CrowdStrike’s former CTO on cyber rivalries and how automation can undermine security for early-stage startups

Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Crowdstrike co-founder and former CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch, to talk about the evolving cybersecurity landscape, the role of startups, and why he says we’re living in a World on the Brink. Listen to the full episode to hear about: What early-stage secure-by-design startup founders are missing when it comes to maintaining security while building quickly and crisis management. How AI export controls and global rivalries are reshaping innovation. What investors are really looking for when backing cybersecurity startups today. Equity will be back Friday with a behind-the-scenes look at TC Sessions: AI, so don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

• 0:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Beland, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. With the $50 billion Chinese AI market potentially slipping out of reach for US chipmakers like Nvidia, and with cyber threats escalating from state actors and criminal groups alike, it's a strong reminder of just how connected tech and geopolitics really are. Few understand that better than today's guest, Dimitri Elperovitch, co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, bestselling author, and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator. Dimitri, welcome to the show.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 0:53Rebecca Bellan?

  Really appreciate you being here. I don't know if we have time to go over all of your accolades and your entire pedigree, but I'd love to hear a little bit about you starting CrowdStrike and working there until, what was it, 2020?

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been in cybersecurity industry really my entire life. I started a company with my dad when I was still in high school, focused on cryptography, the emerging field of encryption, studied it in college. CrowdStrike really came out of an investigation I had done. I was an executive at a company called McAfee, which was at the time, one of the biggest cybersecurity firms. And in January of 2010, I worked together with Google, who had been compromised by the Chinese nation-state operators at the time. And I investigated that operation, realized that there were many other victims that were involved in that intrusion, and they were focused on stealing intellectual property from these companies, that they were also going after at Google specifically email

• 1:47Speaker 02

  accounts of dissidents, Tibetan dissidents and others that the Chinese wanted to surveil. But this was really the first time that the public had learned that nation-state hackers were not just targeting governments, that were not just engaged in traditional espionage, they were also stealing massive amounts of intellectual property. And then over the course of the next year, I did some major investigations, I call them Night Dragon and That unveiled the full scope of what was taking place and the numerous nation state actors, not just China, but North Korea, and then ultimately Russia and Iran, that were engaging in these activities. And that's directly what led to the founding of CrowdStrike, because I realized there was a huge problem that existing companies were not solving and that there had to be a different way to approach,

• 2:31Speaker 02

  not just a hacker in a basement or cyber criminal, but organized efforts by the Chinese People's Liberation Army or the intelligence services that were trying to break into companies, steal their trade secrets, steal their intellectual property.

• 2:43Rebecca Bellan?

  Sorry, you said that one of those investigations was called Night Dragon? That's pretty cool. What was the other one called?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Night Dragon was an intrusion to an oil and gas sector by the Chinese. And the other one was called Shady Rat, that looked at a whole slew of intrusions going back to 2005, almost a six-year operation that compromised over 70 different industries. And that's when I coined some of the phrases that you may have heard about, that this is the greatest transfer of wealth in history that is taking place and that there are only two types of companies, those that know that they've been hacked and those that don't yet know.

• 3:15Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, smart. Yeah, you've talked about this before. Not only are these kind of state-sponsored hacking attempts trying to get information about dissidents, but also IP, also to inform, to kind of like steal IP to bring back to national companies. You had an anecdote about people in the US not being worried about China and saying that if they're still stealing, they're not innovating.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  That's right. So after one of those reports that I had published, I had been asked to come into the White House and brief the national security staff in the Situation Room. And as I was briefing them on the event and this full scope of the intrusions the Chinese were conducting and sort of pushing on them that we have to do something, we have to call China out. At the time, no one in the US government was willing to even publicly say the words China and cyber in the same sentence, even though they were fully aware of the scope of this activity. It was all living sort of in the classified world. I got a response back from across the table, from someone saying, oh, Dmitry, you know, as long as they keep stealing, they can't innovate. So this is not really a huge problem for us. And I just thought that was so myopic, ahistorical. And of course, it's proven to be the case that

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Now China is the leader in so many industries, whether it's electric vehicles, whether it's batteries, whether it's nuclear, a lot of it had come on the back of initially stealing and continued to steal to this day, but also now rapidly innovating in those fields.

• 4:34Rebecca Bellan?

  And you've obviously written the book on this that I want to touch on, but in a little bit, but first I want to ask you, just still looking at the broader global landscape, it seems to be evolving a lot right now, right? There's AI-powered attacks, ransomware is huge, there's supply chain risks. How can startups stay ahead? Startups and companies, just generally, how are people able to stay ahead when it's just constantly moving?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Well, unfortunately, cyber landscape is not getting better. The history of the 40-plus years of this field is that it always keeps getting worse because there are more actors, they're getting more sophisticated, they're going after more targets. And nowadays, it's not just your virtual data, it's not just your virtual systems, but now they're going after physical systems like refineries, for example, or pipelines and trying to shut those down, either to try to get a ransom payment or actually to achieve some sort of national goals. Obviously, Russia is doing a lot of that right now against Ukraine, trying to destroy their energy infrastructure, both kinetically and in cyberspace. But look, companies have to first figure out who might be coming after them, what are their crown jewels, how are they going to defend them? How are they going to recover from attacks?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  At the end of the day, intrusions are really inevitable, so it's really how you recover from one, how you limit the damage, how quickly you can you respond, that will characterize how good you can withstand and recover quickly from an intrusion.

• 5:51Rebecca Bellan?

  So do companies today have to, even smaller companies, do they need to hire a crisis management lead? Or is that something you can kind of outsource?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Well, there are a lot of people that are providing services. Typically, these days, it's law firms that will lead a response to an intrusion because, as you might imagine, there are lots of regulatory issues that will be involved, disclosure issues, shareholder concerns, the SEC now mandates that companies disclose cybersecurity information to the public if it's a public company. There's a whole cottage industry that has evolved in helping companies respond to breaches quickly and certain response companies and the like.

• 6:25Rebecca Bellan?

  I just want to also, you mentioned critical industries and it just made me think of an article that we published over the weekend. I wanted to get your hot take on it. I'm sure if you're aware of early investor Elad Gil, he's doing something where he's kind of, it's like a private equity roll up of just like normal infrastructure industries, you know, energy or what have you, gas, and adding AI to make it more efficient. Do you see that this is like a way to actually create more risk or maybe less risk or not at all for these kinds of critical industries?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, funny enough, I was just with Elad this weekend. Well, look, I think every industry will be transformed in one form or fashion with AI. So I think it makes total sense. What he's trying to do is looking at existing industries and how you can add AI-powered technology to them to make them more efficient and potentially grow faster in some of these industries that have had stagnated growth.

• 7:12Rebecca Bellan?

  But specifically for like the cyber question, like does adding more AI to these traditional industries, does that create more of a protection for them or does it create more vulnerabilities?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  You know, it really depends. One of the biggest vulnerabilities in companies is actually humans. If you have someone that can be social engineer, that can respond to efficient email, that usually is a way into the company. So obviously, if you're more relying on AI, it's less likely to be phished potentially by those types of attacks, although there are opportunities to also game AI, of course, with certain creative prompts if you're talking about generative AI as well. But it can create new avenues for attack. The more you automate, the more you have opportunities for people to find vulnerabilities in your system. So unfortunately, the landscape of attacks that can be orchestrated against companies is vast. New technologies both create new problems but also help fix new ones. So on balance, you're probably no better off.

• 8:07Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, so net-net, zero. Yeah, I mean, people do seem to be the problem. Did you see that article a couple of days ago about the laptop farming? There was a woman who had been holding on to all these laptops from different US tech companies. Each laptop represented a North Korean worker. So all these North Korean workers were able to pretend to be workers for American companies and send back a huge transfer of wealth to North Korea.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  That's right. This is a huge issue right now where North Koreans, of course, are not just doing cyber intrusions and doing ransom operations. So they are engaging in a variety of illicit activities. And the new scheme is to get their people hired as employees inside major companies as well as startups to simply collect a paycheck. And they are actually trying to do work in those companies and hang on as long as possible without being identified as a North Korean operator. But it is yet another fundraising scheme. And you're absolutely right that they're using both witting and unwitting actors within the United States to set up these laptop farms. So it looks like you are inside the United States when in reality, you might be a North Korean worker in Singapore, Malaysia, or China.

• 9:13Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. Does this make the case for all those return to office mandates that everyone hates so much?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Well, there are other ways to do that. One of the reasons that this scheme has exploded since COVID is that the Department of Homeland Security actually relaxed their verification rules around I9s, the forms you fill out to prove that you're allowed to work in the United States. So it used to be that you had to present physical proof of your identity, either by going directly to the company or going to like a FedEx store or UPS store. And they relaxed all that during COVID for obvious reasons and allowed you to do so virtually. So that has become very easy now for the North Koreans to simply Photoshop their IDs, pretending to have a driver's license from Texas or Georgia or whatever. So simply just requiring physical verification upon hiring an employee can help reduce the chances that you'll hire a North Korean hacker.

• 10:02Rebecca Bellan?

  Would you even call that a spy if they're just, they're just trying to get money? They're not trying to get information?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Well, remember, they're working for the foreign government. In almost all these cases, they're not trying to steal. They're trying to collect a paycheck. But I think it's only a matter of time before they realize that, hey, we're also doing espionage operations. And why try to break into a company when we already have people on the payroll there that have access, that know where the crown jewels are and have legitimate need to access it? So I think we're probably months away, if not sooner, before they're leveraging that type of access for espionage as well.

• 10:34Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, and it's just too easy. I mean, with all this deep fake technology, you do a video interview, you can change my voice, the way that I look, everything. And some hirers may not be any the wiser unless they maybe have some kind of technology to scan for that, but it evolves so quickly that's just difficult to keep track.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 10:48Rebecca Bellan?

  I wanted to take it back to your book, World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century. Give us a brief overview of what you're trying to achieve with this book and what you're trying to illuminate.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Well, there are a couple of themes to the book. The first one is that we're reeling in a new Cold War, Cold War II, as I call it, with China. That is actually remarkably similar on almost every level to the first Cold War. I go through some of the history in the book of the first Cold War. I was born in Russia and the former Soviet Union during that first Cold War, so have some unique experiences growing up there. But when you look at the similarities, they're just so numerous. You have a global competition for supremacy between the United States and China that's playing out in every corner of the world, not just in Asia. It's not just military, it's economic, it's technology, it's geopolitical. You have preparations for war. If you go talk to Sam Papar, Admiral Papar, who heads the Indo-Pacific Command for the US military out in Hawaii, as I have, his hair is on

• 11:44Speaker 02

  fire. He thinks that he might be called upon by the President of the United States to fight a war with China in the next few years. The Chinese, of course, are having their own preparations for war, building up capabilities to try to invade Taiwan. You have an arms race that is both conventional with buildup of military technologies and weapon systems, but also nuclear with the Chinese for the first time in many decades trying to rapidly increase their nuclear arsenal. Sounds very similar to the first Cold War, right? You have a space race. We're trying to get to the moon before the Chinese do.

• 12:13Rebecca Bellan?

  Just cuz, right? Just cuz. Why are we going to the moon?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Well, you know, it's a stepping stone to Mars and exploration of other planets, but also there's a lot of prestige in that race as there was in the 1960s with the first race to the moon. You have a scramble for military bases. We're building up bases in Guam and Japan and the Philippines, all over that region, and the Chinese are doing the same things in Cambodia and Pakistan, even Djibouti on the eastern shore of Africa. You have an economic war where we have export controls on technology going to China. They're stealing our technology and trying to restrict access to rare earths that they have and you're monopoly on that is going to impact significantly our tech sector. You have espionage war, right? What I focused on for many decades is the espionage that the Chinese have been perpetrating against us.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  The FBI has said that it's at the highest levels that it's ever been in the history of this country, far exceeding even what was happening during the first Cold War, in part enabled, of course, by cyber. You have a tech war with the AI wars going on and EVs and batteries and all these other technologies and a regional flashpoint that exists. I believe that Taiwan is sort of the new West Berlin that played that flashpoint role in the first Cold War. And of course, an ideological struggle as well with China being authoritarian and Marxist-Leninist country in many ways to this day. So very, very similar situation. And I believe in this book is really called to action that Xi Jinping wants to invade Taiwan in his lifetime. Now, he's in his early 70s now and he's going to be up for reelection in 2027

• 13:41Speaker 02

  as the head of the Chinese Communist Party and thus the leader of China for another five-year term that will expire in 2032 when he will be 79. So I think it's very unlikely, given that in the Chinese system, they don't tend to elect their leaders into their 80s, unlike the American system perhaps. And he'll be looking at that 27-32 period as his potentially last term. And of course, you never know how health concerns and other issues.

• 14:07Rebecca Bellan?

  So what does that leave us? Like, obviously, Taiwan, we think Silicon Shield, we think AI, our listeners are really interested in AI. So how does that affect America's chances at still being the leader in AI?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Well, I think if China succeeds in taking Taiwan, it will be disastrous for United States national security, not just because of chips, but because of strategic position that Taiwan has in that region. Of course, General Douglas MacArthur had called it the unsinkable aircraft carrier in 1950, long before any chips were even invented. But on semiconductors in particular, Taiwan is really existential. Not only does it produce over 90% of all advanced chips, like the AI chips, the GPUs that we use to produce these remarkable innovations, but they produce 40% of all chips, period. The chips that go into your car, your TV, your microwave, your dishwasher. So if China takes control of those factories without damaging them,

• 14:59Speaker 02

  that will essentially create a monopoly for them and a huge choke point for the rest of the world. That will allow China to in many ways have even more leverage over our economy and national security. But if more likely during the course of a conflict, those fabs get destroyed, that is going to bring the world to a standstill.

• 15:16Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, we saw how that happened after COVID, right? There was the chip shortage and that took years for it to alleviate. I think it still hasn't fully alleviated.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  That's right, and that was just a shortage with a few factories that were damaged due to fires and some events that are unrelated to conflict. But here you're talking about massive capacity that will likely be damaged or destroyed in Taiwan. And you will have an estimated 5% global GDP contraction in the first year of that conflict. That's global depression level numbers. It will take years to rebuild that infrastructure. And of course, there'll be concerns about whether you want to rebuild it in Taiwan, given that China might actually occupy Taiwan. And rebuilding it elsewhere is going to be incredibly difficult because all the supply chains, all the workers are in Taiwan. So if China goes after Taiwan, whether they win or lose, it'll be disastrous for the United States, it'll be disastrous for the world. And that's why I believe they should be deterred.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  And that's really the second part of the book, which is how do we go about doing that?

• 16:17Anthony Ha?

  What moves our world forward? Energy. History has been shaped by it, revolutions won with it, and progress dependent on it. For 190 years, Schneider Electric has been a leading force in this story, creating the technologies that harness energy and transform the competitive landscape. And today, in the dawning era of energy and industrial intelligence, Schneider is helping customers build more efficient, resilient, and sustainable operations across every sector. From data centers to homes, from buildings to industry. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner. Discover more at se.com.

• 16:56Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, so much of this fight is happening in the cyber realm, right? So I'm curious what you think, since your book discusses the escalating cyber conflict between the US and China. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about this cyber rivalry that founders and investors should understand?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Well, one is that this has been done, really, not just by Chinese companies, but it's been done by the government on behalf of Chinese industry. Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party, has identified strategic industries that they want to be dominant in. The original goal for this was 2025. There was a famous plan that was unveiled in 2015, made in China 2025, where they declared that they will be, A, independent of the West in those industries, like semiconductors and battery technologies and aerospace and others, and two, become actually global dominant exporters in those technologies. Now, they didn't meet those goals in most of these industries. They've made progress, but not nearly enough. Just because they hit 2025 doesn't mean that the objective is over, and they're continuing

• 17:54Speaker 02

  to invest massively in subsidies, engaging in unfair trade practices throughout their industries, bribery of customers and countries, but also huge amounts of IP theft that is ongoing. They've been doing it for about 25 years now, and it is really unprecedented in its scale. As I called it back in 2011, this is the greatest transfer of wealth in history that is occurring. Hundreds of billions of dollars, probably annually, that are being transferred in terms of IP to Chinese companies. And that's what's now allowing them to build up these huge behemoths like Huawei and others that are leaders in their respective spaces. And if we don't wake up to the threat and do something quickly, I think they'll dominate most industries.

• 18:39Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, I mean, there's a huge opportunity for cybersecurity companies to, and we're seeing it, we're seeing a ton of cybersecurity startups come up with funding. You know, it's not as hot as AI, I guess, but it's still pretty hot right now. Or it's not as hot as defense, but I guess it is also kind of defense. So what role do you think that private sector startups and investors play in national security, given the overlapping between cyber defense and geopolitics?

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Well, huge. I mean, cyber is one of those industries where you will have the private sector defending the nation effectively, particularly the private sector part of the nation against foreign actors, foreign nation states, right? The US government is not going to come in and help manufacturing company defend itself against Chinese intruders. That's not what they do. They will help to investigate it. They might indict some people that may or may not ever be arrested because they may never leave China, but it's up to you to actually try to thwart those attacks. It's up to you to respond to them and kick them out of your system. So that's where the startups, the innovation and private sector comes in to defend both the private sector in this country

• 19:43Speaker 02

  and increasingly the government, because the government increasingly is buying these commercial off the shelf technologies, realizing that their gods, their government-built solutions are completely inferior, particularly in this field, to what's coming out of the innovation in the startup field.

• 19:57Rebecca Bellan?

  And then so looking forward, like what are some of the next threats that you see? You know, quantum is kind of being thrown around as a potential next threat, even though we're not really there yet. Deepfakes, obviously, we mentioned. Is there anything, any trends that you're seeing that you would advise companies to pay closer attention to?

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not super concerned about quantum. I think, you know, it's kind of perpetually decade away and there are actually limits to what you can do with a quantum computer, even if you had one today. It solves certain problems like breaking cryptography, but in many ways, AI and traditional computing architectures, I think, are going to give us a lot more bang for our buck than a quantum computer would once we get it. But AI is both helping to detect new intrusions and the cybersecurity industry is adopting very quickly, but it's also helping adversaries. You know, those North Korean hackers, not hackers, but IT workers that we just talked about, they use generative AI to build up their resumes to help them ace through interviews and get hired in those companies. The social engineering opportunities that these generative AI platforms offer with deepfakes,

• 20:56Speaker 02

  with being able to model someone else's voice and so forth are just enormous. You know, I served recently on a US government board called the Cyber Safety Review Board, which was stood up a few years ago to kind of be an analogy to the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board that investigates airline crashes and train derailments and the like, and to do the same in the cyber domain. And one of the reviews that we had done on the board was look at a group called Lapsus and related groups, which was a group of teenagers in the United States, in the UK, in Brazil, that were incredibly successful at breaking into some of the largest companies in the world, some of the most sophisticated, like Nvidia, like Microsoft and others. And they basically didn't use any technical skills at all. They only relied on social engineering.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  They would call up the internal help desks at these companies, say that they're an employee, asked for their passwords to be reset, basically social engineer their way in. And when a two factor authentication code would come in for the reset, typically to the phone of the real employee, they would clone the phone number using a SIM swapping attack, get the code and basically VPN into the company without using any malware, any exploits, any vulnerabilities, purely by using their English language native skills to social engineer their way into those companies. So imagine now the Russian intelligence services, the Chinese intelligence services being able to do the exact same thing, but now leveraging AI, right? It's going to be an enormous opportunity for them. You're already starting to see that the phishing emails that are coming in into these companies

• 22:26Speaker 02

  are getting a lot better. There's less grammar errors, there are less spelling errors because they're able to quickly run it through chat GPT or another system and immediately correct it and make it sound like a native English speaker.

• 22:39Rebecca Bellan?

  Hmm. So are we moving to a world of iris scanning and trying to? What was that thing that Sam Altman's doing now? He's got another startup, I think, that he's backing that has a little device that will, I think, actually scan your your eyes for cybersecurity, which I mean, and to prove that you're human, that's what it is, is to prove that you're human. Yeah, it's called World Coin.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, biometrics are already being used quite pervasively for authentication because of Apple and Paskies, right? So you can now have a fingerprint scanner on your MacBook or your iPhone, and that can securely authenticate you into a lot of systems and websites that are increasingly supporting that. Windows has the same capability now. So I think that is the future, most likely, fingerprint scanner. Versus Iris. Of course, the one problem with biometrics, well, there are actually two problems with biometrics. One is that they're very brittle. So if you lose your finger, there's no easy recoverable mechanism to resetting it, right? Unlike a password where if you forget your password, you can get a new password set up. You only have so many fingers on your hands and then you're starting to see this in the crypto world in particular,

• 23:43Speaker 02

  where people are going after fingers, right?

• 23:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  When they're trying to get access to your Bitcoin wallet and the like. You know, it's one thing to sort of be threatened and just give up your password. It's another thing when someone is actively trying to cut off your body parts so that they can authenticate without you. So the threat to you is a little bit different than just losing your money.

• 24:02Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, that's becoming a big thing in the crypto world, right? Like these hacks to get into Coinbase or whatever, and then they can see who has a ton of money in Bitcoin and then go after those people. I mean, it's really scary.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  And by the way, when you have breaches that take place at these major exchanges, Coinbase just had a breach where personal data was stolen. Even if the money is not stolen, now the criminals know where you live. They have your phone number, so they can actually target you physically.

• 24:26Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, so many of these startups like Coinbase is, I still consider them a startup. So many of these companies, there's the move fast, break things mindset, right? You're moving so fast to try to innovate, to iterate, to be faster than everyone around you. And does security kind of fall by the wayside? Like, how do you balance that as a startup in a hot industry?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it often does unfortunately, and that's why you've seen so many of these breaches take place in the crypto world, because it's got the combination of that's where the money is, right? As Willie Horton used to say, so the threat landscape is enormous, both from cybercrime, but also through hackers from North Korea. They're trying to monetize that crypto to help fund the regime. And at the same time, you have very limited investment in security because they're startups, they're moving fast. They may not even have dedicated security personnel. So it's a much easier target than going, let's say, after JP Morgan Chase.

• 25:14Rebecca Bellan?

  Now, really quick, what's your hot take on Doge and the amount of data that Doge employees or volunteer? I don't know what they are anymore, advisors have been able to access of government data? And how some of that, you know, there's speculation that a lot of that has made its way to Elon Musk's companies, XAI. Grok is being used in certain agencies now, apparently. What are your thoughts about that kind of level of data? Some people are calling it the biggest data breach in history, TechCrunch certainly has. What are your thoughts?

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing that I think most people don't appreciate about Doge is that these are actually now federal government employees, right? So these are not just outsiders because when you join Doge, my understanding is I'm not a part of it. But having talked to a few people that have been a part of it is that you are a special government employee, which means you have all the responsibilities of what a full-time employee would do at a US government. You have to sign all the paperwork and have all the criminal and civil obligations that a regular employee at Treasury or elsewhere would have. So just them having access to the data, I don't necessarily think is as huge of an issue because other certainly employees within the federal government do the exact same thing. Now, if they are violating those agreements by providing it to a commercial entity without oversight

• 26:31Speaker 02

  or in violation of rules or regulations, that's an issue that has to be dealt with. But just having those people inside government trying to access data, yeah.

• 26:41Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, not necessarily them accessing it, but also like the way that they create new databases for them to kind of play around with and try to find ways to slash costs. Some of those have been reported to be not super secure and easily hackable as well.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, if that's the case, that's certainly an issue, but we'll see what ultimately comes of it.

• 26:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  My understanding is they're also trying to shut down a lot of legacy systems, which might help with cybersecurity. So like anything, I think it's probably going to be a mixed bag.

• 27:04Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, of course. Looking ahead, since this has been a slightly alarming conversation, thinking about all the risks, is there anything that gives you hope about the future of cybersecurity or global digital security?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Well, look, this is such a unique field, and this is what originally attracted me to it when I was still a teenager, is that unlike most areas of science, you're never done, right? You might imagine if you're going to the medical field and you're targeting a particular form of cancer, that one day, hopefully, you'll achieve that success, you'll solve that cancer, you'll develop a treatment for it, and you can go retire on a beach and sip your pina coladas for the rest of your life. You are never done in cyber, right? Because you're facing a sentient opponent. Another human being or another nation state, as is often the case these days, they're trying to find a way around your defenses to ultimately get to their strategic objectives, which they've been given by their leadership. It's a lot like chess. I'm an avid chess player. The adversary always has a move to play, and that's what makes it so interesting,

• 28:00Speaker 02

  but also so difficult to deal with because there is no magic bullet. There's no one thing you could do to help solve the problem.

• 28:06Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, you seem like a chess player.

• 28:09Rebecca Bellan?

  Hey, thanks so much again for joining us on the show. Where can our listeners connect with you online? Or where can they find you? Or are you book touring anywhere? Cool.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  I'm always on the book tour. WorldOnTheBrick.com is where the latest information about the book is and the tour. I have a podcast also called Geopolitics Decanta that dives into a lot of issues related to the China issue, but also the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a lot of analysis of that war and how technology and drone warfare is changing the nature of the conflict. And on X and other platforms, as Dialparvich.

• 28:39Rebecca Bellan?

  Awesome. Thank you so much again. And to our listeners, you can find me on X and Blue Sky and Equity at EquityPod on both of those platforms. Talk to you next time.

• 28:49Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.