy. Don't judge him. Um, we now have these moments that we talk about this. We're like, why did we end up creating Huntress? And now that we're 10 years in, you know, hindsight's always 2020. The amount of places that we were like, look, we created a place that gave us the same mission and the same fulfillment that we had. And so people are now asked, like the finance people are like, oh, you got a big company. You've done these things, but they don't realize the most of the motivations. There were some very altruistic reasons, but there were some also very selfish reasons that I just had to get back into the mission.

• 1:17:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  It's almost like, um, I bet there's some sort of like dopamine hit that comes that you're addicted to. And I remember even going like, there's a couple of these like local like bars and watering holes not far from NSA. That you go and you catch up with your friends and you're all red out now. And there's a little bit of a look, you know, nobody's going to disclose classified, but you're kind of, you look at each other and you're like, okay, I can vibe you because we can, you know, we're speaking at a level that's, you know, non-verbal, right? Non-physical. But you know, you, you kind of just, you, you got that gut feeling. You're like, okay, I can stay connected. But when I jumped into the civilian world, I felt probably as isolated and purposeless as I did.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  And so, and what's, I'm lucky. Like I've always had some sort of sexy flair. I got early cyber, special forces. I don't know how the people, like a lot of the operators will call, you know, the regular army folks legs, right? But those folks there are the folks that didn't get that sex appeal. They didn't get the intel. They didn't get it. I actually think about them a lot of what happens when you didn't have that extra high that made all this worth it? And you just were serving a mission as best as you could? And now you definitely don't have it because you don't like for me, when I have my high highs and then low lows, I can always go back and think, ah, that roller coaster ride was great.

• 1:18:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  But what if everything was just mediocre? And then you leave the service and now you're low? You don't have these moments to reflect on. So I don't know. I think we're at a really interesting place where both armed services, whether it's cyber, whether it's signals intelligence, whether it's human intelligence and just go to old fashioned kicking doors in.

• 1:18:55Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  I bet there's a lot that on the psychological side, we're going to learn now that we're becoming very aware that these things have real effects 20, 30 years later.

• 1:19:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I think you're right. I mean, we're already learning just on like the soft side, like we're learning so much about like blast injuries, you know, the, all the door breaches and, you know, and, you know, post traumatic stress, like, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm 55. So like I remember made for TV movies in the seventies about a Vietnam veteran having post traumatic stress and losing his mind, like having flashbacks in the office and people, there, there are still civilians out there who think that's what it is. And that, you know, they don't understand it comes in all shapes and sizes from all different types of things.

• 1:19:38Jack Murphy?

  One of the, one of the things, the reason why I was asking you about how many tools you accessed on a daily basis, I have a, a acquaintance working on a PhD dissertation about what that does to a person psychologically.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:19:52Jack Murphy?

  He was, he was pointing out that if you're a soldier, let's say you're a infantryman, you learn how to shoot an M4, uh, M240 Bravo machine gun, M249 saw, uh, three weapon systems. Maybe if you're a sniper, you have a few more weapon systems, maybe you have to learn six, something like that. But people who are in the cyber warfare field, you're having to learn hundreds of different tools and move between those systems, those weapon systems, if you will, on a day-to-day basis. And what does that do to particularly a young person, to their mind?

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  I, you know, obviously, you know, it's not ever worth joking about any folks that are on any sort of a spectrum, because like that stuff's real. Some of us get hit, you know, in the chest. Some of us get nicked with the tism, you know?

• 1:20:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  I think about like, I think part of the reason we bonded so well from cyber to some of the operators is very specifically, we all had to learn different weapon systems. Like, I remember my first deployment to Afghanistan. None of us are shaving everything else. Everybody's using Makarovs, AK-47s, and PKMs. You don't learn that in basic training.

• 1:21:02Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  You don't learn any of that type of stuff. And so like, that flexibility, and I think they called it fluidity at the time, like being able to go fluid between different weapon systems on different arms, learning the basics, only gets ratcheted up to a level. Like, I remember the guys looking and they're like, how do you keep track of what to do? And I'm like, I don't even know.

• 1:21:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  I bet there is some real, like ramifications. Like, if somebody asked me quantify the number of tools you've used, like, so I joined in 2003. So what would I be at? I'd be, I guess I would be at 22 years of like, some of this professional experience.

• 1:21:34Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  I don't even know. It would be thousands. It doesn't even make sense. But I bet there's somewhere that like, if you're not on some sort of like, okay with the spectrum, and I guess we're all becoming like, with scrolling, a little short-minded and used to consuming a little bit more. But somewhere in there, it wears on you. So I would be stoked. If you, if you actually have those resources, I would love to see someone writing the dissertation on this.

• 1:21:56Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I can introduce you to that dude. And, and maybe he can get it to you when he finishes it. Well, you, you mentioned jumping into the private sector. Before we jump into that, any final thoughts on NSA that you want to talk about before we discuss your transition into the private sector?

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  I am, you know, if I was to end it on there, obviously, I'm long removed. I don't carry a badge there anymore. But if I was to, you know, end it with, you know, standing on a soapbox, it's, we owe a lot to folks, just like in the armed services, that are okay with being silent professionals. Don't forget, you know, the typical hero doesn't always look like Jason Bourne. It doesn't look like some folks like the three of us that can articulate. It's kind of really interesting of like, at the future of true peak performance, brain power these days can actually be the equivalent of top level athlete who can bench the most weight. So I just would challenge folks to consider that. And even though I don't fit that personality, for instance,

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  I think I, you know, next time you sit back and think about where you want to go, maybe you don't fit in the military. Don't forget the opportunities you have to support, you know, national security in different ways, even if you don't fit the mold. At least for me, I really enjoyed every bit of it, working for all the different types, because I'm not a bodybuilder. I'm also not, you know, quiet. And it was cool working with both sides of it.

• 1:23:24Jack Murphy?

  That's awesome. So what made you decide to transition from, you know, your leave behind your National Guard and your NSA careers, essentially, into the private sector? I think you said what, you had 16 years in uniform?

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so start thinking about that. I'm only four years away. I think I might have had one bad year in the guard because I was a scrub. But either way, four or five years, very close to like, a 20-year retirement of some sorts. Gosh, you're asking me the spicy question, brother. I was pretty, pretty upset by not having representation in that Snowden world. I was definitely part of those that felt like I had given it all. I had my kids, the amount of birthdays I had missed, the amount of things I had given. I finally had a moment where I said, okay. I've given all that I can. I need to use my skills to give back to a new mission. And I think I would have stayed longer if I would have had better support.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  Because at that time, I had the money. Contractor pays no joke. You can make some pretty decent money as a contractor. Sometimes, you know, $200,000, $250,000, stuff that you usually can only get on combat pay. That's good pay as a geek, right? Maybe not quite the same pay as like a big, you know, Fortune 100 bank. But that's pretty great government services, you know, pay or government services like. But I didn't. I didn't have that support. I didn't feel like the mission resonated. And to be very frank, I was looking at these operations that I was supporting. And people forget, when you're in the military and you're doing intelligence gathering, you might be on the same computer with not only other nation states. You might be on the same computer as a cyber criminal.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  And so as I pour me a little bit of drink here in preparation, I guess, of this segment as

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  I

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  I knew that there was kind of a wave, a tsunami about to come, where these people were gonna go from just spy versus spy. It dawned on me that we were about to see the first billion dollar cybercrime groups. And in 2015, I realized if I don't help get ahead of this, we're gonna see some of our most critical infrastructure. Like, don't think about just water and hospitals and, you know, electricity.

• 1:25:42Speaker 06

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• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  Report if you have a parasitic infection, common cold, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, flu or flulike symptoms, joint pain or sore throat may occur. Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extensure. Learn more at Extensure.com or call 1-833-393-3678.

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• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Think of like the backbone of world economies. Your Fortune 500, yeah, that's dope, right? They're the biggest 500 companies of the world. But the US has 33 million businesses, and the vast majority of those are 2,500 employee companies all the way to the smallest. And I realized that nobody was going to be able to protect them when cybercrime said, "Let's not go whale hunting."

• 1:27:35Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  "Let's go hunting for like squirrels, rabbits, and mice."

• 1:27:38Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  And so you can imagine, I'm a little bit bothered by the NSA system. I'm getting crusty, I'm missing my kids, right? I'm realizing I'm missing life. And I decided, okay, I'm gonna punch. Even at 16 years, even being this close, I had a bigger calling and it was gonna be protecting not just the 1% of businesses, but the 99% that fall below the enterprise. So you can imagine.

• 1:28:02Jack Murphy?

  Before we jump into that, I do want to ask you to unpack a little bit the Snowden issue.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Jack Murphy?

  And share the... And, you know, your claim, your issue, it sounds like, was that there's no pushback against it. And so I would love to ask you, you know, to give the insider point of view. You talked a little bit about the importance of following laws and everything, but like, what would be, as a intelligence professional, what would your pushback be against the Snowden narrative of mass ubiquitous surveillance against the American public?

• 1:28:37Speaker 05

  And the, like, the argument that he was just a whistleblower, right?

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. So we'll break those in two different parts, right? The first one is... People fuck up. Let's call a spade a spade. Anybody can do it. I am not a fan of having my personal data leaked by any or snooped on by anyone. Just the same way at DEF CON when I would happily call spot the Fed against an FBI agent. Yeah. Same guy. Yeah. So people don't realize sometimes these government agencies collab. And when you get it wrong, from everything that I've come to read in the public news, it sounds like some pretty jacked up stuff that should have been fixed. It wasn't, by the way, NSA's first mistake. If you go back to like the Pike Church Committee tech stuff. This is not the first time a government agency has done dumb stuff. Right.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  But accidents happen, right? And to be able to call like, you know, anybody, you know, paint with a broad brush stroke. I was really surprised to hear some of the people that they don't realize. The average Joe does not realize how much terrorism, how much abuse of money, and how much kind of like world projection all of our agencies do to like, keep the daily freedoms we have. And then to get roasted in the news. By, and again, I'll toe the line on this really closely. Edward Snowden was an IT administrator. Edward Snowden did the good thing that any person, for instance, could do, which is if you find something that is truly illegal,

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  you should file an IG complaint and get that shit to attention. And if somebody ignores you, you should do the most safe version of whistleblowing. Right. Go to Congress. When 2040 drops, we will see a narrative that is very different. And I'll leave it at that. And it's one of those that it doesn't match any narrative of a Roger Stone film, or if I got that wrong, right? Some of the movies that were on this.

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  He's an administrator that if you, you know, when the actual cards spill and the proof comes out, you'll see it's not a hero, a hero in the sense that he challenged good things. I'm not going to take that away.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  But there's more to any story and I can't wait for that one to become public. And that's as somebody who like, maybe from me to you, I left my whole, uh, your career behind because I was so bothered by the bigger story not coming out. So I'm hoping, and remember, any president can declassify this type of stuff. I hope we see some of these come public, but I don't know. Like it doesn't, some of these stories don't become public. And so on my end, it was enough that it bothered me that me and enough people to come up with an acronym called STEMRidge left.

• 1:31:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. I, and you know, I have no personal inside knowledge of that, but my, like the way I see it, I, like we say whistleblower, I, I, you know, the guy had, I think the guy got like, I don't think he knew what he had. He got lucky that there happened to be something that was, you know, sort of like implicating of the US government, but he was really just being a massive dick.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  You don't, you don't accidentally fly to China and then accidentally end in Russia.

• 1:32:00Speaker 05

  Right, exactly, exactly, exactly.

• 1:32:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. And, and I think the other thing to point out is that he didn't just take documents or blow the whistle on documents about like Prism, that was the big, the metadata issue. He took everything, from what I understand, he took everything.

• 1:32:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  I, so you're, you're, we're, we're right there. We're on that knee respecting like my career and respecting not wanting to end up in handcuffs. But, you know. When something's a problem, you raise the problem and cause the minimal damage as possible.

• 1:32:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  If, for instance, you are creating maximum damage as a plan to keep you out of jail. If what you were doing was ethical from the get go. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of cases where good whistleblowers have been hung to dry. I know this is the gray. This isn't black. This isn't white. It's the gray. But when the details come out, I hope that these things are settled, that, call a spade a spade. Call it for all the good and what I believe will be interpreted as all the bad will finally come to roost and we'll see like, okay. Um, there's, you know, life is complex and I guess, you know, the biggest thing that I appreciate. It seems like that moment actually caused a lot of the intelligence communities to realize.

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  If they don't have a say in the narrative, the narrative will be formed around them and that has consequences.

• 1:33:25Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  Not everything's bad, is what I'm saying.

• 1:33:29Speaker 05

  And the problem with that is, is that, one, it hurts recruitment. Two, you know, the, the public sentiment, which, you know, may or may not matter, but the public sentiment, you know, about, you know, the, these nefarious organizations that are listening to our every phone call. Like, how many people have to work at the NSA to listen to my every phone call I make, right? Um, or, you know, the CIA also, you know, they're, they're just all over the world, you know, creating coups and stuff like that. And it's, it, when these agencies won't stand up for themselves, it hurts them. You know?

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Speaker 05

  It hurts their recruiting. It hurts their, their efforts. Um, yeah.

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So again, I'm, I am one of those type of people that, like, I don't believe you should sit on a fence. You should have an opinion, but I also acknowledge, like, it's not always left or right, or, you know, that side or this side.

• 1:34:21Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  Some stuff is the devil in the details and you can kind of only help, you know, and hope that at the end, you chose the best thing. So if you can tell enough for me to upend, forego retirement and say, I appreciate my service. I need to use my skills for some other reason. And thankfully, like, the service army to be able to do some pretty cool stuff. So I can't be completely salty about Edward Snowden, but I am ready for the reckoning.

• 1:34:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:49Jack Murphy?

  So, tell, talk to us about making the jump to the private sector and how that worked out for you.

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  Can I tell the embarrassing embarrassing side?

• 1:34:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  Those are the best parts.

• 1:34:58Jack Murphy?

  Absolutely, because all of us have that story about leaving governmental service and going into the private sector and slamming face first into the ground at least once.

• 1:35:10Speaker 02

  So all this stuff that made me like successful, right? Promotions early, you know, awards, things along those lines. When you decide to create a business, you have to go into sales. And it turns out I did not have to do much sales in the military. You guys would be so like disappointed if you like, if it ever leaked like some of my first cold calls and stuff like this. I sounded like a dumbass military guy. I was at least had honest, like, I think, guys, the pitch usually went something like, hi, my name's Kyle and I'm a former service member and I'm exploring creating a startup. Do you have a couple of minutes to like, help me? Like, I need help. Like, I was always really honest and I found that if I was more honest, that people wouldn't hang up on me as much.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  And usually I'd find somebody that was either prior service or respect the service that would give me a little bit of time. But guys, you wouldn't believe, like, when I started, I started thinking like I was gonna be selling to like one or two person companies. Think about how many one or two, like, these little tiny micro businesses that are still important. But I didn't know how to make money. I knew like how to personally make money and pay bills, but I didn't know how to do this at scale. And so I am so stinking lucky that like, the state of Virginia did this program, they call it an accelerator. It's pretty much like an MBA in 16 weeks that teaches you how to build a startup. Guys, if I didn't have that program, one, I wouldn't be celebrating a, whatever it

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  is now, $2 billion business, but I sure as heck, I wouldn't have like, I would still be living in Maryland in my three bedroom townhouse, thinking about how I could use my military, my military skills. It was that bad. Yeah. I'm cool now. I can do these things now. I can pitch confident and I can get over like the imposter syndrome, but 20... fourteen, twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. These were like my puberty years that I'm just glad that there wasn't more camera phones at that time. It was that embarrassing.

• 1:37:10Speaker 05

  What you you know, and I think that's very common for, you know, people who are good at something. And and all business is sales, right? So it's like, or or like, I can make these.

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  The acumen is.

• 1:37:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can or I can make this table, but be like, the table doesn't sell itself and I don't know how to run the business. What um? In in addition to sort of that type of thing, though. How was it difficult for you to articulate to a two person business? Who what they know about the Internet is, you know, plug it, you know, having the cable guy come out, plug it in and and, you know.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  Have you tried turning it on and off?

• 1:37:49Speaker 05

  And you're trying to explain to them how their business is potentially at risk uh of getting ransomwared or whatever.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  And I'm speaking hyper geek. I mean, to be honest, I think all careers have this. I bet if a firefighter, right? I'm trying to choose something that's not that's technical, but not too technical. Imagine a firefighter having to talk about all the physics things that you can smother a fire by spraying, for instance, and causing different vacuum like no one is gonna understand that unless they've seen a video. That was me in the cyber world, talking to people that were just like, Kyle, I know you have the skills. But if you can't learn to talk to me and storytell to me on my level, I'm never gonna appreciate what you're doing. And thankfully, like the one gift I got was I got a lot of radical candor, meaning people who

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  I also got like what some people call ruinous empathy, meaning they cared so much about me, but weren't willing to challenge me.

• 1:38:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  They would just not tell me that I suck.

• 1:38:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:38:49Speaker 02

  Thankfully, it was actually a lot of. Either people that were fan of the military or supported the military or prior service that would just tell me a spade is a spade and be like, Kyle, you suck. I don't know what you're saying. Can you talk to me like, like, tell me like I'm five, what, what you're doing? And enough stumbling, by the way, like, I would rather not fail. It's just faster. But it turns out if you're gonna fail, do it really quick.

• 1:39:15Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  People give you. And so, uh, again, I, I just was blessed with failure. And I had the time to, by the way, like, this was real early. So I got those out of the way. So when it came time for me really needing to know this, all that military skills of being used to like in this fast failing environment, just like a hacker trying to break in.

• 1:39:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  Nine hundred and ninety-nine times I fail. I don't care. It works on the thousand. That mentality helped me, actually. My hacking skills literally helped me be a better entrepreneur.

• 1:39:44Speaker 05

  That's phenomenal. The, the, you know, uh, Udo Loop, uh, you know, um, yeah.

• 1:39:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:39:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, it, it's funny you, uh, so one of our sponsors, I'm gonna say it, cuz I like the company. I like their product. But Manscaped used to sponsor us. And, and it's a great company. And even though they don't sponsor us anymore, I'd recommend everybody get one. But they'd send us copy, and we see this a lot in copy, right? Uh, that, the, the copy, like, it mentioned, like, how many RPMs this motor runs at, the little Manscaped motor? And I'm reading this, like, nobody, nobody cares about that.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  Actually, that scares me when I, if I'm shaving my junk.

• 1:40:22Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  I wanna know how many RPMs. I wanna know that the guard isn't gonna whip me. That's what I wanna know.

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  Right. You know, and, and it's like, it, but it's that type of thing that somebody, some engineer who is very proud of getting that, you know, the RPM off. It's like, gotta add this. And nobody said, we don't need to add that.

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's unlocking my fear. I will tell you, I would. There was this analogy, my first sale, very first sales guy told me, he called it painting seagulls. It was this idea, like imagine you've got a beautiful family on a beach and they asked you to do a portrait. So David, you're, you're, you're just painting this portrait and you're like, man, the sky is missing something. I'm going to add some seagulls. That moment right there, you are inserting risk. You don't know, maybe that wife is terrified of seagulls.

• 1:41:11Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

  One attacked her when she was six. The amount of like sales objections, I would immediately add by thinking I was being so transparent.

• 1:41:19Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  And I wanted to have integrity. I was terrible. I could never even get like in the oodle loop to the point that I was deciding and acting. Because when I was trying to observe and orient and educate, like I never even got to this point. And so I ended up having to learn from my lessons, really the hard way of how many, I just often would add so much information that I had sold myself out of the deal, that if I would have just shut up.

• 1:41:45Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  Don't tell me about the RPMs next to something that I care about. I just want to get the job done.

• 1:41:52Speaker 05

  Right. You, you, so you know, you're dealing with, you're dealing with like the business side of this with, with, you know, civilians who have a risk. Was there any side of the NSA or the military that ever looked at you and said, what exactly are you doing with this business? And can you assure us that it in no way relates to anything that you were doing with us?

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  So I had a little bit during the National Guard side where they, like, we, we definitely had to de-conflict to make sure. Like, there's always this problem of like, what if we as a company find US tradecraft?

• 1:42:30Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:42:31Speaker 02

  Would you burn US tradecraft?

• 1:42:33Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  And I am an elitist, very hyper competitive bastard. So my rule of thumb is, I don't care who you are. If you're weak enough for me to catch you.

• 1:42:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  Hack harder.

• 1:42:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:43Speaker 02

  And that gets around that, but I will tell you, for a little while, there was actually some of that conflict. Like I'd left the service, I think in 2018, but I founded Huntress in 2015 and I had to navigate that for about three years.

• 1:42:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:57Jack Murphy?

  Ken, uh, you know, you, you told us a story about, you know, falling flat on your face and trying to pitch these little businesses and it not working out so great. But could you tell us about like the, the success story, a little bit of the aha moment, closing your first big deal and, and, you know, how that came about, lessons learned from that?

• 1:43:15Speaker 02

  Yep, I'm gonna give the pitch that I used to raise $150 million and then translate how that pitch happened and I'll do it very succinct. So what I learned from my time at NSA, we were a team that believed in using very small compartmented teams, an insane amount of automation to deliver value. The value at that time at NSA was largely finding intelligence against our foreign adversaries or saving life in the counterterrorism mission. At Huntress, I went and took that same very small compartmented teams. I used so much automation to be able to bring this product to people that don't have the budgets. And the thing we obsess about at Huntress is a very small, but measurable valuable

• 1:43:59Speaker 02

  thing that prevents people from getting wrecked by hackers. That pitch took me like nine years to get right. I'm 10 years into it, that's how new this pitch is.

• 1:44:08Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  What it turned out that I ended up learning is I had to get so simple. I had to be able to speak in analogies. I had to learn that people like to hear the story, but they don't sometimes need to hear the seagull in the depths. And I iterated on that pitch so freaking long. I think it literally took me four years before I had a version of our pitch that actually like resonated to the point that people were giving me cash. So you can imagine, just like the cyber security mission I mentioned earlier, it's not like the movies. It's usually like months and weeks of like gruesome, you know, hard work to get two minutes of like success and then you're back at it.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  That prepared me for all the failures that I'll tell you like grit matters. Also, what's that country music song? You gotta know when to hold them, know when to fold them.

• 1:45:01Speaker 05

  The Gambler by Kenny Rogers.

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  There you go. I, I was probably foolish enough that at times I probably should have folded them, but that grit actually allowed me to see it through. So I can't tell you there's any one path for anybody. But for me... I was so obsessed by just delivering a small little bit of value. And we used to do this, by the way, in the intelligence world. You don't gotta get Bin Laden.

• 1:45:24Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  Get this, you know, small person in AQ, right? You know, some sort of al Qaeda type personnel that allows you to go to the next level. That allows you to go to the next level, that then allows you to find family, that allows you to be able to do the DNA swab, that allows you to be able to get into the phone, that allows you to find the courier, that allows you to be able to have a team that drops bombs on bad guys or breaks doors, kicks them down and eliminates terrorists. Those were all very small iterative moments, but they all built on each other.

• 1:45:51Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  I don't think people appreciate how much you can do that involves small iterative successes. Instead of, if we would have just went 10 years to hatch the master plan, Bin Laden would still be alive today.

• 1:46:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:46:06Speaker 02

  I don't think people are okay with that idea. And the one thing I would share with the audience, it turns out like it's better to not fail. But if you're gonna fail, fail in a way nobody else has done before and do it quick.

• 1:46:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:20Speaker 05

  And here's kind of a question for you, like,

• 1:46:25Speaker 05

  obviously in coding, or like not coding, but like in hacking, whatever, you probably know when you fail, like when you don't get intrigued. But like in business with these ideas, how, how do you know when you failed? And how do you know when to keep on like pushing?

• 1:46:44Speaker 02

  I'm giggling because when you pitch somebody in real life, especially like me who's used to this little like, you know, even cyber was fairly hyper masculine. People only.

• 1:46:55Speaker 06

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• 1:47:40Speaker 06

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• 1:47:55Speaker 00

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• 1:48:24Speaker 02

  Code is a lot of dudes, military, a lot of dudes. I remember the first time pitching a woman CEO and she was like, Kyle, I have no idea what you're talking about. I could see it across her face before she was even kind enough to tell me. Like, if you don't have that social awareness, and I'll say other parts of it, when I started, like, if I missed that social cue, to be honest, if I was like some of my other NSA compatriots, and I didn't have that, like, it's not just about IQ. Sometimes the intelligence, right, only goes so far in the emotional quotient EQ picks up. Right. If you can't read a room, I dare you to start a company and then look back in two years and find success. It's just not going to happen. Right.

• 1:49:09Speaker 02

  But I was kind of blessed enough with that, like, middle of skills, that even when I didn't have it, like, my co-founder John, he is the quietest guy in the room and will wreck you. But he couldn't do what I do. And my co-founder Chris, there's three of us, he is when some people talk about what one engineer can do. Chris is like a Hulk. He can do what 100 engineers can do. We offset our balances, but you remember that whole conversation we brought up earlier about, like, team dynamic and sometimes having the right team? And we have to be able to cover each other's gaps, but also complement each other's gaps? Right. These skills turn out like you can change worlds. You can build billion dollar companies on the same tactics that six person military units or six person intelligence units can do.

• 1:49:54Speaker 02

  So I just, if you can't tell, like my military time was pivotal.

• 1:49:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  To teeing me up to make a big difference.

• 1:50:01Speaker 05

  I, you know, it's interesting too, because you, you have a team, you built a business with a team. And I, I think a lot of veterans go out there to build business by themselves and are, are very dissatisfied, even if they're successful, because we're used to working in those team environments. And when we're out there on our own, it's like, I, I mean, I'd rather, like, who's my team? You know, my employees, are they my team? Like, I, I think that, that must have been, in my mind, I think that that must have been very gratifying for the three of you.

• 1:50:34Speaker 02

  I mean, think about the use of the word team, team room, right? My team, my teammates. I actually think a lot of this starts with goldfashion psychology. I don't think we realize, like, I know there's all these corny, you know, there's no I in team. Corny or not, I actually think some of these things that if you get them right from the beginning, they just get your head right.

• 1:50:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:50:55Speaker 02

  They help you think about that, like, there's like that old African proverb. I think it goes something like, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

• 1:51:06Speaker 02

  There's nothing wrong with going alone. There's nothing wrong with starting a very small business and a lifestyle business that can still make big differences.

• 1:51:13Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  But if you want to move mountains, you want to go far, you are not going to get there. You could be the greatest cyber warfare operator or greatest, you know, grunt or greatest pilot or whatever you do, you're going to be able to move what one X does. And I will tell you, like, I now have the point where, I think I'm in US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, right? Some Ireland in there too. I've got 500 plus teammates and we move, not just paddling in the same direction, but we're in the same boat, in the same direction, at the same cadence. And that's allows us to go both fast and far. So I think the word team and team room actually has a lot more.

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  To do with success of just getting that right in the beginning and if you get it wrong, I just would challenge like how far can you go solo?

• 1:52:03Speaker 05

  So let's, I want to ask you about Huntress real quick because, you know, my vast time, the whole eight months that I was in cyber, like Huntress is a name, like it is, it is a name that is known in the community. You know, people outside of the community may not have heard of it, you know, may or may not, but it's like it's known. What are you? What is Huntress? What was your original mission? Has that morphed?

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll start with the embarrassing.

• 1:52:39Speaker 05

  Why are you guys so badass is what I want to know. Why are you guys so badass? Yeah.

• 1:52:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, we started with a mission that we were like, all we want to do is fuck up hackers. That's not a good mission statement, by the way. Don't start a company on that mission statement. But it was a good north star. It told us like what we were there. It ended up becoming a mission statement that was, we had to figure out who we were doing it for and how we were doing it, right? That's the why. Start with why, move to how and who, and then finish with what. So at Huntress, our whole mission is to elevate mid-sized businesses, small businesses, and these folks that don't have a budget. We do that by leading with education and community. And we end up delivering this one hacker at a time. That's a double entendre,

• 1:53:27Speaker 02

  talking about taking down one hacker at a time. But we also do that growing one ethical hacker at a time. Notice nothing in there talks about making money. Nothing in there talks about making cybersecurity tools. We just happen to build cybersecurity products. Our whole mission is to elevate people that are underrepresented in business. Because cyber criminals love direct small businesses that are underrepresented. They extort them for 20, 50, $100,000. And that's usually enough that you can't run payroll for six weeks.

• 1:53:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:53:58Speaker 02

  How many Americans can go six weeks without payroll? Not very many. It's really, really low unfortunately. And the part that I'm talking about is when you get your mission right and you start with the real why. Everything else falls in place. That one hacker at a time. It turns out, we realized that if we lead with education, growing other hackers to be able to join our mission. And doing it with a community, not by ourselves, we could go far. And so like what I do is I sell security products. Products that allows my shady team of hackers, that if anybody tries to get in, whether it's your computer, your digital identity, like your Google or Microsoft account, uh, maybe it's trying to get into your data. We're not only going to prevent them from getting in, but when they do get in, we wreck them, right?

• 1:54:41Speaker 02

  That's the whole idea. And it's not perfect. Just like health, you can get sick. But notice what I'm talking about is it started with a mission. Everything else, the stuff that we do afterwards, building it how we do it, that's the minutia. And I think that's what I like most about hanging with you guys is you guys expose stories for the mission first. And it turns out, everything else can fall in place and you can learn it, you know, after 10 years. I can sound crisp because I iterated with small successes. And I can eventually take down much bigger targets. So if you can't tell, I owe a lot to what I learned during my time in the service.

• 1:55:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, i- i- it's, it's amazing. I, you know, um, so i- i- i- the cyber community is, i- i- it's very interesting because you have the government, you have the government that is working on, you know, these, uh, you know, national, their nation, uh, uh, actors, you know, uh,

• 1:55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, nation state adversaries, stuff like that, advanced persistent threats.

• 1:55:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Um, and then, you know, you, then you have a bunch of security companies. And then you have, like you say, these, these companies that can't, they're not going to have a couple of, you know, uh, cybersecurity guys, they're not going to have a sim, you know, they're not, they don't have these things. And, and a lot of the tools out there are out of reach for them, but they are also the ones who get hit often. And you know, and so they get ransomwared. Then they have to hire a DFIR team. And the DFIR team, well, they hire lawyers and the lawyers get the D out. Cause the lawyers are basically like, this is, this is your exposure. Like this is the risk that this, these people might sue you, you know, the people, your clients or whoever.

• 1:56:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're in business to make money.

• 1:56:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:56:27Speaker 02

  You gotta limit your liability.

• 1:56:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And you know, and then with the forensics teams, these are civilian companies that are being paid by the, you know, to find what, to find really one thing. And that is, what is the company's exposure? Right?

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Speaker 05

  And maybe do some ransomware negotiation. But they're not paid the hourly to go in and find out the code or the, who the actor was. And, and so a lot of these DFIR teams are actually on the cutting edge of like seeing a lot of these threat actors for the very first time. But they're not signing that off anymore because they're not getting paid.

• 1:57:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:09Speaker 05

  Uh, the hourly to do it. So you have this really, um, like disconnected community in, in a way of where national, because the national security, it, it all plays. Like a lot of these threat actors are part, or at least a, not necessarily sponsored by, but maybe like given permission by nation state actors.

• 1:57:34Speaker 02

  Loosely supported, loosely connected.

• 1:57:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  When it's favorable, you know? Hey, I don't want to do something as a nation. Why don't I allow this slightly shady proxy that I give permission to do it on my behalf because my hands are clean. You're nailing it.

• 1:57:48Speaker 05

  But if one of these DFIR companies like comes across or is in chat with a brand new threat actor that nobody's seen before, they're not reporting that to anybody because that, you know, they're, they're being billed hourly. Or you're, they bill hourly and they're just going to give these attorneys and these companies what they ask for. And so it's sort of like, how does the government incentivize these smaller companies to, to, you know, to pump this information up and then?

• 1:58:21Speaker 05

  Should the government or state governments pay companies like yours

• 1:58:27Speaker 05

  to cover everybody in order to, you know, basically as part of the infrastructure of our country?

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  We all have bias and I'm gonna show my cards first. I'm a big fan, for instance, of there is great places where the federal government should intervene. Sometimes local government that's closest to you should be able to help. I will also share that I am a firm believer, we all have an obligation to take care of each other. It's just kind of what's got us to be humans in 2025. I'm giving that upfront because I wanna like caveat that there is some places, for instance, the government's job is to facilitate and allow companies to be able to go toe to toe with cybercrime. To go toe to toe with terrorism. But we don't need companies, for instance, being vigilantes.

• 1:59:18Speaker 02

  Imagine if we just allowed like the local person to provide security at the, I don't know, bank. You don't want that. You need some level of professionalism, some level. Heck, the person who cuts my hair has to go through a certificate. I want the person guarding the bank to go through some bar. I don't want a vigilante. But where I'm going with this is their job is to be able to enable this. Just like the story I told earlier, that when the early days of cyber kind of, as it started to mature into 2010 to 2015, the real heroes were the lawyers who allowed us to do more of this preparation of the environment. Right? To be able to do the effects that could actually stop terrorism or stop nation states.

• 1:59:59Speaker 02

  I actually think the role that we have right now in 2025 in the government, and this is global, I'm not making it about the US. Some of it is about facilitating companies that are of the right qualification and the right standard. Why are we not doing more to take defense and not lead by defending, waiting for them to break down our door? But if there are qualified people, and I'm not saying spin up vigilantes, there's gonna be people who interpret this wrong.

• 2:00:26Speaker 05

  But private users maybe. Qualified letters of marque, cyber letters of marque.

• 2:00:32Speaker 02

  I mean, I'll tell you, Huntress itself, $2 billion company at the risk of, you know, liability. When we find, for instance, a threat actor who is just, for instance, a lot of times, people come to us after they're already hacked, not before. We try to prevent it. When somebody comes to me that they're hacked, and I find that this cybercriminal has stolen their data, these, I'll call them what they are, bastards, accidentally leave their credentials exposed, just like how we get credentialed. I would be a liar to say, it is not, you know, I could count on more than one hand the times that, for instance, we said, oh, they left their credentials exposed. We took a look at the risk. We realized it was some shady hosted server and insert shady

• 2:01:17Speaker 02

  country here that you have quite a good idea that it's malicious. We have been more than happy to rendition that data back for somebody. We have been more than happy to dump their logs, and more than happy that when we find a mistake that they make, they use software vulnerabilities to get into people's systems. We have actually found vulnerabilities in the same systems that they use to steal and encrypt and hold data for ransom, that we exploit their system and make their software no longer work. That is not always in an area that's clearly defined. I'm not talking about hacking them back. I'm talking about using our offensive skills sometimes to be able to make their software not work. And the thing that I would go back to without ever getting political,

• 2:02:00Speaker 02

  sometimes you can make a big difference by just carrying a big stick, right? And if you have a defensive company that's led with a very offensive mindset, that also believes in following rule of law, who is happy to explore not just the black and the white, but the gray. I think it's government's job to facilitate that. And when lines are crossed, let's hold people accountable. We can't do illegal things. We all have to be accountable for our actions. But I do think that version is a lot easier version that we can let capitalism do its thing. Let's let businesses protect against hackers. But let's not, like, think about healthcare. If my only job was, I wait till you get stage four cancer.

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  Tell you like let you know you're gonna die. That's too late. Well, I gotta be doing everything I can to find it as early as possible. And if I can, if I can possibly stop cancer from happening. No one would say, don't do that. So why are we not making similar analogies about stopping threat actors and treating them like what they are? They're criminals and they should be stopped. And that sometimes should be law enforcement closely partnered with commercial businesses.

• 2:03:10Speaker 05

  Well, I was gonna say like we've all deployed to the, you know, the GWOT in some way. And it's sort of like it, the US's cyber policy seems to me to be like, we're getting attacked. So let's keep building our base defenses.

• 2:03:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:26Speaker 05

  Let's just keep on, let's add more sandbags. Let's add more HESCOs.

• 2:03:30Jack Murphy?

  Let's uh, let's get to some.

• 2:03:31Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, Jack, are we ticking you off yet with all this nerd stuff here and hackers kind of going unrecked?

• 2:03:36Jack Murphy?

  Only mildly, but we're, we're gonna jump to some, some user questions. Um, because I know, uh, some of our viewers had a, had some stuff for you as well that we want to make sure we get to.

• 2:03:47Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 2:03:49Speaker 09

  Alrighty, um.

• 2:03:52Speaker 09

  From the Count of Cohiba, did you see any differences in people who had shady backgrounds growing up versus straight laced kids?

• 2:04:00Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I actually would say my general rule of thumb is bad decision makers stay bad decision makers. However, if you can't understand the nuance between what is a, think about fruit. I'll choose strawberries because why not? I like them. Sometimes fruit molds because it's next to bad fruit. Sometimes fruit molds because it is truly the one that starts the molding. I would say generally speaking, I've seen rare cases where people who make extremely bad decisions change making bad decisions. It's not saying people can't change. However, I think sometimes separating what's molding because they're surrounded by essentially a bad environment is very different than, for instance, a bad egg.

• 2:04:45Speaker 02

  So what I'm saying is, I've seen plenty of people, I mean, look at my, I started this whole thing admitting, I've been some things that when I was poor that are pretty crappy. I kind of wish I could undo them. They were circumstantial and I've given back a lot more than I've ever taken. And so I don't think this is a case that you can just say, if you've messed up, there's no forgiveness. Like, that doesn't mimic life. So, I appreciate that question because, no, I don't think just because you've made a mistake, you're wrong. But I think there are degrees and it's a spectrum. And if you cross a line, you're probably gonna keep crossing a line. Not because it's wrong or right, but you probably have something wrong with judgment.

• 2:05:21Speaker 05

  Do you, do you think that motivation, because I, I feel like, uh, in, in, you know, the cyber world, that there is a lot of this, there's a lot of crossover with the soft mentality, right? Like, when we take an MPI.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  So much.

• 2:05:35Speaker 05

  Like, like, we have certain traits that we share with criminals. And, you know, but I think that, that, it, it, it, you know, um, we have sort of the same adrenaline, the sort of same compartmentalization, the same desire for challenge, but, but we don't have, we, we don't have the selfishness, or the desire, you know, the, the desire to profit. And so I think, maybe in cyber, there's a difference between, you know, that 13, 14, 17-year-old kid who wants to hack into a system to see if he can get into the system, and the kid who wants to hack into the system to see what he can take.

• 2:06:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. You mentioned the selfishness, right? One of the core values in the Air Force was service before self.

• 2:06:19Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:20Speaker 02

  Why are you doing it? Are you doing it because it's experimenting? And I've had, I've been selfish before, right? It's a, you know, but when I look back in hindsight, a lot of it was an ends to a means that was in a way that was inconsequential. Did anybody get upset back in the day that I was using their unlimited minutes AOL account? They probably never even noticed. Yet, they were giving me a chance to learn. That is so gray, but that's very different than, I tried to get their credit card number, and then I used their credit card and racked up all kinds of gift cards with it.

• 2:06:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:06:54Speaker 02

  That's a very different version. And so, the, the gentleman, or, you know, lady, or person that asked that question, like, that's a really astute question, because to be very frank... It's all a spectrum, and I think the answer is somewhere there in probably the middle to dark gray. I think that's still okay.

• 2:07:11Speaker 09

  Yeah. Uh, we got another question. V, due to the place, due to places like China having an internet and as opposed to an internet, could regular Americans actually do any kind of hacking in places like China?

• 2:07:25Speaker 06

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• 2:08:25Speaker 07

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• 2:08:53Speaker 02

  So the thing everybody forgets, right? Think about a castle wall. And even if you have the world's greatest, you know, moat, and you have all the walls in the world, some people have to bring food in and out of that castle. So China does with the Great Firewall. For those that don't know, it's an actual logical layer that prevents certain traffic that only operates in China and certain traffic that, for instance, allows outgoing. So it's not as easy as just walking into a place with no castle wall. But they're not on their own. And as a result, sometimes you have to be able to find, just like the, think about the old stories about the Trojan horse, right? Sometimes you gotta be able to get things in and, you know, if they were truly like a hermit kingdom that nothing could come in or out,

• 2:09:39Speaker 02

  they wouldn't be the nation state that they are. So where I'm sharing with this is, I think that there is some value in having castle walls, but let's not BS ourselves. No castle wall is permanent because unless you're self sustaining from the inside, stuff's coming from the outside in. And as long as that's coming from the outside in, someone like me is trying to exploit it.

• 2:09:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. Do you think that there's ever any future in which, uh, like a standard defense is just basically to, like, learn how to put, like, create a poison pill for people's, like, data? The, you know what I mean?

• 2:10:12Speaker 02

  So I've gone back and forth between should we have data that just, you know, deletes itself or, you know, kind of like Mission Impossible, this message will self-destruct?

• 2:10:19Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:10:20Speaker 02

  I've also balanced with the such opposite side of the spectrum of, do we care way too much about what data gets leaked? Like, no offense, at this time, I think I've had like 96 times my social security number. I probably have like nine overlapping credit card fraud policies right now.

• 2:10:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:10:38Speaker 02

  I get by every day. I'm a super nerd. I've got Alexas in my house. I could probably talk to my phone right now and ask it to do its thing. There is some level that I think we kind of gotta dial it back and say, like, look at, do you remember that movie Catch Me If I Can? That's that guy Frank Abigail that forged the checks? It's 2025, check fraud still happens. We never solved that problem.

• 2:11:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:11:01Speaker 02

  Why do we think we're gonna solve this cybercrime problem? So I think some of it, we just gotta tone it down and realize, you get hacked in 2025. What's important is can you find it before it becomes like deathly? Right? Before they drain your account? And when they drain your account, is there some sort of way that we can, you know, ease the burden? Because that's pretty extreme to have like no money to pay for bills, you know? So my point behind a lot of that statement is,

• 2:11:29Speaker 02

  I think that there is a level of I wish sometimes data would self delete. We'd be a little bit smarter, you know, minimize it. But I think we should also, not a but, but an and, we should also just chill out a little bit and be okay with certain things is gonna leak in 2025.

• 2:11:44Speaker 05

  So when I say poison pill, I don't just mean the data is self deleting, but, but, but basically installing malware or, you know, basically destroying whatever that data goes to.

• 2:11:55Speaker 02

  Oh, see, that's a good one. I don't, you know what's unfortunate? I don't think that we're quite at the level that people are playing that four dimensional chess yet. Should we have things like, we're getting better, like, even though I'm not a huge crypto fan, we're getting wallets that are like better resilient. They try to prevent people's data from getting stolen and they have some of these built in protection mechanisms.

• 2:12:17Speaker 02

  I, um, I'm never a naysayer. I always think glass half full unless it's bourbon.

• 2:12:23Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:12:23Speaker 02

  But, um, I actually think we're still playing in many ways checkers, not even chess, let alone four dimensional chess. So I think what you're getting to, we'll get there.

• 2:12:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:12:34Speaker 02

  We're just not there yet. Like, we, we still can't keep people from stealing my darn SF86 data.

• 2:12:39Speaker 05

  Well, we've talked about that before. Yeah, our, our OPM file. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:45Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I wish. That's my long way of saying, I hope we get there.

• 2:12:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. All right. M. Corbin, how do you feel about the fact that Chinese cybersecurity organizations or cyber organizations openly, openly acknowledge and publicize their partnerships? Does it result in, in better collective action?

• 2:13:05Speaker 02

  So I think that some of the things that's needed, and by the way, for the, remember when I started this story? I said, all the people that were in decision makers were former tank drivers, pilots, sub drivers, ship, you know, admirals. Turns out in 2025, some of the people in office now are people who started their careers in offensive cyber. So what I'm saying by this is, If we go back to the root question, we've actually got some really well-informed people that are helping make better decisions that allow us to kind of be more public. And with more public, like, I can tell you publicly, Hunteris collaborates with all

• 2:13:46Speaker 02

  kinds of law enforcement, less about government, but all kinds of world law enforcement, sometimes in countries you wouldn't expect. Like, you know, people forget that sometimes on what you read in the news, you read like, "Oh, we're gonna trade political prisoners." Behind the scenes, sometimes cyber criminals are traded. These nation-state governments, for instance, that protect some of these, sometimes use these players as chips. And believe it or not, law enforcement is some of the people that we've actually had the best success of collaborating. We've worked on raids that have brought back millions of dollars of stolen money from cybercrime takedowns. So that's my very long way of saying, "We could

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  do better." And I will wholeheartedly argue some countries are challenging us of how well they do open collaboration. But don't underestimate how much dope stuff goes down in the shadows. Like, we're, you know, we're not playing from a position of weakness. We use this term in the intelligence community that we call everybody else "not peers." We call them "near peers." It's not by accident, it's not by hubris. We do a lot of stuff really well. Don't underestimate what the US can do.

• 2:14:59Speaker 09

  I have a question. Out of all the state actors, who's the best at hacking?

• 2:15:06Speaker 02

  Ooh, that's such a good, and best is such a loaded. Do you know who I like and who I, I'm not gonna use the word "admire" because that'll be unlike, I go, I file for IPO and that'll be used against me. North Korea knows what they are, and they know what they aren't. And what they are generally is very dependent on China for certain things. And they are also pretty darn broke. And this is a country that is more than happy to use their...

• 2:15:37Speaker 02

  Very, very stringent, you know, economic sanctions that are against them. They have no problem going after your crypto wallet, going after SWIFT. That's the, you know, payment systems behind credit cards. And they have made millions, maybe even, there's some estimates that go into the big B word. That is not playing around. Can you imagine like as a business? And if you think about what some of these nation states are, their biggest businesses in their country are actually their hackers bringing in revenue.

• 2:16:07Jack Murphy?

  That's wild.

• 2:16:08Speaker 02

  That's pretty crazy and we don't do that in the US. We don't do economic, you know, espionage this way. Some people will, will, will split hairs. I'll tell you 99 times out of 100, unless there's some weird accident, we don't do that. The way we play with economic espionage is through like things like immigration. We'll just steal your best and brightest and make them US citizens. Not going to open that can because that's a whole different other thing. But we play at a different level of 4D chess and I admire North Korea, knowing how bad they are at some things and being able to make a whole lot of money with a handful of people. They're not us. They can't keep up with us, but that's pretty dope.

• 2:16:44Jack Murphy?

  Before, uh, well, not before, but during, I mean, they were also involved in the whole super notes thing. And

• 2:16:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:16:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. I, I mean, they were like, like, uh, you know, a counterfeiting physical

• 2:16:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:16:56Jack Murphy?

  US dollars. Um, so this is just a criminal regime. Like, like you said, they know who they are and what they do.

• 2:17:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I mean, is there not something to admire where they're like, yo, it's getting harder to re, you know, to recreate and forge and create counterfeit dollars. So let's just not counterfeit as hard and let's go after this new emerging digital. Let's go after people buying crypto. Let's go after some of these core systems. Like they know how to get paid and I know it's so easy to like throw a Kim Jong Un meme out there, but like. They're scrappy, they're hustling, they remind me of a startup, they got startup energy.

• 2:17:34Speaker 05

  Well, you know what's wild is, you know, the same scams that worked in the 1800s, like the snake oil says, like, the Nigerian prince, like this, with these crypto drops, you know, like, they're using the,

• 2:17:50Speaker 02

  Somebody wants something. Confidence man, confidence.

• 2:17:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly, somebody wants something that's too good to be true, and they believe that they just might be the person to get it. And they give people access to everything, you know, it's wild.

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  And people forget, when they're succeeding, they don't have to succeed big, it doesn't have to be billions, when you have such an disproportionate exchange rate, a $50,000 ransom could be significantly bigger for folks in economic sanctioned world, so. I just sometimes think that we, just like how we're really bad as humans, like comprehending how many like stars in the sky, or grains of sand on earth, there's a different law, right, a different set of physics in North Korea, or these other, you know, world regimes, even Iran, who's like much smaller, that they are winning, just at their scale, and I don't think we necessarily, like, we talk trash against them,

• 2:18:46Speaker 02

  but you gotta watch out, because startups sometimes disrupt big environments, and I'm not saying North Korea is gonna become a nation state, but, you know, a nation state, for instance, that we have to worry about, like a China, Russia type scenario, but don't sleep on their ability to, you know, deliver bigger bang for the buck, that's what I'm saying.

• 2:19:05Speaker 05

  And, and the simple fact is, a lot of these countries will play by rules that we won't even consider. Like, I mean, like, look at human espionage, there are countries that will still honeypot, and the United States will not honeypot, you know.

• 2:19:19Speaker 02

  I mean, look at the Khashoggi, you know, situation, right, the reporter. When's the last time the US was accused of hacking somebody apart in an embassy, like, we play on slightly different rules, both in the physical and digital world.

• 2:19:33Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:19:35Speaker 02

  And I think that's something like

• 2:19:36Jack Murphy?

  Microwaving intelligence officers abroad.

• 2:19:38Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:19:38Jack Murphy?

  We don't do those kinds of things.

• 2:19:41Speaker 02

  You know, and there is a level of like, I will say, there's a weird thing about espionage, that it's a very gentleman's, gentle person's game. But we got to understand that we have to play smarter and harder because some people just won't play by our rules. And that's not an excuse to play by the rules. Like, you don't want to fall into that, right? You don't, you got to protect some level of humanism. Like, even adversaries, they wake up and they probably have back pain the same way that my, you know, aging, you know, ass is starting to feel back pain. Like, something generally connects us. They're still humans. So I think it's important that we can't lose that, right? At the same time, let's not let them take our kindness for a weakness.

• 2:20:22Speaker 05

  Let me ask you a quick question because I feel kind of strongly about cybercrime. And I, I feel as though our government gets it wrong, that it's, it's not breaking into the bodega and stealing their cash. It is that.

• 2:20:42Speaker 05

  I'm all for presidential findings. I am all for the cyberterrorism. If you shut down a hospital, that now you become a Title 50, Title 10 target, that you're not, it's not a law, you know, an FBI case anymore. It's not law enforcement.

• 2:21:01Speaker 05

  I would like to see consequences. I would like to see these things elevated in our, in our sort of warfare or in a new domain, a new warfare domain.

• 2:21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so David, I think there's nuance in what you just said, but I will tell you. So what we, we've been hanging out BSing for what, two hours or so? I will tell you, like, we protect 150,000 businesses worldwide. Even with all of our skills, all of our prevention, et cetera, I'm sure there's probably a half to a couple dozen that have been wrecked in the last two hours, even the ones we protect. It's like saying there's perfect prevention against cancer. It's not real. Sometimes it's about just finding it early. And the point that I'm getting across, the whole idea is finding it before it kills you. If you look at things that way, at that scale, that even just during this two hours that we're hanging. You know, just, there's companies that are not going to be able to deliver food tomorrow.

• 2:21:54Speaker 02

  There's going to be companies that can't run payroll. There's going to be companies that can't schedule logistics meetings. And there's going to be people that's causing stress on real people. I don't think we equate cybercrime with real crime. And I think in some ways, we even victim shame, oh, you got hacked.

• 2:22:09Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:22:10Speaker 02

  You don't blame somebody for getting robbed at, you know, knife point in New York City.

• 2:22:14Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:22:14Speaker 02

  You just flat out say, that's crap. Get out, go after the criminal. And I think some ways that we need more support to like, let's treat hackers, and I don't mean all hackers, not ethical.

• 2:22:24Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:22:25Speaker 02

  The people who are threat actors, cyber criminals, let's treat them like they are criminals. And it should come with some real consequences. And let's be willing to handle the gray areas. Maybe there's some places that we have to interpret. Maybe there's some people that aren't quite the same level, right? Just like how we're having the conversations on like recreational drugs and stuff. Let's be smart humans and understand there's gray.

• 2:22:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:22:49Speaker 02

  But I'm telling you, when it's very clear that you're out to ruin people's lives.

• 2:22:55Speaker 02

  Why, why are we not considering more? And I'm not going to all the way to the extreme of use of force.

• 2:23:00Speaker 05

  I will.

• 2:23:00Speaker 02

  There is some level of disproportionate force that I think. Imagine if, for instance, somebody drone-striked a group that was doing scam calls. That's the most extreme example I can come up with here at night. And what I'm going with is, it probably doesn't take too many of these things to have real repercussions. And I would not advocate for like loss of life. But maybe when it hits a certain level that you're willing to attack a hospital. Let's call it what it is. It's no longer cybercrime, it's much closer to terrorism. If not, flat-out terrorism. And I just don't think.

• 2:23:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:23:34Speaker 02

  There's a whole lot of

• 2:23:37Speaker 02

  this willingness to have this hard conversation yet.

• 2:23:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, for me, it's like, e- even talking about scam calls. I mean, do we measure how many Americans kill themselves because they've lost everything through a scam call or through ransomware? Like, so have they sort of taken that life? I don't know. I feel like you, you know, you send a tomahawk to one or two threat actors and you'll separate the wheat from the chaff. You'll see who's serious about, you know, ransomware.

• 2:24:07Speaker 02

  There will still be some that don't care. You're darn right.

• 2:24:09Speaker 05

  Sure, absolutely, absolutely. But...

• 2:24:11Speaker 02

  And there's versions of this.

• 2:24:13Speaker 06

  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extenture, depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, it may be time to try something else. Extenture is an ultra-long-acting prescription-maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extenture is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection.

• 2:24:56Speaker 06

  Common colds, sinus infection, inflammation in the nose, flu or fluke-like symptoms, joint pain or sore throat may occur. Carry on with fewer attacks and ask your doctor about Extenture. Learn more at extenture.com or call 1-833-393-3678.

• 2:25:13Speaker 00

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• 2:25:44Speaker 02

  Right, like jail time. I've seen some of these that are like responsible for millions and they still end up with four to six years when they finally get extradited. I, again, I think there's difference between people who rob banks and people who shoot people while robbing banks. That's logical. That is a difference between that. But I don't think, for instance, we do enough to look at the blast radius. We don't look at the collateral damage, and I do think we will get there. I really think that now we're starting to realize. But I will also say, guys, to not, to like, maybe tone down some of the rhetoric. There's a lot of incidents, actually, that businesses do get hacked. And they go back to business in six to eight weeks as well. So I do think that we got to make sure that, like, when it's extreme, let's treat it more extreme.

• 2:26:29Speaker 02

  Right. And when it's chill, let's normalize that some people get their car burglarized. And let's just go back to work the next day, you know, get the window fixed by USA or whoever's your car insurance. And so if you can't tell, I'm like this weird version of where I'm simultaneously saying, wreck 'em. Right. And also chill. Right. And I think that's okay. Right.

• 2:26:48Speaker 09

  We have any more questions? One more question. Do you have any thoughts on cyber having kinetic effects in warfare? Like hacking medical devices and altering device functionality?

• 2:27:01Speaker 02

  I think if laws support it, do it. And I don't mean that laws can't take it down, but for instance, if I could take your internet-connected car, and I have everything against you that you are an arms dealer that's taken life.

• 2:27:16Speaker 02

  If I have the same war power, for instance, if I was there to actually take life. Why does it matter if it comes from a bullet or your Mercedes swerving off the bridge? I know that's extreme, and I'm trying to make a point with it. But my point behind it is, let's not go too extreme on either side, but let's keep things proportional. Does it really matter? And so I come from a world that my job has literally taken life because of this. And it wasn't against people who just did a little bit of credit card fraud. They were people who blew up, ten, fifteen, twenty innocent people, some of their own citizens, some foreign. I again, I think the nuance matters here. So I'm trying to give these edgy points to like,

• 2:27:59Speaker 02

  make sure people have a soundbite that they can like jolt them to think. But I'm also trying to bring it down to the nuance matters. So for me, there is definitely situations that exist that we should be able to use cyber to deliver kinetic effects. When the juice is worth the squeeze, or when we would have done the same thing if it was a physical situation.

• 2:28:19Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:28:21Jack Murphy?

  Kyle, tell us about, um, where can people find you? Where can they find Huntress? What types of companies should contact you and, you know, try to procure your services? I mean, who, who needs to find you?

• 2:28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I gave all the embarrassing stories earlier. When I was small, we serviced businesses that were small businesses. It turns out now we're cybersecurity for all businesses. And it's not just a tool. We're the full team that actually does all the development. And the same team building the tool is the same team hunting these cyber criminals. Huntress.com is obviously the website. But it turns out some of our spiciest stuff you can find is on stuff like LinkedIn, on X, right, on Facebook. We actually show on a daily basis what we're wrecking. And that goes back to that mission statement I said earlier. If you lead with not only transparency and integrity, but educate these companies that don't have resources, maybe like yours,

• 2:29:18Speaker 02

  with community and with education, you can kind of make a real big difference to the world. So again, the website's cool. You can learn about us on a website. But if you want to see the real kind of like deal that you got to experience tonight, find us on LinkedIn, find us on one of those social networks. That's where we actually talk, just like we talked today.

• 2:29:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, this has been fantastic. We really, really appreciate it.

• 2:29:41Speaker 02

  Guys, well, again, I appreciate it. Again, we got to touch a lot of topics that some people shy away from. We got to be able to play both sides of the fence and I just really appreciate it. I know it took us a handful of years for both of our schedules to work, but I don't know. Two and a half drinks in and I'm feeling like we succeeded. So cheers, guys.

• 2:29:58Jack Murphy?

  Outstanding. We'll do it again sometime, Kyle, and um, thank you for your time spending some of your Friday evening with us.

• 2:30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was awesome. Thank you so much, guys.

• 2:30:06Speaker 09

  Kyle, I got one more question. What, what countries does Huntress service?

• 2:30:12Speaker 02

  So we actually service all of them, right? There is, you know, when it comes down to like, we have some legal obligations. Like, I can't service Syria today if they're sanctioned away. But when I say 150,000 businesses, I'm not talking about like in the Atlanta or Baltimore or DC region. There are 150,000 businesses that some you would know and some that just provide all the power and electricity that you don't know across the entire globe. So no joke, we are a proper global company wrecking hackers no matter where they try to go after.

• 2:30:42Speaker 05

  What, what would be your like five year dream for Huntress?

• 2:30:48Speaker 02

  Dude, so I asked this question, or I get asked this question a lot too, meaning I ask my teammates, but also get asked. And what's nice about it is hackers are so innovative. They have to be respected, just like for instance, adversaries. They're smart humans. And the one thing that I love is think about launching a rocket to the moon. Physics don't change, right? If you know the physics, you know the earth orbit, you can take a rocket, go around the moon, slingshot back, land it on a drone platform, you're done. But cybersecurity is brilliant shady humans against brilliant ethical humans. And the part that I would share is I hope more and more and more through like our conversation we shared today,

• 2:31:30Speaker 02

  that the ethical side can, you know, not just cat and mouse this, but disproportionately win. We're not going to win it all, but I think we're on the cusp of using our offensive skills to support defense that could finally change like so cyber criminals are making less money than the companies protecting them. And I know that sounds like so capitalistic. You want that. If companies like this are making money, you are just doing whatever you do. Dry cleaning, delivering paint, right? Services, shipping things, whatever widget, software, you want that to win. And for me, I would like, no matter where threat actors go, I would love for Huntress to be one step ahead. Like, that would be a really cool place that I could like pass away and feel good about.

• 2:32:13Speaker 05

  That's awesome.

• 2:32:15Jack Murphy?

  Kyle, thank you again for taking the time to do this interview. And maybe we'll come back to you again at some juncture in the future when we need your cyber expertise. And we will see all you guys next week. There's some links down in the description for, you'll find Kyle, you'll find Huntress, you'll also find our Patreon. Thank you, everyone who subscribes. And we have new merch also, so you can find that down there. And thank you.

• 2:32:43Speaker 06

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• 2:33:28Speaker 06

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• 2:34:13Jack Murphy?

  The one, and we will see you next week.

• 2:34:21Speaker 06

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• 2:35:06Speaker 06

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