#85 Bryce Case Jr. AKA YTCracker - Anonymous Hacker

Bryce Case Jr., aka YTCracker, is a hacker and musician. Bryce has been called "The Original Digital Gangster" for his early adoption and manipulation of all things online. Ryan Montgomery, a fan favorite on SRS, calls Bryce his mentor. In this special Holiday release, we cover Bryce's life story starting with his early exploits when the internet was just coming into itself. We discuss his aptitude for clever digital marketing and finding money-making opportunities in every corner of America Online. Bryce made a name for himself in the hacking community by digitally defacing government websites like NASA and propping up coalitions of hackers across the web. A "Black Hat" now turned "White Hat," Bryce Case Jr. has repurposed his unscrupulous skill-set into a leading force for cybersecurity, working with some of the largest tech companies in the world. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://shopify.com/shawn https://gcu.edu/military https://puretalk.com/ryan https://1stphorm.com/srs https://bubsnaturals.com - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://blackbuffalo.com - USE CODE "SRS" Bryce Case Jr. Links: IG - https://instagram.com/y7cracker Twitter / X - https://twitter.com/realytcracker FB - https://facebook.com/ytcracker Website - https://ytcracker.com Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:46Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:53Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:00Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, everybody, it's Thanksgiving 2023.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  We're releasing our Thanksgiving special. We were actually gonna break this up into several portions because the episode is that good, but me and the team decided

• 1:16Shawn Ryan?

  to release it and give it to you all in one shebang because we know there are a lot of you out there who are spending this day alone. So we want to give you something to enjoy with.

• 1:26Shawn Ryan?

  My next guest. Man, what a fascinating gentleman.

• 1:33Shawn Ryan?

  The hacker community. It's a, it is a community that I am very unfamiliar with, but am becoming more and more familiar with, with each interview that has to do with this stuff, and I'm not gonna stop. I believe, I've said it multiple times, I believe that the warfare in the world is changing. I think that conventional military is becoming obsolete in a hurry. And gentlemen like this, with the knowledge that this man possesses,

• 2:09Shawn Ryan?

  is what it's all gonna come down to.

• 2:14Shawn Ryan?

  I'm just so thankful that I got the opportunity to meet this guy. He has the country's best interests. He always has. In fact, he tried to get the country's attention by exposing vulnerabilities when he was just a kid. 16, 17 years old. Nobody took him seriously until he successfully hacked into NASA and defaced their homepage on the website, which then they sent strike teams to come find him. That got their attention and then they fixed the problem.

• 2:46Shawn Ryan?

  Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for my team, my family, my country, and all of you.

• 3:00Shawn Ryan?

  Please head over to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave us a review. Like, comment, and subscribe to the channel.

• 3:11Shawn Ryan?

  And without further ado, please welcome Mr. Bryce Case Jr., one of the premier top hackers in the entire world to the Sean Ryan Show. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Much love. One last thing. We see a lot of you taking our content, making reels, putting them on your channels. We love it. There's a link below. It's got thousands of reels, raw, uncut. Download them for free. Put them on your channel. Monetize them. Make money. All we ask is tag the Sean Ryan Show. Happy Thanksgiving. We love you. Enjoy the show.

• 3:51Shawn Ryan?

  Bryce Case Jr., welcome to the Sean Ryan Show, man.

• 3:55Speaker 06

  Pleasure's mine.

• 3:56Shawn Ryan?

  It's an honor to have you here.

• 3:58Speaker 06

  It's an honor to be here. I'm sitting in a chair that has been graced by so many luminaries. I feel a little... Uh, under honored. I don't know. I, there's so many heroes that have been here. I just uh feel out of place, but.

• 4:12Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man. Please don't. Look, everybody that sits there thinks the same thing.

• 4:17Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 4:17Shawn Ryan?

  So you very much deserve to be sitting in that chair, but I appreciate the uh humility.

• 4:24Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 4:25Shawn Ryan?

  But um, so you kinda came on my radar. I interviewed your buddy, your, your friend, Ryan Montgomery, who's now a good friend of mine. I love that guy.

• 4:35Speaker 06

  Great guy.

• 4:35Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, just a huge heart and uh doing a lot of good in the world, but he described you as his mentor. When he was coming up and so I was like, oh, man, I gotta meet this guy. And so we got connected and here you are. This subject hacking in general is just so foreign to me. And I've, I'm super interested in it. So we got a lot to talk about.

• 5:03Speaker 06

  Sounds good.

• 5:04Shawn Ryan?

  But man, how did you get into this?

• 5:09Speaker 06

  Uh, well, when I was young, I had a computer in my house and it wasn't entirely common. Uh, I'm forty one now and so when I was a kid, now kids have everything. They got tablets, phones, whatever else. Uh, but uh, yeah, my father worked in the defense industry. Uh, he worked at uh Hughes Aircraft Company and then uh Martin Marietta uh became Lockheed Martin, but he was more on the hardware side. He did a lot of uh stuff with um

• 5:47Speaker 06

  uh rockets.

• 5:49Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:49Speaker 06

  He designed the guidance system for the tow missile, uh which is out of the Bradley tanks. And then he uh moved on to the Titan and Atlas rockets, which carried spaceship up there. Uh, the uh satellites and and stuff, but uh he obviously, you know, had access to computers. Uh, you know, for uh.

• 6:14Speaker 06

  In a time when it probably wasn't as common, you know, for people to have computers in their home. And so I just fell in love with the computer from a very, very young age. My mom was a stay at home mom and she was big into interacting with me and kind of keeping me precocious and whatnot. And so I learned how to read when I was two. And then by four, I was already just infatuated with how computers worked and programming them and stuff. So there used to be these books and magazines that would have

• 6:53Speaker 06

  basic programs that you would transcribe line by line into these computers. And so if you wanted to run games or applications or something, they would have just a printout of all of the, the lines of code that you would need to enter. And so it was kind of like learning by doing type thing, like you're mimicking and you're kind of seeing how these things work and interoperate. And so started out, obviously changing, you know, the names in the game to myself or, you know, whatever else fun stuff I wanted, if I wanted more ammunition with, for my spaceship. And, you know, I knew how to change those things. So, yeah, just really curious about computers from.

• 7:36Shawn Ryan?

  So it all started with coding for games, trying to get the cheat codes.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  That's it.

• 7:40Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man.

• 7:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:42Shawn Ryan?

  That's where my hacking career started. It was a very short-lived, but before we get too in the weeds, because I want to cover your whole life story. So I want to cover where you grew up, how you grew up, what it was like, what you were into, getting into your hacking career. I know you did some black hat stuff and hopefully we can talk about some of that. Then you defaced some government websites, uh, which I think is incredible.

• 8:15Shawn Ryan?

  And especially the way you did it. And so I want to get into all that. But let me give you a quick intro real quick before we get into your life story. So Bryce Case Jr., also known as YT Cracker, Whitey Cracker, which we'll get into that. Is that a call sign?

• 8:33Speaker 06

  Uh, it comes from a cyberpunk novel. Uh, but it's a sort of a in-joke amongst computer professionals. It means, you know, Whitey Cracker obviously means something to I think most people, but people that are in the know. Uh, YT comes from a book called Snow Crash, which is this seminal cyberpunk uh, novel. And there was a character called Yours Truly, who went by YT in that. And she was a courier, which is, and I had a pretty storied career in spamming. And then cracker used to be the term for a black hat. Uh, basically, the hackers were always kind of known as the curious

• 9:16Speaker 06

  computer technicians instead like you're trying to just find out how a system works. So it's more about the curiosity thing. And then the media, like even in the eighties and nineties, started to take the hacker word and change it into this nefarious malicious connotation. And I think recently hacker has kind of become more back to where it's roots. Like you'll hear about things like hackathons, which are just where they'll set up a bunch of coders in a room for 48 hours and have them just write code. And so it's kind of become a little bit less

• 9:50Speaker 06

  pointed than the term used to be. But cracker, you know, in the hacker jargon file and stuff, used to be a malicious person who's cracking into systems.

• 9:59Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, okay. Does, do all hackers have a call sign or code name or?

• 10:05Speaker 06

  Oh, uh, yeah, that generally we know each other. We call them handles, but or nicks, uh, for store for nickname, but that for a long period of time on the internet before Facebook and everything, uh, when it was cool to put your real name online, everybody existed with handles. And there's people, you know, even to this day, it's, I feel more comfortable calling them by their handle, you know, than their, uh, their real name. But it's a very common trope. I think now with gaming as popular as it is, people's gamer tags is very similar that. People refer to each other as their, you know, what they play Call of Duty under. But that all that stuff kind of stemmed from the hacker community.

• 10:48Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 10:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:50Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this is kind of how it is at CIA. You know, somebody's call sign, but you don't know their real name.

• 10:55Speaker 06

  The other power word.

• 10:56Shawn Ryan?

  Funny. You know, there's like a joke when a guy. There's a lot of drama within that agency.

• 11:03Speaker 06

  Oh, I imagine.

• 11:04Shawn Ryan?

  And it's funny, you'll see like a guy that hooks up with a girl in there. And they always fall in love.

• 11:11Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 11:11Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and then it's like, come on, man. You real like, you don't even know a real name. It's basically the same conversation as you have when your buddy falls in love with somebody at the strip club.

• 11:23Speaker 06

  I understand.

• 11:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's like, you don't even know their real name.

• 11:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:25Shawn Ryan?

  Come on.

• 11:26Speaker 06

  Three in the morning.

• 11:26Shawn Ryan?

  Come on.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  What are you doing?

• 11:27Shawn Ryan?

  You just know the call sign.

• 11:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:29Shawn Ryan?

  But let me finish your intro. So the original digital gangster cybersecurity hacker, the forefather of nerd core, which is a hip hop genre. First generation anonymous hacker group. Hacked into multiple international government and corporate networks. You're a published mathematician. Now you develop cyber weapons. To me, after our dinner conversation last night, I talked to Ryan Montgomery, obviously, because he's the only other hacker that I know. Now I know two.

• 12:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:06Shawn Ryan?

  And but you seem to be like the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the hacking community. Which you probably, you probably don't.

• 12:16Speaker 06

  I don't see that way.

• 12:17Shawn Ryan?

  Appreciate that.

• 12:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:18Shawn Ryan?

  But to me, that's the way you appear. So, but anyways, everybody starts off with a gift that comes on the show.

• 12:28Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 12:28Shawn Ryan?

  So here it is. We take, I know you've watched a bunch of these. You know, we take mental health very, very seriously on this show.

• 12:39Speaker 06

  Beautiful.

• 12:40Shawn Ryan?

  So, uh, those are performance mushroom. It's a performance mushroom blend. You can dump that into your coffee.

• 12:47Speaker 06

  Beautiful.

• 12:47Shawn Ryan?

  It's a layered superfood. So we partnered with them because of, because we're so uh, into mental health and brain health and part of mental health is keeping your brain sharp and that will do it.

• 12:59Speaker 06

  Very important.

• 13:00Shawn Ryan?

  And then, uh, there's some other stuff in there. Sounds like you like flavored coffee. So that's a coconut creamer.

• 13:07Speaker 06

  Can go with it.

• 13:07Shawn Ryan?

  For fall. And, uh, there's another one in there that's an instant latte. It's got all kinds of adaptogens in it. Basically all the products there have the cleanest. They just have the cleanest, uh, ingredients known to man.

• 13:20Speaker 06

  Sounds good.

• 13:21Shawn Ryan?

  It's good for brain health. So.

• 13:23Speaker 06

  Well, uh, my brain is probably my most important, uh, instrument. So, uh, I'm a hundred, 10% on board with that.

• 13:29Shawn Ryan?

  I think we can all say that. At least I hope. But, um.

• 13:34Speaker 06

  Thank you very much.

• 13:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you're welcome. But, um, let's, let's just dig into it. So I want to dig into your childhood and, and, and we covered a little bit of it. Um, how you got into hacking, but where did you grow up?

• 13:47Speaker 06

  Uh, I was born in California. Uh, cause again, my dad worked in the defense industry. He absolutely hated California. Um, and he was born in Colorado Springs and so my grandparents were there. So pretty much the two years that we lived in California when I was a kid, he did nothing but try to get back to Colorado. And so then, uh, when I was two, we moved to Denver, um, which was closer to the facility that he worked at, Martin Marietta. Um, and then two years later in Colorado Springs, and that's pretty much where I spent my, most of my life was, uh, was there. And, um, Colorado Springs

• 14:30Speaker 06

  had a lot of military. I'm still, still does to this day. There's, um, Shriver, Peterson, NORAD, uh, Fort Carson, uh, the Air Force Academy, you know, lots of kind of military influence there. Funnily enough, uh, in computer hacking, like war games had come out, I think the year I was born, which is a movie about. A kid who's breaking into government systems and there's a huge focal point of NORAD. And as a result of that, I think there was a lot of, there were these weird laws that existed,

• 15:10Speaker 06

  like kind of anti hacking laws that were in Colorado, that area specifically in Colorado Springs, that just pertained, I think, to, because of that movie, I'm assuming is probably where a lot of this comes from. Back then, phones used to be how you would connect to, you would just dial them up with a modem. And there's a concept called war dialing, which is where you would just take a prefix and an area code and then try to dial systems.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  And you'd see if you get a carrier tone on the other end that was a computer. But that was illegal in Colorado Springs for, it wasn't illegal most other places, but for some reason they made it illegal there. So grew up in this kind of where the environment, I guess, wasn't necessarily too friendly, I think, to that type of exploration, which is something that I think some kids growing up in different areas had different experiences. But yeah, again, I just really loved computers. I used to just sit in the computer lab, was a pretty good student early on in all the gifted, you know, whatever programs. But I just like finished my work and I would just go to the computer lab and was like writing

• 16:27Speaker 06

  software on Apple II Basic to.

• 16:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how old are you?

• 16:32Speaker 06

  Oh, school age, like elementary school, probably.

• 16:35Shawn Ryan?

  Let's rewind.

• 16:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:36Shawn Ryan?

  Rewind. Two years old.

• 16:40Shawn Ryan?

  You've claimed to know how to read at age two years old.

• 16:43Speaker 06

  I didn't believe it myself. My mom has cassette tapes and pictures and everything like that. So, I mean, she was very, a documentarian, you know, obviously. I think some, most mothers are at that age type thing. But yeah, learn how to read and then.

• 17:00Shawn Ryan?

  Like how, how, what were you reading it to?

• 17:02Speaker 06

  Oh, just basic stuff, not like, you know, Cat in the Hat level. Bryce Eats Watermelon, Bryce Pets Cats, you know, just very, very simplistic. You know, not like Tolstoy or Shakespeare or anything, but.

• 17:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but still two years old?

• 17:18Speaker 06

  I know. I, I wish I was still that smart. It'd be great, but yeah, it was just. I don't know, like I there's just some sort of whatever I.

• 17:28Shawn Ryan?

  Well, hold on.

• 17:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:30Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on. So you learned it. I have that you learned to read at age two.

• 17:34Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 17:34Shawn Ryan?

  And that you were, you learned to program at age four.

• 17:39Speaker 06

  That's correct. Yeah.

• 17:40Shawn Ryan?

  So are you, are you one of these, are you one of these geniuses that we read about?

• 17:49Shawn Ryan?

  Be honest.

• 17:50Speaker 06

  I wouldn't go that far. I don't think it's so weird. It's obviously it's something that you can't

• 17:59Speaker 06

  call yourself or something. I don't see it that way, just but a lot of it is because I'm exposed to hyper, just insanely intelligent people at all, all times. And I see that the way their mind works in some senses. And I mean, I've heard the feedback that I am a, that I'm a genius and stuff, but it's not something I think I really.

• 18:23Speaker 06

  I think the taller.

• 18:24Shawn Ryan?

  It's not something you can run around and call yourself.

• 18:26Speaker 06

  I, yeah, it's, and it's not humble or anything. I just believe that it's weird. If you think about just this mountain of skill and that the people on the bottom of the mountain like are looking up the mountain and they see just this pantheon of human beings or whatever, that's engaging in all this intelligent behavior. But it seems like the higher up the mountain that you go, the mountain gets taller, like that there's people that I think would some would consider were in the same realm of skill set or whatever. And they are like, you know, it's like LeBron James in the NBA, like everyone's in the NBA and they're all amazing.

• 19:08Speaker 06

  But there's just some people that are, you know, Wayne Gretzky at hockey, there, you know, there's people that are just so far beyond, you know, even like that this very elite level. And I think those are the people that I consider, you know, geniuses. So it's not a term that I really throw around very, very lightly, but I just, yeah, I'm, I stand in deference to all these, you know, the great, you know, I stand on the shoulders of giants as well, like a lot of where I came from and the knowledge that I have. Uh, I, if it wasn't there for me to learn, you know, and, and kind of build on top of, I mean, I'm sure most people feel the same way, but yeah, I just, it's not something I'm very comfortable.

• 19:47Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not, I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable by any means, but when I, when I, I mean, I found, look, I'm extremely green in the space, you know, obviously. I don't even know a lot of the terminology that you're throwing at me in the EDC pocket dump that you did, but you know, when I talked to Ryan Montgomery, who is the only other hacker that I know at this point, and I consider to him, to him to be extremely intelligent.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  Very talented.

• 20:15Shawn Ryan?

  And a very intelligent human being. And when he is sitting here, because I talked to him about you before you came, obviously, because I wanted to learn a little bit more. And um, when a guy like that, when a man like that tells me, yeah, this was my mentor. I mean, that resonates. And then even during your EDC pocket dump, when you're talking about the, the forum that you had created, which we'll dig into, you know, and what, what these guys are, I mean, I don't know what they're learning from you yet. We're going to find that out, but when you have guys that are inventing that cable, you know, that you showed me, that looks identical

• 20:55Shawn Ryan?

  to a, I've literally identical to an iPhone, just hold it up, you know, identical to an iPhone cable and basically enables you to manipulate and access anything that that's plugged into and the NSA is selling it for $20,000 a pop. I mean, that's impressive, you know, and then you got the guy who came from reform that invented that phone, uh, which we'll talk about later, which is, sounds like it's about as hacker proof as you can possibly get. I mean, this is people that have started learning off of your knowledge. I mean, that's, what's that? I mean, how does that even feel when somebody puts that into

• 21:40Shawn Ryan?

  perspective for you? Have you ever even thought about that?

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  I'm not the first, Danny.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 22:46Speaker 06

  Sometimes, I mean, it's something I've considered, obviously, but that I, people, you know, it's kind of like a mama bird in her nest sort of thing that, you know, a lot of the times, you know, you'll just find these chunks of coal and then you sort of fuse them into diamonds in some senses. And I think that that's pretty much the duty of anyone that's good in a field or whatever, is to identify talent and then try to make it something that's better, you know, than it is. But largely, like, the thing is the accomplishments of everybody, I think, that has come from something that I've done, they own that, you know.

• 23:31Speaker 06

  I don't want to take credit for anything, any of the work that they've done, like, you know, the work that Ryan's doing and stuff, that, you know, I do see myself as like a, it's just like a daycare practically, that, you know.

• 23:47Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it sounds like you... Are the inspiration for many

• 23:53Speaker 06

  The muse.

• 23:53Shawn Ryan?

  Of these guys that are out there doing just incredible things. You know what I mean? And that's cool, man.

• 24:01Speaker 06

  It's an honor, right?

• 24:02Shawn Ryan?

  That's a compliment.

• 24:03Speaker 06

  But I'm sure, I mean, I know, so that even like the tactical training or something that you've done, you know, or somebody that wins a shooting competition or something and they, you know, attended, you know, a class of yours. I mean, how do you feel about that type of thing? Like it's.

• 24:18Shawn Ryan?

  It's cool that I was the one that was able to inspire their career.

• 24:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:22Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and that's, I understand what you're saying. You're not, I'm not giving you credit for what they've accomplished. I'm just saying, I mean, you're what sparked that inspiration. It sounds like for a lot of these guys. And that's, I mean, that's cool, man.

• 24:36Speaker 06

  It's an honor. Like I said, I am really just.

• 24:39Shawn Ryan?

  That's very cool. But, um, so back to reading at age two.

• 24:44Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 24:44Shawn Ryan?

  And programming at age four. I mean, so did, is reading at age two, did you just pick it up? Or?

• 24:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think.

• 24:51Shawn Ryan?

  Were your parents teaching you?

• 24:53Speaker 06

  My mom was just very like involved parent, you know, that we, she used to have these, um, like a kind of note card, pieces of poster board and stuff that she would draw circles on. And then have me recognize like how many circles were on the page. Like, so I just done a site like one to a hundred. And I got really good at recognizing just the patterns. I knew like which ones were which. And so she did a lot of just seminal work on me, I think. And I mean, there's some of it's that nature verse nurture type thing. So I give my mother like a lot of credit, just, I think she just really wanted to inspire some type of greatness in me.

• 25:38Speaker 06

  And so, I mean, I'm sure she, you know, she read to me, but you know, there's obviously whatever innate thing you can have, actually have it to, you know, was, uh, was present in me, you know, to, to want to do those types of things. But there wasn't obviously the distractions that there are today. There wasn't any YouTube, you know, dating myself. Like it's not exactly the Stone Age, but you know, there, there wasn't, uh, you know, a whole lot of, I mean, there was, there was television and stuff, but I wasn't really really watching that. It's just kind of, yeah, hands on and things that I found interesting. But, um, yeah, then.

• 26:12Speaker 06

  So just the computer was a something that I just I said, I don't know, I can't describe. Some people, you know, you take to an instrument or, you know, start playing the piano type thing. I just really was fascinated that you could

• 26:28Speaker 06

  make these things do whatever you wanted to do. And so that was just, I think, a huge reason why I got into into programming was just, well, you can actually make these machines like do what you tell them and if they screw up, it's because you screwed up.

• 26:47Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of what kind of programming were you doing at age four?

• 26:50Speaker 06

  So there's a language called BASIC and it's as it's BASIC like it sounds. It was developed, John Kemeni, I think his name was, Polish, or not Polish, sorry, Hungarian. He'd come over, kind of like Leo Zillard and John von Neumann and a lot of the scientists. But he had developed this language that was really, it was designed to get people into kind of programming computers and it had line numbers. There was Pascal and COBOL and FORTRAN and C. You may have heard those, but they're, those are for like business applications.

• 27:35Speaker 06

  Whereas BASIC was designed more just for people to kind of get into programming. They'd started to do these classes in schools prior to even my being born. But the home computing revolution is kind of where a lot of this stuff came from. So I had a Texas Instruments 994A, which is, it is a cartridge loader. You could take a tape drive instead of a disk drive. You could use cassette tapes on it, but the BASIC, the operating system, like what you would consider when you boot the computer up. Uh, was just a basic interpreter. So it allowed you to just enter the code into these

• 28:16Speaker 06

  machines, uh, just right off the bat. Apple twos were very similar. Those were in pretty much all of the schools, but you know, if you booted the apple up, um, and just let it go to a prompt, it would, it would just be a basic interpreter. So that was kind of the, um, lowest, just the most interactive thing you could do with a computer, like right as soon as you booted it up. Uh, I had a Timex Sinclair, um, which is one kilobyte of memory is kind of a little hobbyist computer that my dad and I had worked on. Um, but it also like the said, the basic thing that you would, once you booted the computer up, it was this basic interpreter and then you could just kind of input your code and, and

• 28:59Speaker 06

  do stuff with it. So as I said, there was a plethora of books and computers and stuff that came out that are computer books that came out that had this code just transcribed in it. And so instead of passing around floppy disks or CDs or anything like that, you would just write the code like line by line. And so it was a good way to learn, you know, what the code kind of, kind of did. And that's pretty much the, as I said, entry level for a lot of people, I think, to get into programming at, at around then. That was how they, they learned.

• 29:31Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. What else were you into as a kid outside of computers?

• 29:36Speaker 06

  Uh, baseball cards, Magic the Gathering. Uh, I don't know, just, uh, magic itself. Like I, I just, I was just kind of a normal kid, sucked at sports, you know, complete dork. Like, uh, I tried, you know, played football, played baseball, but was absolutely horrendous at it. Uh, computers were really just the thing that I gravitated towards mostly. Um, in my teens, I got into cars and, um, like doing engine swaps and that type of thing.

• 30:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it sounds like, uh, it sounds like you grew up in a really, in a, in a great home.

• 30:19Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 30:19Shawn Ryan?

  A family oriented.

• 30:21Speaker 06

  It was, I mean, I said, my, my dad, you know, he's from the old school. I think I showed you a picture of him, you know, like, you know, there's, it was obviously some.

• 30:32Speaker 06

  Things in my upbringing that probably it wouldn't be too kosher today. I mean, my dad wasn't like a super violent person by any stretch of the imagination, but you know, got we got beat a couple times, you know, that type of thing. My mom, you know, too, she I think she came from military household as well. And so there was a little bit of strictness, but I all in all, the intentions of my parents, I think were always really, really, really good. My dad wasn't around a whole lot just because he was working and traveling and, you know, going to rocket launches and stuff. But, you know, I said, I have my mom there pretty much. And she was always really good about growing up, you know, any types of extracurricular programs I wanted to do like, there's these

• 31:17Speaker 06

  competitions like Odyssey of the Mind. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but

• 31:20Shawn Ryan?

  I was in Odyssey of the Mind.

• 31:22Speaker 06

  Oh, hell yeah. All right, then. Yeah. So I took state one year. But yeah, just

• 31:28Shawn Ryan?

  No way. What was your project? Did you do the balsa wood thing?

• 31:32Speaker 06

  There's the bridges.

• 31:34Shawn Ryan?

  Ping pong ball has come out?

• 31:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm trying to remember the, that's cool, dude.

• 31:38Shawn Ryan?

  I did that.

• 31:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, right on. But yeah, those were those after school type stuff. We did like, well, there's these kind of plays that you had to do. And then you had to have certain elements in them and you'd like kind of design machines to to go with the play. There was different categories. But yeah, they had this, the bridge strength ones where they were trying to break them. And yeah, so just any of those types of weird math engineering programs that, you know, were extracurricular then.

• 32:08Shawn Ryan?

  So you're a super creative type as well?

• 32:11Speaker 06

  I probably, I mean, I loved poetry and writing, too. You know, I was like a huge thing. He's just write stories all the time and stuff. But, but yeah, I just say that, I don't know, for whatever reason, it's like computers have just always been this thematic thread. Luckily, they're everywhere now. So.

• 32:32Shawn Ryan?

  It sounds like this is, this is interesting because it sounds like things one kind of array.

• 32:40Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe as a teenager.

• 32:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:43Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, for somebody who, I mean, Odyssey of the Mind was for creativity.

• 32:50Speaker 06

  It was.

• 32:50Shawn Ryan?

  It was for extremely creative kids. And the other stuff that you're talking about, computer programming, learning to read it to, poetry, writing, to dropping out of high school.

• 33:06Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like maybe there was some car theft.

• 33:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:09Shawn Ryan?

  Stabbed, stabbed in the neck.

• 33:11Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 33:12Shawn Ryan?

  What, what happened? What, what happened here?

• 33:14Speaker 06

  Uh, well, I think like most teenagers, I got in this rebellious. I, there's some things I can pinpoint, cause I wanted to be an astronaut, I think. So growing up there and everything, that was just, I wanted to be a pilot, you know, in the Air Force, go to the Air Force Academy. So like, my grandfather, my mom's side was in the Air Force and, you know, it was right up the road. So, you know, I was obviously exposed to it. And then in sixth grade, uh, this dude, Chris Ray, told me that you needed 2020 vision to be a pilot. Uh, and my vision's not that bad, uh, and, but, um, like I, at that age, it just destroyed me.

• 33:56Speaker 06

  I was like, oh, okay. Well then I can't, you know, I guess I'm not going to be a pilot. So that, that was a left turn there in some senses, uh, but, or that was a right turn, but a left turn. Uh, the, then in my teenage years, I was obviously, I think every teenager kind of goes through rebellious phase. And then, I said, we lived in a pretty modest, like, you know, middle-class household. Like, there was no reason to really get into too much trouble, but, uh, I don't know if it's the rap music that I would listen to some, you know, whatever. You just had this like, kind of an identity crisis. And pretty much everybody that I hung out with that, from that era, you know, wound up in debt or in jail.

• 34:41Speaker 06

  And I think that's, it's.

• 34:42Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, we gotta go, we gotta go back.

• 34:45Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 34:45Shawn Ryan?

  So what, so you got into crime?

• 34:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:50Shawn Ryan?

  What age?

• 34:51Speaker 06

  Well, probably like fif- fifteen is when I got my, when I was arrested for the first time.

• 34:57Shawn Ryan?

  What did you, hold on, you gotta, what did you get arrested for?

• 35:00Speaker 06

  I was, uh, spray painting, uh, buildings. So, uh, yeah, I was in the graffiti, um, and.

• 35:09Speaker 06

  But the the thing is, this there's a simultaneous like the computer stuff like I said, happened in parallel like the entire time that this is going on, but kind of the crowd that I got involved in um was this said tr more traditional, you know, crime like, you know, we designed, I don't know if you know those can safes that you can hold like drugs in and and stuff. We'd we'd made these all these devices to help us shoplift better. So like these lined cans that had PVC pipe in them. So you could still pour liquid out of them if anybody ever came up to you and told you that, you know, hey, like, what's what's in the drink. But,

• 35:54Speaker 06

  you know, we exacto knife the top out and have like a foam covering and PVC and then just like use it to steal jewelry and stuff from the from the store. I haven't thought about this.

• 36:07Shawn Ryan?

  My gosh.

• 36:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, just the again, I had no real like, you know, some people have to like steal to eat and feed their family. And, you know, that's you kind of go out and do those things. But this was just all I just I've always loved crime for some reason. Like, I don't know why. It's just something that that also is just inherent in my my life. I just just find it's the hacking thing, you know, you find out how systems work, find out, you know, the things that you can do to exploit them and then kind of carry on. But this

• 36:40Shawn Ryan?

  So it's a challenge.

• 36:41Speaker 06

  Challenge. Yeah, yeah. It's a meat. Can you do this without getting caught? I never got caught shoplifting.

• 36:46Shawn Ryan?

  Walk me through this. So you would take like a soda can?

• 36:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, take like a soda can. And then I just cut like so take the the aluminum top part off and then hot glue a PVC pipe to the to that that section of the of the of the can and then have a bottom on it. And so I could pour liquid in there. And then, but in the can, line the can with foam so it wouldn't like clatter or anything. So I'd have, uh, but you know, we used to like go to places like steel jewelry, anything like little that could actually fit into a can. It was like kind of high dollar item. And then that, uh, the top would fix over it. And so if anyone like ever questioned or whatever, like it looks like a can and you know, you have to see me putting it in there, you know?

• 37:31Speaker 06

  So it was just this kind of spy craft, uh, you know, whatever you can call it at that age. But, uh, yeah, it's just these devices to help us shoplift better. Uh, anyway.

• 37:48Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Very innovative.

• 37:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, tried to be. Yeah. It's gotta necessity is the mother of invention. But in this case, I guess there was no real necessity. It was all just about, yeah. What, what, what could you get away with?

• 38:01Shawn Ryan?

  The necessity was the challenge.

• 38:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I suppose so. That's it.

• 38:05Shawn Ryan?

  What, what did that lead into?

• 38:07Speaker 06

  Well, uh, so the other, there's another turning point that happened when I was around that age. And I had gotten a, so I was on the, what would have been considered like the internet at, at that time, it wasn't like anything super, super crazy, but I, uh, was working with these people on internet relay chat. And, uh, there was a company called Network Associates in the Bay Area, like Santa Clara, I think. And they did antivirus software and stuff, but they'd seen some of the work that I had done.

• 38:50Speaker 06

  And I was at 16 years old and I, uh, they had offered me a job. And so I was like, so I went to my parents and I was like, can you emancipate me? So I can go out to California and, you know, take this job because this is, uh, would have been 98, I guess, and. Uh, both my parents were like, no, there's, you know, you're too young, too stupid, like all this stuff. Well, that's the thing is that my parents were the type of people that could say like, you could do anything, you could be anything you want. But then the moment those opportunities start to come up, it's like, you can't do that, you can't do that, you can't do that.

• 39:33Speaker 06

  And I was like, how are you gonna sit there and tell like a kid, you know, cause she's like, you need to finish school. My mom was, you know, huge on that. She didn't wanna be the, the mom of somebody who dropped out of high school. Cause she knew idiots that graduated high school. And so how could you do this and stuff? But, you know, in my estimation, I'm like, well, the entire reason that people go to college and go to, you know, graduate high school and go to college is because they're gonna get a job at the end of it. So I might as well just skip all that stuff. And I would have been, you know, in Silicon Valley, like when, you know, kind of the dot com boom was sort of percolating. And again, if it didn't work out, I could have always, you know, come home and, you know, stay on my parents' couch again. But the opportunity they had presented itself and yeah, they were all just totally against it.

• 40:17Speaker 06

  And so that kind of just made me, well, and you know, I don't really care anymore. I'm just gonna do whatever I'm gonna do. Uh, so that's like, I started getting into the, uh, like the rave scene, like really, really hard. Um, my first, like, the first rave I went to was in, I think ninety-six, I think I was like fourteen or fifteen, um, it might've been ninety-seven. But yeah, that, then I just was, that was an entire world that I, uh, adored. Cause I loved, you know, music and electronic music and stuff, and I'd been making it. But that, obviously that culture, I think Ryan had talked about that in some of his upbringing.

• 41:01Speaker 06

  But that's, you know, that lends itself to a lot of kind of weird behaviors that, uh, you know, especially at that age, you know, formative kind of teenage years. Uh, I do recommend it for anybody, cause it's a blast. But at the same time, you gotta be able to pull yourself out of it, uh, when it comes. But that's where, I said, I got involved with, uh, a lot of.

• 41:23Speaker 06

  Drug dealers and, you know, uh, people, drug users and that's doing a lot of stupid things myself.

• 41:31Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of drugs?

• 41:33Speaker 06

  Oh, just ecstasy, cocaine, meth, you know, the, the, all the, I tried heroin like once, snorted it. I'm deathly afraid of needles entering my skin, so, uh, I totally missed that boat. Uh, unlike, I said, Ri- Ryan, I think that was his, his drug de jour, but, um, yeah, that, uh, the crowd I was involved in, I said, was, it's the way that, you know, the, none of them really had gainful employment or anything at the time. And so you're, you know, trying to find a way to like, get stuff and I was the, you know, the smart, the brains of the operation in some senses. So, did like breaking and entering in businesses and just.

• 42:17Shawn Ryan?

  Like what? Let's get into some specific examples.

• 42:21Speaker 06

  Oh God, like, there was, there was this stereo shop that was a kind of near,

• 42:31Speaker 06

  that was so dumb. So there was this stereo shop, it was called Sunshine Audio. I don't even think they're in business anymore. But, uh, we had rammed my homeboy's truck through, cause they had an install bay, like where they would do all the, uh, like the installs of the stereos and stuff. And so we backed my homie's truck into it and we just took out the garage door and then just ran in. It was like probably six or seven of us and we were able to jack everything. Uh, that we can get our hands on and get out of there. Um, but then, like you said, just the, to tell you like how dumb the crew I was hanging out with was then is then like about two weeks later,

• 43:13Speaker 06

  the same group of friends, a couple of them were like, let's do it again. And it was just like, me and my buddy Jason, we're just like, that's stupid. Like, you know, you don't want like lightning striking twice. They had like a board over, uh, where we had, uh, kind of wrecked into it last time and.

• 43:29Shawn Ryan?

  So you guys didn't even get caught?

• 43:30Speaker 06

  I didn't get caught that time. I didn't get caught for any of the stuff, which is like. Very, but it's where now, like if things happen, like we used to take, you know, the spark plugs, the porcelain of spark plugs and shatter windows and just grab shit out of people's cars and it, but I said in retrospect, it's where the karma, any negative karma I've incurred, I try to like, spend the rest of my life sort of wa- whitewashing it as much as possible because there wasn't, I said, it wasn't an immediate need to really do any of these things. Like I said, it wasn't like I needed to feed myself or anything. It's just, this was just the thrill of the, you know, the adrenaline rush,

• 44:11Speaker 06

  I guess, of all this stuff. Um, but, uh, but yeah, that, like, most of the homies wound up getting caught the second time. Like, I don't know if they'd install a better security system or, you know, what had happened, but, uh, yeah, the cops swarmed everybody and I said, my buddy Jason and I just weren't there that time and we were able to avoid prosecution. Um, man, I haven't thought about this stuff in a long, long time. That's so crazy. Uh, yeah, it's getting it back. Um, but yeah, the, the car thing, like I do, before Fast and the Furious came out, there was a ton of us

• 44:53Speaker 06

  that were into this import tuning shit. And so, uh, you know, I, there was a few shops in the area, but there were also kind of notorious chop shops and stuff. And so you had friends that you knew that we liked these people and we would never jack their cars and, you know, stuff like that. But the Hondas and Acuras around that, that was my focus. I had a, um, a 98 GSR that I had bought with spam money. And I'll get into that later, but that was, yeah, that was when I was 18. This is a little bit kind of going up and I had an 89 CRX. With a B16A front clip from, uh, motor swap from Japan.

• 45:36Speaker 06

  Uh, so I just, but I, car is another like engineering fascination. So I loved working on them. But then, you know, yeah, we were, that those motors were just the cream of the crop, you know? And so like other Integras, the GSRs and Type Rs and the Civics,

• 45:52Speaker 06

  that, that, that OBD1 series and OBD0 series was just really, really easy to steal. Um, and so, you know, we're like stealing cars and then we

• 46:03Shawn Ryan?

  How would you steal cars?

• 46:05Speaker 06

  Like just, we'd find them, you know, just be like cruising around and again, like if it was somebody that, you know, we didn't know, uh, or, you know, didn't care about, then, uh, yeah, just said the whole smash the window, get in there, call them out, screwdriver, uh, take off and then they said, just take it to one of the shops and

• 46:30Shawn Ryan?

  What would you do? Just dismantle it?

• 46:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, just dismantle it, you know, cause some of these things you said, just that the good exhaust or they had, you know, but the motors on those ones were just like insanely expensive. So like you said, the heads, uh, people would do these Frankenstein swaps with the LSs and the GSR heads. I don't know how much you know about, uh, these

• 46:49Shawn Ryan?

  I don't.

• 46:49Speaker 06

  Rice racers. Yeah. But yeah, it was just this, and this was before, you know, then like movies like Gone in 60 Seconds and Fast and the Furious are coming out and we just felt like vindicated.

• 47:01Speaker 06

  This is it. This is it. It's what we were training for. Uh, but yeah, that whole, I said, a lot of those, I don't, one of them, I, I don't know, just all those people, again, in and out of jail. Um, I said, I somehow, there was one time I know even that they were investigating me and they'd gone to my friend and, uh, they were asking her about, you know, my involvement and she didn't snitch. She was like, he's just a computer nerd. He doesn't really do any of this stuff. And I had the pedigree, obviously to back that up, but it was just, yeah, living this kind of weird double life.

• 47:42Speaker 06

  And for no reason at all. Like I said, it was just simply, I think just a teenage angst and you know, whatnot.

• 47:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:54Shawn Ryan?

  You had, it sounds like you had premonitions that you were going to die by your eighteenth birthday.

• 48:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's part of it. So like I had this, I have these dreams and everything like when I was super young, like teen, like thirteen, fourteen, that I just like was gonna die before I turned eighteen for some reason. And so I think that.

• 48:20Shawn Ryan?

  What, did you know how?

• 48:22Speaker 06

  No.

• 48:22Shawn Ryan?

  Kind of dreams?

• 48:23Speaker 06

  It was, yeah, like it was in a lot of ways. It was like car accident, shooting, like just something. But that was the kind of the overarching theme, like something you just, I just felt uh, that it was gonna happen. I mean, I talked to like a lot of my friends about it and stuff. And you know, they were just like, whatever. Obviously it didn't happen, but yeah, a month before my eighteenth birthday, a bunch of the car nerds, like we were out in the back of uh, of Best Buy, the Best Buy parking lot. And my homeboy had done like a burnout and he left. And there was a ton of people there. Uh, you know, we're just kind of hanging out. And then these two like workers come out from Cub Foods,

• 49:04Speaker 06

  uh, which is like a supermarket. I don't know if it exists anymore, but you know, they were like, you guys smoking up our, you know, um, you know, we're trying to work, like all this other stuff. And I was talking to my ex-wife's sister at the time. And uh, all of a sudden I just see this frog just break out. And um, one of the guys has my buddy in a headlock and he's like doing this to him. And I didn't even react. I just saw kind of what was going on. So I left the conversation. I just go up, just ran straight up to the dude and I punched him three times. And uh, he let go of my friend. And then he came after me and uh, he, like I said, I didn't know he had a box cutter in his hand.

• 49:48Speaker 06

  And so he was cutting my buddy up. He had like just sliced over his head. So he was yelling like, he's cutting me, oh, he's cutting me, oh. And I didn't, uh, I said, I didn't even react to that. I just reacted because I saw that happen. And then um, he sliced my arm. And then when I dropped down to hit him, I opened, exposed my neck and he sliced me twice, like there's one big one here and then one little one here, but it was like three millimeters from my carotid artery. So I'm like bleeding everywhere. Uh, my buddy Jason was able to pull the dude. So he, he like kind of suplexed the dude.

• 50:24Speaker 06

  Not the same Jason, that was another Jason, but he got him off me and then the other dude was like off fighting my friend Adrian and then they took off. And I remember just like looking at my friend, I was like, is this bad? And I'm just bleeding like all over the place. And he's like, no, that's no good. And so they we hopped in his car and we went to the hospital and I remember passing out on the way to the hospital, but uh, you know, I wound up getting like eighteen stitches. Uh, and I was like this close, I almost died, like it was just to say, had I leaned into it just a little bit more, anything, I would have been

• 51:02Speaker 06

  been a goner. Uh, but yeah, that was just one of those, again, just said you hang out, you are who you hang out with like type thing. And so it was it was dangerous. Um, but yeah, I survived, so.

• 51:15Shawn Ryan?

  Was that a wake up call for you?

• 51:17Speaker 06

  Not at all.

• 51:18Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 51:19Speaker 06

  That's, that's the part of the problem is I think like that if anything, it just galvanized my false invincibility like at that point, you know, and again, you're a teenager, you think you're, you know, nothing's gonna happen to you type thing. And so it sort of made me spiral even more in a sense, cause I just, there was a period of indestructibility, I think that I was inheriting, you know, cause it's like manic couldn't even kill me. My neck is like sliced open and stuff, so.

• 51:51Shawn Ryan?

  What was it that finally, I mean,

• 51:56Speaker 06

  chilled me out?

• 51:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that scared you out of it or grew, you grew out of it or what was it?

• 52:03Speaker 06

  I would say that my daughter, uh, being born was probably the uh, the one thing that really, cause there was a, so after like that had happened, there was this year that I had spent and I, it just, it was like a personal challenge to myself, but I was like, can I deal drugs and support myself just off of dealing drugs like for a year, like, you know, my apartment, my car, like all this stuff. Um. And this is like, you know, even after I'd hacked NASA and stuff, um, I was just still in this kind of mentality and, uh, but that was before my daughter like was born. So I was like

• 52:47Speaker 06

  kind of eighteen to nineteen. I worked three months at Gateway Computer, uh, which was a computer company. I was doing tech support for them. Um, I got hired shortly after that and the next stuff. And then, uh, I worked the floor for three months, but everybody that I met there, uh, you know, like loved cocaine and meth. And so like, I pretty much just got this clientele from the, the tech support world. And then I had the rave people and stuff. And so I had like a decent Rolodex of people that I could trust that weren't necessarily, you know, violent or anything. And so, uh, yeah, that's like, I said, I just this was this

• 53:31Speaker 06

  personal challenge. I had all this seed money from, uh, spamming the internet. And so I used that to parlay it into drug dealing and, um, but that got it's mad annoying because it's like tweakers and stuff would call you at like two in the morning. They don't care what you're doing. You know, you'd drive them like, uh, you know, a gram, then you'd be like halfway back home and they're calling you and they're like, can I get another gram or whatever. And it's like, well, it's just buy them both way there. It's going to be cheaper for you. So that type of stuff is just, it's not conducive to a very restful lifestyle. So shout out to all the drug dealers out there. I don't know how you do it. I'm very, very proud of you. Sticking to it. Uh, but again, the, everything I said, I just, there's a lot of stuff I've

• 54:15Speaker 06

  done is in retrospect, even saying it now, I just sound stupid, but yeah, it's sort of what, you know, you're on the some of your experiences, you know, type thing. So like, kind of just engaging in all this type of behavior, I think showed me like quite a bit.

• 54:30Shawn Ryan?

  So the, the birth of your daughter, how old were you when she was born?

• 54:34Speaker 06

  Uh, I was twenty.

• 54:36Shawn Ryan?

  Twenty. So the, wow, that's young.

• 54:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:39Shawn Ryan?

  So the birth of your daughter is what? Got you to the realization, hey, this is a dead end road.

• 54:45Speaker 06

  That's, there was a little bit of a tapering, yeah. Shortly after she was born, like, I think there was still some kind of remnants of stupidity. But, yeah, that, the realization that, yeah, you now have this other life that you're responsible for. And so I encourage everybody out there who doesn't have kids to, well, I mean, some people, I guess, it's like having a baby to save your marriage is always a bad idea. But, you know, I had always wanted to be a father, you know, so it's just one of those things that it's like, might as well get it right, you know? So that was, that was probably like a huge turning point.

• 55:27Speaker 06

  And, yeah, definitely all that, that type of behavior.

• 55:31Shawn Ryan?

  So, I mean, going through all of your, I'm sure we didn't touch on, there's a lot we didn't touch on. But, you know, on a serious note, there's a lot of kids that go down this road. You know, what would your advice to them be?

• 55:49Speaker 06

  The part of, what's problematic is that, and I think some people have a gift for this, but learning vicariously through other people. And that with me, no one could tell me anything. That's the thing is that if I, I mean, and that's even somewhat true to this day, like that there's a certain, if somebody tells me something's impossible, like, let me take a stab at it first and see if it's impossible. I'm not just gonna take people's word for it, in a sense. And I think that's part of the problem is you can't really tell anybody. The advice that I would give, again, is that it's a very personal kind of experience.

• 56:33Speaker 06

  And, you know, of course, I knew things were wrong. I had mens rea, you know, I understand the, you know, what's, what's good and evil and, you know, what's right and wrong and stuff. And I still kind of made the choices to act those, those ways anyway.

• 56:49Speaker 06

  But I will say that, you know, you can always turn it around, that it's, that I don't think it's ever too late. Like, even if you've murdered somebody and you're like, you know, coming out the other end and. Uh, you know, you wanna make a conscious change, but people have to want to help themselves type thing. And so the biggest thing is, you know, for the people that kinda wanna get out of that lifestyle or whatever, just know that it's possible. It just takes discipline and dedication. Uh, and again, I also wasn't really forced into that. These are just things that I, for whatever reason, found fun, um, you know, for lack of a better word. I mean, it, it did, it was exhilarating, like it, it had a good component to it that,

• 57:32Speaker 06

  you know, made it very fun, but, uh, and interesting and, you know, obviously you see adrenaline pumping, the same thing, you know, I said, I should probably join the military and, you know, get shot at or something would have, would have been a little bit different, but, uh, yeah. So, military couldn't take me anyway, though.

• 57:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I appreciate you sharing that because, you know, there are a lot of kids go down that road, you know, and then I think a lot of kids wind up deep into it and then they just continue.

• 58:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's unfortunate.

• 58:07Shawn Ryan?

  They never pull themselves out.

• 58:09Speaker 06

  Plenty of friends that, yeah, there's people that say that's still from that era that are in and out of jail to this day, you know, and just don't wanna get their act together. And is one of the, one of the first businesses that I had, uh, I had a call center, um, but like it was huge. One of the biggest things I tried to do is hire, uh, convicts and stuff. Not only do you get some cool associated tax breaks, but it's like, I think everybody deserves a second chance, you know, and one third, sometimes a third, sometimes a fourth, you know, you gotta just work with people. And, you know, I see people just kind of go through weird stuff in their life. And, you know, so I, I would say that the perspective I gained, you know, from that, there's a lot that I, you know,

• 58:52Speaker 06

  that I understand sort of from that end, like why people behave the way they do or what they do. And, you know, there's, again, there's people that are forced into it and there's people that are just kinda doing it as a hobby. And so, uh, you know, both of those obviously have different, uh, reasons and outcomes and stuff, but.

• 59:11Shawn Ryan?

  I have that it's also in the childhood that you were starting businesses and, and selling them. When did, when did your kinda entrepreneurial

• 59:25Shawn Ryan?

  career begin?

• 59:26Speaker 06

  So that, um,

• 59:30Speaker 06

  One of the, I think, one of the services that was really, really prevalent to get on the internet was America Online. It was pretty much the only game in town for a really long time. And it, it made the internet accessible to just normal people. My first exposure to the internet was through, uh, my father had what's called a slip account, serial line internet protocol. It's, uh, it was an account through work and there wasn't really a world wide web or anything to that nature yet.

• 1:00:08Speaker 06

  It was all like Archie and Gopher and FTP and these antiquated protocols that, you know, people rarely even use anymore. But AOL was this kind of gateway for people, CompuServe, Prodigy, there was a few services. Um, but America Online had kind of the biggest user base and it was just for the everyman to kind of see what was going on on the internet. And, uh, with that, you know, obviously the technical competency of the people that were on that service was drastically different than, you know, the people who came on the internet before. There is this concept that started in news groups called the Eternal September.

• 1:00:51Speaker 06

  And, uh, it was something that the early internet nerds had, had noticed, uh, that when kids got back into school and would use the, the university computers, then the, the posting quality would go drastically down in these, uh, in these news groups and stuff. And so people would just say like, oh, September must be, it must be September or something. Cause you know, obviously everyone's back in school. And so there's this concept, it's been a place, you know, attributed to different places in internet history. But the Eternal September is kind of, you know, what's considered when there was a corollary to when AOL kind of came on the scene.

• 1:01:33Speaker 06

  Because then you just have all these, you know, normies that are using the internet now and they're posting on these news groups and doing this stuff. So it's the September that, that never ended.

• 1:01:44Speaker 06

  With America Online, they made it very, very easy to programmatically extract uh, cause they had chat rooms and they had member directories and so they had all these ways to basically cultivate the members of that service. And uh, so unsolicited, commercial email like spam um, became just a giant force of nature. Like to be able to make money like off of these people because you knew they had credit cards, obviously, and they they are on the internet. So you could go through programmatically, like we'd write programs to go and um, grab the names out of the chat rooms and grab the names from the member directory and just harvest all this stuff.

• 1:02:26Speaker 06

  And then you could just email like just constantly. Um, so whatever products that you wanted to sell. Uh, and at the time, you know, uh, obviously pornography and the internet kind of go hand in hand. So uh, I was doing affiliate programs. Um, so you'd get like a cut of the sales when you would, after you would uh, drive traffic to these sites, you know, when they put their credit card in or whatever, you'd get a certain amount of money per sale. Or they would pay you per click, but you had to have a certain ratio of clicks to sales. You couldn't just send, you know, garbage clicks or whatever. Um, but that, you know, when I was,

• 1:03:08Speaker 06

  you know, I'm a teenager uh, in high school. Most people are having summer jobs. Like I worked at the movie theater for a little while with my friends, but even when I worked at the movie theater, we were, it was all of us. We're all friends. So like if you, if we were working the ticket counter and two people came up and wanted to buy a ticket to a movie, we would sell them one, rip the ticket in half, give them each a stub, pocket the other half. We'd short count the, there was a scams everywhere. There's always running scams. But that I didn't have like a regular.

• 1:03:40Speaker 06

  Said job that this this was how I made money was like I go home and I would uh you know dial up uh I was on another um. I was on Earthlink, which is another ISP um that I that I stole those accounts. And then I would just use AOL accounts that we would crack. And then I would use those to send out all this uh these spam messages, I guess, to porn sites and. So, you know, at that age, you know, I'm doing this maybe like one, two hours a day and I was making about a thousand dollars a week and just, you know, as a kid. And this is like nineteen nineties money, uh so.

• 1:04:20Shawn Ryan?

  So these affiliate programs go all the way back to the nineties.

• 1:04:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, and again porn, the the thing about pornography is it is the genesis of a lot of. Internet technology and these types of concepts that the affiliate program was really, really birthed and metastasized from porn industry. I mean, the VHS, Betamasks, I don't know if you remember, like the the tape format stuff. Yeah, and then VHS like wound up winning um largely due to porn that I mean broadband internet, you can attribute pretty much to pornography. Pornography has always been this weird sort of vanguard, you know, it's this. Oddly enough, like in the industry itself, like you would always refer to porn as porn and mainstream as mainstream, like this kind of these two pieces, even though.

• 1:05:08Speaker 06

  That it it was weird, a lot of the advertising techniques and everything that were being employed in porn, you know, sort of. Eventually found their way into what we will be considered mainstream. And, you know, that's just been true since maybe the dawn of time, but especially like in this, you know, in the internet.

• 1:05:25Shawn Ryan?

  So porn is.

• 1:05:28Shawn Ryan?

  Porn is.

• 1:05:31Shawn Ryan?

  It's like the pioneer to advertising and the affiliate programming.

• 1:05:35Speaker 06

  Big time. Yeah, a lot of the, yeah, a lot of the ways that the operating models that the affiliate programs used in porn like now they're ubiquitous and you find them in in a lot of the, you know, the different programs, you know, now like any, any type of affiliate program you're going into, there's some sort of

• 1:05:54Speaker 06

  uh ancestral thread that goes back to to the porn industry. Uh, but at the time, again, it was just one of the more lucrative that, you know, you could sell most products and stuff, but it just seemed to be, you know, it was always the one and you knew that they paid on time and you knew that they had the the coffers to to do it. And so uh, I wasn't even really old enough to look at porn at that age, but uh, so I signed up with fake information, but you know, I'd had to be able to cash the checks and stuff. So, uh, that was it. It's just a lie about my age and started slinging that.

• 1:06:31Shawn Ryan?

  So how if

• 1:06:34Shawn Ryan?

  if I just, this is the snapshot I'm getting. So basically you infiltrate some of these chat rooms or whatever messaging services extract all the email addresses out of them, create some kind of a marketing email with porn clips in them, something to, something to capture somebody's attention. You send it out. They click on it. It does capture their attention, drives them to the site. And then there's some kind of tracking that goes from your email or the, or like a cookie trail or something.

• 1:07:08Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:07:09Shawn Ryan?

  And then you get paid off of that.

• 1:07:12Speaker 06

  So you have a, um, so they, a lot of times.

• 1:07:19Speaker 06

  So there was these things called thumbnail gallery posts and movie gallery posts, TGP's and MGP's and, and those were considered like the kind of the clean ways to generate traffic. Um, there was a huge one, the hun.net. I don't even know if it's around anymore, but it was the repository and it just had like daily lists. Um, but the affiliate programs, the porn companies would basically post the, these landing pages, you know, that just had links to them, you know, on these TGP's and MGP's. So this was like more of a direct, uh, Like, the way we'd set it up is, um, the same way kinda OnlyFans and things like that are done now,

• 1:07:59Speaker 06

  they're based around single girl, you know, uh, structures. And so, you know, we'd have like, a landing page that looked like a girl like using a webcam or something like that. Our friend, our friend Lindsay was like, love her. She's, she was like the model for a lot of our stuff. Like willfully, like, you know, we could use her pictures to, I don't, I don't even know how much porn Lindsay sold back in the day. But, uh, her handle was Magic. Um, but you know, create a page that like, looks like it's just her kinda homepage. And then, you know, hey, like, if you wanna see me naked, you know, click here type thing. And so in the query string, back then it was done more with, uh, with that, like, aside from cookies.

• 1:08:44Speaker 06

  But, you know, so as part of the URL, you know, you'd have like an affiliate ID that kinda get put in the code. And so then that's how it would track you. When you clicked on that link, you know, and it sent you to the page, that's how the affiliate program tracks that you're the one that sent that and, and, uh, and, and who you sent it to optionally. But yeah, you're basically just pretending to be that girl, emailing people like, hey, it's me, Magic, like, or Lindsay, or whatever. She, she's gonna love that I've dropped. But, uh, the, that, yeah, this is, this is, you know, come see my pictures, you know, or come see me live, whatever it was. And so then they would click on that link and then, yeah, the, then usually the thing is that you'd get paid on free trials.

• 1:09:29Speaker 06

  So whether or not somebody, um, which is another thing that porn started and then mainstream kinda picked up on. Cause it's in the nutraceutical industry and all types of things now, like where, you know, you get the, get the free bottle and then they hit you every, uh, every month. It's called a continuity offer, like where they will rebill you. They'll hit you for forty dollars a month and keep sending you bottles until you cancel. It was a similar thing with like the porn sites is that they'll, they'll pay you as an affiliate on the free trial. But then, you know, it said in three days, five days when the trial's up, then they're hitting them for a hundred dollars or, you know, whatever it was. Cause there's usually all these cross sales and network sales and stuff that were working out, but, but yeah, um. What age did you get into that? Why? What age? What age? Uh, fifteen, sixteen, yeah. Wow.

• 1:10:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was uh

• 1:10:18Shawn Ryan?

  You're on like the cutting edge of all this.

• 1:10:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, and back then there were no rate limits like you so you know now if you try to send a ton of emails, you know, you'll say no more of that. Uh, you know, you probably see it now, especially with captures and stuff. Like if you try to do something too much, it'll pop a captcha up. I mean, there was nothing like that. A lot of the reason that those technologies were developed was because of, you know, people like myself that were just having a field day on these these sites, kind of doing whatever. Um, because there was no limitation to how much, you know, all you had to do when you pulled somebody's screen name out of these chat boxes and stuff is just add at AOL.com and then you have their email address. And so they had an entire basically directory, like just a list of,

• 1:11:01Speaker 06

  uh, you know, the chat rooms that were open at the time. And so you click this who's online or who's chatting button. Uh, it's all this is done with a computer program. So you subclass the windows, uh, and then you would basically simulate the click to these buttons and then read these text boxes. And so this was all done programmatically. Visual Basic was the, uh, this is has almost nothing to do with the basic I was talking about, but Visual Basic was kind of the, the language that a lot of kind of AOL hackers were using, um, to create these, uh, these, um, these programs. But yeah, it was the AOL just made it insanely easy to blanket carpet bomb their whole,

• 1:11:43Speaker 06

  uh, their whole service and iteratively they improved on it, you know, over the years, but there was always some sort of workaround, uh, to kind of,

• 1:11:54Speaker 06

  to kind of get in.

• 1:11:55Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting. Let's, uh, let's take a break and when we get back, I was gonna say, let's start with, uh, the beginning of your hacker career, but I think we just did that. So

• 1:12:06Speaker 06

  We're in there a bit.

• 1:12:06Shawn Ryan?

  We'll just pick up right here.

• 1:12:10Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:12:54Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:14:17Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  And Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:14:44Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to The Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave The Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 1:15:05Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Bryce, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dig into kind of how you got into hacking, even though we, I guess we talked a little bit about it with the, with the porn industry and AOL, but I want to talk about, you know, some of the beginnings. You know, what, what was your, what first caught your interest in hacking?

• 1:15:31Speaker 06

  As I said, I think it was a natural progression of, you know, insert thing, get system to do thing type, mentality, but the, the first hack that I remember doing, um, so there was, before the internet, um, there were these things called bulletin board systems that you would call into, with your computer and then you'd access information, you know, they had file libraries and, rudimentary chat and kind of threaded stuff, similar to bulletin boards now that are on the web, but except,

• 1:16:11Speaker 06

  you know, you just basically call these systems and there was a ton of hobbyists that ran them. Some companies ran them and stuff, so I ran a couple myself.

• 1:16:23Speaker 06

  Uh, and there the way to kind of get files and knowledge, like the anarchist cookbook. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but it was this, it was this book to tell you how to create bombs and, you know, do all this ID theft and, you know, all these different, different things. It was a print, uh, I think it was, I think it was in print, but then, you know, the online is kind of where it was disseminated, but it was a pre-internet. Uh, the systems were linked through a thing called FIDonet, um, for a while where you could send electronic mail to different systems. Uh, but there were just these sort of local nodes. And so it was this cool little community because a lot of times you dial into these

• 1:17:07Speaker 06

  BBSs and it would just be, you know, people that we'd have meetups at Denny's, uh, you know, smoke cigarettes and drink coffee all night type thing. Uh, but it was kind of the precursor to what, you know, we know as the, the internet. Uh, and the public library, the system ran one of these bulletin board systems. So you could like see what books were checked out and, you know, it had news and all types of things, but it was a multi-node system, meaning that, uh, you, you had multiple phone lines that you could dial into. And so there could be, it was a multi-user environment. A lot of times it is kind of a one-to-one thing. If you had a single node BBS, you could only, only one person could be on it at one time. And so you usually had a time limit that

• 1:17:51Speaker 06

  you could stay on there and other users, you know, would, uh, try to call in, but you'd call and you'd get busy and you just know you had to call back later. Uh, but the public library had a bulletin board system that it was running. And I found it was running some custom software, but I found out how to drop into a, uh, an executable shell, um, which basically like a command prompt that would allow me to type in and do anything with the system that I wanted to. And so I had used it to, uh, set up an egg drop bot, which, uh, back then it was hard to find computers that were online all the time, you know, because again, this, the whole thing when you

• 1:18:36Speaker 06

  Call in the systems and stuff and you know you get knocked off if somebody picked up the phone line type thing so. Universities, obviously, companies, you know, they had these dedicated lines that were set up and have persistent connection to the internet and so. This was a way for me to have a machine that was online all the time and. Internet Relay Chat was this is kind of like where a lot of hackers and stuff hung out. Um, computer enthusiasts period, but it's, you know, think AOL chat rooms, but it was way more bare bones than that and predates it. Uh, but if you, you would have these channels that, uh.

• 1:19:17Speaker 06

  Were assigned to different interests or groups or whatever and the thing is, is if the last person left the channel, then. Uh, the channel would shut down and so you want to have. Computers that were in there at all times that would basically hold the channel for you like while you were gone and so the. Thing that I had set up on this library computer was basically a persistent connection to allow me to have. A, a robot online all the time that was monitoring these, these channels, um. And that was, that was cool, uh, but then.

• 1:19:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, the AOL was kind of this breeding ground for a lot of hackers too. There was a software that had come out. Called WinNuke, um, that it was a, it took advantage of. There's a, a port that's open on Windows systems even to this day, but it's used for file sharing, like if you're sharing. Information between two computers, but there is a specialized. Out of band packet that you could send a port one thirty nine on a system that was online. And, uh, if you send it this malformed packet, it would basically. Blue screen the computer, meaning that it would lock it up and you couldn't use it anymore. And so if you had someone's IP address.

• 1:20:39Speaker 06

  This is before consumer firewalls or, um, you know, people usually plug their computer directly into the internet. There wasn't routers or anything, so. Anything that you're sending to that machine is like direct to that machine, so. Uh, the, this WinNuke software, uh, when it had come out, it just allowed you, if you knew somebody's IP address and they had a Windows machine. You could always knock them offline like and crash their entire computer, basically. And so tha- that had kind of come out and some other people on the bulletin boards that I was talking to, one of the CoSIS Ops, uh, you know, I said, man, this tool is really neat. Like, I can't believe it works this way. And then he's like, have you ever been on AOL?

• 1:21:18Speaker 06

  And I kind of dabbled on it, but hadn't really ever taken anything seriously. He's like, you gotta check this out because, uh, you know, on there, people are just, there, you can knock people offline all the time. And it's like, again, like with the computer enthusiast crowd, it's like one thing, but then to do it to just completely normal people is, is another. Uh, and so that's where I got into uh, America Online and doing, so this, the spamming and everything kind of sort of came out of this, uh, this curiosity, but the, uh, you could send malformed, uh,

• 1:22:02Speaker 06

  HTML in over instant message. And it would have the same effect, like where it would knock people's computers, or there were certain reserved, uh, directories in, in DOS, uh, which was the operating system that things ran at the time. Uh, there's certain protected directories that if you tried to access files on those directories, uh, it would knock people offline. And so, uh, you, you could play sounds on AOL, like you could make them say goodbye, or welcome, or the IM sound and you just do like a, like a curly bracket S and then a directory of a sound. Um, and then some of them were just built into AOL, but that using that,

• 1:22:45Speaker 06

  uh, formatting and then trying to access like con con or a, a parallel port or something would knock an entire room offline. So you could get into a chat room, 23 people are in there, and then you drop this sound file that's fake, and then it would just kick everybody off. And so these were the just, it was just hijinks, like stupid stuff like that.

• 1:23:07Speaker 06

  But then

• 1:23:07Shawn Ryan?

  So was it just the thrill that caught your attention?

• 1:23:10Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:11Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it doesn't seem like there's really a point to it, other than getting a thrill out of it.

• 1:23:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's well, it's just that, you know, the internet's always been a source of acrimonious behavior in some senses and flame wars and, you know, people talking shit to each other and stuff. So the ability to, you know, just screw someone's computer up after, you know, you get into a fight with them over, you know, who was the best Power Ranger, you know, which Ninja Turtle was your favorite or whatever. Then you just knock them offline. Uh, that was the appeal, I think of it is it's just this, it's powerful. You know, you're able to just kind of, uh, yeah, just that it's, it's your playground, like you own this stuff. So, you know, people will, and again, back then, uh, you know, it wasn't very common, you know, your screen name

• 1:24:01Speaker 06

  baby, like some people would pick screen names that would give away their birthday, you know, they'd be like Bryce one nine eight two or whatever. And so you infer a little bit of information about some people, but a lot of times it was completely anonymous as far as, as you were concerned. And so it kind of became more of our focus to hack the system itself.

• 1:24:25Speaker 06

  And there were these private rooms that were on AOL that were just sort of the, in the back, the back channels of, uh, and it was all people that were, you know, kind of interested in these types of things, you know, or making programs that interface with AOL to do the spamming or, you know, these programs that would automate the punting. Uh, there was terms of service violation programs. I mean, these, these types of things work on Instagram and stuff today. Like if you have, we used to call them network tosses, but if I have a ton of Instagram accounts and then I report you and I say like, you know, you've been harassing, you know, me, then if there's multiple people that are saying like, you're, you're harassing us, then what they'll do is they'll just take your account offline.

• 1:25:09Speaker 06

  There's automated systems that do this type of thing. So, you know, we used to, um, you know, submit reports that somebody is harassing my children, you know, or whatever. And so you craft these custom mails, you'd send them from much different accounts and then you'd kill people's accounts. Uh, so as I said, these are just kind of hassles, but this is all just figuring out how, you know, to manipulate the system to. For our advantage. Uh, the progressively like what had happened is started to investigate the internals of AOL. So with these groups, you know, we'd get together and um, there was one of my partner's glitch

• 1:25:48Speaker 06

  that I lost touch with, but we got into hacking into uh, assets like AOL, like internal assets, ones that only the employees could access and we found kind of debug tools that allowed us to use the America Online interface the same way an employee would. Um, or we could access hidden forms, like sometimes instead of when they deprecated like a mail form or something like that, they might still be in the code and there might still be a way to to interact with it, but as far as the front end is concerned and anyone else that was using this system, they're getting the normal one, but then we have this kind of alternative version that we could manipulate and use.

• 1:26:34Speaker 06

  And things back then too, wasn't like a lot of people had AOL keywords instead of websites. And so, you know, uh, if you look at any kind of video from the late nineties, early two thousands, you know, they'll say CS on AOL keyword NFL or whatever. So instead of NFL.com being the place where a lot of people got their stuff, because the America Online had so many people on it, like you'd go to keyword NFL and that would be where you'd get all your information on the on football. Um, so progressing through that, like it was fun to take those keywords over and like, uh, if you could find the accounts that were basically view ruled to edit those keywords, then you could make it so that,

• 1:27:14Speaker 06

  you know, NFL keyword was whatever you wanted to put on it. And so we would edit keywords and deface keywords uh, with these empowered accounts.

• 1:27:25Speaker 06

  And again AOL just had this, the most of the member base was just regular, you know, everyday people type thing. So it was insanely easy, just because they're non-tech, to take advantage of a lot of kind of just miss uh, missed assumptions about, you know, how the technology really, really worked that even though they would have uh, like notices on instant messengers, like, you know, AOL staff will never ask for your username or password, that you could craft like a specially, you know, like a name that looked like it could be an employee, like staffenge92345, and then say like, hey, you know, this is AOL

• 1:28:08Speaker 06

  tech support, we need your username and password. Again, these attacks still persist today, but this was the sort of the proving grounds for how all this stuff uh, worked. And so we got into actually breaking into AOL employees' accounts, as well as what's called overhead accounts. These were ones that uh, AOL, if you were advertising on AOL, they basically give, gave you a free account. And so, and they had certain powers, because they were able to edit keywords and stuff. Uh, but after targeting employee accounts, uh, then we were able to pivot into the internal network of America Online, and they had some compensating

• 1:28:48Speaker 06

  controls. Uh, but me and this guy Carbox and Casey developed, uh, I did, well, I wrote the software for it, but it was a reverse tunnel. Uh, so I was saying, there's not a lot of systems that were persistent on the internet at that time. Uh, so I had a university jump box, and what it would do is it would tunnel into AOL's internal network, and then it also had an outgoing connection that we could connect to, and then it would basically get us into the local area network of America Online. And so if I connected to that jump box, then I could log on to employee accounts without

• 1:29:27Speaker 06

  any secure ID, any type of two factor authentication. And so from there, you were able to access uh Chris, which was the like customer relations information service, or I forgot exactly what it stood for. But from that panel, you could type in someone's screen name and it was like customer service. You could get your address, phone number, credit card, all the accounts, you know, everything that had to do with those accounts. And so that it evolved into now if I'm having a flame war with someone on the internet, I can just look them up and be like, you live here. Like this is where you Oh my gosh. And so you'd see people just like, cause there was, you know, your buddy list would

• 1:30:11Speaker 06

  show you when people are online, when they came online, when they didn't. Um, and uh, you know, said Messenger, everything kind of stems from this. But yeah, you wouldn't see him sign on for weeks. They'd just be terrified. Cause you know, again, this is information that's supposed to be secret, but you know, you're accessing it from this uh, from, you know, AOL's control panel, basically. Uh, but the major thing that we used it for was to take screen names that we wanted. So like I had my first name, like I had Bryce at AOL.com and you know, so all of the homies all had their first names and they had their handles, you know, and some people's handles are a lot less, uh, I guess, like Oday, for instance, you know, is, is a term in computing

• 1:30:55Speaker 06

  that I, I know, actually know multiple Odays besides Ryan. But you know, if he wanted that screen name, like I would get it for him, uh, type thing. And so we used it more for that type of stuff. Uh, again, we weren't stealing people's credit cards to, you know, charge them or anything, but it was just fun to have that type of access. Cause again, it was very You know, imagine you could just look somebody up that you were having a internet fight with and you know, you knew exactly where they lived and you know, how often they paid their bills and stuff.

• 1:31:24Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it sounds like you were really on the precipice of hacking, the very beginnings.

• 1:31:32Speaker 06

  I would say in the in the eighties is like when it really took flight. There was a lot more you could do with phone systems and computers back then. There was absolutely no compensating controls at all. And so glory days, like in New York, there was like Masters of Deception, Legion Doom, like there's these hacker wars of the eighties that were just legendary. But I would say a lot of kind of the the modern twists and stuff. This was, yeah, it was very cool to be a part of that that time because again, the internet was just barely coming into itself and it was just starting to get available to to normal people. And that's kind of why I really like the era I grew up in because it I had that kind

• 1:32:17Speaker 06

  of the the giants that came before me and you know, sort of set that foundation. But the stuff that we were doing around then is a lot more kind of analogous to the the types of threats and everything that we're dealing with today.

• 1:32:30Shawn Ryan?

  When you talk about some of your buddies that you were hacking with, like I think you mentioned him, somebody named Glitch.

• 1:32:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, Glitch.

• 1:32:39Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, do you do you know these people? Or are these online connections? You don't know what they look like?

• 1:32:46Speaker 06

  I've never met Glitch in my life. He had, we had talked on the phone and we do, we do conference calls like a lot. Like that was another big thing in the hacker scene is we would hijack conference lines and then everyone would just kind of call in and so he, but he had the deepest voice of anybody I've ever heard, but I don't know if he was white, black, like nothing about him, never saw a picture of him. And he was like my, my boy, like we were super, super tight. And I don't even know where he is now.

• 1:33:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how do, how do you, how does this work? Where do, how do you meet him?

• 1:33:16Speaker 06

  So

• 1:33:17Shawn Ryan?

  Like, oh, I'm Bryce. I'm a fellow hacker. Let's be friends. Let's be friends. Like, how does this work?

• 1:33:22Speaker 06

  So like I said, we had these private rooms that, uh, so once you kind of get into the network, the fabric, then you sort of spider spider out into, you know, the other kind of corners. But there were these, because of the programs that were being released on AOL at the time, there were rooms that were named after programs that people would go to. Like, you would just type in the name of the program. Like, Fate X was a huge program. Havoc was a huge program. That's the one, that's the first room that I was really, really a part of.

• 1:33:53Speaker 06

  But, uh, they had a ton of software piracy rooms. Uh, so if you wanted to get, what we called WARES, it was short for software, uh, you would go, some people pronounce it WARES, but it's WARES because it comes from software. And you would go in these rooms and they were like numbered. So it was like server one, server two, server three, server four, da, da, da, but any type of software that you wanted to get, they basically would use AOL as a file distribution service. IRC has an analogous, uh, system called DCC, but on AOL, it was stored on their servers. And you would just basically get emails with pieces, chunks of a file. So if you wanted Photoshop or something,

• 1:34:34Speaker 06

  you could go into these server rooms and then download sequentially, you know, each chunk of this file. But going into these rooms, like, there was a, just a, a network, I would say, of like, this person would be in these two rooms, this person would be in these three rooms type stuff. So you just get to talking and collaborating. And I was already a pretty good programmer at that time. So, you know, I was going in there and it was a very, like, the open source community. There's software that is released now that you can look at the source, you can, you can contribute to it. Anybody can contribute to this stuff. Linux, you know, the operating system is a, uh, is an example of this open source software where, you know,

• 1:35:19Speaker 06

  Everything's available to you. You can see all the code. You can edit it. If there's a feature that you want in there and you can code it, you can submit a pull request and then they'll put it in. AOL had that same type of culture, except very, very early, where, you know, we would share methods with each other. If I found like a cool way to pun somebody, then I could copy paste my code to somebody else. And so you just sort of gain a name for yourself in that community.

• 1:35:44Shawn Ryan?

  So it's just sharing

• 1:35:46Speaker 06

  Information.

• 1:35:47Shawn Ryan?

  information and innovation.

• 1:35:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was very collaborative in those years, too. There was very little. I mean, of course, you had some things you kept close to the chest, you know, some secret sauce. But I, like, the things that I was famous for writing were, I had like an all in one check command program, but then I did a, I wrote a program called Concert that allowed you to get free AOL accounts. It was when AOL Instant Messenger had been released and you used to not be able to have lowercase screen names. Everything had to be uppercase. But when AOL, when American Online released AIM, then you could create, you could take your AIM account and you could turn it into

• 1:36:32Speaker 06

  an AOL account. And we called them I cases, because if you, when the lowercase I or capital I looks like a lowercase L, like in the font that was, that was, in the font that AOL displayed in. And so the, that these were kind of desired screen names to have, because everyone else had these uppercase screen names and you get these lowercase screen names. But the program that I wrote, it used, it leveraged Canadian registration to create free AOL accounts that would last for

• 1:37:13Speaker 06

  about three to five days. And so people that didn't, I never paid for AOL in my life. Like, I always used stolen accounts or cracked accounts or something. And so a lot of us were like that, too. And this program would just basically defraud AOL to make these free accounts that, you know, were just burner accounts that would last for a few days. But it was a way, it just, it leveraged a problem in the way the Canadian registration system was set up and how it validated credit cards, that you could basically get these burner accounts that would stay alive for a few days. And then I made this series of animated movies in Visual Basic that were kind of about what was going on in AOL at the time. And the

• 1:37:56Speaker 06

  music was kind of adjacent to it, too. But that's sort of how I got a name for myself.

• 1:38:00Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any of those videos?

• 1:38:02Speaker 06

  Uh, which ones?

• 1:38:03Shawn Ryan?

  Any of the ones that you created?

• 1:38:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:05Shawn Ryan?

  Can we put one in the episode?

• 1:38:07Speaker 06

  Uh, I would have to, there, because I converted them to Flash, and now Flash is not really a thing. But yeah, we could, I could, yeah, fine. They're stick figures and stuff. It's just really dumb, but.

• 1:38:18Shawn Ryan?

  It would just be cool to put that

• 1:38:20Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:38:20Shawn Ryan?

  history in here.

• 1:38:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 1:38:23Shawn Ryan?

  Somebody has seen it. Somebody, somebody watching.

• 1:38:26Speaker 06

  Somebody has seen it. Yeah, they were, they were micro-popular. But then I said, that was taking, once AOL's hacking sort of taken seriously, you know, then I said it was more about breaking into the actual systems that AOL ran on, rather than, you know, reverse engineering the protocols and how it talked to each other. Like, we were building thin clients that could emulate America online pretty closely without actually having to use AOL's software. So, those were the, that was kind of the progression of how we weaponized the hacking stuff. But there's a ton of people on

• 1:39:06Speaker 06

  AOL that, you know, this day, it was, it was like, I said, an academy, you know, there's a ton of people that came from that era that, you know, moved on to my forum at DG and, you know, are doing insane things, you know, now, but they got their start. I think Mark Zuckerberg even talked about, like, he used to hack AOL's Messenger, and that's like, he wrote a, what was called a fader, and what it would do is it would change the text color, like, as, so as you typed it, it would just be like a cute rainbow type thing. And I think that was one of the programs that he'd mentioned, kind of writing, but.

• 1:39:39Shawn Ryan?

  That sounds like something Zuckerberg would have.

• 1:39:41Speaker 06

  That sounds like it's a Zuckerberg thing.

• 1:39:43Shawn Ryan?

  But, well, you mentioned, I got a couple of questions, actually. So on these.

• 1:39:49Shawn Ryan?

  In these online communities, would you call it a forum of hackers?

• 1:39:54Speaker 06

  This was more, these were more chat rooms.

• 1:39:56Shawn Ryan?

  Chat rooms.

• 1:39:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:39:57Shawn Ryan?

  How many hackers would be in a chat room?

• 1:40:00Speaker 06

  I had very 10 to 15, you know, it's the, and people of all varying skill levels. Uh, there was a, maybe a couple handfuls of us that were really, that got, you know, to the kind of the upper

• 1:40:13Shawn Ryan?

  We're good.

• 1:40:14Speaker 06

  Echelon, yeah, but then you had a lot of people that were just, again, learning. Some people didn't care to learn too much. They just really liked running the programs that we would make, you know, and make themselves look cool and, and stuff. Uh, but yeah, the, uh, the, there was a group that I looked up to insanely that were somewhat local. Uh, they're called Lithium Node and those guys came up with some of the just most gangster things. Uh, there was like limitations on the amount. You had to have at least three characters in your screen name, you know? That was a kind of a bare requirement and they found out how to make one and two character screen names. And they also had found exploits in AOL's web server.

• 1:40:59Speaker 06

  The way the software that they used to serve all their, their web traffic, uh, actually exploited a bug in that. I think it was in TCL, uh, but just that even then, you know, there was people that were kind of a strata above my crew. Um, there were, there was, as I said, there was just a ton of different groups, but all of various, uh, kind of skill level. Node was probably the most elite, but I was part of AOL files and observers. And, uh, those were probably like said, the second tier. It's just, I, I, you know, how the hierarchy of, I'm sure there's one special forces or something.

• 1:41:39Speaker 06

  But yeah, the, the, the groups that I was a part of were up there, but not like the top, top, top, tippy top.

• 1:41:47Shawn Ryan?

  Not the tip of the spear.

• 1:41:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe other people had different opinions and they'd be like, oh yeah, you know, you were the, you were at the top. But, uh, yeah, I just said, I remember just at the time, there'd be things that people were pulling off. And I was like, how the hell do they do that? So.

• 1:41:59Shawn Ryan?

  You had mentioned.

• 1:42:02Shawn Ryan?

  You don't put everything out, some stuff you keep close to the chest. Did you have anything you were keeping close to the chest that was for your eyes only?

• 1:42:10Speaker 06

  Uh, by the end of it, probably not. Um, it was more, yeah, that there were certain, I would say,

• 1:42:22Speaker 06

  internal websites that I knew about that I didn't want anybody else scraping or knowing because then it would just raise the signal on them type of stuff. Uh, but as far as the, we call them methods, like it just, as far as any of that stuff goes, eventually I would just try to, you know, share that type of knowledge. Because generally it'll come back to you. If people aren't super greedy, they'll take your stuff and then, you know, they might mutate it in some way and then you're going to get back something cool later. A very sharing economy. People that weren't like that, that it just kind of consumed, you know, you don't deal with them.

• 1:42:58Shawn Ryan?

  It didn't last long.

• 1:42:59Speaker 06

  It didn't last long, yeah. So it was more about the people that were really forthcoming with all the cool technology that they were developing.

• 1:43:06Shawn Ryan?

  Give take relationship.

• 1:43:07Speaker 06

  Exactly, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:08Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 1:43:12Shawn Ryan?

  Would the stuff that you were doing in AOL, would that be considered black hat hacking?

• 1:43:17Speaker 06

  A hundred percent, yeah. There was no, there was nothing benevolent about any of that stuff. It was all just, and the way I, I think about it now and there's no way, I must have, I terminated on the order of hundreds of thousands of accounts probably. And, you know, the member base of AOL was in the, I think the eight figures, you know, it was mid million, I don't know, it was 20 million, I forgot, 25 million. But significant chunk of those, I mean, I definitely spammed everybody on AOL, um, at one point, but I, the hassle thing I was saying earlier about, you know, your credit card gets canceled, that if your AOL account got terminated because I happened to break into it or something, that's, you know,

• 1:44:00Speaker 06

  three hours on the phone that somebody had to, it's, it's not far fetched to think some... Ninety year old grandma who just wanted to see pictures of her grandkid, you know, is sitting on the phone for three hours and, you know, had a stroke because she was so frustrated with talking to customer service. Like, there may have been some ancillary deaths. I, you know, I could take it to the nth degree on any of it, but yeah, there was nothing. I mean, I'm learning about the system and it was really cool because you're, you know things that, you know, maybe some, most of the internal employees don't even know and you're kind of consuming all this. So, but very selfishly, uh, and yeah, there is no way to characterize that as anything but black hat.

• 1:44:41Shawn Ryan?

  Did you, did you meet any of these, like Glitch or any of these other people? Did you meet any of them?

• 1:44:47Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:48Shawn Ryan?

  In person?

• 1:44:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. So like a couple of my best friends, uh, of all time, like we started out on AOL together and, uh, the, actually, I mean, like, most of my friends that I still hang out with on, uh, today, uh, they came from some facet of online, but that AOL, like my friend Egot, my friend Flo, my friend Horetzu, like all of them, like they all came from America Online. That's, that's where we met and known each other. So we've known each other for like, yeah, whatever it is, uh, what 25 years.

• 1:45:23Shawn Ryan?

  How long, how long did it take you to meet them in person?

• 1:45:26Speaker 06

  Uh, probably in, in adulthood, um, like, yeah, mid twenties type thing is like when we finally came, came together and we weren't really.

• 1:45:37Shawn Ryan?

  And this stuff was starting at age 15?

• 1:45:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:39Shawn Ryan?

  So it took, it took a decade.

• 1:45:42Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:45:42Shawn Ryan?

  To start meeting people.

• 1:45:43Speaker 06

  But we'd been, you know, internet. Well, I said, some of it was, uh, earlier than that, I should probably say like, yeah, 22, 23 even. I think like when Taylor was in college at UCSB, I was, I was 19. Yeah. So maybe it was the, the few of them. Yeah. We met like, but a lot, a grand majority of them. Yeah. I would say throughout my twenties is kind of when we started kicking it, you know?

• 1:46:08Shawn Ryan?

  I mean.

• 1:46:11Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's weird.

• 1:46:13Speaker 06

  Very much so.

• 1:46:13Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you think about nowadays and, and people that, you know, they, they, they made all their friends on social media and you were doing this, what, 30 years ago?

• 1:46:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24Shawn Ryan?

  25, 30 years ago?

• 1:46:25Speaker 06

  And back then it was, you know, you don't meet weirdos off the internet type thing. That was the attitude that a lot of people had, uh, but yeah, and they're my, some of my best friends now to this day. Uh, the people that I've, you know, and it's known through that, uh, that scene and it's, it's cool. Uh, but they're the people that I identified with the most, uh, you know, obviously. And, you know, we had like a lot of common interests and stuff, so.

• 1:46:53Shawn Ryan?

  This is, uh, but this is fascinating to me. Do you, do you think that, look, everybody has a stereotype, right? Stereotype in the special operations community, stereotype at CIA, stereotype in NSA. All these different places I've worked at, there's definitely a stereotype that kind of fits the mold. Would you say there is a stereotype in the hacking community?

• 1:47:18Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, I, I think everybody sort of pictures the guy in the hoodie with the anonymous mask on and cans of Red Bull or Monster or whatever, just polluting the desk. And that's what's so crazy is that a lot of, or, you know, ultra nerdy, like super, you know, coke bottle glasses. Like any of that type of, that, that archetype is just, you see it as a trope in, in Hollywood pretty consistently. But, uh, what I've found is it's a really eclectic, it's in all races, all creeds, religions, whatever, you know, different looks. It's very, there's a lot of people that you wouldn't even know are, you know, looking at them that they had anything to do with computers.

• 1:48:00Speaker 06

  As it's, it's a very, it was a wake up call, I think even, even then, you know, that's like, well, not everybody's just a dork. Pretty cool people here.

• 1:48:12Shawn Ryan?

  What about personality traits?

• 1:48:16Speaker 06

  That, I think everybody that's on the computer as much as we are, has some mental illness, like you have to. So that stereotype is true, there's no going anywhere, there's, everybody's subject to some idiosyncratic behavior or trait. There's a lot of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar, you know, all that type of stuff, coalesces in the hacking world fairly regularly. I said, that stereotype, I would say, is pretty true about everybody I know. And autism is like, super, super big, like, that, it's an in-joke

• 1:49:00Speaker 06

  within a lot of us, that, you know, the more autism you're showing, like, the better you are, type thing, the Asperger's, you know, focused and just super meticulous and everything, that it's a quality that I see as a superpower in a lot of ways, you know, when it comes down to it.

• 1:49:21Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. So, all right, so let's move past the AOL stuff. What, what started coming next?

• 1:49:28Speaker 06

  Uh, so, I had started doing the webpage defacement type stuff in, in parallel, like I said, the keyword defacement was one thing, but I was would, you know, watch television and there'd be an ad for a car dealership or something, and then I would just go type it in my computer, and then I would just hack the car dealership, or whenever I'd see any sort of indicator.

• 1:49:56Speaker 06

  So, I wasn't very prescriptive about which targets I was doing, just to see if I could do it, but eventually, after doing a lot of those types of defacements, like-

• 1:50:07Shawn Ryan?

  What would you do to a car dealership?

• 1:50:10Speaker 06

  Oh, I, there was a Honda dealership called Empire Honda, and I had-

• 1:50:17Speaker 06

  Posted a picture of Christina Aguilera on the site and I said that I demand that they give me a Honda so I could drive around with Christina Aguilera. So I just held there, had their webpage hostage, uh, cause I had a crush. Um, but things like that, just to where anybody else that would go to the website would see, you know, what I had put up there.

• 1:50:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. So let's dissect this. So you, you put a, you put an image up on the homepage of Christina Aguilera.

• 1:50:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:46Shawn Ryan?

  What, how, I mean, where does the reaction come from?

• 1:50:49Speaker 06

  Oh, I don't, I don't even know what the, I would love to see what people's faces would look like when they saw that, or when the people that, uh, that, yeah, that own the website.

• 1:51:00Shawn Ryan?

  Would you be the one to take it down?

• 1:51:02Speaker 06

  What do you mean?

• 1:51:03Shawn Ryan?

  Like eventually would you just be like, all right, fine.

• 1:51:06Speaker 06

  No, I would leave it up until they fixed it.

• 1:51:08Shawn Ryan?

  So just do it and then drop the mic and I'm out?

• 1:51:12Speaker 06

  Sure. Somebody's gonna notice eventually. Yeah. But it was just funny things like that. Um, and I was, that I'd infected my high school pretty well. Uh, and it's, it was eventually part of what I got investigated for, but I hacked every school district in Colorado. Like I had all their, anything that was internet facing or inappropriate, I had, you know, either defaced or I had some sort of foothold in, um, cause I could bounce my connections through them, all kinds of stuff. But I had kind of after, this is doing the company stuff for a while, but the government,

• 1:51:54Speaker 06

  the dot gov's and dot mills were the, that's the top level domain for, you know, government and, uh, military sites. And that was the progression, you know, again, gotta give an addict, you know, more, and these were just shinier, uh, targets than car dealerships and stuff. Uh, so I.

• 1:52:17Shawn Ryan?

  So pride started getting in the way.

• 1:52:19Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's, well, and the challenge, like, can I, you know, I'm a, just a dorky high school kid. Can I break into, you know, the military's, uh, these websites? And I was part of a group called Global Hell that, uh, famously, I mean, hacked like the whitehouse.gov and army.mil. And we, uh,

• 1:52:46Speaker 06

  I don't know. We looked at it that, you know, people were like, well, why'd you hack this? Were you looking for UFOs or nuclear secrets or anything like that? And it wasn't really like that. Everything that I was doing was just.

• 1:52:59Shawn Ryan?

  Whoa, let's backtrack for a minute here. So I think we're going into, we're going into when you defaced all of the .gov, .mil, big government, agency websites.

• 1:53:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:53:15Shawn Ryan?

  So let's, let's go down the list.

• 1:53:18Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:53:18Shawn Ryan?

  I know this is what I have. You defaced NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center website, a cartoon of a hooked hacker, a hooded hacker, a peace symbol, and a warning of website security holes. Did you also hack the FFA or FAA, DCAA, NATO, Colorado Springs Police Department, Texas Department of Public Safety, Honda, Nissan, and AT&T?

• 1:53:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:53:45Shawn Ryan?

  Am I missing anything?

• 1:53:47Speaker 06

  I'm sure you are, but it was a, it was a crime spree at that point.

• 1:53:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, again, it's done great things for me, obviously. This is, it's a fantastic resume to have, but in retrospect, that, again, was the juice worth the squeeze?

• 1:54:08Shawn Ryan?

  How old were you when you're hacking these?

• 1:54:10Speaker 06

  Uh, seventeen, sixteen, seventeen.

• 1:54:13Shawn Ryan?

  Sixteen years old and you're hacking NASA?

• 1:54:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:54:17Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 1:54:17Speaker 06

  But.

• 1:54:19Shawn Ryan?

  That was the juice worth the, worth the squeeze?

• 1:54:21Speaker 06

  I mean, I, the consequences weren't really that, that bad. You know, I didn't do prison time and they didn't keep the computer away from me or anything. What was really telling about it was my investigation, I had seven different agencies investigating me at the same time and I wasn't really careful about. I wasn't deleting logs. I was really kind of up for I figured, you know, the more transparent I was about the crime I was doing and whether or not that worked in my favor is debatable, but I I knew specifically how to keep myself out of it, you know, I wasn't.

• 1:55:00Speaker 06

  If I would have done it under a different handle, there's things that I did under different handles that, you know, but everything I did here, I was pretty much looking to get caught in some senses and I'm a minor. I'm not, you know, what are they going to do to me? So that's the attitude that I have. Uh, but that I think about it, you know, now as an adult on the other side of stuff and I just, I don't even know how many days I ruined, you know, people chewed out by their boss or, you know, people got fired. I'm sure it was, uh, probably not very, very fun. Um, but the things.

• 1:55:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, you did expose a vulnerability.

• 1:55:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. And this was, so this is the turn of the millennium and I was really, you know, I've always been insanely patriotic, like I, you know, love my country, fear my government type kind of guy. Uh, and that it was sort of,

• 1:55:56Speaker 06

  I just saw the way that the winds were blowing, you know, and, and that if, uh, somebody with some high school kid with free time on his hand is sitting there and just doing this massacre of all these government websites and huge companies that that doesn't, if I was a concerted, you know, state actor and I wanted to get persistence of these machines or I really cared about doing more than instead of being loud about it and defacing the front pages, if I wanted to get in there secretly and stay there secretly, like that would have been very, very easy for me to do. And so as a just, again, a kid with free time on his hands, able to do this, like, imagine if you were paying me, you know,

• 1:56:39Speaker 06

  quarter million dollars a year to do this type of thing and do it nefariously, like I just. That that's the logic I had walking into it is like, you know, why aren't and why isn't people fixing this? Because I could, I would email, you know, webmasters and I'd be like, hey, this is wrong. Like, you need to fix this. Nothing. So then, but the moment you break it, like then all of a sudden it's a it's a rush to to fix it. And so that was the onus for a lot of what I was doing is just to raise this awareness that this illusory power structure that exists that, you know, you think is all impenetrable is being defeated by.

• 1:57:18Shawn Ryan?

  So you actually had a positive motive.

• 1:57:21Speaker 06

  A hundred percent. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but again, so I said, the means by which I accomplished these goals probably considered criminal or black hat. But yeah, then I it's said, I'm on record and I've quoted that since, you know, then it's just, it was more just like, it was absurd to me that, you know, you have companies with all this money or governments with all these resources like weren't paying attention to this type of stuff. And I mean, now it's even more of a death sentence than it was. There's just so much that's hinging on technology that.

• 1:57:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's, let's walk through the beginning then. Just walk me through step by step. So you said you started to see the way the winds were turning. And and all these agencies were extremely vulnerable to being hacked. So

• 1:58:09Shawn Ryan?

  what, what got them on your radar? Just at the very beginning, you just you were just up in the ante seeing if you could do it. Then you realized, oh, this is atrocious.

• 1:58:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, that hacking a car dealership, a local car dealership and holding the ransom for

• 1:58:27Speaker 06

  Christina Aguilera or something is one thing. But then, yeah, being able to do these types of things to government websites was totally, you know, different. But you realize it's the same, like in a sense that the amount of protection that that car dealership has is almost the same amount of protection that this has. So there's a asymmetrical value to, you know, where you would think the, the people would be paying attention to.

• 1:58:56Speaker 06

  But again, it was the same type of thing. Like, it was just as a hip hop fan, you know, there's the elements of hip hop are like, you know, turntableism, breakdancing, emceeing. Graffiti was always considered an element of of.

• 1:59:12Speaker 06

  Of hip hop and so I the first ticket I got like I said was spray painting. And so it's just the same type of behavior, except using the internet as a medium for my graffiti. And so, yeah, whatever manifestos I had about the state of security or, you know, whatever dumb thing I was ranting about at the time. It was called hacktivism was the kind of term that emerged as that, you know, whatever political message you're trying to send or, you know, trying to drive traffic to a cause like that's but my evangelization of security was more, you know, hey, look, I'm a dumb kid and I'm hacking this stuff. So, you know, what are you going to do about it?

• 1:59:54Shawn Ryan?

  What was the first website that you hacked government wise?

• 1:59:58Speaker 06

  The first one, oof, I don't remember.

• 2:00:07Speaker 06

  Cause the one that said it was the the three, the NASA and the Defense Contracts Agency, Defense Contract Audit Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration were the were all done in the same, I think it was November 23, 1999.

• 2:00:25Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, you remember the exact day.

• 2:00:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure I might get skill checked nerd sniped, but that

• 2:00:36Speaker 06

  that that was like what caught the attention of mainstream media and.

• 2:00:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, this one everywhere, correct?

• 2:00:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was on Wired, CNN, Fox. It got pretty big traction.

• 2:00:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, but that's what I that's the one I know. Cause I said I was doing local government stuff. I had done the the thing that was crazy that I found out later was that the the police department systems that I hacked actually like if I would have traversed the network, I would have been able to, you know, pull up like access.

• 2:01:15Speaker 06

  Like the, is it the, is it NCIS? I think it is. The national, like to, you know, be able to look at warrants, like international or national warrants. And, you know, I could have manipulated like actual police records, like speeding tickets and da, da, da. That, uh, the, for whatever reason, their website was on the same network that all the rest of that stuff was. Uh, so I didn't find that out until after the fact. Again, my message, my mission was basically to go in. Sometimes I would install some amount of, some kind of persistence that way I could get back in. But for the most part, it was just, uh, I would deface the website and then it would have instructions on how to fix it. And how to remediate, uh, what was going on. So, uh, yeah, just trying to remember.

• 2:01:59Speaker 06

  I'm pretty sure that some of that stuff, some state government stuff had happened before that. But the NASA one was the one that kind of, uh, blew up, but I didn't stop after that. I, I still kept going.

• 2:02:09Shawn Ryan?

  How long does it take? How long did it take you to hack into NASA?

• 2:02:14Speaker 06

  Not long. So the, the thing that was, I think people have a misconception about what hacking really is. Like think you're just grinding out passwords or anything that, there was a exploit that I was leveraging,

• 2:02:30Speaker 06

  uh, in a database service that, that came on, like if you had a website that was running on a Windows system, there was a, uh, MSADC, uh, dot DLL. It was a, uh, for, uh, data connections. Um, but it was a dynamic link library that was accessible from the internet. The problem is, is the way that it was configured out of the box is you could send it shell commands and basically issue commands to the box as if you were, you know, sitting there. If you had an account on the machine and it would run under the web user permissions. So I had modified, a lot of people, when they were using these, this way of defacing,

• 2:03:11Speaker 06

  all they were doing is they would echo a text string to the index page of the website. So you would just get this black and white screen that said Sean Ryan was here type thing.

• 2:03:24Speaker 06

  The way I did it was I was, I would basically manifest network shares on the machine that I could connect to. And then I could do, I had full directory access. And so it was basically more. robust than what was originally designed, like the proof of concept type thing. So it was an exploit somebody else, this guy Rainforest Puppy had developed and found. And then I just kind of did my own little spin on to it. Uh, it was really easy because you could just grind out sites. And if you saw that this library existed uh, on the website you were investigating, then you knew it was probably vulnerable. So I would write grinders that would take like, you know, Sean Ryan show.com,

• 2:04:09Speaker 06

  vigilance elite.com, da, da, da, da, all these different websites. And then I could just plug in and see, you know, is this file present? Is it not present, you know, type things? So it was carpet bombing uh, the internet. Um, so if I saw one that I, you know, if I was more focused on something, then it was easy for me to just kind of go in there and look. But I was just loading up domain lists, anything that ended in dot gov, you know, dot mil. You know, I had a, there was a site called Netcraft back then that would, it kept a repository of what operating systems uh, and versions and stuff that sites were running. And so you would, you can get good DNS intelligence from that and find out, you know,

• 2:04:49Speaker 06

  what not only top level domains, but sub domains of, of uh, that belonged to the government or the military. Uh, so there's different ways to do it now through passive DNS scanning and stuff. But that was how I got, that was how I got the laundry list back then.

• 2:05:07Shawn Ryan?

  How many of these, how many government organizations did you hack at once?

• 2:05:12Speaker 06

  Uh, 20, something, I didn't know a lot.

• 2:05:17Shawn Ryan?

  How did you get approached? I mean, what, I got a lot of questions. How did, how did they approach you when you, when they were on to you?

• 2:05:25Speaker 06

  So there was this kid that was.

• 2:05:30Speaker 06

  Again, these hacker groups, we all have these little cliques and shit. We had this one called Sesame Street Hackers. Uh, it was a joke on Secure Shell, uh, cause SSH is a uh, software that you use to log into a machine securely. Uh, but we had the same initialism, but it was, uh, Sesame Street Hackers. And there was this kid, his name was Darkness. And, uh, he was 15, so a little younger than, uh, than I was. And he broke into a satellite and he, instead of deleting the logs, he accidentally deleted everything on the machine, like completely screwed up.

• 2:06:12Speaker 06

  And the administrator of that machine was named Black Dog. And he came into our IRC chat, uh, and he was like, you're all like, all of you are, you know, they're after you, like, you don't understand. He even put this site back up and he had like edited the stuff that we edited. So he re-defaced our defacement. Um, but he said, they know all about you. And he knew way too much for it to be a troll. Cause sometimes, you know, obviously we'd be messing with each other. And, uh, but this guy was a hundred percent for real. Logs on from a, you know, you could see

• 2:06:53Speaker 06

  the IP address that he'd logged in from, and it was a NASA Gov one. And, and he just knew way too much information about what was going on. And so he, he was like, you know, you should probably contact them before they contact you. And so I was like, all right, I'll call. So he gave me the number of, uh, NASA has an investigative arm called OIG, the Office of the Inspector General. I think a lot of government agencies have a similar thing, but it's like the law enforcement arm of NASA. And so I called, uh, Sheila Brock, I think was her name. And, uh, yeah, and I just basically said, I'm Whitey Cracker. I heard you're looking for me.

• 2:07:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, how can we make this peaceful? And somehow, and so they said all the information came out later. Uh, but that, so the Texas Department of Public Safety was after me, which is kind of, uh, their sheriff's department, uh, cause I had hacked them. Uh, there was the FBI. You hacked the FBI? Well, I didn't hack the FBI, but they, uh, they were obviously. Oh, they were the investigators? Yeah, there was, uh, DCIS, uh, it's like, uh, which, uh, I forgot what that stands for. Defense Criminal Investigative Service, something like that. I think they handled like DOD stuff. Uh, there was NASA, NASA Office, the Inspector General.

• 2:08:22Speaker 06

  There was the Colorado Springs Police Department. I know there was seven, like I, that number seared into my head and I was a, the case report filed with you. But what I found that it was nuts, cause it said after all this stuff, NASA came in. Uh, it was two agents sat down at the kitchen table, you know, we went over everything. Uh, but the inter-agency coordination, I mean, I'm sure you know how this stuff works. Just, I, I cannot believe that it happened, but the FBI was supposedly two weeks away from kicking my door in. Uh, my, the local police department, they'd been set up across the street and just monitoring, you know, my house, when I would go in and out of school and stuff, they were getting ready to kick it in.

• 2:09:07Speaker 06

  Somehow NASA was able to contact all the agencies that were at open cases against me and tell them it was their caller or whatever. So I never wound up getting my door kicked in, like it was just nice, invite them in, have, you know, coffee or whatever, and we just kind of discussed everything, but they took all my computers and, you know, back for a forensic investigation. A lot, a lot of that stuff that emerged during the case, uh, and the case report was just huge. But yeah, all the different agencies that were investigating me, like each had a little kind of section in this file, uh, which was insane to me. It's like how much manpower had been

• 2:09:47Speaker 06

  wasted on, on little me, uh, but.

• 2:09:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, said I.

• 2:09:54Shawn Ryan?

  Did you see the news? Did you see the news break?

• 2:09:58Speaker 06

  Which one?

• 2:09:59Shawn Ryan?

  With all the website defacing before you had these meetings?

• 2:10:02Speaker 06

  Well, I was interviewing with the press and so that's what I mean. They were that, you know, they'd contacted me through. There was this, so the site that, there was a site that mirrored all of the hacks that people were doing called it, it was attrition, attrition.org. They still have the mirror. They're up, but their paths are protected, but they used to kind of keep track of all of the different defacements that were happening. And so it became this leaderboard amongst hackers, like who could hack the most stuff. And so the different groups and all, but there's a whole just chronicle of every website defacement that has ever happened, pretty much attrition was keeping kind of record of that. And so we would be sending

• 2:10:45Speaker 06

  stuff to them, you know, to make sure that they mirrored it and showed that that we had done it. And so a lot of times media would contact them and say like, how do, how can we get in touch with this hacker or that hacker or whatever? And again, if you're looking for that fame and that recognition, then it was, you know, a no brainer. And a lot of us around that time, yes, they were kind of pointing out the insecurities in government, all shared that same ethos. And so talking to press was just another way of getting the word out of what we were doing.

• 2:11:19Shawn Ryan?

  So did you talk?

• 2:11:22Shawn Ryan?

  Did you talk to the press before or after?

• 2:11:25Speaker 06

  I talked to the press before I got busted. Yeah.

• 2:11:27Shawn Ryan?

  Wouldn't that be cat out of the bag right there?

• 2:11:29Speaker 06

  Well, like I said, I didn't really care that I'm 17. I was like, what was worse gonna happen to me type stuff? And I wasn't thinking about the consequences in, in that way. And I'd written an article for Hacker News too about that, you know, it's like the best time to do things, obviously, is like when there's no real repercussions. And this was before nine 11. So it wasn't, there wasn't a whole lot of. Uh, and it was apparent what I was doing. Like I said, I was very open about the way I was getting in, how I was getting in, what I was doing. There wasn't much clandestine, you know, secret behavior going on. I just, I was really upfront about the, the how and the why,

• 2:12:10Speaker 06

  uh, which I believe saved me in a lot of ways. But yeah, I mean, I want to, I didn't do any jail time. I was on probation for a really long time and I had to pay a shitload of restitution. But other than that, there was, wasn't much fallout, you know, in the sense that it didn't affect my professional career at all or.

• 2:12:27Shawn Ryan?

  What did, um, I mean, what is that conversation like when NASA walks into a seventeen year old's home and is asking you why you hacked their website and defaced it?

• 2:12:39Speaker 06

  They had a, I said, there's a wealth of evidence and they had chat logs. They're, they're monitoring our chats and they had a list of people that they were asking me if I knew. And even if I did know them, I said I didn't know them. I, I was real cagey. I about, uh, I, again, anything that I did, I was taking responsibility for and ready to go down for. But they said, conversation was super cordial and they just, I said, they left with all of my hard drives and equipment and stuff and off for analysis and imaging or whatever they did to it. But they had most of the evidence, obviously there, you know,

• 2:13:19Speaker 06

  and my confession, but, uh, I said, the most impressive thing was that somehow they were able to coordinate with all the rest of the agencies. And so I didn't get my door kicked in seven times and be like, oh, the computer's already gone, like NASA's already got them. So that, that was, that was nice.

• 2:13:38Shawn Ryan?

  Did they, did they fix the problem?

• 2:13:40Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 2:13:41Shawn Ryan?

  Did they, did they need your assistance to fix any of the problems?

• 2:13:45Speaker 06

  No, and that's something people ask me all the time. It's like, why didn't the government offer you a job? And. Uh, the, the answer that I actually got was an odd one, but it said it made, it made sense at the time. And it was just that, you know, justifying, you know, the catch me if you can type, uh, philosophy that it, you know, can you justify to taxpayers that we now have a criminal kind of overseeing the security of our systems? And so, you know, how do you go from being, you know, this prolific hacker? And then all of a sudden, you know, change of heart, now you're like working for them type thing. So that was the justification that they use that they never, uh, there, there's some stuff that I had done for the FBI later.

• 2:14:27Speaker 06

  Like, cause I have a strict code of no snitching, like I'll never like go down on my boys. And even to this day, like I just, something never sits right with me. And, you know, but like technical type of, uh, consultations, you know, like how does this attack work? Or something like that, that those are the types of things that I was wound up offering to agencies part of my, um, community service that I had to work off, you know, just, you know, what is, you know, how does this credit card attack work? Like, how do they, you know, how are they finding these numbers? And, you know, how, I don't know if you know how that.

• 2:14:58Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what, what's going through your head when you have the, when you have the FBI and NASA and all these government websites or just government agencies asking a 17 year old kid, how, how, how does this work?

• 2:15:12Speaker 06

  The, the movie Matrix had come out that same year and I did, it's just those, things that are fused into your head that it's just weird cause you just feel like you're living in a, in a movie in some senses. And that was probably the weirdest takeaway from it. Cause the reality set in, it's like, well, you know, you do the crime, do the time type thing. But it was fascinating to me that, that I said, I can't even imagine the amount of manpower and resources it was taking to compile. Cause the, the stuff that they had, I mean, again, it's like a King James Bible, this thick, full of all this, uh, you know,

• 2:15:53Speaker 06

  said chat logs and pictures and images and, you know, things they had already had informants that had flipped on us and stuff. So they, you know, they had documentation, you know, from other people that they'd already kind of encountered and talked to. Uh, one, one of the leaders of the group, I don't think he ever got busted. He was a Canadian national, uh, maybe RCMP did hit him up, but then one of my homies, Missing Link Rackmount, he never got caught. That's part of the reason that the anonymity was super important for a lot of us is that, you know, again, if you didn't, we didn't know who each other really, really was, you know, you're just a face, a name, and we just respected each other's skills. Uh, so you don't know what race somebody is, you don't know what gender they are.

• 2:16:38Speaker 06

  It's just, you're just a name on a computer screen as far as I'm concerned.

• 2:16:41Shawn Ryan?

  I guess, I guess where I was going is did it, did the incompetence of the government agencies as far as cybersecurity, did that register with you at that age?

• 2:16:54Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. The, but again, with age comes experience type thing. I understand, uh, the defender's dilemma, I had brought that up when we were eating dinner, but that a defender has to be successful against all, uh, points of ingress where an attacker only needs to be successful with one. And it's very, very hard to maintain a decent security posture with all of the attack surface that might be going on. And some of these systems that I was breaking into were probably just overlooked, you know, on the internet, some kind of.

• 2:17:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, you had mentioned earlier that you were sending the, I don't know, sending them emails or messages or something saying, hey, there's a hole here. You guys might want to fix this. Okay. You don't want to fix it, then I'll expose it. I mean, so you gave them the opportunity to fix it. Did you, did that come up in the, in the interviews?

• 2:17:50Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's why I said, my sentence as far as I think most of my contemporaries was really, really lenient, uh, that pretty much, like I said, the restitution was charged, it was, it was a quarter million dollars, but it was like, that they basically justified it through the salaries of, you know, how much time they wasted, you know, and you know how government math is, like where toothbrush is $500 and screwdriver is a billion. So, yeah, there was some kind of guerrilla math that had gone on, uh, with how they calculated it. Uh, but the, said in, looking at it now, you know, especially just the resources I think that were available and the types of professionals that were doing it. I mean, that I know, knowing now, like what I.

• 2:18:35Speaker 06

  Or knowing then what I know now is just that of course a kid is going to be able to do these things. Like I have all the time in the world. I, you know, I'm, I'm on the bleeding edge of this stuff that I might be. My adversary on the other end, you know, may have been a long time computer user or something like that, but they have no idea of this. The realm that I'm operating in type thing. And it just each generation that comes after me, you know, is going to be better than than mine was type stuff. Uh, so I forgive them, but in a sense, like this is, these are the stakes. You don't want to be playing, you know, especially today, you know, in this day and age. Like you, you want the best and brightest, you know, protecting that type of stuff because uh, just the opportunity costs.

• 2:19:20Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, anything that would go to the contrary has catastrophic consequences if you're not.

• 2:19:28Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'm just, it, it, I'm just really curious how the converse, when you told them. I mean, I don't know if you remember, I realize this is a very long time.

• 2:19:39Speaker 06

  This is a while ago.

• 2:19:40Shawn Ryan?

  But um, what 24 years, I guess, but uh.

• 2:19:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:19:45Shawn Ryan?

  When you, when you tell them, I mean, cause they're, they're sitting there telling you, hey, you know, all the. Adding up the, you know, their guerrilla math on, oh, well, we had to expend this amount of money, you know, because of salaries and whatever. I mean, in your response could have been, well, you know, actually this issue could have been fixed with zero.

• 2:20:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:20:09Shawn Ryan?

  With zero money had you been on the other end of my message.

• 2:20:14Speaker 06

  That email.

• 2:20:14Shawn Ryan?

  Said, you might want to fix this.

• 2:20:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:20:16Shawn Ryan?

  You could have done this in an easier way. And so I'm, I'm just curious. I mean, they have to feel relatively foolish talking to a 16 year old, 17 year old kid who just broke into NASA's.

• 2:20:30Shawn Ryan?

  Website after giving them warnings about what you're going to do.

• 2:20:35Speaker 06

  I assume.

• 2:20:37Shawn Ryan?

  I would feel like a fool.

• 2:20:39Speaker 06

  Well.

• 2:20:39Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I told you guys to fix this, but you didn't pay attention to your customer service platform. So I had to hack it to get your attention because this is a matter of national security.

• 2:20:48Speaker 06

  If the if the administrator had come to my house, let's just say, this is just, you know, a couple of agents that just have all this information that I'm sure the conversation would have been completely different. You know, because from the tech side, but I that it just blows my mind because a lot of these.

• 2:21:09Speaker 06

  You know, you think that it's the government and it's got to be secure, like there's some sort of inherent, you know, just feeling that you have and that I that I don't know the reasoning, the why, like, there could have been a huge patch backlog, or maybe that email isn't monitored as closely or something. There's a million reasons as to why the they didn't act upon, you know, the the the messaging that I was giving. And I said, after a period of time, like I was shoot first, ask questions later type guy. Because that's what happened is it started out as I was emailing people and like, this is fucked up. And then they wouldn't respond or fix it. And then so that's when I just went on the warpath, you know, and then then

• 2:21:54Speaker 06

  there there may have been other agencies that I hacked that would have been more receptive to that type of, you know, our exchange. But I just I had a few of those ones where no one did anything. And so I was like, all right, you know what? Just best way to fix it is to, you know, break it because then somebody's going to see it, you know, somebody's going to be like, oh, okay. You know, this guy's for real. He wasn't just, you know, pulling our chain. And you can imagine that, I mean, they might get people trying to prank them all the time or fake ransoming them or whatever. So I I he's seeing is believing. So you got to demonstrate the.

• 2:22:30Shawn Ryan?

  Fair enough.

• 2:22:31Speaker 06

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 2:22:32Shawn Ryan?

  Fair enough. Well, let's move into your forum, Digital Gangsters.

• 2:22:40Shawn Ryan?

  So it sounds like this was a very prolific forum.

• 2:22:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, a lot of so there was some other internet forums around that time that I was kind of a part of. But there was no.

• 2:22:58Speaker 06

  There wasn't one that kind of brought together the hacker community that we had fostered during the AOL days. So there was a period of time kind of between the AOL heyday and Digital Gangster. So in 2005, Digital Gangster, I'd started it out as a production company. I was throwing raves because I was DJing and all this stuff. So it started out as this local production company that I was throwing raves and stuff on earth. The website used to just point to whatever club nights and things I was throwing, but I had stopped doing that. And so the website was just sitting defunct. Nothing, nothing pointed to it.

• 2:23:42Speaker 06

  And there was a couple of other forums. There's this one called General Mayhem that was kind of big. And it was just kind of, it was, it started out as a computer gaming kind of forum. And then there was one called GFY, stood for Go Yourself, and it was an adult oriented, for adult webmasters and stuff for the internet. So I had this semi-community, you know, from the work I'd done in the adult industry and then, you know, the gaming stuff, and then all these people from AOL that didn't have a home. And so that's when I started Digital Gangster. And then all the, kind of the elder statesmen who were already quit hacking AOL,

• 2:24:25Speaker 06

  elder statesmen, meaning like, you know, 23, 24-year-old type, you know, came to the forum. And the current kind of AOL hacking scene was more shifted to AIM and then they had joined. And then I had the internet marketing people join and some gaming people join. And it just started to snowball and gain traction.

• 2:24:49Speaker 06

  We were hugely active on

• 2:24:54Speaker 06

  Kind of just the more of that data sharing collaborative like tech tactics, techniques and procedures that would be useful against places. We, I think one of the first things that we did was, uh, we created a, a bunch of fake coupons that, uh, would say like, "Thank you for being an E-Trade investor. You know, take this coupon into McDonald's to get a free extra value meal." And we just make them look like super, super legit. And so people were always taking like videos and then this is before social media was really prevalent. Uh, but yeah, using these coupons at places like getting free pizzas and, uh, free McDonald's

• 2:25:36Speaker 06

  and Taco Bell. I had a guy that works for me now that, uh, had no idea that that was us that had started doing that. And he was like, "Dude, I fed myself for like a whole year like with this shit." It got to the point where these stores were putting up, you know, "Do not accept these coupons" type thing. But it was all this disruptive kind of bullshit that we were doing. Uh, but there was a guy, um, Camo, Cam Zero, and, uh, he had hacked into Paris Hilton's Sidekick. Uh, Sidekick was a phone before the iPhone that had like a full keyboard and it was sort of the phone

• 2:26:17Speaker 06

  of the stars before the iPhone became big. But, uh, her password was her dog's name was Tinkerbell. And the thing was is that that address book was just full of celebrities and then it had a bunch of images on it. And so that hack had happened and that kind of

• 2:26:38Shawn Ryan?

  That came from your forum.

• 2:26:39Speaker 06

  That came from my forum, yeah. And so then my forum got known for doing Just things like that.

• 2:26:47Shawn Ryan?

  So, hold on. So what did you guys do with the information?

• 2:26:50Speaker 06

  We posted it. Like, we just shared it. So, I mean.

• 2:26:52Shawn Ryan?

  So it had all these celebrities' names, addresses, phone numbers?

• 2:26:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, emails, uh, yeah, and then, so there's private pictures. And it said, in retrospect, like, I, that, it was, it became a huge, sensitive thing, especially recently. I don't know if you remember the fappening, like, when people had their, they were getting their iClouds hacked and celebrities had their sex tapes posted and...

• 2:27:15Shawn Ryan?

  Was that you guys?

• 2:27:16Speaker 06

  That wasn't us. But that's, uh, but by that, th- these are the things, I think about it now, and it's like, that's a, it is a serious invasion of privacy type thing. Like, I totally see the wrong in it. Um, and whether or not people are media figures or not, it doesn't necessarily give you the right to be posting the stuff. So, of course, regrettable behavior, you know, but at the time, it was juicy and, you know, the media was just all around it and, uh...

• 2:27:45Shawn Ryan?

  So did that, did that break the news cycle too?

• 2:27:48Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah. That totally did. And tangentially, like, that's the thing that's funny is that on the, on the porn side of things, like, one of my buddies is the dude who brokered, because remember, her sex tape is like, kind of what launched that, I mean, theoretically, by butterfly effect, it launched Kim Kardashian's career in some senses, but, uh, that, yeah, that was, there was an entire, you know, deal being brokered between, like, Rick Solomon and Paris Hilton and, uh, this porn company that basically released the, the sex tape for, to, to buy it. Uh, so all of this press, I think, was, in a way, it was good, but at the same time, the methodology is, as, you know, for what we had done with it, I, I,

• 2:28:31Speaker 06

  I don't, it's not something I would condone, you know, now, uh, or whatever. And, but that's kind of what our board was doing for a while, is, uh, MySpace was really huge. And so we'd hacked Tom's MySpace, who was the founder, he was everyone's friend. And we'd hacked his website and we directed a bunch of people, the digital gangster. Uh, we hacked Tila Tequila's MySpace, and she was like the starlet. This is all ancient internet history stuff. Uh...

• 2:29:01Shawn Ryan?

  How much of this stuff hit the news cycle?

• 2:29:02Speaker 06

  Quite a bit of it, yeah.

• 2:29:04Shawn Ryan?

  We're gonna put it all up here.

• 2:29:05Speaker 06

  And that's where, that's where it really started to snowball, because then members would come in that were just fresh blood, that had heard about this hack that had happened. Um.

• 2:29:17Shawn Ryan?

  So everybody wants to be a part of this.

• 2:29:18Speaker 06

  Exactly, yeah. And so you had these, but the thing that was funny is that people would come in and then just like any a club, there'd be just insane amounts of hazing that would happen because you'd get all these newcomers and then it would be everyone who was sort of veterans on the board, it would be their, it would be their job to kind of weed out and find, you know, who's just, who's a poser, who's just here, who's trolling, like whatever, and would just run these people through psychological torture practically. And then anyone who wound up staying, you know, made the grade and then they would be the person that would make fun of the next batch of people that would come in. So it's this revolving

• 2:30:00Speaker 06

  door of, uh, of just idiots, but what's cool is then people would come and they'd be like, how did you do this? Like, what was, you know, what was the method? And they'd really be curious. And then we would, you know, ment- actively mentor these, uh, these people and teach them, you know, exactly what we're doing and how it worked. And, uh, so some people would stick with it and some people wouldn't. No, but it was, that was what was most awesome is that you basically had this pipeline of fresh talent at all times and people were just really curious about, you know, what was really going on.

• 2:30:33Shawn Ryan?

  Is the digital gangster forum still in existence?

• 2:30:35Speaker 06

  It is not anymore. I took it offline a while ago. Uh, there's remnants of it. Uh, there's a lot of stuff that was posted there. I mean, I still have backups of it, but, uh, the successfully taking off the internet, like Ryan even I'm sure has a lot of embarrassing things on there that shouldn't see the light of day. There's so in for

• 2:30:58Shawn Ryan?

  Like what?

• 2:30:59Speaker 06

  Uh, who knows? Like, uh,

• 2:31:01Shawn Ryan?

  Help me out here. What would be on a hacker forum that you wouldn't want to see the light of by today?

• 2:31:06Speaker 06

  Uh, just

• 2:31:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's humiliating.

• 2:31:08Speaker 06

  Maybe not humiliating, but you know, just, we're very

• 2:31:14Speaker 06

  Like self snitching on, you know, very public about the types of things that we were doing and engaging in. Just the behavior and

• 2:31:21Shawn Ryan?

  So self incriminating.

• 2:31:23Speaker 06

  Self incriminating, yeah, very much so. And there's some, some people may not want that out. Like I said, I don't care personally. But the other thing is too, is that all the private messages that were sent, you know, between people and stuff in the, in the forum. I'm sure I have a copy of there's, there's ones that we got, when we got hacked a few times, there's dumps that exist of all this stuff too. So it's not like it's completely out of the, uh, the record, but yeah, I just. I just felt like it when I sunsetted it, I sunsetted it. It wasn't, uh, big, but

• 2:31:54Shawn Ryan?

  In its prime, what is the most amount of users you had on there?

• 2:31:57Speaker 06

  Oh, millions. It was

• 2:31:59Shawn Ryan?

  Millions?

• 2:31:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:00Shawn Ryan?

  Millions of hackers.

• 2:32:01Speaker 06

  Well, just the, the user base was probably like in the hundred thousands like, but the, the page views were just astronomical. Cause we had really good page ranking on Google and stuff. So people would type in, you know, anything and they'd wind up finding their way to the site. But yeah, I mean, like at any given moment, yeah, it was, there might be a million people active on the site. It was, it was insane.

• 2:32:27Speaker 06

  The one, the, the big one that actually happened was when Miley, Miley Cyrus's email got hacked. And it's, she was still like, uh, a teenager, but it got, it was, there was, there wasn't any like naked pictures or anything like that. But they were just like silly, cause she was still Disney kind of person. There was one, the hacker on my forum who, uh, had released those pictures. And that made it on to like Nancy Grace. And it was just funny, cause you ever notice in the news that if there's a story that you happen to know, like kind of what really happened, that none of it matches, the narrative matches. But you read another article about something you have no idea about. You're like, oh, okay.

• 2:33:08Speaker 06

  Like it's this weird cognitive dissonance and there's so much stuff that got published about us that was completely false. But it's like, what's in the news? And then, you know, again, you don't apply that same heuristic, you know, analysis to like other articles that you read about in the, you know, in, in the news. So it trains your brain to think like that, like where there's a disconnect between like what's reported and what's like really, really happening. So I tend to look at news through a different lens that way. But yeah, with respect to like the the Miley Cyrus one was probably what got us the most uh traffic and and and traction. But there was this, I said, the series that that forum had just a ton of different stuff uh that

• 2:33:52Speaker 06

  was attributed to members on it. Barack Obama's Twitter got hacked and.

• 2:33:58Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 2:33:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, and my homie.

• 2:34:01Shawn Ryan?

  That came from Digital Gangsters too?

• 2:34:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:34:04Shawn Ryan?

  This is incredible.

• 2:34:05Speaker 06

  You can look it up, but the fuck, though, as stupid as they, okay, so the guy, he had access to Twitter admin panel and he said, he, he, I think it was, it was a guy, Mark Sanchez or something, he was a reporter. Uh, then, but Barack Obama, so remember I said that there was this amalgamation of uh hackers, internet marketers and gamers that were kind of formed the core group. So the the bleed in our skill sets started to become apparent because we had this section of the forum that was called Why Work? Uh, it was well, Margorp, which is programmed backwards and Why Work? And those were actually AOL chat rooms that existed back on in the AOL days

• 2:34:50Speaker 06

  that I had had a sub form that was just named after those. And it was for business talk and you know, things. I said, if you're doing internet marketing or anything like that, it was like kind of the forum, the sub form for that. But uh, the, when they took it, when they took control of Barack Obama's Twitter account, they were tweeting out uh gas card affiliate links. Like, so it's just like, it's just too stupid to think about because how are you going to get paid? They have to know who you are because that's how or they send the checks. But he was like, hey, yeah, Barack Obama was like, get it, get your free gas card, you know, here at this link.

• 2:35:28Speaker 06

  Dude, just.

• 2:35:29Shawn Ryan?

  So you had that on Barack Obama's Twitter?

• 2:35:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, Barack Obama's Twitter. I said, you can, I said, there's, there is news articles about that that happened, uh, but you know, and then just.

• 2:35:40Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, hold on. So what, just dub it down for me, explain to me why? Of all the things you could have put on Barack Obama's Twitter account, why was it free gas cards?

• 2:35:52Speaker 06

  I don't, you have to ask, because GMZ was a dude, uh, you have to ask him, like, why, what he was thinking? Because there was, well, as I said, the other ones, they were just like tweeting out like. Like homophobic slurs, like there's no, that's a, that some of this stuff is financially motivated, obviously. Some of it's just motivated, what we call for the lols. It's just, you know, for the hell of it. Like, you're just doing things just to do it. And, uh, but yeah, the, the gas card thing, it was just funny because it's an affiliate link. So you're supposed to get money off of it. But how are you gonna, like, they're gonna bust you. Because it's like, how, like, what other, you're totally tying it to yourself. This is not, just moments,

• 2:36:33Speaker 06

  not everybody's like completely, you know, brilliant in these, in these arts. Uh, but, so a lot of times, it was just, everything was just kind of done for fun. Like, it wasn't really, it wasn't a monetary gain for a lot of those things. They just get us. And Nancy Grace and that crowd thought that we were a girl a paparazzi site, that we were just, that was what we specialized in is just outing celebrities. But that was only really, like, a small subset of the types of things that we were really doing.

• 2:37:05Shawn Ryan?

  What are some other things you were doing in there?

• 2:37:07Speaker 06

  Well, as I said, that we, we had just this factory of like mentors, mentees type stuff. Ryan was a, he was an administrator on that forum eventually. Uh, but, you know, he had come and he was really young at the time. He's younger than most of the people that were there. And he just kind of took to a lot of the internet marketing stuff and learned, um, like, learned how that game worked. And so he applied it to, you know, his rehab centers and everything. Like, it's just the, the school there is that, you know, we just had ways of making money on the internet. And, you know, how do you take advantage of,

• 2:37:47Speaker 06

  like, the systems that existed and maximize the amount of profit that you can get them. And at this time, like, I was even, I was kind of one foot in and one foot out of the porn sites. Like, I'd still getting mailbox money from it. But I was focused more on, like, diet pills, like, garcinia diet and acai berry stuff. And, uh, like, business opportunity, uh, leads, like, people that, you know, how to make money from home type stuff. There's all these plethora of programs out there that, like, you know, again, you just kind of find out what converts with your traffic. And, and, uh, you'd focus on, on those.

• 2:38:27Speaker 06

  Those verticals. But yeah, it was mainly a set of training ground, teaching people how to program, teaching people how to how to hack, teaching people how to market on the internet and stuff. Because a lot of us, again, saw the value in, you know, you get some fresh eyes on it. And then all of a sudden, they they're coming up with new methods and stuff. And it becomes this cool collaborative community where everyone's sharing things. And so a lot of that, the illegal activity was sort of inconsequential, like to the actual mission or what was actually going on in the forum. Like, one of the crazy things, I think Ryan had spoke about it, the Bitcoin drive by malware

• 2:39:11Speaker 06

  that he had, that was like infecting, it was infecting systems.

• 2:39:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, he had mentioned that you were in the hotel room. And saw the actual amount of money.

• 2:39:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was ridiculous. Well, I remember like the computer that he had on his wall that was naked. That that that was a very intelligent, that's what I'm saying. It's like he had this really cool way of spinning. You had all these different components, these pieces, but to put them all together and to create an operation like he did was one of a kind. And yeah, it was it was millions of dollars in those days, like of just, yeah, Bitcoin. And he exited his position, he didn't, I said, he might still have a little bit. But as far as I know, like all that, I remember like when he got rid of it.

• 2:40:04Speaker 06

  But if he would have sold it now, like or even at the all time high type thing, it was 10x or 20x than what it was, what it was then. I don't think he has any regrets about it because it was still like a good chunk. But, but yeah, that was just such an insane coup de grace. Like the way that he had done, because he was using pretty much instead of each element, the driving internet traffic to things and, you know, having this malware on. So he used all of those elements that pretty much what Digital Gangster represented. And he packaged them and he wound up making like a good amount of money off of it.

• 2:40:44Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have a lot of, what do you call them, users? In the forum?

• 2:40:50Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, members, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

• 2:40:52Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have a lot of people in there that? That impressed you? I mean, it sounds like that hack that Ryan did impressed you.

• 2:41:00Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, of course, constantly, the, and there's one, one of my friends. Uh, Gluebag. We all have dumb names, real name's Nate, but Glue, uh, he'd come on. There was another forum member that played World of Warcraft with him and he, uh. And, and so my other friend told him like, hey, you should join this board or whatever. And he was just a teenager from Ohio, uh, never coded anything in his life type stuff. And we used to have this. Uh, it was called Adopt a Noob Program, like where, you know, you'd be designated like mentor for, you know, someone.

• 2:41:45Speaker 06

  Depending on what they wanted to learn. And so Glue really wanted to learn how to program. And so he, I think he was under this dude Audio. And within three months, he'd already blown past, uh, kind of what Audio had been teaching him. And he started doing a lot of the affiliate stuff. We had a, a porn program that was kind of, like, I didn't really get any cuts of it, but it was a good friend of mine and this other dude that. I just sort of let them advertise and have this, uh. What do you call it? Like they're kind of their support forum was sort of on my board.

• 2:42:22Speaker 06

  But Glue just started writing all of the software, uh, for the spammers and stuff that would do all this, you know, hosting, posting, messaging. Type, and he was just giving this programs away for free for a while. And then another one of my buddies like picked up on it and was like, dude, this stuff is just solid gold. Like, we need to package it up and market it. And, you know, just do it with my program exclusively. And to this day, like, he's one of the most insane programmers on planet Earth, like, hands down. Yeah, and he, the stuff that he did just.

• 2:43:01Speaker 06

  Uh, because I had worked really closely with him because he basically kind of worked for me like he was under me like in this in the organizational structure, but the stuff I learned from him even and I said, I've been coding my whole life and you know, and he's what, uh, like 10 years younger than me or a little bit more than that. And just mind blowing, like the stuff that this dude come up with and just the ideas he would have and it was fun because he would invent, he would think he invented something and then I'd be like, actually, this is like a huge problem in computer science that has existed or, you know, this is a really cool solution for it, or you know, he would just self-discover, you know, it's like learning how to make fire, you know, everybody knows how to do it now, but imagine like inventing

• 2:43:46Speaker 06

  like your own way to make fire and stuff. And that's the type of person that

• 2:43:49Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:43:49Speaker 06

  we would just somewhat attract. Uh, and yeah, some of like, just some of the people on there is just to this day, it's just surprise and impressed me. Um, there's, so one of the guys who's like super, super big in the bug bounty scene now, uh, is uh, like say world class, but yeah, he came from the forum and just said a lot of business, uh, it's just, yeah, I don't know. I'm just really proud of everybody, you know, I said, Ryan being another shining example of that, that there's a lot of people that took everything that they learned there and applied it correctly, you know, in some way that brought fame and fortune and all sorts of stuff, but.

• 2:44:31Shawn Ryan?

  Can you, can you explain Ryan's hack into the, into the cryptocurrency stuff?

• 2:44:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was just that, so the way to Bitcoin mining, uh, has to do with,

• 2:44:51Speaker 06

  yeah, if you think about your computer just doing, solving Sudoku's or something, I don't want to try to draw the best analogy for it, but there's a Well, I'll just, I'll do the technical. So there's a, there's a cryptographic hash. So there's a, there's functions that exist in mathematics and cryptography where you input something into the function and then you get something out. But there isn't a way to get it back. It's not bidirectional, it's unidirectional. So you insert this garbage and you get this garbage out.

• 2:45:27Speaker 06

  That even if you alter this data very, very little, change a bit, like just change a letter, any of that stuff, the output of this function is going to be drastically different than what went in. So there's even small perturbations in the input of the function leads to drastically insane output of a function. And so one of the ways that, or the way that Bitcoin is mined, like how you get the, how you get allocated Bitcoin off of the network is that depending on the difficulty, you have to find an input that combines the transactions as well as a nonsense value and you input

• 2:46:10Speaker 06

  it into this function and you want to get a ton of zeros at the beginning of this, of this output. The more zeros, the less difficult, but that it's very, very hard because it's not deterministic, like what's you're going to put in here and get out the other end. And so that's the proof of work that how Bitcoin works is basically unless you found a way to hack mathematics itself, the ways, the way that the function operates, that you, you need to go through this process manually, like it just has to be done. You have to do an exhaustive search of, give me random number versus this block and then you get out this, this output.

• 2:46:48Speaker 06

  And so there's these pools that exist that, for mining Bitcoin, where it's a shared group work of a bunch of people. So we could each be mining Bitcoin and so we're both solving Sudoku's. Our computers are doing like a percentage of the work that everybody else is doing. But let's say you and I are in a group of a hundred people and we've all contributed a certain amount of computing time towards this effort. But instead of the guy that mined it actually getting all of that money, it goes to the pool and then we all share it as piece of, you know, kind of a portion to the amount of work that we did.

• 2:47:32Speaker 06

  So even though you weren't successful in finding that, you would still put in, you know, X amount of computer hours or whatever. So you should get, you know, your, your piece of the pie as it fits with the entire pool.

• 2:47:46Speaker 06

  What Ryan was doing was basically the, kind of the penny jar type analogy thing where it's like one for you, one for me, uh, where he was mining, that they'd be mining Bitcoin for themselves, but then they would also be doing work for, for his pool. So on his, so he's taking a slice of all the work that's being done. So instead of all the computing resources being devoted to your mining operation and, and what you're doing, it's a, it's, there's a slice of it that's kind of cut out and carved out for him. But he had a botnet basically of distributed computers that are all doing this slice. So while everyone else is doing something individually,

• 2:48:31Speaker 06

  like he's got a little piece of everyone's action. And it's with that piece of action that when scaled and it goes along, uh, but you could basically just visit this site. And that was, that was the thing is that before Java used to just run in your browser, like without any types of prompts or anything. And so it was called a drive-by, like where, you know, again, if you just visited this site. So I could put this plugin on like one of my porn landers, or I could put it on, I could have a game, a flash game running or whatever, where you're just playing Tetris, but I have it running in the little corner. You can't even see it. And it's basically just cooking your processor, making you, uh, making you mine Bitcoin. So it, that, but

• 2:49:15Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:49:16Speaker 06

  That's the, uh, yeah, that's, that's how that operation kind of worked. And this was

• 2:49:21Shawn Ryan?

  How many computers did this go out to?

• 2:49:23Speaker 06

  Hundreds of thousands at least, like, uh, that, but the way he could see, that's the thing is it's where that line is drawn that with that same The same technology, he could have done different stuff with like, he could have taken over people's computers and downloaded all their banking information like that these the access that this virus Trojan horse would institute would be the same as any other type of malware. But as I say, he chose to use it to mine cryptocurrency instead of key log you, you know, and steal all your passwords and stuff. So that it's like the lesser of multiple evils, I guess, is in his case, it's it is burning some, you know,

• 2:50:07Speaker 06

  non trivial amount of power mining coins for him. But yeah, the way that he had done it, it was the nicest way that you could probably, you know, get hacked. It was a very gentlemanly hack, if you will.

• 2:50:22Shawn Ryan?

  Nice. Do you have a something that you did that was a major payout for you?

• 2:50:31Shawn Ryan?

  Similar to that?

• 2:50:33Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, but well, not similar to that, but in the same, a lot of what I was able to take advantage of in with the the marriage of hacking knowledge and then also the marketing stuff is I being able to find exploits in like site account creation and things like that. I had this, I mean, there is a race condition in in Google that I was taking advantage of for a long time, because Google has one of the best anti spam

• 2:51:16Speaker 06

  filters on the planet. It's it's called Bot Guard. Mike Hurd, I think, is who developed it, but it the amount of

• 2:51:29Speaker 06

  Work and research that these things have like BotGuard is like one of the toughest, I would say it technically it runs its own micro code in inside a JavaScript virtual machine, but it's a way to detect if people are making automated accounts or just doing making stupid actions. And if you think about the intelligence network that Google has in usage of its site, it's very easy to identify patterns that exist that are human beings are doing versus ones that are bots bots are doing. And so them and Facebook obviously has a huge like network of being able to detect anomalous behavior like, you know, what are human beings doing when they're on Facebook as opposed to an automated program?

• 2:52:14Speaker 06

  Google similarly, but the and so one of the biggest things obviously is account creation. And I had found a way like using the path with like older Android phones, they had a way to basically make accounts without captcha things. And so captcha is just a speed bump in a lot of cases. You can usually send captchas over to Bangladesh and there's you can pay people pennies to, you know, fill out captchas and click them and stuff. So there's they're not really a huge barrier to to account creation and stuff. All the bot protections, that's usually how it's done is if it's not done through programmatic

• 2:52:56Speaker 06

  optical character recognition or anything, there's usually a human being that's just getting paid pennies that's playing it like a video game. But finding bypasses and things like that where, you know, I could get, I could defeat capture. There was race conditions like where I could create, create subaccounts off of like how Tinder, for instance, if you use a Facebook account to sign up to Tinder, similarly like Google has single sign on type stuff that you could do. But there's, there's a period of time before the account gets deleted and detected by BotGuard that you're able to sign up to sites with that Google single sign on and you get a valid token. And so even though the account eventually

• 2:53:39Speaker 06

  dies, you wind up getting spidered accounts on a bunch of different services and using those to do whatever. But a lot of say, what was lucrative for me is just staying ahead of The technologies that people were trying to institute. Cause the cool thing is, is when they do change something, like they change a rate limit, or they change the way software works. Uh, it becomes a new playing field because everybody that knew the method that was doing it, you know, they're taking advantage of it. Then they change something. Now all of a sudden, all these people can't do it anymore. And so now you're the only one on that site that's able to, to spam or, or whatever. And it was big with the dating sites, uh, like, cause obviously the cam, you know, I'm

• 2:54:20Speaker 06

  a girl, like sign up to my webcam, prove that you're 18, you know, type stuff worked really well as lucrative. So those are the types of things that I did, finding like just idiosyncrasies in the way that sites operated to either create accounts or, uh, if they, how their protocols worked, you know, like, you know, what order do things need to be in? What's the timing that they have to be in? How do I emulate a human being as, as accurately as possible so that way that their detections don't work?

• 2:54:51Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Interesting stuff. Well Bryce, let's take a break. When we come back, we'll get into some of the equipment that you used to hack and then we'll get into your, your professional career.

• 2:55:05Speaker 06

  Sounds good.

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• 2:56:18Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Bryce, we're back from a long lunch break. And so I think we left off, we were talking about Digital Gangster, some of the stuff you and Ryan did together, dissected his whole cryptocurrency hack, and we're getting ready to dive into your professional career. But I know you and Ryan are super close. And so I've actually got him on the line here. Beautiful. Yeah. And so what was it like? Ryan, you on here?

• 2:56:54Ryan Montgomery?

  Yeah, I'm here.

• 2:56:55Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome back to the show, man.

• 2:56:57Ryan Montgomery?

  Hey.

• 2:57:00Shawn Ryan?

  Hey. But we were just talking about how you found the forum Digital Gangster.

• 2:57:08Ryan Montgomery?

  Got it. So back in, I guess, I couldn't even tell you what year it was, but when I was a very young kid, I was on a, I'm sure you guys have spoken about it already, but AOL Instant Messenger.

• 2:57:20Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:57:21Ryan Montgomery?

  There was another way of communication back then called IRC, which, you know, he can go into detail if he hasn't already about. It's a monumental part of both him and I's upbringing in this field. And on AOL Instant Messenger, there were group chats and then individual chats. And somebody introduced me to Digital Gangster as a platform for affiliate marketers and hackers. And, you know, I was just getting myself into cybersecurity at that time. Didn't know much about affiliate marketing and found Digital Gangster. And I don't know what it was. Because I didn't know anything about Bryce. I didn't know anything about the spam game.

• 2:58:05Ryan Montgomery?

  Didn't know anything about any of that at the time. And I just, like I said, fell in love with it. You know, I I learned from everybody there quickly. Bryce and I got along very quickly. And got into marketing and using my, I guess, cybersecurity abilities. Along with the marketing to automate things. Um, uh, am I allowed to conversate? Cause this is.

• 2:58:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:58:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:58:31Ryan Montgomery?

  Okay, so, um. Bryce, uh, like, did you already talk about what we what we sold back then?

• 2:58:39Speaker 06

  Uh. Naked women?

• 2:58:46Ryan Montgomery?

  Right, well, you know, I was more on the on the, you know, the dating dating website side of things, but, uh. You know, there was there was a combination of all of it when I was a very young teenager and that was where, uh. You know, a lot of the money was made, but there was other other things we worked on, similar like, uh, business opportunities, uh, like. Get rich quick.

• 2:59:04Speaker 06

  Bizop leads.

• 2:59:05Ryan Montgomery?

  Advertisements, they would pay out ridiculous, uh. It it they would call it like a cost per click or, um. Or a a pay, I'm sorry, I'm I'm getting a brain fart. A pay per pay per signup, PPS, and there'd be pay for free signups. Um. Did you already explain all this, Bryce?

• 2:59:25Speaker 06

  I I, yeah, but it's.

• 2:59:26Shawn Ryan?

  Let me ask another question. So.

• 2:59:30Shawn Ryan?

  Me and Ryan have become pretty good friends, uh, in a relative, in a very short amount of time and, uh, but. He is always, so I asked him about you and he had said that you were one of his mentors. And so what I'm wondering is, I mean, it sounds like you had millions of people on Digital Gangster.

• 2:59:51Speaker 06

  At least tens of thousands, yeah.

• 2:59:52Shawn Ryan?

  Tens of thousands of people on on Digital Gangster. What? What was it that kind of caught your attention with Ryan out of all the people that you had on there?

• 3:00:03Speaker 06

  Just really sharp. And as I said, his the the a lot of his. As I said, in the MySpace era, he was a bit of a force to be reckoned with. So that there was already some inherent. Ability for self-marketing, I think that Ryan.

• 3:00:20Speaker 06

  Again, he wouldn't know this external, like you'd only know this externally, like it's something I don't know if he kind of recognized his own shining type thing, but obviously just naturally kind of understood everything. You can kind of tell when people already, they already have that spark or like what's needed to position somebody, you know, in, in, in for success. And so those types of people would try to identify, you know, fairly quickly and again, cause the, the more money you're making with your friends and the collaborative nature of that stuff, it makes it that much more fun, you know, to, to do. And I said, in, in Ryan's case, like again, he was super young when he was

• 3:01:00Speaker 06

  kind of engaging all of us and then also just had the mind, you know, for it. Uh, and that's what I mean. He was eventually an administrator moderator on the forum, like where uh, you know, he basically was able to ban people and, you know, kind of make decisions unilaterally, you know, for the good of the board. Uh, but yeah, he just had started out as like a, a user, but you can just tell by people's posts and how they interact and stuff. If they happen to have what it takes, you know, so it's a great proving ground, you know, some people are just shit posters and that's all they do type thing. But, you know, Ryan definitely took like a huge interest in

• 3:01:38Speaker 06

  the holistic picture of like how to make money online, you know, is like a big thing. And as I was saying, investigating methods and trying to figure out ways to outsmart like these dating companies or, you know, any type of place where you could possibly get your message out. Uh, that there's a hacking component to that where you have to figure out how to defeat things like rate limiting and IP restrictions and, uh, just whatever protections are in place. And the less amount of people that can target a platform successfully, the more money you're going to make because it's basically no one else has the secret sauce to break into the, that market.

• 3:02:16Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Ryan?

• 3:02:18Ryan Montgomery?

  Yeah, and he couldn't have explained that better.

• 3:02:22Shawn Ryan?

  One, one more thing I just want to cover with you guys. We already covered Ryan's crypto hack that, that seems to be pretty ingenious. And, uh, and, uh, but Ryan, I'll let you pick. What, what was one of the, what was one of your favorite? It sounds like all these hacks happen as a group, a lot of them. You guys are working as a collaborative team. So what was your favorite? What was like the first big, exciting hack that you were a part of? With Digital Gangsters, Ryan? And then both of you guys can tell the story.

• 3:02:58Ryan Montgomery?

  Um, let me try to think, uh, that's something that people know about, um.

• 3:03:08Ryan Montgomery?

  Yeah, give me a second to come up with something because I don't know what you guys already talked about, so.

• 3:03:12Shawn Ryan?

  Doesn't matter, just go for it.

• 3:03:15Ryan Montgomery?

  Um, I think, I think, uh, ah, well, I don't know if this is even public knowledge, so.

• 3:03:23Shawn Ryan?

  Even better.

• 3:03:24Ryan Montgomery?

  Address book, Bryce?

• 3:03:25Speaker 06

  Which one?

• 3:03:26Ryan Montgomery?

  The address book situation?

• 3:03:29Speaker 06

  Who, who's address book?

• 3:03:32Ryan Montgomery?

  Uh, I don't even want to say it then. Um, it's a celebrity, but, uh.

• 3:03:37Speaker 06

  Paris's?

• 3:03:38Ryan Montgomery?

  Never mind.

• 3:03:38Shawn Ryan?

  Paris Hilton?

• 3:03:40Ryan Montgomery?

  Um, no.

• 3:03:41Speaker 06

  Oh, not that one?

• 3:03:42Ryan Montgomery?

  No.

• 3:03:43Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 3:03:43Ryan Montgomery?

  No, yeah, it's, it's not a big deal. I think of something else.

• 3:03:49Shawn Ryan?

  Come on!

• 3:03:50Ryan Montgomery?

  I can't do it. I can't.

• 3:03:52Speaker 06

  You can do it.

• 3:03:55Ryan Montgomery?

  No, no, I shouldn't. It's not a good idea. Um.

• 3:04:00Ryan Montgomery?

  Let me think.

• 3:04:02Shawn Ryan?

  The audience is dying right now.

• 3:04:04Ryan Montgomery?

  I think that the better thing for me to do would be to talk about, about how, how, uh, you know, we would put together methods, as, as he said, um, to, to bypass certain restrictions and back in, back in that time, especially in the early days, there weren't as many restrictions for email. So you could inbox a lot easier than you can nowadays. I mean. There was a time in my life when I remember most email providers not even having a spam or junk folder. So you could just, just send, uh, literally a million emails or you can send out, uh, on a different, completely different angle. You could send out a hundred thousand text messages with, you know, pay prepaid phone, uh, SIM cards.

• 3:04:44Ryan Montgomery?

  Um, so there was these things back in the day called GSM modems that you would, you know, I had, I had a little dock for mine. And, uh, I don't know if Bryce did too, but most of us did. And, um, we would, we would perform not only these mass email campaigns that would send millions and billions of emails out with ads from acai weight loss berries to, you know, dating websites to, uh, you know, you, you name it, we were, we were spamming the crap out of it. And, um, and then that, you know, progressed into text messages, which are a felony at the, you know, you're not allowed to spam via text. It's a, it's a serious crime to go to prison for it.

• 3:05:25Ryan Montgomery?

  And, uh, I think there's a specific court that there, there was at that time, there was a specific court in Virginia you'd have to go to for, they used to call it spam court back in our time.

• 3:05:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:05:35Ryan Montgomery?

  And, uh, you know, if you got caught for doing something like that, luckily, uh, I didn't and, um, we never ended up on that, that, uh, on that, the list.

• 3:05:46Speaker 06

  I didn't, yeah.

• 3:05:48Ryan Montgomery?

  What'd you say?

• 3:05:48Speaker 06

  I said, I didn't either. Yeah. Tallest blade of grass is the first to get cut by the lawnmower type thing. So it's just, you gotta, you gotta do just enough.

• 3:05:56Ryan Montgomery?

  What, what was it? It was the Rosco, right?

• 3:05:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. Roxo. Roxo.

• 3:06:00Ryan Montgomery?

  Roxo, yeah. Roxo. So luckily we didn't end up on there and, um, you know, there was like a, a spammer most wanted list. So we, I guess that was probably my favorite part because not only was it fun to send out a ridiculous amount of text messages and, and millions of emails, um, but not only, like, not only the process was fun, but making the money, you know, seeing, seeing something digital that you did that is an automated process where you, you put in your message, you put in your recipients, you press a button and then you just sit back and refresh your screen and you just see money accumulating and you just wait, like, let's say that program. Has a net fifteen payout in fifteen days, you're getting paid out. Some of them had a net one payout, so you get paid out in one day.

• 3:06:42Shawn Ryan?

  This day.

• 3:06:43Ryan Montgomery?

  So, uh, even if they don't agree with the methods that you're spamming, you know, like, maybe it's against their policies to incentivize somebody to sign up for a product, or it's against their policies to, uh, to, to do text message spamming. If they have a net one payout, you already got paid out, and sometimes that number is pretty large. So I would say outside of the hacking side of things, we still were hacking and we still were, we still, we still were a collaborative effort. But, um, you know, that, I, I, I, I really liked, that was, that was my main motivator there was making money in this field. Um, so hacking, hacking was a, a passion for me, but so was marketing and so was making money. So I would say if you had to ask out of all of the attacks that we've done, some that I won't, won't even bring up.

• 3:07:28Ryan Montgomery?

  Um, I don't even know what Bryce has told you. I hope it's nothing horrible, but, uh, you know, it's that, that's it. Definitely spamming and the money that came from it.

• 3:07:38Shawn Ryan?

  How about the first swatting experience?

• 3:07:43Ryan Montgomery?

  Oh, gosh, this is crazy. Um, do you remember this, Bryce? When, uh, when, when I did become administrator, you, uh, you gave me administrator to the site and there was this guy, which I won't say his name because he doesn't, he doesn't deserve the attention.

• 3:07:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, he doesn't deserve the attention.

• 3:07:59Ryan Montgomery?

  Yeah, this, this guy sucks. And it's not, not just because of, uh, not just because of me, um, like, he, this guy is just over.

• 3:08:06Shawn Ryan?

  Bad, bad human. Yeah, bad human.

• 3:08:09Ryan Montgomery?

  And, and, and one of his friends as well is horrible human being, and if they're watching this, they'll know exactly who they are.

• 3:08:14Shawn Ryan?

  They'll be watching. You know they will be.

• 3:08:18Ryan Montgomery?

  Oh, I hope they are. Um, but so back then, he makes me administrator and that gives me the pretty much this, it pretty much if not the same abilities that he had, you know, so I could do anything. I could, I could put a picture of me on the, you know, the front page of the website. Um, I have the same permissions that he did. And, uh, when that happened, people got upset, you know, cause they, the same way people get jealous nowadays of things and, and become keyboard warriors, that, that was they're the same back in the day, but just maybe a little bit more of a, uh, uh, like a jungle back then. And, uh, one of those guys. Like I said, name redacted, decided it was a good idea to use what's called an IP relay

• 3:09:00Ryan Montgomery?

  service, which is a service that is for people that, you know, have a disability. And you can type into a, you type into a prompt and you say what you, like what you want the person on the other, other end of the phone to hear. So, let's say I wanted to call you, Sean, and I, and I use an IP relay service, I'd say, "Hey, how you doing, Sean?", and then I would hit enter, and then a man or woman would be on the phone and repeat what I typed to you through this IP relay service. So this, this guy, you know, used an IP relay service to call the local police station of where I lived, and he said that there was bombs strapped to my windows, that there was people tied up in chairs, that I already killed some of my family members, that if

• 3:09:42Ryan Montgomery?

  anyone came in, they were gonna get shot, all kinds of this horrible stuff, but he was claiming to be me. So, what happened was, I remember the exact number, there was eighty-six, uh, different types of, eighty-six, uh, law enforcement officers, um, bomb squad, snipers, police, helicopters, uh, you name it, they were there. So, what happened was, they, originally, they went to the wrong house, they went to my old address, which was like- Oh my gosh! -ten, ten houses down the street, so it was pretty, you know, they were close, but they had my wrong, my wrong home address, but that, what happened after that, because at this point, no one ever heard of what swatting, no one ever knew what it was. So, one of the officers knew me, and he said, "I know Ryan Montgomery",

• 3:10:26Ryan Montgomery?

  and, uh, and he brought all of those officers, the helicopters, everybody, to my current address, and then ran down, you know, to see, you know, he ran down to where I was staying at that time, it was like, "Ryan, are you okay?", he's freaking out. And, uh, and I have no clue what's going on, I had no indication this was even gonna happen. So, you know, it all ends up being okay, and I didn't, I didn't get hurt, I didn't get shot, if you think of- You know, the dangers there, it was not only the first swatting to ever happen in the state of Pennsylvania, but it was one of the first to happen in the country and I still have the news article on uh, on my computer, I'm not sorry, not news article, I still have the um, news clip uh, where it says,

• 3:11:08Ryan Montgomery?

  again, the exact words are, it's like, a new incident called swatting and it goes into like explaining what swatting is and you know, how he used an IP relay service and like they talk about what happened, they talk about how I got swatted. Um, but the dangers here are, what if I did walk outside and you know, I made the wrong movement? They've never heard of any incident like this before and I went and grabbed, you know, they'll put my arms down or I didn't like, I made any wrong move, I would have been shot.

• 3:11:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:37Ryan Montgomery?

  They, they were really believing that I had, you know, people dead in the house, bombs on the windows, like they, they believed it. So this person put my life in jeopardy because I became the administrator of a website.

• 3:11:50Shawn Ryan?

  Holy cow.

• 3:11:52Speaker 06

  It was funny times. I was talking about that yesterday.

• 3:11:56Ryan Montgomery?

  Without me, without me uh, you know, making myself sound, and I think people would agree with me here. Um, he, he got, he got revenge just in a more uh, you know, non-life uh, non-life, what's the word for it?

• 3:12:12Shawn Ryan?

  Threatening?

• 3:12:13Ryan Montgomery?

  He got his revenge, yeah, yeah, he got his revenge in a non-life threatening way, but I, I definitely got my uh, my revenge.

• 3:12:19Shawn Ryan?

  Well, what was it?

• 3:12:22Ryan Montgomery?

  Uh, I, I don't wanna say that, but just trust me, it was not, he will never do that again to me.

• 3:12:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:12:28Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. Right on.

• 3:12:30Speaker 06

  Who, off, off the record, are you talking about like when we were prank calling like Laurence Fishburne and Cameron and all that?

• 3:12:37Ryan Montgomery?

  No, no, I'm talking about his mom's social, everything.

• 3:12:42Speaker 06

  His mom's social?

• 3:12:44Ryan Montgomery?

  Yeah, I, I'm.

• 3:12:44Speaker 06

  No, no, no, I'm talking about the address book thing.

• 3:12:47Ryan Montgomery?

  Oh, I'm, I'm talking about uh, Paris.

• 3:12:50Speaker 06

  It was okay, it was, yeah.

• 3:12:51Shawn Ryan?

  It was Paris Hilton?

• 3:12:52Speaker 06

  Paris Hilton, yeah, we already, yeah, I already, I talked about that already.

• 3:12:55Shawn Ryan?

  We're gonna get back to the interview, Ryan, but hey, man, I appreciate the call and when's the last time you guys hung out?

• 3:13:02Speaker 06

  Uh, a couple of months ago.

• 3:13:04Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, right on.

• 3:13:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, or last month, I guess, yeah, last month.

• 3:13:07Shawn Ryan?

  Cool.

• 3:13:07Ryan Montgomery?

  Yeah, oh, and somebody hit my uh, someone hit my car. Like two months before that and uh

• 3:13:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:13:13Ryan Montgomery?

  Pretty much right after I see you uh or I'm sorry, right after our our podcast started to go viral Sean. Um, we met at a conference called Hack Miami and um and someone hit hit my car out front, which was, you know, not not fun, but then we seen each other a month after that and he was performing at a an event called DEFCON, which is the largest hacking convention in the world. And it was amazing. I mean, I I don't know if you're into nerd core hip hop. Hopefully you become a fan now. But he's he's, you know, he's the best. He there is nobody better than than Whitey Cracker when it comes to nerd core.

• 3:13:48Shawn Ryan?

  We're getting ready to dive into that subject right now.

• 3:13:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, thank you.

• 3:13:51Shawn Ryan?

  We're gonna have to get both you guys in one show at the same time.

• 3:13:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:13:54Ryan Montgomery?

  Oh, that'll be so cool.

• 3:13:56Shawn Ryan?

  But uh, all right, Ryan. Well, thanks again, man, and be safe and I'll talk to you soon.

• 3:14:01Speaker 06

  Love you, dog.

• 3:14:02Ryan Montgomery?

  Awesome. Awesome. Love you guys. Peace.

• 3:14:03Speaker 06

  See you soon. Peace.

• 3:14:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, the that swatting stuff I had mentioned that some of us would never ever go there. You know, something we just never ever do. Uh, but the IP relay service that he's talking about, it was set up for um for deaf people to be able to communicate. It was a service that was run, but you would just you could instant message a screen name and then they would call you on their beha- on the other party's behalf. And so the trick was, I said, it it used to be trucking, which is where you send the fire department to somebody's house. And so you could, see, if you're using IP relay as a vector, you'd get on IP relay and you'd say, uh, hey, uh, my phone's inside. I don't have my mobile, but I'm I have my laptop and I'm still connected to the internet and I'm,

• 3:14:53Speaker 06

  you know, I need to send the fire department to blah blah blah at my address or whatever. So you don't, you I'd give them your address and not the real one or whatever, and then the fire department would show up. But then it became this, I said, the the next evolution of that was the swatting stuff where they'll s- they, you know, make a fence full. Uh, story about how you're murdering your family or like you said, making bombs or there's definitely drug activity over here or something and invariably what will happen is they send just a million officers over to your house. And again, they're jumpy, you know, because they don't know what to expect in there. And so, yeah, there's been cases, obviously, since like, it's one of the things that like I said, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it originated on digital gangster, but like

• 3:15:38Speaker 06

  off the first swatting, I said, his was the first swatting incident in his state and

• 3:15:45Speaker 06

  there was a lot of that. There was SIM swapping is another technique that uh, is kind of people do it now, but it's where if I walk into your wireless provider and I'm like, I'm Sean Ryan, I lost my phone. I need to set up a new phone with, and I have, and I know some of your details. And let's say I've made a fake ID that has, you know, you, your picture on it or something. Say I lost my wallet. Here's my library card. Like, you know, you're dealing with somebody that's making, you know, whatever 15 an hour or whatever. So, uh, what they'll do is they'll swap over the port, that number to a different phone. And, uh, this is like where two factor authentication and stuff breaks down a little bit because if I'm able to take over your phone number, I can,

• 3:16:28Speaker 06

  there's a lot of services now that'll text your password to your phone, or you can reset your password as long as you have that phone. And so I got SIM swapped. Uh, I was at South by Southwest and I was performing, I think it was in 2011, but this same group, you know, had, this is when this attack was really like kind of uh, in its infancy stages, but they'd taken my, uh, they hijacked my phone and then they went and stole all my domains that I had had. Uh, now people use it a lot more for To steal crypto wallets and bank, uh, bank details and, and anything that you can

• 3:17:08Speaker 06

  reset via a phone, uh, but obviously it's very difficult because you have a very short window, like you're going to notice that your phone's not working, you know, especially if you're looking at it all the time. And so that's, but it's really, really hard to get that back while that attack's going on. There's a lot that can happen in that short amount of time before you're able to get into the AT&T store or whatever it is to, to fix it. Uh, but swatting is a huge problem. Like now, again, it was something that was reserved for your worst enemies, you know, back in the day, but now you'll have kids lose on Call of Duty or Fortnite or something. They're swatting people. So the, the police departments are a lot more aware of it. Uh, it was funny because I basically, the police

• 3:17:53Speaker 06

  already knew who I was, obviously because of, I had eviscerated every, the local PD. And so my name, I don't know, they might have a plaque of me up in every department or something, but no swatting attempt against me was ever successful because the police knew that that was, you know, if that was going on, it was probably a prank call.

• 3:18:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:11Speaker 06

  I got lucky.

• 3:18:13Shawn Ryan?

  Is this SIM swap thing? Is this still happening all the time?

• 3:18:16Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It happens all the time. But as I said, it's, it's a targeted attack. Like if somebody knows details about you, your phone number, knows your carrier, and you have something that they need to get from you, you can just go into a store or whatever. And I'd be like, I got robbed. I lost everything. It's just about being convincing. It's all social engineering, but you're just taking advantage of the fact that, again, this person wants to be helpful and you're, I'm Sean Ryan, you know, that's all that's, as far as they know. So if I can just, but I can basically just steal your number. And then depending on what services, usually these attacks are really targeted. Like I know a reason that I want to, uh, to attack you. On my phone. There it's notated like just a bunch like it wouldn't there's nothing that would really

• 3:18:59Speaker 06

  stop an employee from doing anything like as far as a compensating control that's in the system itself but I just know that in my notes on my cell carrier it's like do not you know I have to bring in two forms of ID at a store in order for anybody to do anything with my account uh that's it's just notated like crazy uh so I haven't had a SIM swapping event in a while I'm sure if if some viewer wants to try and ruin my day uh test test the security of whatever cellphone carrier I'm using then that's fine but please don't it's a hassle

• 3:19:34Shawn Ryan?

  Please don't

• 3:19:34Speaker 06

  Please don't

• 3:19:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah well hey we so we pretty much have wrapped up your black hat or very dark gray hat career but how I would like to wrap it up before moving into your professional career is talk about some of the equipment that you use

• 3:19:52Speaker 06

  Okay

• 3:19:52Shawn Ryan?

  So

• 3:19:53Speaker 06

  Uh

• 3:19:54Shawn Ryan?

  Wherever you want to start

• 3:19:55Speaker 06

  Yeah so similarly uh I said it I think that uh Ryan Montgomery popularized uh this mine doesn't have a lot of the funny antennas on top of it but this has been part of my everyday carry since it came out uh mostly what I use it for though is uh friends that live in condominiums or apartment buildings that have uh fobs I uh just copy them so I can break into their houses uh with permission of course the other thing it'll do is it'll also write them uh so usually apartment complexes and condo associations will charge like thirty to a hundred dollars just to uh just to have extras so I but I can just

• 3:20:35Speaker 06

  make extras for my friends and just subvert the whole process so it's a it's a good thing um this is a uh a Prox Mark III it's a

• 3:20:49Speaker 06

  More of a grown up version of the Flipper, but it deals with uh near field communication, RFID devices or um chips. Uh it has Bluetooth power. I think is it, is it on here? Do do, yeah. Uh so this one, I have the battery attachment that goes on to it, uh but you can use this to copy hotel keys. It'll read passports, uh you can use it to pretty much anything. I said the same fobs, apartment fobs that uh that the Flipper can access, this access. But this is more, I said of a grown up version of the Flipper.

• 3:21:29Speaker 06

  Uh it is, it just has a lot more functionality and extensibility uh than uh than the Flipper does.

• 3:21:37Shawn Ryan?

  What can that do that the Flipper cannot do?

• 3:21:40Speaker 06

  So I don't think, like for instance, the the passport documents and stuff. I don't think that the Flipper can do that. You may, there may be a plugin or something that's uh some sort of firmware modification. But as far as I know, it doesn't uh um it doesn't support that. Uh but this, I said, pretty much any type of wireless uh

• 3:22:09Speaker 06

  like access mechanism, the the Proxmark, for a long time, this was the gold standard for all the NFC uh type. Said copying, writing, dumping, it all came from uh, this was like the the device that most of us hackers used uh in order to uh to do those types of attacks.

• 3:22:31Speaker 06

  But it said it doesn't, it lacks the IR capability and stuff that uh that the Flipper has. Um I also have the uh, this is a Hacker. Um I don't know if, I said, I don't know if Ryan had the Portapack uh add on onto it, but this is just a software defined radio. Um I think I have.

• 3:22:56Speaker 06

  Some amount of power. I forgot which firmware I'm running on this one too. But this interface, like this, the Hacker itself, this is kind of an add-on that bolts into it. And it has another case, but when you buy the PortaPack, then you kind of use this case and this interface. But it does everything from, I said, it can send and receive ADS-B, which is the, so the airplanes, like when they go by, they have a beacon that they send, obviously, to tell air traffic control where they are, where they're positioned. But with a strong enough antenna, you can broadcast those types of signals as well.

• 3:23:41Speaker 06

  This is a telescopic antenna, but I don't think here, within the studio, we've,

• 3:23:47Speaker 06

  we're gonna have enough juice to do anything interesting with it. But this, I said, if you just think of this like an AM/FM radio for all wireless bands,

• 3:24:00Speaker 06

  I mean, you could actually listen to AM and FM radio on this if you want. But it, you could tune to a TV. The analog television signal's not digital anymore. I guess you could technically, if you had a decoder. But the, this, the firmware that's in the PortaPack is different than the actual, the SDR, Software Defined Radio itself, is extensible, like programmatically through,

• 3:24:27Speaker 06

  like you can use new radio, you can write custom applications that basically interface with this SDR and use it to decode, I said, P25, which is a trunked radio that police and fire and stuff use. It's encoded. POC-SAG, which is a member of the old-school pagers. Sometimes restaurants use those to keep track of where orders are and-

• 3:24:53Shawn Ryan?

  So this is basically a listening device?

• 3:24:56Speaker 06

  It's a listening and a transmitting device, so it does both.

• 3:24:58Shawn Ryan?

  What would you transmit?

• 3:25:00Speaker 06

  You could transmit those signals too. Like I could send a pager message. I could send, uh, I could, I said, I, if I, I could hook it up to a microphone and I could transmit. I could do ham radio off of this if I wanted to. You need a stronger antenna and more power, obviously, but, uh, yeah, I mean, this, it's, it's, it's determined, and you said, both for listening and for, um, and for, uh, for transmission. Um, some of them are a bit like the RTLSDR is just built, it's a more of a dongle and it's built just for receiving, but, uh, the hack RF is used for, for both. But anything that goes over the, that you can't see is all wireless, like all that technology is facilitated by some version of the electromagnetic spectrum.

• 3:25:44Speaker 06

  I mean, even infrared is just not visible light, but it's the same, it's that same kind of, uh...

• 3:25:51Shawn Ryan?

  And this picks all of that up?

• 3:25:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's got a very wide spectrum of, uh, uh, frequencies that I can basically tune to. Uh, this, this one down here is, I forgot what, um, this is a spectrum analyzer, but, uh,

• 3:26:10Speaker 06

  and this is just a battery operated one, but you can see it's just got like, uh, I don't know where the camera would be. But you could tune that to, like I said, same thing, tune it to a radio, uh, frequency, you can see where the peaks would be. Um, but that, that's, that device is just all in one, uh, to, it said, just monitor, monitor frequencies.

• 3:26:35Shawn Ryan?

  So, I mean, for somebody like me that has no idea what the hell you're actually talking about, what would you be monitoring with this and why?

• 3:26:44Speaker 06

  Well, let's say you had, let's say you had a wireless protocol that exists, is existing like an off-public band, like this, the FCC, like in our case, uh, which is our governing body of Federal Communications Commission or whatever, they have certain bands of frequencies that they've allocated for public use. So, like the 900 megahertz band, like 2.4 gigahertz, 5 gigahertz, these are the things that wireless technologies exist on. But let's say there was a command and control channel that was happening in some low bandwidth frequency, let's say like 800 megahertz range or something, and I wanted to attune to that. Pull out like the data, like what was going over it, analyze what type of data that was.

• 3:27:27Speaker 06

  I could basically tune to it the same way you tune a radio. And dump basically the, the, whatever, the signals that are going over that, that frequency. So if there's, so like if you're doing a site survey or whatever, um, and you're looking at why, like is a frequency busy or not? Is there lots of traffic? Cause we're in those bands that I was talking about earlier that are public use, those are shared by all manners of devices, like Bluetooth works over 2.4 gigahertz, but so does, uh,

• 3:28:04Speaker 06

  so does a wireless, like wifi. Wifi has, I see in the States, like there's a, there's a centering on the channel one, channel six, channel 11, and the bands kind of overlap, but you could just, the bandwidth, which is the width of the band, kind of dumb that down and so say you're in 20 megahertz or 40 megahertz hops and you can actually see like, okay, how much traffic is, you know, how much signal, what's the signal and noise ratio like on, you know, this band in and of itself? So you can pull just signals out of there. So it's just like tuning your radio is the best way I can explain it.

• 3:28:47Speaker 06

  The other thing that I think I told you about, uh, is this, uh, the phone that my buddy manufactures, oh, sorry.

• 3:28:56Speaker 06

  But yeah, this phone is an obelisk one, uh, it's by Obsidian Intelligence Group and it's a hardened Android phone that, uh, does, it has pretty much a lot of functionality that you would get within a laptop, uh, just, but it's in a phone. It can do, it runs a version of Linux.

• 3:29:21Speaker 06

  Well, it runs a planet, but like a penetration testing version of, how would I explain that?

• 3:29:28Speaker 06

  Cause it's, it is Linux, but. It's designed for tablets and phones. It's called Andrax. And so you would use this for, in the same way that you would use Kali Linux. I don't know if you're familiar with that. But it's a distribution that's designed specifically for kind of hacker tasks. But this also supports software-defined radio. So it can do some of the similar things that the Flipper and the Proxmark and the Hacker do. But it's obviously a little more stripped-down version just because of the phone itself. But this phone is just available, like when I go anywhere internationally, this is what I use to tether my communications through.

• 3:30:10Speaker 06

  It has a static IP address that's associated with it, so it never changes. So I always know kind of what it's, like if I want to contact it inbound, I know exactly what it's always going to be. But it works pretty much everywhere I go. And I use it to backhaul data. But it's a very, very locked-down version of Android. And it only supports secure communications. So there's no, it's all voice-over IP. There's no like regular phone kind of conversation. It's all done, you know, Signal-esque. There's like 3CX and Signal and stuff on here. But I just use it, I said, when I'm overseas and I want to make sure that I have a secure internet connection

• 3:30:54Speaker 06

  or backhaul, this is my weapon of choice.

• 3:30:58Shawn Ryan?

  What does the, what does the single IP address do for you? I don't understand that.

• 3:31:04Speaker 06

  Well, a static IP just doesn't change. So most times, an IP address is dynamic, which means it'll rotate. Anybody can kind of come in and take the lease, and so it's not consistent. There are services that you can use that will, every time your IP address changes, it'll automatically map it to a domain. You'll find these no-IP services. Netgear routers even have a version of this that they offer their customers to where you can get a subdomain on, like, or you can set up a domain yourself that just knows to point to that. So you can always type in home.shawnryanshow.com and you'll always get your home computer or whatever.

• 3:31:47Speaker 06

  The idea behind that is just if you have... Like I connect to my home app, uh, my home network through a VPN. I have a VPN that's set up on my home network. So if I ever need to access files or I need to look at what's going on on my computers, do remote desktop stuff, I have to log in through, through there. Uh, but the, most of the ISPs, like cable providers, you're going to have a dynamic IP address that's subject to change. Uh, static IP address again stays the same all the time, no matter what. So you know what to expect. I mean, I could refresh it if I want to, but it, that's, that would be something that I would, I would have to initiate myself. Uh, otherwise I get to keep the same one, no matter where I go and what I do.

• 3:32:31Speaker 06

  So running services off it, like I could actually run, uh, cause the way that in, the internet mapping service works is you have a name and then that name points to an address the same way your home address would be. Uh, but you know, again, if you move, then you need to point that name to, towards your new address, just like a post office forwarding type thing. But with a static IP address, it just stays consistent. So it's the same address every time and so you don't need to have it associated with a domain if you don't want to.

• 3:33:02Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, so that's, that's just about as close to 100% secure.

• 3:33:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:33:10Shawn Ryan?

  Communications as you can get on the civilian market.

• 3:33:13Speaker 06

  I can't make, as I said, there's no outlandish claims that I'll make that it's unhackable uh, or anything, but just for the sake of brevity, I'll say that the, the way that this has been stripped down and built from the ground up, like there isn't any, it's like with Android, a lot of times you'll have a lot of Google threaded in through there. And, uh, you know, depending on how you might feel about Google or whatever, there's a lot of telemetry that, uh, Android phones wound up sending, you know, invariably debugging reasons, you know, for whatever, uh, some of it is just advertising, tracking, that type of stuff, but a lot of that has been stripped out. So there isn't, this isn't a phone you would use if you.

• 3:33:58Speaker 06

  Usability is not what this phone is after. It's more after security and the slider. The way I always explain it is if every time you left your house, you had to unlock seven deadbolts and then lock them up again and then you realize you forgot your wallet inside. Well, then you gotta unlock seven deadbolts and you gotta, you know, open it. So you do that enough times. It's going to be a hassle. So it's all the compromise becomes one deadbolt. You know, is that secure enough? I don't know. That's the compromise that you reach. You know, if you want to, uh, to have a house door, you know, a lock on it. But with respect to this phone, it's not for necessarily for, you know, being a social media, running a social media empire or anything like that on, uh, it's completely locked down.

• 3:34:43Speaker 06

  There is no Google Play Store, so you have to sideload all the applications that you want to use explicitly. And so it's designed more with the security first rather than usability first, which for most consumer devices is a little bit counterintuitive. But it is for, again, I've been using it for a couple of years.

• 3:35:03Speaker 06

  For, you know, for my, for my rating or whatever, it goes hard. Like I said, I've never had problems with it. So I've been to UAE, been to Europe, been to Asia, like all over and said, just it works as intended all the time. And I've haven't had any problems with it. And instead, the phone itself is hardened to a little degree. Sometimes you get these things like the, they call them M and M's, you know, because they're crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. This thing tries to be like a jawbreaker.

• 3:35:33Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 3:35:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. You gotta suck and suck and suck unless you want something to happen.

• 3:35:38Speaker 06

  These are fun. Uh, and, uh, so this is a, a, this is an OMG cable. And, uh, it's designed by my friend, Mike Grover, um, but he was also a member of Digital Gangster. And he'd started out in the IT world and, uh, sort of came on through to computer security and introduced to it through Digital Gangster. Uh, and he's become an insane hardware hacker. But I have, this is a, this is an OEM iPhone cable that you get from Apple itself. I think this, this one came actually with my AirPods. And then this one is, uh, the OMG cable and within, in this little.

• 3:36:24Speaker 06

  Piece right here exists a full computer and full wireless radio to basically

• 3:36:32Speaker 06

  connect to and it's like winds up being a command and control channel for anything that it's plugged into. So

• 3:36:39Shawn Ryan?

  So any phone, any computer.

• 3:36:42Speaker 06

  This would more, this more works against the computer that it's plugged into. Not, but functionally, it still does all of the same things that an iPhone cable does. So it still charges, you could still do data transfer over it and everything. It's just that in this little piece right here, there's

• 3:37:02Speaker 06

  there's a ton of system packed into this little plastic end M piece here that allows you to connect, you can connect to it wirelessly and then exfiltrate data. You can take control of any machine that this stuff is. So if I gave this to you and I said, hey, I need to charge my, uh, my AirPods really quick. Then, I mean, I can show, I can do it right here.

• 3:37:29Speaker 06

  This is where it's very important to be careful with, cause looks can be deceiving. Oh yeah, this was the, this is the NSA has a, I don't know how I should show these to the camera.

• 3:37:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, just point the screen towards me.

• 3:37:46Speaker 06

  The NSA was developing utilities like this. This is one of the data sheets that was in a leak, but they were charging $20,000 for these cables. And so now you can just get them as a consumer for, for 20 or for less than $200. But the implants, you know, obviously this is the, the old USB A B connector. And the, within that, you basically have this command and control channel that you're able to access wirelessly, even though it's plugged into a unassuming system. With Apple keyboards, like they charge the same way that the phones do. So if this cable is actually in between

• 3:38:32Speaker 06

  a keyboard and, uh, and a computer, then it will do all the key logging for you. It'll, it'll take any key that's been pressed into the keyboard and exfiltrate it over this channel.

• 3:38:44Shawn Ryan?

  How, how much range does that have? How close would you have to be?

• 3:38:48Speaker 06

  Uh, pro, I mean.

• 3:38:51Speaker 06

  It obviously depends about the topology of the room and stuff as well. But I mean, I can probably be within, just within wireless range. So as much as, you know, you would think, uh, maybe like 50 to 100 feet type stuff with clear line of sight. Through a Faraday cage or something, obviously, there's, there's nothing, there's certain. But yeah, that's obviously one of the problems is you.

• 3:39:12Shawn Ryan?

  So basically in the same house.

• 3:39:14Speaker 06

  Same house would work. Yeah, for sure. Uh, but the, um, again, it functions perfectly as a charger does. So, you know, charging my AirPods there, you can see the, uh, orange circle. Uh, I cooked a couple payloads up.

• 3:39:35Speaker 06

  I don't know if this is gonna be visible.

• 3:39:39Shawn Ryan?

  You can screen record it too and send it.

• 3:39:41Speaker 06

  Oh, I could do that too. Yeah.

• 3:39:45Speaker 06

  Dun dun dun. Oh, wait, let me connect to.

• 3:39:51Speaker 06

  So I just have it named, I have the cable SSID broadcasting as hotel wifi. So it looks inconspicuous. Uh, you wouldn't know that it's, it's anything evil. Uh.

• 3:40:07Shawn Ryan?

  If you point that just a little towards me. Sean Ryan has the best podcast on the internet.

• 3:40:14Speaker 06

  Holy shit. Uh, let him know. Uh, and then this right here, I said, just loading up a website. So what it's doing is it's emulating a keyboard, the same way as if I was there typing in front of it. But it's just inconspicuous. It's still charging the, uh, AirPods.

• 3:40:37Speaker 06

  This payload here will, uh, open up a website.

• 3:40:46Speaker 06

  It opened up.

• 3:40:49Speaker 06

  There you go. I needed to close the other one first, but uh, yeah. Easy as pie.

• 3:40:55Shawn Ryan?

  So you're just controlling that entire computer through?

• 3:40:57Speaker 06

  Through a phone.

• 3:40:58Shawn Ryan?

  Through a phone that's connected to that cable?

• 3:41:01Speaker 06

  Yes, it just. Yeah, it's just, it's set up the same way a wireless network would be set up and it has a web interface. And again, on engagements and stuff, if you're in testing the security of a company and I'm somehow I'm able to leave this plugged in a computer or whatever, and I have an employee that's using it to charge our phone, as long as that thing is plugged into that computer, it's basically like having a USB keyboard attached to, to that, uh, that computer. Uh, but.

• 3:41:31Shawn Ryan?

  And you can extract whatever you want as well?

• 3:41:33Speaker 06

  Correct, that, I mean, these examples are very low. Like lowbrow type things that realistically what I would do is instead of making the computer say something is I would have it download, I could, I could echo into a script that basically, so even air gapped computers, you know, like in a SCIF or, uh, that, or, um, if they're not connected to a network in any way, I can still manipulate them until they get, until they get on a network, there's, there's a payload in the Elite series that I, I don't have on, I don't have in here, but it can actually do a data exfiltration.

• 3:42:14Speaker 06

  Once I run a payload on the computer, it can actually do key logging and stuff, and so I can go back and I can exfiltrate it through this cable still. So even if it's an air gap machine, it's never been on the internet before. I can basically type in the commands that will allow it to store that data for me and then I can zip it back out when I need to. So it's a, there's a huge. Just risk, you know, because again, these things look completely benign, but they, this is now in the hands of regular human beings. You don't need to be in the CIA to, to get an OMG cable. You can buy it as long as supplies last. It's like similar to the Flipper.

• 3:42:54Speaker 06

  Uh, but this said, it's, it's used more as in my line of work, the context is like red team engagements where we're testing the physical security of a business. But I mean, you can see that there's applications in stalking if you were an enterprising, uh, young lad who was trying to, uh, you know, figure something out, you know, then it basically has all that utility, but don't recommend using it for those types of activities.

• 3:43:28Shawn Ryan?

  What else you got? Does that cover it?

• 3:43:31Speaker 06

  I think that covers, I think that covers the toys I got right here.

• 3:43:36Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you know, I keep saying this, you guys are dangerous.

• 3:43:43Speaker 06

  Everybody, I think that at a certain age or point or whatever, everyone kind of grows out of the, the, well, most, most people do. They grow out of the, the bad aspects of it. Cause it's like,

• 3:44:01Speaker 06

  if it, if the more energy that you dump into negative things, the more negative energy that you kind of get out of it. And so you become a lot more, like I was saying, back in the day, there'd be,

• 3:44:19Speaker 06

  you know, when there'd be fighting on America online, like we're talking about, and then turn around and post their home address and stuff that I can't even think of any situation. I mean, you would have to go after my daughter or something like that for me to have that type of angst. I mean, I've seen everything and done everything by this point, but a lot of that sort of, that's what's dangerous with a lot of hackers is when you have that type of power at your fingertips to be able to do things that really are movie worthy and stuff. It's pretty the same in, in your line of work that the moment that you can Reasonably do these things. It's like just the threat of force is just as important as like,

• 3:45:03Speaker 06

  you know, not not acting on like the the great power comes great responsibility type thing. And because the field itself is so lucrative, you know, in computer security, there's rather than having to look over my shoulder and wondering if I'm going to get arrested or anything. It's not really worth it to invest time and, you know, it doesn't make dollars. It doesn't make sense type thing. So.

• 3:45:30Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense. Makes sense to me. Well, let's move into some of your professional career.

• 3:45:35Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 3:45:35Shawn Ryan?

  So I know you're working for a big tech company.

• 3:45:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:45:40Shawn Ryan?

  One of the biggest in the world and you are developing cyber weapons.

• 3:45:47Speaker 06

  That is a very sexy way of putting it, but uh the the short answer is yes, but not the not what you would think, I guess. Uh, the the purpose of these cyber weapons are is actually a prophylactic. Like we're trying to develop cyber weapons or weaponize these exploits and vulnerabilities before somebody who's actually bad gets a chance to do it. Uh, but I work mainly in embedded security, device security. Uh, so Internet of Things is kind of goes to your your cameras, your home IP cameras,

• 3:46:28Speaker 06

  your uh thermostats, smart homes are, you know, everything is smart nowadays. You have toasters that can washing machines, uh, all that stuff. There's a underpinning, they all share a lot of similar components. And so if you find a bug in one thing, there's a chance that you're going to find a bug in a lot of different things, just how the implementation is. Uh, so.

• 3:46:56Speaker 06

  We do vulnerability research based on like what we find interesting. Selfishly, like look at products that our own company kind of is using, but keep our ear to the streets on anything else that might be emergent. But the objective is to try to protect customers from anybody weaponizing this before we do type thing. And so we have a very, our focus is mainly on what's called zero day vulnerabilities, which is every day that a vulnerability is known, then it becomes like a one day, two day, three day, an end day. But zero day vulnerabilities aren't published and no one knows about them.

• 3:47:40Speaker 06

  They're completely secret. So it's, it's like discovering a new element or whatever when you have, when you find one of these things. Because it's, you could, you could be the only person in the world that knows that that vulnerability exists. And so we've found some pretty serious vulnerabilities in software that is used widely throughout the IoT ecosystem. And we've developed patches for them. So not only do we figure out the, the weapon, but we figure out how to fix against the weapon as well. And that's a huge part.

• 3:48:15Shawn Ryan?

  Have you ever seen, so I get what you're saying. You basically developed the weapon that somebody could utilize against whatever system. And then you develop the, whatever you want to call it, the antidote.

• 3:48:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, right.

• 3:48:28Shawn Ryan?

  And have you ever seen somebody, have you ever developed a cyber weapon? And then seen somebody else develop the same cyber weapon, but you already have the antidote for it?

• 3:48:40Speaker 06

  Uh, hasn't happened yet, like in this case. As I said, the, the research and development it takes to emerge some of these is a lot of, there's a lot of time and effort that goes into it. And my team is all geniuses. And there's some Venn diagram overlap in people's.

• 3:49:07Speaker 06

  Skill sets and understandings, but largely it's just a superhero. It's like the Avengers type stuff that you just. They surprise and impress me constantly. But the the goal, like I said, the part of the the opportunity that we have to work in so closely with a lot of these products is we have maybe some more, some of the stuff is open source. So as I said, anybody can look at it and pick it apart and go for it. But how it operates with the rest of the pieces of the system is somewhat important. And so we, you know, we have products that obviously share all of these components.

• 3:49:49Speaker 06

  And so we're able to kind of see how they interoperate and then work on something, a theory craft. But we know how they were built. We know how they were constructed. So there's not much of a need to reverse engineer some pieces of this, which shortcuts time considerably. But the to date, like, there isn't anything that we have found that we have noticed was exploited in the wild prior to us discovering it. That's not to say that it doesn't happen. It's we don't have any telemetry on it. The cool thing is, though, is I know a couple of the findings that we have had were super significant, affecting like hundreds of millions of devices type thing.

• 3:50:29Speaker 06

  And to be able to front run that and, you know, get our customers safe and do that is super, super important. I mean, I use those products in my house. I eat the dog food. I think most of my team does too. And I think that's something that is sort of lost on the the public at large is that the people that are actually working on the security for these devices, especially, as I said, just in my wing of the starship. Everyone cares like tremendously about privacy, about security. You know, because we're users of this stuff too, so we want to see the best product out there. And so it's very, very important to all of us.

• 3:51:12Speaker 06

  Like, we take it, our job is very, very seriously just because, you know, I think about my grandma or somebody, you know, gets something happening, you know, as a result of a screw up that I probably had the ability to fix at one point. Um, so again, the accountability is there, uh, but it's also just the most interesting stuff just because it really is bleeding edge. You're finding vulnerabilities in these technologies that are ubiquitous throughout, you know, the consumer space.

• 3:51:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yesterday, we talked about, I mean, you've been recruited, or maybe not recruited, maybe you apply, I don't know, but you found yourself in UAE.

• 3:51:56Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:51:57Shawn Ryan?

  What were you doing over there?

• 3:51:59Speaker 06

  So, uh, the Dubai government, there's a convention called G I Sec that they, uh, they had a, it's kind of like their DEF CON. They had a CES, like a consumer electronics show that they had a huge security presence as part of that show, and then they spun it off to its own show. Um, but the, uh, they have a security focused conference, but as part of that conference, they run a bug bash. Uh, the government basically invites, they partner with bug bounty programs and they invite a bunch of us hackers to go over there and they give us scopes of systems, uh, to,

• 3:52:44Speaker 06

  that we're allowed to attack, basically. And then they pay us bounties based on the severity of the bugs that we find. Um, but they had us auditing defense contractors and, uh, telecoms, like things that are very...

• 3:53:02Speaker 06

  Sensitive infrastructure, but giving us permission to basically actively penetration test these systems and see if we can find bugs and they said they pay us out based on the bugs that we find. But one of the coolest things about you can tell like how serious their cyber securities are is like as far as you know, the posture, the security posture that they want to take. It's more advanced. I've seen in a lot of other countries is that they're very forward thinking about they know that this is the battleground of the future. They know like what they need to be protecting against. And so they're

• 3:53:43Speaker 06

  the talent that they're flying out to do these types of things is best of the best of the best of the world. I mean, I'm said, I'm like,

• 3:53:50Shawn Ryan?

  And you're one of them.

• 3:53:51Speaker 06

  Well, like I said, it's like the NBA, like there's a lot of people, some people that warm the bench in the NBA, they're still better than anybody that played in college. But yeah, I don't, I don't really consider myself like top, top, top echelon. Just said just self evaluation. I'll let other people make whatever conclusions they want to. But yeah, that's it's a lot of companies now, you know, do these types of things and governments. UAE's those is just, it's very advanced. I would say just the fanfare behind it and how much they are really pushing for security over there.

• 3:54:31Shawn Ryan?

  How many other countries have you been involved in with the Red Cell operations?

• 3:54:36Speaker 06

  Uh, four or five, I guess.

• 3:54:43Shawn Ryan?

  Ever here in the US?

• 3:54:46Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Here in the US.

• 3:54:48Shawn Ryan?

  How does our, how do we compare to UAE?

• 3:54:52Speaker 06

  Uh, in, in what way?

• 3:54:57Shawn Ryan?

  In forward thinking.

• 3:54:58Speaker 06

  I so it's getting there. I'll say that there used to be a very.

• 3:55:06Speaker 06

  I don't know how to like cautious attitude, I think, towards this type of work. But I there was a few years ago, I did a bug bash that was sponsored by the US Air Force. And then they had a ton of their assets in scope. And they, again, they said, I would say the tide is changing, you know, a lot, a lot more. It's the, I think the US government is starting to kind of get the idea of how this stuff works. I don't know where they got the inspiration from exactly, but the same types of groups of people, you know, are also doing, again, it's just mercenary work practically. So you're, you're doing it for, for, obviously, if they're on OFAC or some terrorist list,

• 3:55:50Speaker 06

  then you know, we're not going to work for them. But it's a very, so mercenary is the best way to put it is it's your hacker for hire.

• 3:55:58Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let me, let me put it this way. How would you grade is an overall grade?

• 3:56:06Speaker 06

  Oh, like the

• 3:56:07Shawn Ryan?

  The US cybersecurity space. Are we a D?

• 3:56:13Speaker 06

  Not to disparage, yeah, but C plus, you know, it's the, there's a huge problem that the United States has and we invented the internet.

• 3:56:29Speaker 06

  That's why we have dot com and we have dot net and everyone other country has like dot co.uk or, you know, whatever. We're telephone country number one, like you don't have to enter any, any weird numbers. We're number one on US and Canada, like when you're dialing our phone numbers. So there's a huge sort of concentration of technology that, you know, the United States has always been very, very tech forward. Say, you know, in recent years, I think South Korea per capita has the best internet in the world and that's largely due to their gaming infrastructure. They've taken esports seriously for a really, really long time.

• 3:57:10Speaker 06

  But the, the, there's a lot more that you can attack in the United States, if that makes sense, that there's the, the systems and the way they're constructed and how they're constructed and, you know, there's a website for every, you know, division or something that you just, the attack surface is just very, very large. And there's a lot more.

• 3:57:34Speaker 06

  Just exposure, you know, then like, again, the UAE as an example, you know, has a very small subset of problems compared to what the United States would have infrastructure wise.

• 3:57:46Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 3:57:47Speaker 06

  And I will say, like, that's something that, like, there are things that authoritarian governments, which, I mean, the UAE would be classified as one, are going to do exceedingly better just because of the bureaucracy is not as there. So this, the trade offs, the trade off that you have for democracy versus like autocracy is you're going to, you know, some things need to be decided in committee here and there's just, things get lost in the red tape. But, you know, generally, something's a problem in an authoritarian government, like, they're going to address it very hard on. But that's that Churchill saying about

• 3:58:30Speaker 06

  democracy is the worst form of government except all the others. I think he said that that's how I had to feel a lot about this, that we're victims of our own success in some ways, like, and empires and how they, they tend to crumble after a little while.

• 3:58:47Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm. Yeah, I think we might be seeing a little of that happening right now. But you also did a lot of security in the adult industry, correct?

• 3:58:59Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah. There was a lot of crossover. I was a, I was the head of security for Grindr for a while. And that was a, it's a, it's a gay dating site. But the, the, there's a lot of weird problems that, so Grindr, like, one of the things about it is it was designed so that way if you're a If you walked into a bar, a straight bar traditionally, then you could, it would tell you that there is another gay man in proximity to you within a certain radius.

• 3:59:38Speaker 06

  So the utility of the program all exists in a proximity sense. And that, as you can imagine, that comes with certain safety risks as well, because if I was targeting, you know, homosexuals, I could just do it via that application, you know, no, I can say like, oh, within 20 feet, there's a person here. So there's a huge trade off in usability, because we would, we developed these geo boxes. Basically baking, you know, like the old school maps, how they had like a squares and you'd be like, oh, Franklin is at three, five or whatever, or A5, that the same type

• 4:00:21Speaker 06

  of, there's a, an algorithm to box the world out in the same way. And you can change the resolution up to, you know, you can go down very, it's called a geo hash, but you can go down to inches, you know, centimeters, whatever. Micro. Micro to macro, yeah. And so, but we found usability wise, that whenever we would make this bounding box a little bit too big, the customers would complain about the usability, like, I can't even use this app because it's not doing what I told it to. And so it's a very like interesting case study in what the users want and like what as a security person, when you would actually recommend in this case, because Tinder had

• 4:01:03Speaker 06

  a huge problem with this with stalkers and what's called trilateration, like programmatically, like if I emulated a phone, I can make it so that way my location is jumping around. And so if I am 20 feet from somebody at this point, and I'm 15 feet from him at this point, and I'm 10 feet from him at this point, you're kind of able to zero in on. Triangulate. Yeah, yeah. I think trilateration is the, is the, the term, the nomenclature for, for that methodology. But there was a lot of countries that Grindr operated in where those features were completely disabled, because it's just illegal to be gay. It's, there was the death penalty, you know, just for.

• 4:01:48Speaker 06

  Whoever, you know, just for, just for being gay is like, it's insane. And so in, in those countries, uh, we had nonprofit organizations that were boots on the ground, that were going and kind of promoting different safety, like, you know, don't show your face, you know, meet in public places, just a lot of meat space type protections. Uh, but you had, you had government agencies trying to entrap, uh, users of Grindr by emulating, uh, the other gay people on the site and they were talking, so they would converse with you and then they'd meet you and then they'd arrest you type stuff. And

• 4:02:30Speaker 06

  so it became this huge human safety issue, uh, that was really intense, like, because their lives are at stake. And I'm traditional libertarian guy, do what you want, I don't care, like, have fun, you know, and just don't, like, if it doesn't bother me, you're not infringing on me, then I, I don't give a shit what people do with their lives. Uh, and so I just, with that ethos, kind of carrying that into that sphere, it was just nuts, the, the real world stakes, I think, you know, the lives were, you know, in danger. And so something that we worked really, really hard to, uh, to prevent. Um, but then, uh, it

• 4:03:15Speaker 06

  was bought out by a Chinese company, uh, and they, uh, released pretty much most of the staff that, that cared at one point. And what was nuts, I think I was only kept around for compliance reasons in some senses, but, but all of that data technically belonged to the company that bought them, who, you know, most agencies or organizations within China are state owned. And so who knows, I don't know to what extent, but, I mean, they did buy the data, but, I mean, there's a chance that they were looking for senators' dick pics and whatever else they could find in there and data mining it, uh, which is a high possibility, but I, there was nothing I could really do about it, you know, as

• 4:04:00Speaker 06

  far as, um, you know, from my position, but I wound up, uh, Yeah, they wound up eventually getting rid of me and then the US government stepped in and actually forced them to sell to a US company because of the national security risk. It was very strange.

• 4:04:19Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, isn't it a little late?

• 4:04:21Speaker 06

  It was a little late.

• 4:04:22Shawn Ryan?

  We'd like to buy all that data back.

• 4:04:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:04:24Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:04:24Speaker 06

  It's out of the bag, yeah. So maybe the data is a few years old, but that was one of the weirdest experiences.

• 4:04:33Shawn Ryan?

  Are we, are we being serious here?

• 4:04:35Speaker 06

  We're being serious here.

• 4:04:36Shawn Ryan?

  They bought, they sold the data and then the, and then the US government bought the data back thinking that they didn't make a copy?

• 4:04:45Speaker 06

  No, the US government basically forced, uh, the company was called Kunlun. They forced them to sell back to an American-based company. Uh, it was a forced sale and I, I forget, there was some act that they had, uh, let me, we can edit this part out. I'll, uh, the CFI US, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, informed Kunlun that its ownership of Grindr was a national security risk. And they didn't, so Kunlun didn't submit its acquisition of Grindr for review. And so then they, they basically unwound the sale, but I said by that time they had access to everything if they wanted to.

• 4:05:26Speaker 06

  And you can imagine the amount of compromat that's in, I mean, there's a lot of people that are in the closet, you know, till this day that don't admit that they're gay and, you know, they're keeping on the down low and stuff. And so I, I know that Grindr was frequented by, you know, politicians and celebrities and stuff that probably wouldn't want that information to be out there. But yeah, that, all that data basically, um, yeah, went, went somewhere that we couldn't control it.

• 4:05:55Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Wow. I mean, you know, I'm really curious, how do you get recruited? I mean, you're, you're a very prevalent top tech company. You currently, you've been an advisor for four to five foreign governments, uh, including our own. You, I've worked for, you know, the adult industry, Grindr app. I mean, these are like, pretty.

• 4:06:30Shawn Ryan?

  High profile, extensive jobs. I mean, how are you getting recruited? Do you apply to them? How does this work?

• 4:06:39Speaker 06

  I'm pretty much all inbound.

• 4:06:41Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you're a high school dropout.

• 4:06:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, no degree.

• 4:06:45Shawn Ryan?

  Who's been arrested for defacing NASA.

• 4:06:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:06:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how like, and these people are going,

• 4:06:53Shawn Ryan?

  we want you to perform red cell up operations on our company, on our government, on our applications, on, I mean, what's obviously extremely sensitive and or classified data. How does this?

• 4:07:12Shawn Ryan?

  You're asking a black hat hacker to do penetration, penetration testing and red cell operations on, on governments, on super high profile tech companies and.

• 4:07:26Speaker 06

  Well, as I said, I think that the maturity level has a lot to do with it that, you know, there's a lot of things I did. Well, I mean, I wouldn't say said even in my mid twenties or whatever, I probably wasn't, you know, washing my hands completely clean. And there's always some threat of whatever, but that my own moral code and stuff like I've always been, people can always rely on me and I've always been, you know, very matter of fact, and I never stabbed anybody in the back. Like I have a very good reputation and that that whole, um, like I have a, I have a tattoo

• 4:08:06Speaker 06

  of a green hat on my wrist that me and my buddy got in China. This means something completely different, but, uh, the what, what, remember we were talking about white hat, black hat hacker that we've always been green hats. Like we just do it for the money. I don't care who you are and be, you know, Psalm bin Laden. I don't care. You got the monies right. But in realistic terms, like we all have this, these codes of honor, you know, that we just don't violate. And, you know, so. For that perspective, the challenge is what's fun, you know, but it's like same thing as Oppenheimer, you know, developing this weapon that, you know, again, causes mass destruction.

• 4:08:47Speaker 06

  It's been something that's huge in the, uh, obviously it wasn't just him, but you know, the, it's in the zeitgeist, so I guess I'll mention it. Uh, but yeah, that, you know, on the one hand, like here, you're using this weapon to end, you know, suffering in a war, but at what cost? You're like radiating, you know, two cities as a result of it. And so there's always kind of these trade offs, uh, in a sense, but I've always been really, really trustworthy, I think is like one of the things that.

• 4:09:21Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I'm not, I'm not calling you a bad person, you know, by any means, but if I had your background and I was applying to CIA,

• 4:09:35Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not getting that, no way. They're not gonna give me the clearance, they're not gonna give me the access, like, they're just not gonna do it, you know, and so what I'm asking, I mean,

• 4:09:48Shawn Ryan?

  you're, you're at that level.

• 4:09:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, but this is the problem, and I think this is like why, and I mean, there's, was an article I read a few years ago about how the FBI was maybe thinking about lowering, like allowing people that smoked weed, if they were hackers to, to join. And that what's crazy is, is you're gonna find a lot more people like me that are willing, I mean, again, I'm insanely patriotic, I've been around the world, I love this country, like it's, there's still, for all of its faults, like I still haven't been anywhere else that I love more than this place. So, you know, if I was ever called, you know, to cyber battle, uh, or whatever,

• 4:10:34Speaker 06

  like I know what team I'm associating with, you know, and, but would they even take me? You know, that's a great question, and I think that that's a misconception that the, you know, some people in power probably have is, oh, that person can be trusted, or oh, you know, they're, they, you know, they, because of their past, you know, they're not gonna be good, but it's, it like, it's very short sighted, cause you know, if anything, the people that are.

• 4:11:01Speaker 06

  Behaving in that way or know that way or they're thinking adversarially like at all times and so your mind just works differently and I mean obviously if I'm outsmarting government employees as a teenager, you know, and then still doing it now, like there's uh, there's said is say something about the system.

• 4:11:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I mean, it's just, it's, it's, I mean, does it, so are they recruiting you or are you applying?

• 4:11:25Speaker 06

  Oh, I, I get, I've been recruited for, like I said, I did my own entrepreneur thing for a really long time and then so the grinder thing kind of brought me out of semi-retirement and it was just so much fun and then the company I work for now, uh, it says just, it's amazing because it's the tech I work with is just bleeding edge, the budgets are insane and it's, there's nothing I could do in entrepreneurial space that would even compare to like what the type of, the things I can do and have access to and leverage for, uh, with the company I work for now, so it's.

• 4:12:04Shawn Ryan?

  Did they recruit you?

• 4:12:07Speaker 06

  They did, uh, because they were having some issues, uh, with account takeovers and stuff and that's, that's something that I happen to know pretty well and.

• 4:12:15Shawn Ryan?

  How did they find you, do you ask?

• 4:12:17Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty well-known in the computer.

• 4:12:22Shawn Ryan?

  I see that, but I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's just, I don't know, just, I don't think there's very many of you guys out there that, you know, have a, have a completely clean background, but I mean, just going down the list, I mean, you defaced NASA, the FFA, the DCAA, NATO, Colorado Springs Police Department, Texas Department of Public Safety, Honda, Nissan, AT&T, Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus, Digital Gangsters Forum, I mean, you've got quite the past, stabbed in the neck at seventeen for stealing, you know what I mean? It's just, it's just interesting to me that like, you're the guy we want running our cybersecurity.

• 4:13:07Speaker 06

  I, I agree, I mean.

• 4:13:08Shawn Ryan?

  But at the same time, you're the guy would run, run in my cybersecurity, so it's, it's just, it's, it's, it's interesting.

• 4:13:15Speaker 06

  I, uh, no, I totally, I don't really get it at all, uh, my.

• 4:13:22Speaker 06

  I said, my hero, I told you before, is Ben Franklin. Like, the people like that don't exist so much anymore where you try to be an expert at a bunch of different disciplines and study different different subjects and try to be a student of the world, you know, in some senses. And you end up having these multiple lives and multiple careers. And so I, you know, I don't know what I'm going to be doing in 10 years, you know, if I'm going to give this type of stuff up. But everything that I've learned up until now has made me really effective. I mean, especially from a leadership perspective. I've just seen things, um, you know, that other people haven't in the space.

• 4:14:02Speaker 06

  And so the younger people that are coming up now, I said, it's a lot less geared. There's just too many opportunities now to make money at this that aren't criminally related. That's not to say that it's not happening insanely, especially in other countries. Uh, but that for the most part, there's a path to green now that doesn't require you to

• 4:14:27Speaker 06

  hack the government, whereas back in the day, I think there kind of was. So for me, I couldn't have gotten a college degree in cybersecurity. It just didn't exist. But now you can pretty much go to a junior college, any community college now. They probably have some sort of cybersecurity offering. And so it's a little bit different, like the school, you know, there wasn't anything before it. And now it exists and it's a profession and stuff. So I'm just thankful that, yeah, that they look past all that stuff and they noticed that I'm, I mean well, I'm not a terrible person.

• 4:14:56Shawn Ryan?

  You know, so, I mean, they, we talked about this last night, but when, I wish we could just say the name, but when the, when the tech company, the current one, that you're running Red Cell operations for the, and developing cyber weapons.

• 4:15:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they, they gave you, it sounds like a hell of a deal.

• 4:15:18Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 4:15:19Shawn Ryan?

  You, we haven't even gotten into your music career yet, but you're still going to other countries. You're going to all these conventions. You're still have your music, your music career. And they allowed you to build your own team, correct?

• 4:15:36Speaker 06

  I, I built two teams there.

• 4:15:38Shawn Ryan?

  How, how many team members do you have?

• 4:15:44Speaker 06

  Fifteen, I think.

• 4:15:45Shawn Ryan?

  Fifteen. So what are you looking for?

• 4:15:47Speaker 06

  What am I looking?

• 4:15:48Shawn Ryan?

  When they, when they asked you to build a team, who are you looking for?

• 4:15:53Speaker 06

  A eclectic mix, because I, if you get a bunch of people that think exactly like you, then you're, you're not going to get a sycophantic, yes, men, yes, women that don't offer anything. So, but the biggest thing that I look for when identifying talent is that, what I was discussing with Ryan, there's a certain shining, like a passion that you can tell when people really, really care about something as opposed to they're just showing up for a paycheck. Not that there's anything wrong with people showing up for a paycheck, but that this work,

• 4:16:29Speaker 06

  and maybe I said it's somewhat subjective, but it's very easy to be passionate about this type of stuff. I don't know, like, how you're, what your feelings on the military are, but I'm sure you felt a bit of a calling, you know, in some senses, and then, you know, found that you're good at it, and then you're passionate about it. Uh, there's always some parts of jobs that we don't like, but, you know, again, I think you're just called to do something in a sense, and that shows in your work. And so, a lot of the reason that I'm allowed to do all those things and move around and, you know, do the music and evangelize across, you know, travel to different countries and do this stuff is because as a recruitment tool,

• 4:17:11Speaker 06

  like, if there's one thing that I've proven consistently, it's the ability to identify and develop talent, and that's something that I think a lot of companies are really interested in. And, you know, as far as my team goes, they're all super brilliant, super dedicated, super amazing, just awesome, awesome people. And, you know, when you're able to construct a group like that from the ground up, I've had no attrition, you know, on my teams either, which is really awesome. Uh, so yeah, that, it's just...

• 4:17:42Speaker 06

  Well, it's important to me to find people, I don't care what their background is, if it's academic or if it's self-taught, but you have to just show a bit of a love for the game.

• 4:17:53Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh. Are these all, are a lot of these former colleagues of yours or former friends from digi- digital gangster days or?

• 4:18:03Speaker 06

  There's a couple that, yeah, from that, so just, there's a few of them that, yeah, were friends prior to this, but even the ones that, uh, some of them were fans of my music, uh, and so knew of me, but I didn't know of them. Um, others were just cold, you know, coming in and, you know, cause I'm all about opportunity and, you know, in that sense, like, I don't think that it should be complete nepotism all around. Nepotism is fun, but not all the time. Uh, but yeah, it's, it's a, it's a wide mix, but that, just being able to identify, and it's a very diverse group of people too, you know, um, races, genders, like whatever, it's, it's so, we've been good on checking those boxes, but yeah, it's

• 4:18:47Speaker 06

  the, it's this, there's a certain passion I just can sniff out in people and i- if it's not there, I find out kind of how, that there's something, everybody's interested in something. And so there's a way to kind of always peel and turn computer security in a way that in- interesting to people. And if there was one superpower or something like that, that I would say that I have, that's probably it. It's just the ability to i- identify and cultivate talent.

• 4:19:17Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thanks for sharing that.

• 4:19:18Speaker 06

  Well, thanks.

• 4:19:19Shawn Ryan?

  Let's, uh, let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll get into some current events, what you think we need to be concerned about. And, um, then we'll get into your music career and that'll be a wrap.

• 4:19:31Speaker 06

  Let's do it.

• 4:19:35Shawn Ryan?

  I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now.

• 4:19:44Shawn Ryan?

  Just want to say thank you, guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on Vigilance Elite Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So, we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys, or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So we get, right now, there's a lot of concern about self-defense, home defense, crimes on the rise, all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so, we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home,

• 4:20:28Shawn Ryan?

  how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol. For beginners and advanced, we talk about mindset, we talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on, at the end of every month, where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it, check it out. And, if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping, all the firearm stuff, pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there.

• 4:21:04Shawn Ryan?

  So anyways, go to www.patreon.com/vigilanceelite, or just go on the link in the description, it'll take you right there.

• 4:21:17Shawn Ryan?

  And if you don't want to, and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine too. I appreciate it either way. Love you all, let's get back to the show. Thank you.

• 4:21:30Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Bryce, we're back from another break.

• 4:21:32Speaker 06

  Another break.

• 4:21:33Shawn Ryan?

  I think we're gonna go to seven hours.

• 4:21:36Speaker 06

  That would be insane.

• 4:21:37Shawn Ryan?

  Seven hours, right? But I wanted to talk to you about some current events, some stuff that we should be having our, some stuff that we should have our attention on, some stuff we should be concerned about, and hopefully some positive stuff, too. But first thing I've got is US government vulnerabilities when it comes to cybersecurity. What are some of the top things that you think we need to be concerned about?

• 4:22:04Speaker 06

  I think that a lot of the, what's called FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, I don't know if you've ever heard that term before, it percolates in the media about our infrastructure, like power grid and utilities, water purification, like those types of things, not necessarily have to do with the government themselves, but many of the systems that run our infrastructure are very custom. There's a gentleman that works for me now, that he formerly worked for this company,

• 4:22:49Speaker 06

  and their entire mission statement was securing all of this, kind of, these types of systems, SCADA systems, and it's insane, just the amount of the horror stories, you know, that you hear, that, again, everyone's trying their best, but it's just, there's so much, the attack surface is just so large, and then some of these systems that are employed to do this, there's a concept called security through obscurity, and it's something that

• 4:23:29Speaker 06

  is always considered not a best practice, but just by making something hard to decipher or hard to work on, it technically makes it secure because not as many people know about it, but on the flip side of that coin, not enough people know how to fix it and remediate those problems either, so you wind up in this sort of nebulous area that is very, very hard to nail down, like how exactly you improve these, this types of the systems, but... That those, that that's kind of where I see, you know, the potential collapse of society in some senses if, you know, you were, I, a lot of people don't know how, I mean, I was a Cub Scout.

• 4:24:13Speaker 06

  Like, I still know how to make a fire with sticks and I know how to hunt food and field dress.

• 4:24:20Speaker 06

  You know, how to skin a deer, you know, those types of, thanks, thanks dad. But a lot of times, you know, I think that a lot of people would just not know what to do with themselves if, you know, there was a power outage that lasted.

• 4:24:33Shawn Ryan?

  It's very funny you mention this because I had an entire interview on the subject on the power grid. And that, I mean, I'd always heard, you know, in, in, in, I mean, from my previous career as a SEAL and CIA, you know, we've, I mean, we're, it's contingencies, contingencies, what if this happens, what if this happens, what if this happens? I, I didn't realize how vulnerable the US power grid actually is.

• 4:25:02Speaker 06

  Oh, it's nuts.

• 4:25:04Shawn Ryan?

  And,

• 4:25:06Shawn Ryan?

  you know, I learned a ton from that interview, but I didn't know that a lot of our transformers, a lot of our power grid equipment is made, is made in China. Which, I guess I just assumed that because pretty much everything's made in China.

• 4:25:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:25:21Shawn Ryan?

  But there is no law that forces the power companies, I can't remember, I think there's seven major power companies in the US. I could, I, don't quote me on that.

• 4:25:37Shawn Ryan?

  But there's no law forcing these companies to do some type of an inspection on the equipment that they're importing from China to put into our power grid, looking for malware or Trojan horses or whatever. And, I mean, the way that I understood it is basically all they need to do is push a button.

• 4:25:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't want to be alarmist, but there is. So I, because I think about people, you know, that go vegan and then, you know, that seems to be somewhat easy, but as a thought exercise, I've asked my friends, like, do you think you could go China free? Like, is there a way that you could live your life and not ingest any China, you know, and if you just look around, there's so much stuff that's manufactured over there.

• 4:26:29Speaker 06

  And it's part of, I think, the CHIPS Act that I think Biden's just recently signed in bipartisan, you know, to get a lot more of that manufacturing of the silicon back here in the States is super, super important because from a supply chain aspect,

• 4:26:46Speaker 06

  that if you don't have that whole control from seed to sale, there are, you could introduce hardware-based vulnerabilities that you can't patch with software, like, because it's exists within the chip itself. And with a deliberate attack, part of it, you have to look at it from a consumer market standpoint. Like, is it worth it? It has to, the juice has to be worth the squeeze in that sense.

• 4:27:17Speaker 06

  Lot of juice, lot of squeezing, but, you know, is, if there's one manufacturing plant or something like that that went rogue, you know, you might have some impact there, but if there was a concerted effort to make, you know, devices that were absolutely nefarious, the moment you blow that is the moment that trust gets eroded, but, you know, all you need maybe is that that one burst of this manufacturing, these things. And, and so, part of it, I think, is just kept in check because of capitalism and economics, you know, but who knows how long that, you know, if you're making some sort of longitudinal effort to.

• 4:27:59Speaker 06

  undermine a nation, then obviously the stakes, you know, do become worth it. But uh, that's the the brittleness of a lot of our utility systems. Uh, and again, I have very little experience myself. There's some systems I've played with and some protocols I've messed around with reversing. Uh, so I'm just again, parroting what other experts and stuff have told told me on it. But it it is pretty scary, you know, like, and again, sometimes in reverse engineering these systems, you become the expert on them, you know, just because even the people that have designed it are so disparate or, you know,

• 4:28:42Speaker 06

  and how it's cobbled together. Many people don't understand the gestalt, you know, they have all their little constituent pieces sort of figured out, but then how they work as a as a whole is a completely different animal. Uh, so just knowing that is a little, it's it's obviously scary. But do I think you could take down like the entire US power grid, you know, in one fell swoop? Uh, without an EMP like level event? I don't think that that there is, because even things like solar flares impact how, uh, you know, we adjust uh, power usage, because we have to be concerned about solar flares and and stuff.

• 4:29:25Speaker 06

  And there's all sorts of things from space that that, uh, you know, make, um.

• 4:29:30Shawn Ryan?

  You've really researched this.

• 4:29:32Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, but I again, I wouldn't consider myself a a field expert. I have no doctorate in this and I I haven't, I've never hacked a power grid myself, but I kind of, I just know the pieces of the puzzle in a sense of like how these control systems work and operate. And, you know, some of them are.

• 4:29:51Shawn Ryan?

  You know a hell of a lot more than most people. So.

• 4:29:54Speaker 06

  Would hope so.

• 4:29:56Shawn Ryan?

  On a scale of one to 10, how how concerned are you?

• 4:30:02Shawn Ryan?

  Of the vulnerability of our power grid from being hacked.

• 4:30:07Speaker 06

  Probably seven, eight. I mean, it's up there. The, just recently, there was those maniacs, I think it was in the Pacific Northwest. Like, we're winning with guns to, yeah, and.

• 4:30:21Shawn Ryan?

  I believe that was in North Carolina.

• 4:30:23Speaker 06

  Oh, it was in North Carolina, then I was.

• 4:30:25Shawn Ryan?

  I could be wrong.

• 4:30:26Speaker 06

  You could be right. I said, maybe it's happening everywhere and we have, it's, we're just kidding. So, but yeah, that, I know that, like, there have been, you know, even just attacks, you know, they, they don't know. I don't even know if the, the nature of what they are, if they're just kind of domestic terrorist cells or whatever, but that from a, a lot of these systems, like part of it. We had this legendary attack against Iranians nuclear weapons program called Stuxnet. I don't know if you're familiar with, with that. But that we, it was a joint Israeli-US operation and we were able to get malware on their, in their enrichment plants that.

• 4:31:12Speaker 06

  It set their nuclear program back a number of years because it, it basically made the centrifuge spin faster. So I don't remember the particulars of it, but it was a very benign, small change. And these systems, they weren't connected to the internet in any way. They're air gapped. And so they had to infiltrate, get somebody to actually install this stuff on. But in order to build something like that, you need to kind of have a, be able to emulate that environment or build a replica. So the way that that attack could be orchestrated, like, it's not something that a teenager could probably do in their basement.

• 4:31:50Speaker 06

  Because they just wouldn't have access to the parts of that system in order to figure out how to, how to, how to break it. And so I think that is somewhat, said, the advantage of the security through obscurity type thing is that, that these systems themselves, it's not like you can buy. A cheap, you know, that some just kid can go off the shelf and buy a, a system that is going to be employed or would be employed in the power grid or the water treatment or anything like that. But it's not above a state level actor, you know, to afford these things. I mean, that's just a, it's a rounding error in a budget somewhere. So that's where.

• 4:32:31Speaker 06

  It becomes this arms race where obviously we are trying to secure our devices and we need to get these things patched, but there's just a engineering backlog that tends to balloon out. It happens in every organization. And so depending on how they're prioritizing those patches, I just, I know that there's things that have been found that do exist that just haven't been patched because they haven't been, uh, there hasn't been a priority for them to, to be, uh, and, but again, this happens all throughout the software ecosystem and hardware ecosystem. It's just in these critical systems, uh, you know, there's a whole likelihood of risk, you know, how plausible is it that somebody is going to be able to

• 4:33:14Speaker 06

  infiltrate and, you know, implant this type of stuff. But again, it could be this quiet logic bomb that lays dormant, you know, and just pops out one day and completely cripples us. And, uh, I don't mean to be conspiratorial. It's just that the nature of how a lot of this stuff works, there's, I said, there's very few people that know how to work on these systems. And there's very few people that know how to hack them, but there's a cross section there that leaves a lot of room for state level actors if one was so inclined, you know, to, to basically.

• 4:33:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of companies in China are owned by the state.

• 4:33:52Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:33:53Shawn Ryan?

  And if they're manufacturing our transformers, putting them into our power grid, we don't even have a law that makes these companies check to make sure they're safe. I mean, I think it's a valid concern.

• 4:34:05Speaker 06

  I, and that's.

• 4:34:06Shawn Ryan?

  No matter what.

• 4:34:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's insane to me because I, even the, you know, the devices, if we have, you know, obviously we have manufacturing, um, you know, in Taiwan, I think mainly in China for sure that there's, but we're still doing pretty.

• 4:34:23Speaker 06

  Comprehensive audits on, you know, the internals of these things, making sure that nothing got swapped out. And, you know, if the firmware that's on it is usually cryptographically signed, so we know that it it is what it purports to be, the hashes match. So there's no, there can't be anything, any funny business, nothing added in into the system that we don't know about. But I did not know about the, if there was, there's no scrutiny on on the transformers and stuff. It's just a very, seems like very odd, you know, that we would treat it that way. Because in most industries are really highly regulated and you would think that would be one avenue where they would do that. So, again, though,

• 4:35:07Speaker 06

  it's just finding, like, being able to audit these transformers comprehensively, you know, you may need a transformer to kind of practice on or something. And that could be something that me and the homies could look at and see if it's, if it's what it purports to be. As I said, my only real comfort or security in the situation is, you know, China is not necessarily a adversary, like, in a lot of ways. Like I said, I don't, we're not at war with them. Like, there may be some shadow proxy war. And obviously, there's a lot of designs that they will, you know, we've, we've discovered that time and time again. I think statecraft in general, like, you're going to have this, these copycats that come

• 4:35:52Speaker 06

  out. And, you know, the, the cheap Chinese version's a little bit of a trope. But, you know, we are giant trade partners with them. So the moment that that balance shifts is the moment I see, like, maybe there's going to be a lot more that we need to worry about as far as that, you know, the build time, supply chain stuff comes in. But it does surprise me that there's no scrutiny over whether or not a transformer.

• 4:36:18Shawn Ryan?

  Surprised me too.

• 4:36:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:36:20Shawn Ryan?

  You're, you're concerned about our water treatment plans as well?

• 4:36:23Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Like, anything that you could. Any, I'm, I'm just trying to think of like, what is, you know, the creature comforts of the average American, and I think running clean water is something that a lot of us take for granted. Uh, if, you know, the Flint, Michigan thing, I, uh, you know, just kind of showed even the, where, you know, human error or something can botch, I think it was a year, I, I think it's been fixed since twenty, it was twenty thirteen, twenty fifteen. I don't wanna misquote, but I know that, I think they're still having issues, but for the most part, like the, the lead problem was, was solved. Uh, but if you look at that

• 4:37:05Speaker 06

  at a grand scale, you know, and again, if it's, you just make these minute tweaks, you know, in infiltration software, any of the analysis that's going, I mean, you could basically make, you could ensure that particulate is getting through or added, or some more of this chemical, less of this chemical, and, uh, you know, in the, within the treatment process. And, uh, if you're controlling, most of this stuff is all computerized. It's not like there's a guy going out there with an eyedropper every five minutes and, you know, checking it, at least as far as I know, you know, a lot of those things, we are just trusting computer systems to do that stuff. And so by entrusting computers with the ability to kind of make these sort of decisions, then I think it becomes a little bit scary

• 4:37:49Speaker 06

  'cause, you know, from, from my perspective, computers are fallible if, uh, if the right persons are hacking on them.

• 4:37:58Shawn Ryan?

  You know, there's also recent news about China hacking into a lot of government sites. I think they just hacked into the State Department.

• 4:38:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. Uh, China's been, it's, it's something that, uh, open secret type thing that China and Russia, I don't believe their citizens are prosecuted.

• 4:38:23Speaker 06

  They can kind of look at the US as a playground and act individually and they don't really have much to worry about domestically. Whereas even in America, I think if you get caught hacking even our, what we would consider adversaries, like it's still grounds for prosecution. From one end, you know, that when you're looking at it, they could, they could be building an active case against, you know, whoever they're investigating, or they might, they, like the government might already have a foothold in the system and then you come in and then screw it up. And so you're basically ruining, you know, however many years of investigation that they've invested in it.

• 4:39:03Speaker 06

  So from that perspective, I see why it's a little bit different, but that, as I said before, the infrastructure of the United States is a lot more robust and we've been using, I mean, there's countries I'm sure that you've been to where running water and power are, you know, it's super luxury and stuff. So, I mean, they wouldn't miss it, but yeah, there's just so much here, you know, that we, again, take for granted, uh, being the, you know, first world and just kind of as advanced as we are, uh, that we've installed computers in all of our processes, you know,

• 4:39:45Speaker 06

  to a point where it's just fused into a place where, you know, we're not carrying around water tablets, you know, and boiling water to purify it or anything. It's, it's all just done upstream somewhere and then, you know, through, through some pipes to your house, uh, type stuff. But China and Russia, um, like one of the biggest things that's prevalent now has been ransomware campaigns. Um, and I don't know if you're familiar with what that is, uh, but.

• 4:40:18Speaker 06

  It's really crazy because these, they actually operate much like a regular business does. They're honest, but what they'll do is they will install malware on your computer. Well, one of two things, they'll install malware on your computer that basically encrypts your entire drive with a key that only they know, and then you have to pay a ransom for them to give you that key to unlock it. So if you have, let's say you don't do cloud storage for your show, it's all stored on some hard drive. And then you run this malware or it's delivered to you through some vector.

• 4:41:00Speaker 06

  Then it'll encrypt all of your videos, all the Sean Ryan Show videos, and you only have one copy of it, let's say. So you're going to want to pay that ransom to get that key to unlock it. And usually they have an expiration date, like they give you like a week or two weeks or three days or something to pay this ransom, or they don't give you the key. And if they don't, if they destroy that key, then there's no way that you're going to get that data back. And so pictures of your kids, whatever, but this is leveraged towards healthcare, you know, hospital systems. This is leveraged towards, you know, financial institutions, you know, again, where these records,

• 4:41:41Speaker 06

  where they're able to pivot the network, people have onsite backups instead of cold storage, like where it's sitting on a tape drive, you know, in some shelf somewhere. They're able to penetrate the whole network and then even the backups become useless. But the interesting thing about ransomware gangs is again, they mainly run out of China and Russia. But they do, they will encrypt your data if you pay them the ransom. So they, some of them even set up customer support lines and it's, it's nuts.

• 4:42:13Speaker 06

  The other ransomware type thing that they'll do is they'll break in and they'll exfiltrate a ton of the data. And then they'll threaten to sell it if you don't pay a ransom.

• 4:42:26Speaker 06

  If you don't pay, then what they wind up doing is selling it to the highest bidder. And some of these groups, what they'll do is they'll promise that they'll delete the data. So they'll only sell one copy of it. They won't hoard out and give everybody a copy. But, you know, there's these organized crime and, you know, again, state-sponsored gangs that are making millions of dollars just doing this, uh, this type of work. Uh, and it's generally unheard of here in the United States. Like, it's not something that you can really engage in. Uh, it's a great lucrative business opportunity, but, uh, yeah, we don't, uh, we just, we, we're seem to be falling behind in that department.

• 4:43:06Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we had a, a really interesting conversation at dinner last night about kind of the imbalance between hacking in the US versus hacking in China, Russia. I've been saying that I think that

• 4:43:24Shawn Ryan?

  warfare is changing.

• 4:43:25Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:43:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's changing very rapidly. I think we're seeing a, a, without getting into all the woke BS, uh, that's happening. I, I think we're seeing a shift, uh, in the military.

• 4:43:39Speaker 06

  Uh-huh.

• 4:43:40Shawn Ryan?

  And I think that the,

• 4:43:43Shawn Ryan?

  I'm gonna get a lot of flack for saying this, but I think that guys like myself, former SEALs, uh, Green, just

• 4:43:53Shawn Ryan?

  on the ground,

• 4:43:56Shawn Ryan?

  special operations, operators, I, I think that we're becoming obsolete and the tech is taking over the battlefield. I think cyber security or cyber warfare is gonna be, I mean, it's, it's, we're, we're already seeing it. I mean, just the progression from, uh, the wars that we just, that we've been in, you know?

• 4:44:23Shawn Ryan?

  Over in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, you know, all these places, I mean, you saw AC-130 Spectre gunships turn into drones, you know, turn into unmanned drones and, and the, just the tech that I saw at the beginning, when I first started, you know, I think I went to, I think my first time in a war zone was in 2005, and to watch it, how it developed into 2015 when I left, I mean, I didn't even recognize, it wasn't even the same thing, you know, and anyways, what I'm getting at is the cyber warfare

• 4:45:07Shawn Ryan?

  stuff is becoming more and more and more real, and the way you were describing how China and Russia does it versus the US, I mean, that's, that's pretty alarming, and then, and then the, the military conference that you just sat through, where they're recruiting hackers for the US Army, and they were talking about numbers, I mean, just go into all of that.

• 4:45:32Speaker 06

  So, the, the cool thing is, is I would really like it if warfare was just conducted by robots, I mean, because then none of your friends would die in battle, like, you basically just have a ton of junk that's just firing stuff at each other, and that, the stakes, obviously, in cyber war, you know, when you're attacking nuclear power plants, or any of that type of stuff, if you're not making them melt down, you know, and irradiating human population, there's probably somewhat of an advantage to have, having UAVs, you

• 4:46:11Speaker 06

  know, and countermeasures against UAVs and fighting each other, because, you know, then again, it's just people probably just handling joysticks, or artificial intelligence doing the fighting, so it, it may be another mature form of warfare in a sense, but where the human cost is, is lessened, it's probably not the way it's gonna go, you know, there's always like these civilian, civilian casualties that happen, and I don't think that soldiers are gonna go away in that sense, but...

• 4:46:42Shawn Ryan?

  Let me rephrase this, what I was, what I was really getting at was how...

• 4:46:49Shawn Ryan?

  Hacking is becoming so relevant in today's warfare.

• 4:46:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, so getting, what I was getting into is that a lot of the equipment even that operators are taking in like with smart HUDs and you know, like how helicopters, they can fly like pretty much where you're looking and the gunner, you know, the gunner can just kind of, you know, look and the gun points to where they're looking and there's this, that everything is so warfare, so technology based now that inherently, you know, the ability to control and, you know, if you're able to hack those systems, like I said, even in the supply chain or, you know, saboteur or remotely, because all this stuff, you know, the drones and everything have to be

• 4:47:36Speaker 06

  controlled somewhere and wireless communications, that's what's nuts is wide spectrum jamming will always work. Like you can do things like frequency shift keying and spectrum hopping and stuff, but realistically, like that if it's have, if you don't have a wire, you know, like the tow missile, you know, attached to the actual thing itself that's feeding in any type of telemetry or instructions, then it's going to be subject to some sort of electronic warfare. And part of the problem is that in America, like the, the way that we've traditionally treated, you know, our hackers hasn't been favorable, whereas, you know, I, just the trend I noticed,

• 4:48:21Speaker 06

  like we said with China and Russia, they're basically able to use the United States as a playing ground and they don't, they don't suffer any consequences for it. And so they're learning against the best systems, they're sharpening, you know, they're against the whetstone of America, you know, and, and the systems that we have. And meanwhile, I don't think we are practicing the, you know, in the same way, you know, against them. It's not like, it's asymmetric as far as like how these things are getting handled. Uh, when it comes down to it though, um, that's one.

• 4:48:57Speaker 06

  What's really strange is that hackers themselves, like, we don't really exist without with borders. You know, we don't, I don't, a lot of us don't really think of ourselves as part of a country. You know, again, if it's kind of like if soccer, you know, football, something like that, like, we're part of a team, like, we are. But in a sense, we are in the same league. There's these rivalries that maybe, you know, they don't bubble up so much. Uh, I said, within the hacker community, there's Russian friends of mine, you know, I have Chinese friends of mine, you know, type things. And I don't think we really see it as there's animosity, but you know, in the event of if a full-scale war broke out, like, we all kind of know.

• 4:49:40Speaker 06

  You know, it's said like the Olympics, you know, you kind of know which country you're going to be fighting for type thing. Um, but I can just, again, the the development of the skill set and

• 4:49:55Speaker 06

  like, we have very, very good hackers here domestically, but internationally, I said amongst our allies. I also see strong hackers, but that there's a there's just more of a, I think.

• 4:50:14Speaker 06

  What do you say? Predisposition or encouragement, I would say, over there. Uh, for adversarial mindset and thinking and doing these scams and stuff that's present in Russia and China. That we don't have that in our DNA the same way. And so there's a certain way that they're doing things that I just don't think we can replicate without a complete paradigm shift in how we treat computer security, how we educate on computer security. Uh, because they just have, even, I said, even their hobbyists are of a

• 4:50:50Speaker 06

  They're employing way more personnel in their military than we are. We have contractors and stuff to back it up. But as you mentioned, I said, if I don't know if my fingers are correct, but we had, there was an army recruiter that had come to talk at this hacker convention and was just basically begging, like, please come to the military if you think you can hack or want to hack for the military. And just looking at the numbers, I said, I think it was around 1,500. I think they had like 1,000 enlisted and 500 officer corps in the army cyber group. And if you, that's abysmally low if you think about the amount of coverage that we would have to have.

• 4:51:34Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you were saying you're the tech company that employs you currently has way over.

• 4:51:41Speaker 06

  Way more, and that's a private company.

• 4:51:43Shawn Ryan?

  1,500.

• 4:51:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:51:44Shawn Ryan?

  Hackers.

• 4:51:45Speaker 06

  So, I mean, again, across Space Force, Air Force, Navy, you know, Marines, Army, like branches, I don't know what the total tally of cyber operators is. But the other thing that is crazy is that the private sector is insanely more lucrative than, you know, government work. And so, yeah, as a, I mean, even, I mean, I make insane amounts of money where I work and the financial incentive, you know, in the military, I'm sure you know, is not super great. So, that's the other kind of barrier to entry a little bit is that the talent isn't necessarily

• 4:52:30Speaker 06

  going to be drawn naturally to, unless you have a, you know, some super sense of duty or something to go into the military to do this type of work. But as I said, if, if the gauntlet was thrown down and, you know, I, it was called up, you know, I'm fighting for America, like, I'm gonna do my part.

• 4:52:54Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it just seems very imbalanced. I mean.

• 4:53:01Shawn Ryan?

  To get to your level in this country, you have to do it illegally. It seems like. It means you have to be looking over your shoulder. You know you're doing something wrong. Whereas in Russia and China, it's encouraged.

• 4:53:19Speaker 06

  True.

• 4:53:19Shawn Ryan?

  It's encouraged to hack into our government.

• 4:53:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:53:23Shawn Ryan?

  And so, you know, when you have an imbalance like that, I mean, how far behind are we?

• 4:53:31Speaker 06

  It's significant.

• 4:53:36Speaker 06

  What's, I said, the, one of the things that's changed the landscape is that because of bug bounty programs that exist now, which is companies and governments, it's what we, uh, like was talking about for the US Air Force and Dubai, these types of things where you'll get paid for these vulnerabilities that you find. And based on the criticality of the bug, uh, you get a certain bounty, an award that with the emergence of the bug bounty programs, uh, you see a lot more, that's, that's, that's real world hacking that's actually happening that people are getting compensated for. And so there's now more of a financial incentive to go the right path. And you're also subject to safe harbor laws. So they agree not to prosecute you.

• 4:54:21Speaker 06

  You know, what, whatever you're hacking, you know, you, and you find as long as you're doing it in good faith, they'll, they, you know, they won't prosecute you. So back in the day, like there was none of that. Like if you wanted to figure out how a system worked, you basically just had to break the law. But now we've gotten to a point where it's that a hacker can actually hack real world systems and then get paid for it. Uh, and the Americans that I know that are engaged in this are among the best of the best. So, uh, I know individually, we definitely, if there was a hacker Olympics, we could probably will be taking silver at, at worst, you know, like that there's still, we still have enough, uh, skills in our thing, but

• 4:55:04Speaker 06

  that it's just more, I said, the attitude and the, the way that they, the trajectory of the way that they've architected their programs. They have.

• 4:55:15Speaker 06

  Legitimized and formed businesses, they're, we call them APT groups, Advanced Persistent Threat Groups, and they have, they're enumerated, but they're actually, they'll have office buildings, people show up to work, and they're actually just criminal organizations that do nothing but hack us. And some are state-sponsored, some are private, in a sense, but probably have some kind of attachment to some state apparatus. And it's fascinating to me, because I don't think we have an analog here in America so much, where, you know, you can't just set up some sort of cottage hacker industry and then, you know, get, like, you just get a blank check to hack the foreign governments. At least if it exists, I've never heard of it, so.

• 4:56:02Shawn Ryan?

  What are you most concerned about when it comes to China, Russia versus us? Is it, is it the number of hackers that they have on their roster, or is it the skills that the hackers have on their roster?

• 4:56:18Speaker 06

  It's a little bit of both. Uh, that...

• 4:56:26Speaker 06

  It's more the culture and how it, like, they're just ahead of us, a lot of it, in how they manifested their, their security, computer security programs.

• 4:56:39Shawn Ryan?

  Their aggression.

• 4:56:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, their aggression, and how they, they carry these things out. They're just, they're SOPs, they, they've, they've codified this industry a lot better than I think we, we have. So when it comes to actually fighting a cyber war or something, I don't know how equipped we are, just because we haven't, like, our site hasn't been cutting our teeth the same way that theirs has. It's like we're playing the same game, but by different, different rule sets or something, which is unfortunate. But saying that, you know, again, I, I think that when push comes to shove, delete hackers that I do know that are at least...

• 4:57:26Speaker 06

  Our ally countries or that we have that the talent pool is still really, really impressive on our side. So I'm not really too concerned that we're gonna get, it's more outgunned. I think just overwhelming, you know, overwhelmed by the amount of attack surface we have. And the types of things that they can attack versus the types of stuff that we could attack.

• 4:57:51Shawn Ryan?

  You know, it's very, it's very interesting just to hear you say that about the rules. Because it's, you know, I will say one thing, this country, one thing I've learned about from being at war is this. The United States is.

• 4:58:09Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know why we do it, but we put, we handicap ourselves. We put these stipulations on ourselves and, I mean, you see it in hand to hand combat, you know, or just.

• 4:58:22Speaker 06

  No, I got you.

• 4:58:23Shawn Ryan?

  Rules of engagement.

• 4:58:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:58:24Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? And it's, you can't shoot them unless they're shooting at you. If they drop their weapon, you can't shoot at them, you know, and it's, it's, it's just. It's, and then they're literally decapitating us.

• 4:58:40Speaker 06

  Right.

• 4:58:40Shawn Ryan?

  If we get captured, cutting our heads off on camera. And, and we put, we put these stipulations on ourselves in war. And now here we are, you know, cyber warfare, same exact thing. We're handicapping ourselves, we're putting these ridiculous stipulations on our own people. When our adversaries have zero and we're just handicapping us.

• 4:59:05Speaker 06

  It's like, it's like Geneva Convention, you know, type stuff that, I mean, that works in civilized warfare. I guess with, you know, countries that are respecting some amount of rules, but.

• 4:59:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's not.

• 4:59:19Speaker 06

  I I think people think there's nobility in it or something.

• 4:59:23Shawn Ryan?

  We're our own worst enemy.

• 4:59:25Speaker 06

  But yeah, we're not, it's you're not keeping up with the time. And I don't advocate, obviously, like, you know, the wholesale murder of civilians or any of that stuff. I mean, that's something that I think that, you know.

• 4:59:37Shawn Ryan?

  I don't either.

• 4:59:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, right.

• 4:59:39Shawn Ryan?

  But you know what I mean? When if you're gonna handicap your people when we're literally being dismembered, having our heads cut off. I mean.

• 4:59:49Speaker 06

  Gotta fight fire with fire a little bit.

• 4:59:51Shawn Ryan?

  Have got to go.

• 4:59:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you'd have the ununiformed combatants and stuff. I mean, you're fighting, but these are the types of like, that's guerrilla warfare, you know, in a nutshell.

• 5:00:00Shawn Ryan?

  All's I'm saying, though, is it's it's bleeding over. It's bleeding over into this stuff now, too. And it's, oh, we play, we're. We play by a different set of rules. We we like to handicap ourselves. We're gonna make it tougher on ourselves here. These people are getting ready to take us over.

• 5:00:16Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 5:00:17Shawn Ryan?

  And we're playing by this ridiculous set of rules.

• 5:00:20Speaker 06

  And I don't think, and what's odd is, as I said, in the cyber world, the stakes are a little bit different. Like, depending on the crimes and everything like that, but it doesn't have the doesn't carry the same interpersonal risk, you know, that warfare even does. So I would think.

• 5:00:33Shawn Ryan?

  Well, maybe, maybe not, but if they hit our power grid, you're gonna see a hell of a lot more people die of that than it than the amount of people we killed and more.

• 5:00:40Speaker 06

  For sure, no, hundred percent.

• 5:00:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, hopefully, that's one thing I would like to see just shifted. They they do need to.

• 5:00:50Speaker 06

  Like, I think the, as you were talking about earlier, the kind of restrictions on, you know, becoming an operative or whatever. I understand, you know, if you're deeply in debt and, you know, you're a drug addict or something, they don't want you having a clearance. They don't know if you're gonna sell nuclear secrets for a bag of coke or whatever. But at the same time, you know, in this, in the cyber world or whatever, a lot of the characters that have these crazy personality flaws are exactly the types of people that you would want on your side, you know, uh, fighting in the cyber trenches type thing. So there, a lot of that stuff, I think, should be looked at, you know, through a lens of, sure, there's a cool, calm composure that you definitely want to have somebody have in battle.

• 5:01:34Speaker 06

  But, you know, behind a keyboard, you might be able to relax those restrictions a little bit, you know, just to make sure it sure this shit happens.

• 5:01:42Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into deep fakes. AI stuff.

• 5:01:49Speaker 06

  Let's say a crazy topic.

• 5:01:53Speaker 06

  I, there's an album that I finished, uh, that I just didn't release. There was, it was a prequel to another album that I had done, but it's all about, the proliferation of deep fakes. And I said, I'd finished it a few years ago and it's really weird because a lot of the things that have come out since then were stuff I was talking about. But

• 5:02:18Speaker 06

  what's crazy is there's so much media over even just regular people now, just everyone's TikTok reels and or Instagram reels and TikToks and

• 5:02:34Speaker 06

  YouTube videos and just even your normal, average person is going to have a ton of material out there about themselves and that the

• 5:02:44Speaker 06

  maturity of these models and the ability to,

• 5:02:51Speaker 06

  you know, on your own home computer, basically create this, these pretty convincing deep fakes. I mean, some are better than others, obviously, but the, the technology is only going to get better. And it's going to get to the point, you know, listen, you and I are similar age. So when, you know, you're going to get picked up by a stranger at school and then your parents have a password, you know, that they have to tell, you know, the school or you to know that you're supposed to get in this car and, you know, leave with them, that it's going to get to the point where we're going to have to start having MeetSpace passwords. Cause it's already started where scammers are doing FaceTime calls with people.

• 5:03:33Speaker 06

  Like I could call you as your wife and just say like, hey, I need you to send $200 PayPal to this address, or I need you to wire me this money, or just completely nonchalant, but in her voice, with her face and you, if there's no kind of secondary. Authentication of who that person is, then it'd be totally convincing to you. And this technology, I said, it's in the consumer space now to a point where people with a decent enough graphics card can train these models. So we're just getting to a point where, you know, what you see isn't what you seeing isn't believing anymore so much. There's a lot of things that have been memified.

• 5:04:18Speaker 06

  Like with Joe Rogan and the presidents and stuff. I don't know if you've seen those kind of jokey TikToks and stuff floating around, but they'll be like, it'll be like Trump and Elon Musk and Joe Rogan playing a video game. But they've just made up fake dialogue with all of their voices and stuff. And these are things that are being joked about now, but that

• 5:04:39Shawn Ryan?

  It's real.

• 5:04:39Speaker 06

  It's real, yeah. And the moment it becomes weaponized against, you know, common people, which I said it already started to be, it's gonna be nuts. But the thing that I find

• 5:04:53Shawn Ryan?

  How deep does this go? Like, how convincing could a deep fake be? Run me, run me through a scenario.

• 5:05:04Speaker 06

  Well.

• 5:05:05Shawn Ryan?

  Where it would just be perfectly done.

• 5:05:08Speaker 06

  The, just if I had enough, maybe think about all the interviews that you've done and shots, angles of you, that I could train a model based on you and then have you mapped to my face. And then I can always, I can emulate a camera programmatically and then just kind of intercepting the image. It's the same way that Instagram and Snapchat filters work, like where they can just overlay stars on your eyes or make you look younger or whatever. But again, like if I had said, if I had to call somebody, you know,

• 5:05:50Speaker 06

  one of your relatives, or if I had to, you know, call your bank or anything and just pretend to be you, depending on the information that's available about you, it's like it's a combination of social engineering plus technology that, I mean, I just basically become you and I mean, so the implications of that are endless. I mean, said if I wanted to said say that, you know, I'm I'm being held for ransom, like I, you know, Sean, I need you to send, you know, said, send money, or I need you to come to this place and, you know, come and get me, or, I mean, your imagination is the limit of this. Uh, so it's gonna be very, very important for us as people to have, like, said, secondary passwords or things that, you know, only, like, you'd have

• 5:06:35Speaker 06

  to ask them, like, you know, what he, what's something that only this person would know about that I've never told anybody else. Uh, but the the DNA thing is weird, because their service is like 23andMe, uh, they know that do the genetic testing to see what your lineage is, uh, but I remember reading an article not too long ago about being able to reconstruct, like, I, that, it's not gonna be, we're not gonna be far off being able to reconstruct deep fakes from DNA. So, like, being able to model what a human being looks like, just based off of some skin

• 5:07:14Speaker 06

  cell they left somewhere, or some lip print, uh, that I can see that being, uh, like a future where, you know, and people don't even have to have video of you, as long as they have just one of your cells, they're able to just recreate you in the aggregate over, uh, over technology. Super, super scary. So, it's, you know, you're not gonna be able to believe newscasts anymore, you're not gonna be able to know, like, did Trump really say that, or did Biden really say that, or anything, because if it seems plausible, you know, Biden mumbling is something that happens every day. So, like, how are you gonna know, you know, if it's real him mumbling, or some, you know, some fake shit? You think we're there already?

• 5:07:57Speaker 06

  We are very, very, very close. Like, it's, there's some analysis that you can do on videos, it's the same way you can do noise level analysis on Photoshop pictures and stuff. There's certain artifacts that deep fakes are still kind of wrapping, that there's, they're still perceptible, even of the human eye, there's ways that you can tell, like, some of these, but, uh, the really good ones are getting really good. Like, and there's VFX artists out there that have done... Just fan edits of movies, uh, or the place another actor in a role or something and just looking at it with the naked eye, you can't tell the difference. He would think that, uh,

• 5:08:38Speaker 06

  you know, that actor had played that role, um, you know, in that, in those clips. It's mind boggling.

• 5:08:45Shawn Ryan?

  So it won't be long before everything we see is fake.

• 5:08:52Speaker 06

  Seeing is not believing anymore. It, it won't be. You'll have to have some sort of consensus on, you know, whether or not something is, is real or not. Uh, it's, it's, it's sad, but you know, hopefully this is where man's reach exceeds his grasp a little bit. I think that the ramifications of this technology, one of the things it was used for when it was first coming up is, you remember, as I said, porn is the thematic thread through all innovation in this stuff. And so this deep fake technology was employed a lot of times, like if there was a, a person you wanted to see naked, you'd find someone

• 5:09:34Speaker 06

  with similar body type and then you could map their face onto their body. And so people were using this to basically make fictional porn of people that didn't exist. And that was going on even in the Photoshop era. Like when I was growing up, you know, people would put Britney Spears' face on, you know, some nude model or whatever and say that that was Britney Spears. But yeah, the, now it's like even, you know, some girl that you met at a bar at the gym or something and you're like, I want to see what she looks like naked and then train a model, you know, with, uh, I said similar with similar body type and then put their, their face on it and then boom, fantasy achieved. Uh, and, but obviously

• 5:10:15Speaker 06

  while that is questionable, you know, and as far as is that ethical or not, probably not. Uh, I mean, it's not really doing any harm to that person, but if it leaked out, you know, how would they defend that that, that wasn't them or, you know, whatever. And then said the flip side of that coin though, is that you can totally use that same technology to make people say and do things. Uh, like one of the problems so that we.

• 5:10:42Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, where I work is like if people are faking video footage. Uh, if, if people do somehow transmit fake video footage to our backend, you know, how do we know if it's genuine or not? How do we tell? Cause law enforcement, you know, may use that as evidence. And so, you know, I could invent a domestic violence situation that didn't really happen. And then, you know, that's the evidence that's against me. So it's just the rabbit hole goes deep and it's only as, uh.

• 5:11:14Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't even think about that.

• 5:11:16Speaker 06

  No, dude, these are the things I have to think about all the time. So it's a, it's, it's scary.

• 5:11:23Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into, uh, machine learning.

• 5:11:29Shawn Ryan?

  How does this work? How do machines learn?

• 5:11:33Speaker 06

  Uh, well, that's artificial intelligence or what we kind of consider artificial intelligence is this is, uh, is machine learning. Um, when people think of artificial intelligence and like deep fakes are a product of this, uh, and I think the, the goal of mankind in some senses is to trend towards, uh, generalized intelligence, which is having a computer think exactly like a human does. Uh, so being able to learn abstract concepts, uh,

• 5:12:12Speaker 06

  not necessarily, a lot of what AI is now is regurgitation of training data. Um, computers are just very good at certain tasks, uh, like image recognition is, is huge. Uh, it's something that machine learning has been employed on for a long time. How captures work actually is, uh, you know, when they're saying like pick the pictures of fire hydrants, um, you know, in this, uh, this block, what they'll do is.

• 5:12:43Speaker 06

  Google basically, um, for recapture, they'll add adversarial noise to those pictures until their own image recognition doesn't recognize it as a fire hydrant. That's why those images sometimes look really grainy or stupid, uh, depending on the level of security on the captcha. And then you as a human are basically making that model better by, you know, it knows which ones are fire hydrants when it first places the, them up for you to see, but it adds a ton of noise to those images that way until its image recognition software doesn't recognize them as fire hydrants anymore. And then when you go in there and then you click the fire hydrants, then that trains the, that's reinforcement learning for the computer to basically know that, uh, now

• 5:13:28Speaker 06

  if I see something that's a little boggly, it probably still is, is fire hydrants. Um, that's just a kind of a rundown of how we've employed humans basically to make these models, uh, better. But one of the fascinating things about ML is that we don't, mechanically how it works is you have intermediary nodes that are all assigned mathematical values. So there's something that goes in and then you have a desired output and then these layers, uh, just, it's like a brain. It's a neural network. It looks like the same way, uh, our brains probably process things, uh, electrochemically.

• 5:14:10Speaker 06

  But we don't, we don't really fully, we understand how this all works, but we don't really understand, if you were to take a snapshot at any one point in the computer's thought process, it's just a bunch of values. Uh, so it's somewhat, it's meaningless really to us, but to a computer, like.

• 5:14:33Speaker 06

  That's that's how it interprets interpreting the data. So if I have a picture of a dog and then through all this convolution, uh, it and it outputs dog like however, the parameters are set up in the model itself to, you know, determine that this is a dog, all of the thought that goes on in the middle there. If you were to take a slice of that, you like, we wouldn't be able to interpret it as human beings. It's a very esoteric concept. So even hardcore engineers, you know, in this stuff, again, how it works as a whole, totally understandable, but like the real machinations of machine learning are still kind of a mystery to everybody because it's just

• 5:15:16Speaker 06

  mathematical values that somehow the computer it outputs, you know, fakes, fakes it or whatever you want to call it. And then it it's able to reach these conclusions the same way that a human would, uh, which is fascinating, obviously. Uh, but there's things that computers are really good at doing, and there's things that they're not very good at doing. I'm sure you've heard of chat GPT. Uh huh. Yeah, like those for content generation and stuff, you know, these these large language models, super efficient and they're very convincing. Uh, that's part of what Alan Turing had this positive this thing called the Turing test,

• 5:15:54Speaker 06

  which in a nutshell is if you were talking to a faceless something like just a machine, like, would you be able to determine if the person on the other side was a computer or human or not? And we're starting to reach that point where you know, even the chatbots and stuff that I was making as a spammer were obviously fooling people, you know, and that was low level stuff. And this is much more comprehensive and involved. Uh, but these L L M's now that the capabilities that they have are just astronomical because they're basically, you know, they can write you college papers. There's lawyers that have been using it and getting caught

• 5:16:33Speaker 06

  because it was citing fake cases and stuff. So you're seeing it being tried to trying to be weaponized in the mainstream a lot more. Uh, but it it still is really impressive to see, you know, the the types of things that these L L M's are outputting. Uh, but they're they're again, they're they're only as good as the data that they're trained on, um, which is.

• 5:16:57Speaker 06

  Said that what what is that what that comes from is the corpus of you know, whatever we've generated in human history. It's it's a. So that's why it has biases towards certain things because we have biases towards certain things and see that's where they're tweaking the knobs and you know what people say is like wokefying, you know, the AIs and stuff because it's gonna spit out racist statistics. It's gonna spit out things that just don't make sense, but that's just how the data that's been fed into it. So it doesn't really know any better. It can't make decisions, um, you know, based on feeling the same way that human beings can.

• 5:17:39Shawn Ryan?

  It can make it can make decisions based off feeling?

• 5:17:43Speaker 06

  Oh, it can't. No, it can't. That's what I'm saying.

• 5:17:45Shawn Ryan?

  You said it can.

• 5:17:46Speaker 06

  No, no, it lacks that. Yeah, the comprehension is different, uh, but said it did. It just fakes it well enough, you know, now who knows where this is gonna go, obviously, but ML has a lot of.

• 5:17:59Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you think this is gonna go? I mean, you read, you read about it and it seems like just about every profession is gonna be replaced. They talk about it replacing attorneys. They talk about it replacing financial advisors. They, uh, I read something the other day that said that, um, I don't even know what you call it. A program is they they fed it. I don't know thousands of mammograms and this thing can diagnose cancer like.

• 5:18:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, 99% success rate. That's where a lot of the medical field, there's so many applications where ML is like super, super useful, uh, you know, in site optimization, you know, uh, there's projects like GitHub Copilot and, uh, Amazon has one too that. Grab some water.

• 5:19:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, like there's products like GitHub Copilot and AWS has one too that I should remember that help kind of scaffold code. So it's been trained on lots of different code. ChatGPT even can output, you know, certain programs like boilerplate type stuff. The way I see it kind of going in the short term is it's definitely going to be a skill to be able to do what's called prompt engineering, like leveraging AI to augment your workflow. I don't know how much it's going to replace workers yet, but being able to, those that can use it as a force multiplier in whatever they're doing are going to have a lot higher advantage than than those who aren't.

• 5:19:45Speaker 06

  So it's just, you know, the the hammer to the jackhammer type thing, like where it's the evolution of just another tool that we're using. But when, again, when it comes down to it, I don't know. I would love to see computers, you know, reach a state of Terminator and Skynet. Like, it would be just awesome because hopefully I've treated them nicely enough that they'll see me as a friend. And maybe they'll elevate me to Emperor of the Universe or something. But the, yeah, the realistic, like, I, there's a lot of jobs that are going to completely disappear

• 5:20:25Speaker 06

  just because you're going to wind up having, I think there's a, there's a lawyer site called, I think it's do not pay.com. Not affiliated with them at all or anything, but they, they've, they're just, it's a LLM driven lawyer service. And it'll write like, so it'll fight traffic tickets for you. It'll do, it has this line, it'll write divorce paperwork. It'll, it has this huge laundry list of things that like it will, it will do. So it's kind of a lawyer in a box, but that, you know, if you're trying to get something removed from your credit, you know, you have to send letters in snail mail to the company and da, da, da. Well, taking

• 5:21:07Speaker 06

  Uh, like a L L M G P T, chat G P T or something, and then front ending it and then giving it access to be able to print letters and mail them. Uh, you know, now you've got this entire work stream where you can have a an A I fighting your credit card, uh, credit report, you know, for you, completely automated. And so what's gonna happen is on the other end of that, they're gonna have an A I that's reading what's incoming. And so I just see these, you're basically gonna have these A I's that are fighting with each other, that A I's talking to each other, sending each other like, you know, legal documents, resumes, like whatever you can think of. And so the gatekeepers of both of these sides are going to be

• 5:21:53Speaker 06

  artificial intelligence and human beings aren't gonna be reading this stuff anymore, cuz it's just considered mundane. Uh, so I can see that kind of in the near future, where you just have A I's that are talking to each other, that are resolving disputes in a sense, because, you know, human beings become too lazy to you know, fill out a form to do something.

• 5:22:15Speaker 06

  It'll be fun, but.

• 5:22:17Shawn Ryan?

  What are some professions that you think are just going away?

• 5:22:21Speaker 06

  Uh.

• 5:22:22Shawn Ryan?

  Like guaranteed it's over.

• 5:22:27Speaker 06

  I think that the driving, self-driving is gonna be a huge, uh, and the transportation industry is gigantic. If you think about the, just logistics from, you know, truck drivers and uh, you know, just regular delivery drivers, uh, taxi cab, I mean, you name it. The, that's the transportation industry just has a ton of people that are working there and probably little by little, you're gonna see a lot of that stuff automated, um.

• 5:22:56Shawn Ryan?

  So pilots.

• 5:22:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, pilots, maybe. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Definitely, I said, road operated, private choo choos to the old trains. I'm gonna see similar thing.

• 5:23:10Speaker 06

  I don't know what the timeline is for that. I'm not that much of a futurist, but that's where I see the most economic impact just because of how many people are employed and kind of propped up in this industry. We've been scared about robots for, I mean, as long as I've been alive, you know, robots taking over, you know, automated factory processes and stuff. But the other thing is to content writers,

• 5:23:37Speaker 06

  you know, reporting, you know, I think it's gonna get to a point where you just type in a few bullet points about an article and then it'll just crap out something that's totally readable. So, you know, you might need a lot less writers on staff. That's part of, I think, what the strike, the Hollywood strike is about is, you know, but in my estimation, if an AI is writing better content than a human being, then maybe, maybe you're not that good to begin with. So,

• 5:24:05Speaker 06

  I don't know. I'm always, you can't ever fight technology. You always have to embrace it. And you see this just happen, you know, throughout human history. You know, there's professions, I think, that we had considered sort of bulletproof, like you could, at any other time in history, if you were a blacksmith, you were probably the man, but you know, I don't know too many blacksmiths in 2023. It's just the rapid nature. I mean, we discovered how to fly and went to the moon within 70 years type thing. And never, I mean, dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years and they didn't have any internet. So, I mean, it's just this, this is crazy, like jumps forward that we're making that

• 5:24:50Speaker 06

  it's very hard to tell like where things are gonna be. Science fiction authors, science fiction authors refer to it as the singularity. That there's just gonna be a point that we reach where everything, you wouldn't be able to explain.

• 5:25:04Speaker 06

  What was happening to anybody before you, like even with the phone, you know, now I can show it to you. But it's kind of like smoke signals. If you were a caveman, I'd be like, yeah, this is sort of like that. You know, smoke signal thing that you guys do. Like, oh, okay, I get that. But supposedly, the singularity becomes this point where it's just completely unrecognizable. There's no language I could use to explain, you know, where we're at or what's going on.

• 5:25:28Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Not heard of that. Singularity.

• 5:25:33Speaker 06

  The singularity, yeah.

• 5:25:34Shawn Ryan?

  I gotta look into that. That sounds interesting.

• 5:25:40Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into cryptocurrency.

• 5:25:46Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 5:25:49Speaker 06

  As far as crypto goes, like, I'm not, I was just an early adopter of the technology and I just like how it operates.

• 5:25:58Speaker 06

  I wrote a song about Bitcoin in 2012 that became somewhat popular. Uh, and it's probably my most played song. Uh, but when I was, when I had gotten into Bitcoin, it was very, like, 2009 is kind of when it started and 2011, 12, 13 is sort of when I was, it was on my radar. Uh, and at that time, it was just coffee shop meetings type stuff. It wasn't very, it was like 20 people would come to these meetups. It wasn't this huge phenomenon that it is now. And I just really

• 5:26:40Speaker 06

  appreciated the technology aspect of it. It solved this intractable problem in computer science called the Byzantine general's problem. But it's basically just, you know, how do you solve the ability to double spend currency?

• 5:26:59Speaker 06

  And, you know, how do you, how do you trust, like, how can you assign authority to somebody sort of verifying these transactions? And I spoke about earlier that the hashing thing where you try to find the most zeros in this arbitrary hash that you're pumping values into. And so that's pretty much how it's done. But it's just, the cool thing about cryptocurrency or where it came from, I don't really, I'm not a big fan of banks, you know, that there's been times I've gone to the bank and I've asked them for the money that's mine and they're like, oh, you gotta wait, we gotta get it for you, or, you know, that I tried to send a wire the other day and they were

• 5:27:44Speaker 06

  like, why are you sending this wire? And I said, I don't, why do I have to tell you that? Like, it's not, you know, it's my money, I should be able to do what I want with it. So Bitcoin eliminates all that stuff, like, but it also, you're in charge of your destiny there. So if you lose your keys or you give somebody your passphrase or whatever and you get wiped out, there's no phone number that you can call to beg for it back. So you have this responsibility that also kind of comes with that. But the problems that people try to, for a while, there, there's a lot of pitch decks floating around Silicon Valley that were trying to solve every problem with blockchain and that's just not the case. There are certain things that it does really well.

• 5:28:27Speaker 06

  And so the fact that it's distributed, decentralized, you know, the purest kind of crypto world that, you know, becomes a great alternative currency, alternative value store, you know, if you want to, if I want to send money to a foreign country without going to Western Union, without dealing with a bank, like, it's nice because it's practically immediate, you know, within five minutes and you can do it very cheaply relatively. I mean, I can send a billion dollars, you know, for

• 5:28:56Speaker 06

  Less than a dollar, you know, in, in less than five minutes type thing. So it's, it's a great concept. Uh, but I don't buy into a lot of the hype around cryptocurrency now, the way that it is. It's just, it's become kind of taken over by a lot of finance pros and, you know, quants and Wall Street types that are just kind of in it to make a buck. Uh, but I was always just, just a purist. I'm just in it for the technology and in it for the.

• 5:29:23Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think this is the future?

• 5:29:24Speaker 06

  I do. Um, and even America, uh, like our, I think our treasury, reserve, national, national reserve, has been discussing making a cryptocurrency, uh, for, to represent our dollars. Like there is, there's a couple, uh, like tether and USDC. There's a few coins. They're called stable coins that are basically pegged to, they have a dollar amount associated with them. Just one coin is one dollar type thing. Uh, but even the US government now is getting to a point where they've been kicking around the, starting their own stable coin, you know, just government backed.

• 5:30:05Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think of that?

• 5:30:06Speaker 06

  I.

• 5:30:07Shawn Ryan?

  Central bank, digital currency. It's a big topic right now.

• 5:30:10Speaker 06

  It is huge. And.

• 5:30:15Speaker 06

  So one of the advantages to cash, obviously, usually the only time I've ever gone to the ATM was to, buy drugs or gamble, like that even regular money these days isn't used for, uh, you know, maybe you're tipping a valet or something, but for the most part it's, it's not, uh, it's not something that,

• 5:30:37Speaker 06

  where every other cash purchase that you're doing is usually with a card or, um, like the debit or credit. So there's a transaction there. If people were always talking about, you know, the government being able to see what you're spending your money on, and everything. And that's one of those.

• 5:30:56Speaker 06

  Like in China, they have a social credit system. I don't know if you're aware of it. I am aware. But I I could see them instituting something like that over here uh in the US, you know, where if you spend money on these vices, then you know, you're demerit or, you know, minus three points. And that's where I see the more kind of digitized that we make currency in general, like the easier it is to track in that sense. And so it becomes just another way for

• 5:31:31Speaker 06

  authoritarian minds to, you know, data mine or do whatever with. The one thing is, though, is even in the existence of that, there's a lot of things that are illegal these days, like you you shouldn't be able to download movies and music illegally. If you will do it anyway, you shouldn't be able to um

• 5:31:54Speaker 06

  you shouldn't be able like, you know, pirate satellite signals, people do it anyway, should be able to jaywalk, people do it anyway. There's no way you can outlaw Bitcoin at this point. It doesn't, it's just the network is too robust. And so you can always use that as an alternative, or there's currencies like Monero that are privacy focused. They're designed, because with Bitcoin, it's pseudonymous, that you can be as public or as private as you want to be uh with that, but the entire purpose of the blockchain is it's a ledger from end to end of every transaction that's ever happened uh over the history of the blockchain. And so it provides that,

• 5:32:37Speaker 06

  you know, I think for nonprofits, for instance, it's a really brilliant thing to use because I would have total accountability and anyone could audit me because they could all see which transactions are coming to my address, when withdrawals are made. I would have to have some sort of

• 5:32:54Speaker 06

  Uh, tie in to like, what did I spend this money on, you know, because everybody will see it go out. Everybody sees the money come in. So I think for nonprofits and stuff, it's a super, super useful tool for accountability. I don't know if people want to adopt it because to really, people really want accountability in that sense. For those things, it's good, but privacy coins like Monero obfuscate the transactions of blockchain. So you can't really, I can't, they can't really see if you and me are sending money to each other. And that's how it's designed. That's the kind of the point of the privacy coins, but depending on, you know, what you're looking to get out of it. This is the thing, it's good that we have alternatives, but even if the US government was trying to outlaw Bitcoin, you couldn't really, I don't think you really could. So you can try.

• 5:33:38Speaker 06

  The biggest thing that you'd be able to do is cut off central exchanges, but that's why there's just decentralized exchanges that exist now where the liquidity pool is decided by

• 5:33:49Speaker 06

  members of the decentralized community. So if I have some Bitcoin I want to sell and you have some Ethereum you want to sell, then, you know, we'll meet in the middle somewhere in this decentralized exchange and then swap it. But it's all, I said, just currency is only as good as people that adopt it. Like you can walk into the corner store right now with five euros and the guy's going to laugh you out of, out of the store. But it's, that's real money, you know, it's just the fact that they don't accept it there. And so once cryptocurrency gets to a point where it's

• 5:34:22Speaker 06

  in a place that everybody kind of accepts that it's real or not, then we'll see a turning point, I think.

• 5:34:30Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get into, we talked about it quite a bit, but we talked about it with your phone, but secure communications. Signal, WhatsApp,

• 5:34:42Shawn Ryan?

  regular text. I mean, what is the most secure method of communication nowadays? Everybody's worried about government overreach and big tech tracking everything we do. And what do, what do you use?

• 5:34:55Speaker 06

  I use Signal primarily. I have Telegram and WhatsApp, which both have the end-to-end encryption features. P42 iMessage on iPhone actually is also end-to-end encrypted. What that means is that No one, like you and I have the keys to unlock the contents of that conversation. So it's end to end, like then there's no intermediary, there's no intermediary server that can take that traffic and decrypt it because we've, the key exchanges is like between the two of us.

• 5:35:37Speaker 06

  Usually what compromises devices' security, the text messaging and stuff is that the actual phone itself is compromised. So it's not necessarily the apps themselves. Signal is by default is an encrypted, perfect forward secrecy. And it's designed to be really lightweight, like it doesn't have a lot of the features that Telegram and WhatsApp and stuff have. I think you can do emojis, it has link previews. It's bloated up a little bit over the years. It's not as Spartan as it used to be, but that, for my money, that's the, it's all open source, you know, so the code is auditable. And I just said, I've been a fan of Signal ever since it came out.

• 5:36:20Speaker 06

  Largely, unless mathematics is broken, or quantum cryptography, or quantum computing takes a huge step forward, we don't really have to worry about, you don't have to worry about Signal, like as far as that. But where you're gonna have a lot of problems is more in the fact that the device that the software is sitting on is actually compromised. So somebody's hacked your phone, and then, then they can read anything anyway.

• 5:36:49Shawn Ryan?

  But Signal will be the most secure?

• 5:36:51Speaker 06

  This is what I use. I mean, it's like, I'm not sponsored by them or anything like that, but yeah, I just endorse just how it works. And it undergoes pretty regular audits. And it said, the code is, anybody can look at it, anybody can see just how it works. And it said Signal has just been kind of my secure messenger of choice for a long time. But it said iMessage offers the same protection. The clear text SMS is really bad, because that's what I'm saying, anybody in between can view the contents of those messages. So the phone company, that's why, you know, in-

• 5:37:32Speaker 06

  When the court subpoenas records or whatever, if they don't have access to the phone, they don't have access to the text records. But if they're SMS, you know, green on iPhone, then they can just get that stuff from the phone company.

• 5:37:47Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, kidding. I didn't know that. So, so they have to have the actual device with an iPhone message or with iMessage?

• 5:37:54Speaker 06

  With iMessage, yeah. There hasn't been, uh, yeah, as far as I know, I don't think the encryption's been broken. But yeah, it's that they would have, you'd have to have the, uh, you'd have to have the device to, yeah, peel anything off of it. Or, or control the device.

• 5:38:12Shawn Ryan?

  What are your views on Snowden?

• 5:38:15Speaker 06

  Uh, I, the, I, hmm, that's a tough one.

• 5:38:25Speaker 06

  I respect what he did for sure. Like, I love whistleblowers. I think that that's a good thing. But the, the nature in which it was done, I think, is something I find somewhat problematic. I don't, I don't know, again, being a former member of the intelligence community and stuff like that, there's a lot of

• 5:38:46Speaker 06

  information that you, you know why it should be secret, you know, in a sense, or especially if there's lives at stake or, you know, anything. Not too long ago, I forgot, was it, I don't remember if it was Trump or was that, uh, when all those assets got leaked, uh, the foreign assets, there was like the, the knock list in Mission Impossible, but they, a ton of deep cover operatives were, uh, exposed.

• 5:39:17Shawn Ryan?

  I don't remember who that was.

• 5:39:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, uh, just that there, there is things, I don't live in a, you know, I, of course, I have this hacker ethos of all information should be free and we should be, you know, we should have access and transparency is important and stuff, but there are, there is a certain, who decides this? Again, it's imperfect, like, but should Snowden be the arbiter of that type of, type of information? I mean, yes or no? Like, this is a very personal, subjective thing. You know, he, he did it through the channels, releasing it to The Guardian. Uh, I don't think that he should be prosecuted. Uh, but at the same time, I think if everybody behaved in that way, it would be somewhat reckless.

• 5:40:03Speaker 06

  Uh, you would, you can't just have everybody like doing that, that type of stuff. Uh, so personally, do I think he belongs in jail? No. Do I think he should get a pardon? Yeah. Uh, but were there, are there questions around, you know, how, what he did and how he did it? I, I think so. I think, but again, that's, that's for him. And this is just my judgment, you know, as far as, uh, I'm sitting, I'm looking, I'm outside looking in. I don't know.

• 5:40:34Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get into, let's get into some fun stuff.

• 5:40:37Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 5:40:40Shawn Ryan?

  Nerdcore music.

• 5:40:44Shawn Ryan?

  What is it? I've not heard of this until, until you came along.

• 5:40:49Speaker 06

  Uh, so nerdcore hip hop is a term that applies to a wide range of music, but all of it is, it's considered nerd culture, geeky stuff. So Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars, Marvel, before there was, you know, all these movies about it. Like just being a comic book nerd or anything. And it was music just about these nerdy pursuits. And, uh, I, right around the AOL days is when I started making music in, it wasn't called nerdcore then, uh, but the same way that you listen to regular,

• 5:41:30Speaker 06

  you know, regular hip hop music or mainstream hip hop music and, you know, the subject matter that it's rapping about. And then I was just trying to, one of the core tenets of hip hop being to keep it real. I just thought it was fun to rap about the types of things that we were doing on the computer. You know, cause there's a lot of.

• 5:41:52Speaker 06

  Correlation between making money on the streets and making money on the internet. You know, it's, I think it's very, there's a lot of the similar qualities that both of those things have, you know, I was pimping on the internet, you know, and they're pimping in the streets, like that, you know, I'm, I'm robbing banks and they're robbing banks, but I'm doing it in my underwear and they're doing it, you know, with a ski mask on. So it's, uh, it just seemed like the natural progression, but most of my contemporaries are doing it in, uh, like one of my friends, MC Lars, like he has a degree from Stanford

• 5:42:33Speaker 06

  in, uh, 19th century literature. And so he, a lot of the contents of his rap is about poets and the poetry and prose of that era. And he does, I mean, he does songs about a lot of stuff, but that's kind of his focus. And then, uh, MC Frontalot is like, uh, he's considered the godfather of nerdcore. He's the one who named it, uh, but he was a graphics designer, he's an artist, web guy, and he just makes geeky songs about geeky things, but he's not much of a hacker. So has no real insight into computer security. Megaran

• 5:43:15Speaker 06

  is another one who, uh, he'd started out kind of doing, uh, video game raps the same way that I did. Uh, we took like old video game beats and then made music to them, uh, but about nerdy subjects. Megaran's probably the, he's been doing a lot of stuff with the WWE and, you know, he's a huge fan of wrestling. And so he's got songs about wrestling. He's got songs that are in video games and, uh, like in the credits and theme songs and stuff, but everybody sort of has these little even subgenre pockets, nerdcore that they occupy. And mine has always just been computer security, uh, that I rap about hacking and spamming

• 5:43:59Speaker 06

  and all those things that, you know, we've talked about today, but just put it in a song form.

• 5:44:06Shawn Ryan?

  So you're a forefather of this. I mean, did you start this genre?

• 5:44:12Speaker 06

  Chronologically, I was probably before everybody. Considering, listen, nineteen ninety-eight, nineteen ninety-nine, the genre really started to become, like embody something, I'd say in the mid two thousands is like where the wave started to catch. But I'm sure that it was being done. Like, I don't really know how. I'm considered, yeah, one of the forefathers of the genre.

• 5:44:48Speaker 06

  But I think it would be, I don't know if I could have said I created it. Again, I think it was more of a team effort and, you know, built by a bunch of us kind of around the same time, independent discovery, like, like Calculus with Newton and Leibniz, but. Leibniz? Yes, I don't know.

• 5:45:07Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, it sounds like you've had a hell of a career. You've performed alongside Busta Rhymes, Nelly, Three Six Mafia, George Clinton, Two Shorts, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, and you released a collaborative single with Dead Mouse.

• 5:45:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:45:22Shawn Ryan?

  This year.

• 5:45:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was earlier this year. Yeah, a lot of.

• 5:45:27Shawn Ryan?

  Wait, does that mean, are you on tour with all these guys?

• 5:45:32Speaker 06

  Not really. Like, I do like a lot of one-off shows and stuff with most of the people on that list. Yeah, we just see each other when we see each other and do shows with each other. I DJ too. And so I just, I love music. I've been playing guitar for a really long time and I love.

• 5:45:56Speaker 06

  It's a lot of fun, but more or less, my mission, like with the music is I've had a lot of people that have listened to it and then they've decided to take up a profession in coding or in computer security or whatever. And that's something I think is very unique to the music that I make is it, there is how-to music out there of how to make crack cocaine and, you know, whatnot. Of course that exists, but that the subject matter that I try to attack and things that I say, you know, it's all fairly real-world application. It's either something that's happened to me or something that's happened to somebody I know, very. So that keep it real thread is really, really important in, in the music that I make.

• 5:46:39Speaker 06

  Uh, but my fan base is very, very

• 5:46:45Speaker 06

  intelligent and highly technical, like, cause there's a little bit of a barrier to entry to kind of getting in and understanding the music, cause it uses a lot of technical jargon and uh, the analogies and stuff are just a little more heady and they have to do with hacking and spamming and stuff. So people that kind of do the deep dive and get in there and figure out uh, what the lyrics are really saying, then they tend to walk away with little nuggets of knowledge and it's cool to get that feedback from people that have done sort of deep dives on the song lyrics or the content.

• 5:47:24Shawn Ryan?

  How's it working with Dead Mouse?

• 5:47:26Speaker 06

  Dead Mouse is amazing. He's a great person. Uh, said the, the way it all came to be, um, was is like right around when COVID was kicking off and there's a guy, his name's Steve Duda and he, uh, good musician in his own right, but he's a, he's a plugin developer now, just a software developer, uh, that he worked in the music industry for a really long time and he was a one-time coworker with Dead Mouse, but they had a group project called BSOD together. Blue Screen of Death is

• 5:48:02Speaker 06

  what that name comes from. And so they were, a lot of the kind of seminal electronic work that the two of them were collaborating and working together. Uh, and so they were in Toronto, working on new music and Dead Mouse just had this instrumental uh, that needed lyrics on it. And so Steve had DM'd me on Twitter and he was just like, hey, I'm up here in Toronto, working with Joel and we downloaded one of the acapellas off your website and slapped it on the song, cause we needed vocals for it and Joel really likes it. So, you know, what are we gonna do about it? And that song is about this group LulzSec that did a ton of, they were anonymous adjacent,

• 5:48:45Speaker 06

  did a ton of hacks, like kind of at the turn of the decade. It was really, really highly publicized. And that song was the theme song for that group. And then here, you know, whatever it is, 12 years later, you know, to have it like this re-emergence and re-release is funny because Joel's into internet culture and stuff. He was there for a lot of this, but never in a million years would I think that song would resurface as a single on his, on his album. But yeah, the last couple of years, I just, you know, we'd find ourselves in the same places or I would just go out and, you know, perform it with them. So it's been a blast. I've, I've

• 5:49:29Speaker 06

  said I've been in the music scene pretty much my whole life. And so I've made a lot of friends and kind of rubbed shoulders with everybody for a while, but I don't, I said, I don't really take music as seriously as I think I should probably. But I think if I took it more seriously, I probably wouldn't find it as fun. But yeah, Joel is just a trip, bro. I love him. He's a great guy.

• 5:49:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, my wife and I are huge fans of Deadmau5. So yeah, that's, I think that's cool.

• 5:50:00Speaker 06

  Super cool. Yeah, he's a great guy. So you, I'll see if I can get him on here and just twist his arm.

• 5:50:06Shawn Ryan?

  On here?

• 5:50:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, on your podcast. So we can talk to him. Yeah.

• 5:50:10Shawn Ryan?

  That would be the shit.

• 5:50:12Speaker 06

  Let's do it.

• 5:50:13Shawn Ryan?

  All right, let's do it. That would be awesome. But um, man, we covered a lot of ground.

• 5:50:21Speaker 06

  We did.

• 5:50:21Shawn Ryan?

  Of all the things that you've been involved in, music, hacking, Black Hat hacking, the stuff you're doing with the big tech companies, I mean, what, what's your favorite thing to work on?

• 5:50:38Shawn Ryan?

  What gives you the most?

• 5:50:42Speaker 06

  This is gonna be cheesy, but being a good dad, it's like

• 5:50:47Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think that's cheesy at all.

• 5:50:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's probably the stupidest answer, like just easy platitude, but that, I mean, my daughter, she's, you know, grown now, but we talk constantly, like just being that close, you know, and just watching her kind of grow up and, you know, now she's in college and, you know, gonna make her own mark on the world type thing. It's just, just most proud of her and just the fact that she's out there, like, still alive. She didn't starve to death, so I did okay, but yeah, just being a dad is my favorite thing, I think.

• 5:51:26Shawn Ryan?

  Well, man, in my humble opinion, that's the best answer you could have given.

• 5:51:30Speaker 06

  Good.

• 5:51:30Shawn Ryan?

  So, uh, that's awesome. Congratulations.

• 5:51:35Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 5:51:35Shawn Ryan?

  On a successful, uh, fathership.

• 5:51:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:51:38Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, all right, Bryce, we're wrapping up the interview. Last question. Three people that you want to see on this show?

• 5:51:50Speaker 06

  Uh, we mentioned one. Let's see if we can get, uh, Dead Mouse on here. Uh, I think Connor Daly would be amazing. He's a race car driver. Uh, you two would just love each other. Uh, and probably Sam Curry, who's a, he's one of the younger generation hackers is really, really big, uh, in the bug bounty scene. But he's one of those guys I was talking about that's a young gun that's just done so much impressive stuff. And he's been with me a lot on more of the recent journeys, like to the UAE and, uh, Just highly, highly skilled, insane, amazing, just, yeah, brilliant.

• 5:52:34Speaker 06

  So I think you would really, really like him too.

• 5:52:36Shawn Ryan?

  I'll look him up.

• 5:52:37Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 5:52:38Shawn Ryan?

  I appreciate it. Well, Bryce, man, it was, what a fascinating conversation. I think we're, we gotta be close to seven hours.

• 5:52:46Speaker 06

  Has it been? Yeah, geez.

• 5:52:47Shawn Ryan?

  And I'm not gonna lie, I could go longer, but I, I think you're getting tired.

• 5:52:51Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm just, I'm just amazed somebody wants to talk to me this long. It's, this is crazy. So, yeah, I'm having a great time too.

• 5:52:57Shawn Ryan?

  You are a wealth of knowledge and, um, you know, we covered it all. Childhood, at least I think, is there anything we need to cover that we haven't yet?

• 5:53:11Speaker 06

  Did we do the mathematician thing? Did I qualify that? Oh, cuz it's, that, it's funny you say that, say that cuz it's not real. But, yeah, I have two published sequences with my friend Tony in the online integer, in online encyclopedia of integer sequences.

• 5:53:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know, I remember you mentioned that up top and I was like, I don't know.

• 5:53:31Shawn Ryan?

  That is real though.

• 5:53:33Speaker 06

  That is real. Yeah, yeah, it's real. It's, it's not like rigorous, scientific, like I proved Fermat's Last Theorem or anything like that, or the Riemann hypothesis. But at the same time, yeah, it's, it's funny how much nerd cred that actually gets you. Like when you figure out a new sequence of numbers, that they, they really seem to enjoy that. But, yeah, other than that, you could write my biography now. I think you got, you got it everything.

• 5:54:01Shawn Ryan?

  Fascinating stuff. Well, Bryce, I just wanna say thank you for coming.

• 5:54:06Speaker 06

  The pleasure's mine completely. I really, really enjoyed myself. Thank you.

• 5:54:09Shawn Ryan?

  Me too. Cheers.

• 5:54:11Speaker 06

  Cheers.