Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast The Power of Probability with Alex Cosoi About this episode What is the probability of our existence? Neil deGrasse Tyson and cohosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly learn about the probabilities all around us, the idea of risk, and how they factor into our own security in the digital age with cybersecurity expert Alex Cosoi.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You are alive against stupendous odds. And I take the posture that because of this, life should be cherished.
0:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk's special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And of course, we've got Gary O'Reilly. Gary, former soccer pro, sports commentator.
0:37 Gary O'Reilly? Yep.
0:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hi Neil. And longtime co-host of StarTalk, Chuck Nice. What's going on guys? Today's topic is one of my favorite, just as an educator, simply because it's where people miss think things most often. And I feel extra responsible to try to get in there and make it work for them. We're going to talk about probabilities. So Gary, it was your idea to do this topic. I love the topic. I devoted a whole chapter to it in a recent book I published. So I'm pretty fresh in commentary regarding it. But more specifically, where did you want to take me on this?
1:18 Gary O'Reilly? So probabilities Neil, calculating risk gambling, call it what you will, we all do it, stand on a wobbly chair, eat that food in the fridge that's been there two weeks. It's a gamble. Probabilities has its own branch of mathematics.
1:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
1:34 Gary O'Reilly? And it's intertwined into so much of our everyday lives. Risk and assessment for insurance, predicting extreme weather models, which has been very, very important in the last few weeks. It's baked into AI and especially that annoying predictive text program in my computer that tells me what I should be typing and I hate it for that only. It's probability that's used in cyberspace.
2:04 Gary O'Reilly? And we do without realizing have that baked in again. And we'll get to that later on in the show when our guest Alex Koshroy. He's Chief Security Strategist at Bitdefender, the cybersecurity experts. And we'll, we'll open up what it's all about, where it's going, what it's likely to look like going forward. And our approach to risk itself. So having said that, Neil, let's, let's find out more about what happens when a bunch of physicists turn up in Las Vegas.
2:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me preface this by saying, but back in the 1980s, the, my community of physicists, the American Physical Society, the APS. Uh, there's have annual meetings and one of them was scheduled for San Diego. Uh, San Diego, especially of late, is a big convention town. Comic Con, you know, the most famous of the world's Comic Cons takes place there. And the whole city sort of adjusts for it and there's a convention center and everything. Anyhow, the community of physicists had booked hotels and was ready. And it turned out there was a snafu where the hotel reservations failed for some reason, and I don't remember why. So here's this convention that was supposed to happen and it can't happen. So what do you do?
3:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, the MGM Grand, then the MGM Arena in Vegas says, we'll take you. We have the largest hotel in the country. We can take you on short notice. So the APS pivoted to Vegas, pivoted. And so that year's convention was in Vegas where people give talks and their public talks and, and professional talks and this sort of thing. All right, a lot of breakout rooms. It's where we sort of reconnect, especially in an era before there was much emailing going on. It's a geek, it's a geek fest. Geek Fest, thank you. Physics Geek Fest. Well, a week later, there was a headline. This is after the conference. Physicists in town.
4:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Lowest casino take ever.
4:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The American Physical Society has been asked to never return to the city.
4:17 Chuck Nice? That's great.
4:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so you can ask, well, did the physicists sort of know the odds and play the odd? No, they just didn't.
4:25 Chuck Nice? Didn't play because here it is. It is the only activity where the people tell you, we are legally cheating you.
4:40 Chuck Nice? Now, we just want you to know this, when you come in, the reason why we say good luck is because we already win.
4:51 Gary O'Reilly? And the great thing is Chuck, when you start, when you get a little bit of a run going, if that ever happens, they see you and they bring you, they bring you free drinks.
5:00 Chuck Nice? Well, I was gonna say, any place where that brings you free drinks, there's a trap somewhere.
5:09 Chuck Nice? There's nobody that says, hey, just drink up all of my liquor and uh, yeah, and that's all. We're good. No. So.
5:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No. Here's a cabinet.
5:21 Chuck Nice? Like I have some, I had a party where my best friend at the time opened up my cabinet and took out a bottle of the Macallan thirty year old Scotch.
5:35 Gary O'Reilly? Oh.
5:36 Chuck Nice? Right. Which I don't share with anybody. Okay. And proceeded to pour off my Macallan to my other friends and I went around and picked up the glass and what the hell are you doing? Get to do this. So anybody giving you free liquor is a catch. That's all there is to it. So that lets you know what, what Vegas is up to.
5:57 Gary O'Reilly? Nice to know, nice to know you've let that go Chuck.
6:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck is still in therapy for many things.
6:04 Chuck Nice? Yeah, many things. That is, that is one of them. Yeah.
6:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I, I thought I'd look a little more deeply into this, only to discover that if you look at various branches of mathematics.
6:16 Chuck Nice? Yeah, right.
6:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of which there are many, but let me list a few. Let's go in sort of historical order. There's sort of geometry, geo, geometry means earth measurement, by the way.
6:27 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
6:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, it from, I guess that would be Greek, uh, geometry, uh, earth measurement. You have geometry, you have arithmetic, you have algebra.
6:38 Chuck Nice? Which is the terrorist version of mathematics.
6:43 Chuck Nice? I'm sorry. I'm, just move on. Let's keep moving.
6:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Algebra, uh, you, uh, we keep going. You can get to calculus. There's trigonometry, whole branches of math that we remember. Even if you're part of the walking wounded of those classes, we remember these from perhaps as early as middle school, certainly high school. If you sequence these, do you realize all of those branches of math were discovered, invented before it occurred to anyone to take the average of numbers?
7:25 Chuck Nice? Okay. Oh, interesting. I see what you're saying. Yes.
7:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's weird.
7:32 Chuck Nice? That is.
7:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's weird when you think about it. So here are these numbers. You add them together, divide by the total. Somebody had to do that first. Okay? That didn't happen until, uh, when, when did I have? Late 18th century? Long after calculus. Newton had calculus in the bag. Okay? By the late 1600s, early 1700s. Calculus, people. And now someone later on says, hmm, let me sum these numbers together and divide and see if that means anything. Well, that's early statistics.
8:08 Chuck Nice? Right.
8:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And there are books as late as the 1800s that believed, these are official math books, that described how you can influence the outcome of a certain set of probabilities. Cause they believed that was the case because probability and statistics was not yet properly formulated. As an authentic and bona fide branch of mathematics. Right. Point is, why is that so? How is it that people, we in our species can say, we need calculus? And there's no probability, okay, there must be some, something absent in our brain wiring. Yep.
8:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That prevents us from thinking natively in this space. Yeah, it's, it's, it's called heuristic hubris. It's, that's who we are. Because outcomes are what we want them to be. Right. Not what the math says they will be. And we still do that. We still do that. We still do it. To this day.
9:10 Gary O'Reilly? Are we not hardwired, Neil, to calculate risk as a survival mechanism?
9:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, okay, so if you speak with sort of evolutionary biologists. Yeah. Uh, they will frequently, and I think without much debate, tell you that we do make certain assessments. Yeah. For example, if, th- this will take us to an aspect of how the brain works, but consider, there's something that repeats multiple times and you learn that, and it hurts you. Yeah. Then you say, well, let me not do that again. So then you don't, and then you avoid it. So this is, this is simple. So this is the act of how repeated occurrences decide for you what the future is gonna be, all right?
9:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And this, this matters for survival. My favorite survival fact is how we put order on things, even if there's no order there. That has extraordinary consequences. Exactly. Let's look at how it might have begun. So we're in the Serengeti and you don't want to get eaten by a lion. And there's the grass, you know, the, the amber grass is blowing in the breeze. And you say to yourself, I wonder if there's a lion there. In fact, I think there is. Let me go check. Yeah, yeah. Right. Okay, this will summarily remove sort of the curiosity gene. Yep. And.
10:40 Chuck Nice? Because you don't, you don't get to have children to be curious.
10:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If it is a lion.
10:46 Chuck Nice? If it is a lion.
10:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You don't get to have curious children to the extent that curiosity is, is inherited. Okay, so it turns out we are better off thinking there's a lion in the grass.
11:01 Chuck Nice? Right.
11:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whether or not there is, and then going in the opposite direction than not thinking there's a lion in the grass, missing it and having it eat us. But consider that we think there's a lion in the brush, whether or not there is one, and that's the genes that got protected. Okay, so this is pattern recognition. We will see patterns even if there isn't a pattern there. We can put a set of random dots.
11:26 Chuck Nice? Right.
11:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you say, oh, I see this and I see that. You must have done that on purpose.
11:31 Chuck Nice? Cloud.
11:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I see it. And your life experience overrides the mathematics of what just happened. And or your life expectations or your life belief system overrides.
11:41 Gary O'Reilly? The pattern recognition, Neil, is the probability that that will happen, as you say, from experience. And we use this in sport a lot from analyzing gameplay.
11:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So let me bring this to the present. We have this feature in our brain wiring to detect patterns even if they aren't there because that was in the interest of our survival. We're not making those same decisions anymore about whether we might get eaten by a lion, but that's still that, that brain feature remains within us. And we see patterns in everything and we think because we see a pattern that the pattern is real. Even we think the absence of patterns is a pattern. You had a roulette table. And I said, why you keep betting on seven? It's due.
12:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I say, how do you know it's due? Because the roulette table shows you the previous ten rolls. Okay, spins. Oh, the previous twenty. And you you don't see a seven. It's due. No, it's not due. Go take a freaking probability class.
12:45 Chuck Nice? Yeah, it's a it's not due. The same way the Washington Generals are not due to beat the Harlem Globetrotters.
12:51 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, how about that?
12:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They play the Washington Generals?
12:55 Chuck Nice? I don't know what they're called now. I don't know.
12:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like forty years ago.
12:58 Gary O'Reilly? Made up name.
12:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, uh, this this notion that because it hasn't happened recently, it's bound to happen in your next bet is how casinos make money. Casinos exist to exploit these frailties of the human brain wiring. They exist for that purpose.
13:23 Gary O'Reilly? But it goes back to the point you had about magicians. The casinos know more about how you think than you do.
13:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
13:30 Gary O'Reilly? And they manipulate that, obviously.
13:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's completely manipulated. And like like Chuck said, they tell you that going.
13:37 Chuck Nice? Straight up. Hey, by the way, we're gonna cheat you today. Enjoy yourself.
13:42 Chuck Nice? Right.
13:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And cheated.
13:43 Gary O'Reilly? Is that why they call Las Vegas Lost Wages?
13:46 Chuck Nice? Lost Wages, yes.
13:47 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah.
13:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. And and so, by the way, as a scientist, we know how important probability is to separate your own bias on what is going on in the world from what is objectively going on in the world. So every year I was in school, we had some element of probability and statistics taught related to the aspect of the of the sciences that we were addressing. So I would say all told, I might have had eight years of probability and statistics. Yet, if you look at a school curriculum, it's not there at all.
14:22 Chuck Nice? No.
14:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? At all. Now, will you grant me one conspiracy theory?
14:26 Chuck Nice? Go ahead.
14:27 Gary O'Reilly? Hmm, depends which one it is.
14:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No. See Chuck believes in me. He just says, go out.
14:32 Chuck Nice? Go ahead, go for it.
14:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If he doesn't like, he's gonna slam you down, but never mind. Okay. There it is. You know, the state lottery systems?
14:39 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
14:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, do you know how they get funding for that and what they, you know, there's tax levying on that? Do you know where that money goes to typically?
14:49 Chuck Nice? Well, they tell you that it's for education.
14:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Education. Let's assume that's true. Let's even assume that's true. So it's for education. And I said, oh, that's good. Public education, you know, K through 12. And then I looked at the curricula across the country of what is taught. And probability, if it's taught at all, is only an elective. It's not a fundamental part of the math curriculum. And so it occurred to me that as long as they don't teach probability in school, you are susceptible to playing the lottery. Which funds the school. Which funds the school.
15:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Paying for your education. Probability, it could be the end of the state lottery system.
15:34 Chuck Nice? Well, yeah, because anybody who knows something about probability does not play the lottery. As a matter of fact, uh,
15:42 Chuck Nice? my father used to tell me, uh, take a dollar a day. The dollar you would play the lottery. Start right now and just take that everyday dollar and put it in the bank and through compound interest. Uh, it will take 20 years, but you will hit the lottery.
16:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's good. Yeah. People trying to assess their health or their security based on risk, uh, risk factors. And I, I think in the book, I, there are people who smoke knowing that there's a risk of cancer.
16:15 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
16:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I think if, if you're an active smoker, there's a one in eight chance that your tombstone will say died of lung cancer. And so then I thought, let me glorify that up a bit and say, okay, uh, instead of you just taking that risk, let's do it this way. Today. Everyone who lights up a cigarette, one in eight of them, on that first puff, their head will explode and they'll fall over in a pile of blood on the pavement. And if that is not you, you get to smoke for the rest of your life without cancer. Would you take that risk?
16:54 Chuck Nice? Well, what brand of cigarettes are we talking?
16:58 Gary O'Reilly? The exploding kind.
17:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exploding kind.
17:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so what I tried to do in the book was rejigger the risk into something that might be a little more tangible, a little more devastating for you to hear, even if the numerics remain the same, just to try to get at the fact that our brain is not wired for this to happen. So, yeah, Gary, it's, it's sad even. I drive by casinos and it's like, man, I'm sad for our brain wiring and for the education system that doesn't address that fact.
17:34 Gary O'Reilly? Drive past a casino, Neil, how often is the car park full?
17:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Full, all the time, all the time.
17:40 Chuck Nice? Yeah, that's why you gotta be an especially bad business person to lose money if you own a casino.
17:49 Gary O'Reilly? Or in a movie where George Clooney turns up with some friends.
17:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen.
17:58 Chuck Nice? Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, twenty, whatever they're up to now.
18:01 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, the franchise just keeps paying off.
18:13 Speaker 03 I'm Jasmine Wilson and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
18:28 Gary O'Reilly? So Neil, we're programmed, we're hardwired, but how do we get here? What's the probability of actually us existing, being alive, being born?
18:39 Chuck Nice? Now, do you mean like having a mother-like mind and making it to adulthood? Or do you mean like being conceived at all?
18:45 Gary O'Reilly? Well, let's, let's start with conception.
18:47 Chuck Nice? Oh, okay.
18:48 Gary O'Reilly? And then move through the laundry list.
18:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Obviously, humans have no...
18:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Trouble making more humans, right?
18:56 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
18:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Eight billion in the world.
18:57 Chuck Nice? Yep.
18:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it has to probably to 10 billion in the coming decades. So having a person of any kind is not the issue here. We can ask the question, what are the chances of you, specifically you, Gary O'Reilly, having been born?
19:16 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
19:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so we look at your genetic code. And a way to address that is how many possible configurations of that genetic code exist?
19:28 Chuck Nice? Wow.
19:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you're the one that's you.
19:30 Chuck Nice? Yes.
19:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so you can do that now. You know, there's lots of ways that they arrange. And many of them, it makes a human, but it's not entirely viable.
19:40 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
19:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or you have like three arms and two heads or whatever. So if you remove all the ones that create oddly different, but still living humans, okay? And so we talk about what we call a normal human. The different ways you can estimate this. But we think it's one in a billion trillion trillion.
20:09 Chuck Nice? That's not even a number.
20:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But that's not.
20:12 Chuck Nice? What you just said, it's not even a number.
20:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's what a kid says, right? It's a million.
20:17 Chuck Nice? Billion, million, trillion. That's.
20:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But there's a lot of configurations. Point is, the total number of humans who have ever been born.
20:31 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
20:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can estimate that is about 100 billion. Okay, just that's a round number, but that's about what it is. So you can ask if 100 billion humans have ever been born, yet we have the capacity to make a billion trillion trillion humans, a vanishingly small fraction of all humans who could ever exist have ever been born.
20:55 Chuck Nice? Interesting.
20:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what are the chances of you showing up once again in this genetic code? The answer is never. It's never.
21:09 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
21:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, because of how much larger the total number of possibilities are compared to anything we will ever create on this earth. So you are alive, you Gary O'Reilly.
21:25 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
21:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Are alive against stupendous odds. And I take the posture in the book that because of this, life should be cherished.
21:38 Chuck Nice? Agreed.
21:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And by the way, even if you did show up again in the genetic code, there's no reason to think it would be you.
21:44 Chuck Nice? No.
21:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It would look exactly like you.
21:46 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
21:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But we've done these experiments, they're called twins. We have identical DNA. And you're not the same person. You have independent thoughts. Okay. You even have different fingerprints, turns out. Uh, so the, the clone experiment doesn't require a machine to wonder how that's going to turn out. People said, we shouldn't have clone machines because we'll clone people for their organs. And I'm thinking, do we do that with twins today? Do we, do we purposefully have twins to take out their org? No. Why, why would we behave any differently with a cloning machine than we do in the presence of twins that already walk among us? Point is, you're never going to get another Gary. And so armed with that information, that cosmic, that scientifically informed cosmic perspective,
22:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? we should treat life as the most cherished thing on earth. And not enough people do, leading to all manner of misery and bloodshed and war. And in this world. And I wonder if people really knew the statistics of this, if we treat each other more kindly and more considerably than we do.
22:53 Chuck Nice? Depends on how much you like war and bloodshed, you know?
22:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, some people.
22:56 Chuck Nice? Some people are into that, you know?
22:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not in their own bloodshed.
22:59 Chuck Nice? Right. No, that's the point. Yeah.
23:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of course not.
23:02 Chuck Nice? It's so funny, you're such a scientist because you actually went at that from the DNA configuration, uh, perspective, which I find fascinating because I thought about this, like, I think everybody thinks like. You know, could there ever be another me, or how many like, like, what did it take for me to get here? And I looked up the average number of viable sperm in an ejaculate, which is somewhere around two hundred million.
23:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, half a billion.
23:31 Chuck Nice? Yeah, some somewhere around there, or it could be, yeah, somewhere. And that means that for just me in that one batch.
23:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm hmm. You're one in two hundred million.
23:44 Chuck Nice? I'm one in two hundred million, just in that one little batch. Forget the other batches that we don't even wanna say what happened to them.
23:53 Chuck Nice? You know, I'm just saying, like, you know, dad was once a teenager, is all I'm saying.
24:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He was once seventeen, yeah.
24:07 Chuck Nice? You know, but that alone gives you an idea of just how hard it is uh for a human being to come to existence.
24:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, and that's another another angle that probability takes you into.
24:19 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
24:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The rarity of who you are as an individual.
24:22 Chuck Nice? Wow, yeah.
24:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, yeah, I don't, Gary, did I hit all the points you you were looking for?
24:27 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, I mean, we, the thing is, if we if we go and do every single one, we are gonna be here for another day.
24:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so Gary, where else are we gonna take this?
24:35 Gary O'Reilly? All right, so we look at our our everyday lives and without realizing it, we are calculating, as we've discussed, and it's kind of like baked into a number of things. We are living our lives online. Some people conduct a whole part of their life online. They'll have maybe a dozen, ten or so online accounts, which they manage, which means passwords, which means protection, which means security, all those things. And the probability of all the bad stuff, probability of it being okay, so. I think what we need to do is speak to someone who's really at that cutting edge of cybersecurity. And for that, we have our dear friends at Bitdefender, the cybersecurity experts.
25:19 Gary O'Reilly? And we have Alex Kochei, I can't believe that's how you pronounce it. If I've got it wrong, I'll stand in a corner. He is their chief security strategist. So this, this guy is a guy who doesn't just try and look after things. He will go after botnets with Europol or Interpol and bring them down. They're on a, a large scale level as well as the personal level. So there's a whole different range of how they operate, which I think could be very fascinating. And add another facet to how probabilities are entwined into our lives.
25:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, because lately, when I choose a password, it tries to tell me whether it's a good password or a bad password. And presumably there's some risk factor calculated to assess that. Otherwise, why would it know anything at all?
26:10 Chuck Nice? Like, one, two, three, four is a bad password.
26:14 Gary O'Reilly? I mean, there's, there's information that you have, right? That's in the public domain. For instance, your birthday, maybe the probability of something bad happening is greater. So we need to speak to that expert and Neil, here is Alex.
26:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alex, hey, welcome to Startalk. Hi Neil, hi guys.
26:34 Gary O'Reilly? Thank you.
26:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hey. You have the bad assist title of anybody ever. It's made up, nobody, it's just made up.
26:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chief, give me the title again, chief what? Chief security strategist. Chief security strategist.
26:51 Gary O'Reilly? We should salute, shouldn't we?
26:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Alex, let me start with a couple of questions here. The word risk is related to probability and statistics. People think they understand risk, generally they don't. Or they, what they do understand is not the full story typically, but they're making decisions about their lives, about their health, their wealth and their security, based on their understanding of risk. So Alex, in what way does the probability of a cyber attack fold into your decisions and your draw?
27:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, this is, as you were talking earlier, because I've been listening. The probability of somebody being attacked, I would say it's biased. From my perspective, is 100%. Everybody will be hacked, or attacked, or scammed at one point or another. But we also did a study a few years back. And all the respondents, in total, like 76% of them said, "I don't think somebody will target me, I don't have enough money, why would I be of any interest?" Super false. That's not how things are going in the cybercrime industry. They're practically attacking everybody.
28:11 Speaker 04 And it's probability and percent of who actually says and accepts that link and clicks on that button and does the next step. So I'm pretty sure, Gary, Neil, Chuck, you've been targeted by a scam at least once in the past two years. I put $10,000 on that.
28:30 Chuck Nice? Yeah, of course.
28:31 Gary O'Reilly? Can I have that $10,000?
28:33 Chuck Nice? I've actually targeted people in scams myself.
28:38 Gary O'Reilly? But the thing is, there's a sophistication to the scam. Because if someone comes in, and this has happened to me, they take a very small amount to begin with. And if you don't notice it and let it skip through your bank statement, they come back in and go, "Grab."
28:50 Speaker 04 No, there's an operating to that. So they tell you, "You can invest in this particular business. You put like, you know, $10, and you receive a return of $50. And then they tell you, if you put more, you'll get more. So you put 10 grand, nothing comes back." How about that? Wow.
29:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so it's a con game. It's not just a cyber attack, all in cyber. There's, somebody has to communicate with you, gain your confidence. And then, so this is just another con game then?
29:25 Gary O'Reilly? It's a shell game. You know, you're moving those shells around. There's a, whatever, the stone underneath.
29:29 Speaker 04 It is, it is. But all these things happen now in the cyber world. So what about WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Facebook, things that you actually use every day? And these platforms are actually challenging you into spending more and more hours in front of them. So when the scammer shows up in your platform, you, you already believe that this app has been vouched, it has been like, uh, uh, checked if it's safe or not. So you already have like a 50% bias to, to do it, right? To fall for it.
30:02 Gary O'Reilly? So our familiarity with, with these platforms, with our time spent on, on a screen, that familiarity breeds the complacency. Is that what you're saying?
30:16 Chuck Nice? I'm sorry, guys. I hate to interrupt, but as you can see, I gotta answer this call. It's potential spam.
30:24 Gary O'Reilly? How about that?
30:25 Chuck Nice? So you know that's, it's just coming in right now. So you know that.
30:27 Gary O'Reilly? Hilarious.
30:28 Chuck Nice? Clearly that's a scam. Somebody trying to get something from me.
30:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, the idea is that when you receive like an anonymous call from a number you don't know, or an email from somebody you don't really know, you're like, yeah, it's probably a scam. I'm gonna ignore it. Like you have your phone, it's potential scam. But when you receive these ads directly to a platform that you trust, you've been using it for years, the chances of you, uh, being biased and ignore, Neil, as you're saying, the probability of being scammed, you're, you pass the bias are so much higher. Like, oh, so I received this ad on Instagram to buy a ticket to, um, some concert. Okay. Maybe Taylor Swift because it's super in the news right now.
31:17 Speaker 04 And it's so much cheaper than the actual prices and it's on this Instagram or Facebook or whatever. You'll buy it.
31:24 Gary O'Reilly? Oh, wow. Then if you read the news, it's about at least a million or more on every concert.
31:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A million dollars?
31:35 Speaker 04 Yep.
31:36 Gary O'Reilly? On every concert?
31:37 Speaker 04 Per country. Per country, per concert, yeah.
31:41 Chuck Nice? That's a very good business.
31:42 Speaker 04 Yep.
31:43 Gary O'Reilly? So now, a lot of bands, a lot of bands use one particular outlet.
31:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, we spend our times doing PhDs and research.
32:12 Chuck Nice? So can I ask, why do they want your emails? Like, I get a lot of emails from, I just delete them because there's either nothing in the body, or it's a link. And I'm like, okay, everybody who knows me knows I'm not opening any links. So I just, I just delete it. Why would you want to get my email list? You hear people say, "Oh, I got hacked." "Don't, you know, my email list got hacked." What is the value in an email list?
32:44 Speaker 04 Okay, so if I get a single email address, okay, I can search known databases of passwords associated with that email address.
32:54 Chuck Nice? Oh my god.
32:55 Speaker 04 That companies or other leaked databases, okay? So I have your email address, and now I have a list of passwords that you used on different websites.
33:05 Chuck Nice? Oh, what?
33:07 Speaker 04 I can go further.
33:08 Gary O'Reilly? Anyone else scared right now?
33:11 Speaker 04 With those passwords.
33:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dude, you're freaking us out, Alex.
33:15 Chuck Nice? Oh my god.
33:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alex.
33:16 Chuck Nice? This is terrible.
33:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alex, shut up now. I don't want to hear anything more from you. I'd rather live in my blissful.
33:24 Speaker 04 If you want, you can give me your email addresses and I can do the search for you.
33:28 Gary O'Reilly? That's, that's, no, no, no, no, no. No, you can't, you've already said, "Trust me," right? Now you want my email address.
33:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He did say, "Trust me."
33:37 Chuck Nice? So wait a minute, first they get your email, then they get the passwords, and what else can they do? I mean, what's the next step?
33:43 Speaker 04 Well, there are many steps later on, because I can see if these passwords are still working, so getting it to your various accounts. I can also see if you have the same password to a different email address that I don't know about. Your business email or your Yahoo email that you used 10 years ago, and you didn't change a password, and I can see all your previous girlfriends from when you were 17.
34:09 Chuck Nice? How about that?
34:11 Speaker 04 There are so many possibilities. If you work in a company and email and passwords work, I can use those to connect to your, I don't know, VPN account, launch a ransomware attack, make some billions out of it.
34:24 Chuck Nice? Okay. Mental note, change all email passwords.
34:29 Gary O'Reilly? Alex, okay.
34:30 Chuck Nice? Every password I must change. Change it every day, every day, yeah.
34:33 Gary O'Reilly? We see hacks, we see data leaks and breaches, and it seems to be one a week almost. And I know you do these, you fight these, these bad actors daily, and thank God that people like you are out there. But are we not now kind of desensitized and people are to the point where it's gonna happen? So what the hell? Have we lost that sensitivity to the impact that this could make?
35:00 Speaker 04 Uh, yes, but not with the right mindset for this conclusion. Because, yes, there are news of cyber attacks literally every day. So when I wake up and read the news, at least one hack per day, right? So people are reading this and they're like, yada, yada, yada, not gonna happen to me. That's unfortunately the bias and the conclusion of having been desensitized by this news. And when it happens, and I've been talking to hundreds of victims, they're like, I had no idea this is gonna happen to me.
35:31 Chuck Nice? You know, I just came up with an idea that I'm sure somebody else has had to have. But why isn't there a service where I subscribe, I have a master password, but then that service changes my password on a daily basis? And all I need to do is have the one password to get into them?
35:55 Speaker 04 Yes, these services exist. They don't change your password every day because you don't have to do that.
35:59 Chuck Nice? Okay.
36:00 Speaker 04 It's recommended to change your password, I would say, maybe every three months, the password that you use on these accounts. But these password managers, this is how they're called, they will do what? So when you subscribe to a service, you don't have to think about, okay, what password should I use? Should it be long, short, numbers? So these are going to suggest a password. They're gonna save it for you. You don't need to know it. And every time you need to log into that service, the password manager will fill in the password for you. And some of the browsers already have this functionality built in, so that's fine. Then are other dedicated software that they're gonna keep this passwords list super protected with super encryption. But yes, the idea is that you remember one single master password
36:45 Speaker 04 and everything else is being taken care of. Because for us, every, you know, regular people, let's be honest. Okay, so now, in 2024, we might have an education of this. But I bet you, we have accounts that have been created in 2010. We stopped using them in 2012. They're still active, the passwords are still poor. I don't know. One, two, three, four, for instance. And there, and there is information in there that can still cause us trouble if it goes out. Oh.
37:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, I've got a different angle here. If password hacking occurs because someone gets access to a file of previous passwords, then they're not actually decoding your password.
37:34 Speaker 04 No.
37:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're not actually figuring out your password from scratch.
37:38 Speaker 04 Correct.
37:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So why is there any difference at all between a simple password and a complex password? They're not decoding your password for its complexity.
37:51 Speaker 04 That is correct. And that's the other reason why you should have a complex password. Because there are different ways into finding out a person's password for a particular account. One of them would be, you know, just brute forcing, trying all the passwords. Another technique would be password spraying, which means trying the most common passwords on a particular account that are known to be used by, by people. And in many cases, this actually functioned because for particular languages, statistically, people use similar passwords. Test one to four, that's quite similar. From one to nine, that's quite similar. I know. In 2024, it sounds stupid. Even nowadays, we find these passwords in reality.
38:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? My password is password, they'll never figure that one out.
38:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody like, uh, from like the military. Uh, like a high-end grade in the military saying that I had a very simple password because I thought they will never try that out considering my job title. It was a.
38:53 Gary O'Reilly? So do you run algorithms based on the probability of a certain set of characters? Yeah. Where do you have a language? Is that right?
39:02 Speaker 04 Uh, not necessarily the probability set of languages, but also but by by words in that particular language. And also there are billions or hundreds of billions of passwords that already are in the public space or the public domain from previous hacks. So you can make a statistics on that. They can say, hey, twenty percent of the people use this password. Let's try that on first.
39:24 Chuck Nice? Wow. And chances are it'll work, huh?
39:26 Speaker 04 We know probability, criminals know probability. So they will do their math first.
39:32 Chuck Nice? Hmm. Damn. Wow, you want to talk about using math for terrible purposes?
39:39 Speaker 04 You can use it for many things. Do you know that joke with a very important mathematician that received a Nobel Prize and he had to fly to get it? And he was so afraid to fly because he thought somebody would be with a bomb in the plane and he wanted to reach the destination. But eventually, at the event, he shows up. Everybody knew about his uh his fear. So they asked him like, hey, we knew your fear about, you know, a bomb exploding. So why are you here? Well, how did you come? Like, well, I took a bomb with me. What were the odds of two bombs being in the same place?
40:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, you can. That joke. No, all that joke is it's older than TSA, right? Because. Yeah, exactly. Before they checked for bomb.
40:28 Gary O'Reilly? So Alex, um, we're in October twenty twenty four right now, but last month there was the National Institute of Standards and Technology, that's the US National Institute. Yeah. That stated, and this was an article that was written in Forbes, so it's a reputable news outlet, that complicated passwords can make you less safe.
40:51 Speaker 04 Yes.
40:52 Gary O'Reilly? Now, we're talking about how to make complicated, different characters and different cases and numbers and all sorts of things. But why, why now complication is an issue?
41:03 Gary O'Reilly? Because otherwise it's password 123.
41:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, there are two ways of defining a complicated passwords. And one of the ways is actually OK. The other way is not really that OK. So by complicating a password by making it longer with alpha characters, numbers and everything else, that's going to make it, that's going to make the password super hard to remember. So unless you're using a password manager, it means that you're going to have to write it down and so on, which basically sets in the mindset of, you know, just giving up. Just giving up, putting the same password because it took you so long to create it or just string them down to make it easier for you. However, you can make long passwords without doing all these characters unless the website was the, or the service forces you to,
41:51 Speaker 04 by having a passphrase. I went to the moon and back in a car. That's pretty safe, OK? Or even a longer phrase, something that's easier to remember. But I think NIST and also our recommendation is to use a password manager that's going to make your life a whole easier. And also use a multi-factor authentication or two-factor authentication. So besides the password, you can use something else or even eliminate the password at all. You can, you can use all these things. You're going to have a better peace of mind by that.
42:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, in fact, I have a couple of websites that don't use passwords.
42:26 Speaker 04 Exactly.
42:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's two-factor authentication.
42:29 Speaker 04 And don't you love going to those websites?
42:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, it's, it's, it's, it's beautiful.
42:34 Gary O'Reilly? OK, so Neil has quite a distinctive voice and he's in the public domain. Are we now at the point where we no longer use voice recognition as the password?
42:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was like in style for like six months, a couple of years ago.
42:49 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, we, we out of that phase because there's just too much AI come along to, to replicate.
42:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, I don't think voice recognition can be still considered a way of authentication. And even face recognition, that's not gonna work any longer. I was in a meeting with some of my colleagues. And one of them was in vacation, but he was showing up in the meeting on Zoom. It was the fake AI, somebody was playing a joke, which was very nice because he seemed a bit younger, he probably had photos from a previous training. But that was, it was scary for us, because we know the possibilities, but it was very nice to have.
43:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait, wait. You just said you had a business meeting? And someone duped you into thinking an AI version of an attendee?
43:40 Speaker 04 Yes, but it was a colleague, it was a colleague. However, there is, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was on purpose. We knew what's going on, we were just analyzing it, and we're just like, oh, this is so cool. He looks so close by. But I remember reading an article quite last week about a scam in China where somebody paid fifty-five million dollars. Because he was in a Zoom meeting with, I don't know, thirteen or fourteen other people from the organization. His manager, COO, CFO, everybody was saying it's safe, he did it. He was the only real person in there. Everybody else was deep fake.
44:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh my god.
44:19 Gary O'Reilly? That's Bond villain badness.
44:21 Speaker 04 That's the level we're talking to.
44:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That is, yeah. I have a question, and plus we gotta sort of think of landing this plane. In the old days, a computer virus was really just mischief. People just trying to see if they could harass you in one way or another. There wasn't much financial motive behind it. And so it was a nuisance. Now, this kind of hacking always seems to have a financial objective. What is the total?
44:57 Chuck Nice? Money earned by bad actors?
44:59 Speaker 04 So I would say a total would be what a total last year was 1.5 trillion dollars.
45:06 Gary O'Reilly? What? There's a T in there?
45:08 Speaker 04 Oh. No, we're talking about ransomware and other scams.
45:11 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
45:12 Speaker 04 These numbers vary. I mean, if last year was 1.5, this year can easily go to two or three.
45:20 Chuck Nice? Trillion dollars.
45:21 Speaker 04 We're talking about scams that target consumers.
45:24 Chuck Nice? Right.
45:25 Gary O'Reilly? I mean, that's that's a national debt for some countries.
45:28 Speaker 04 Yes.
45:28 Gary O'Reilly? Or great.
45:29 Speaker 04 Like I said, these are just money that are earned by cyber criminals. These are not money that count in your financial loss as a victim. Because if you're a company and you pay, that's one number. But you also have a loss in.
45:44 Chuck Nice? You have a loss in productivity, you have a loss of, you know, yeah. So I, God, I can't believe I've been telling my son that he should continue to study to be a biochemist. What the heck?
45:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He's in the wrong business.
45:58 Chuck Nice? He's in the wrong business.
46:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, I got one other thing I have to like just get clear in my head. So that means in your business, you're worth one and a half trillion dollars to this world if you can prevent that.
46:13 Chuck Nice? If you can prevent it, right.
46:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, that's fact one. Fact two.
46:17 Speaker 04 It would protect everybody, which is not.
46:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, but here's my thing. If someone retains you to protect their organization, then they're putting all their trust in you. So maybe the organization won't get hacked. But suppose you get hacked.
46:34 Gary O'Reilly? Oh.
46:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're a single point failure of that entire system. Because we're all entrusting you in this one, what do you call bottleneck?
46:43 Speaker 04 Yep.
46:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of of trust.
46:45 Speaker 04 Yes, that is called supply chain attack. So basically, when you're targeting a customer, you can actually target all the software that they use in their organization. So we have a, if if we have a vulnerability, that's going to affect most of our customers. Yes, that is a correct statement.
47:04 Chuck Nice? So now why aren't you just, uh, why aren't you a good guy?
47:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, you become Dr. Evil.
47:10 Chuck Nice? What what the heck is your problem?
47:13 Speaker 04 Yes, we get that, uh, we get that questions a lot, you know.
47:15 Chuck Nice? Yes.
47:16 Speaker 04 You can make a lot more money on the dark side, but then again, how will you sleep at night?
47:22 Chuck Nice? On a very expensive mattress, that's how.
47:25 Speaker 04 And it's correct.
47:25 Chuck Nice? Because I'm part of a trillion dollar industry that I created.
47:31 Gary O'Reilly? So Alex, you're Chief Security Strategist.
47:34 Speaker 04 Yes.
47:35 Gary O'Reilly? How much of your strategy is, "Oh, this is a supply chain bottleneck. We have to get ahead of a story." How many stories are you getting ahead of rather than putting out fires?
47:45 Chuck Nice? Oh, good point. Hmm, interesting.
47:46 Speaker 04 Uh, I think it's a equal amount, I would say. Because yes, there are some situations that you can actually prevent because you thought about it, you knew that would happen, and you make some plan. But then, by working with your customers and victims and having a lot of conversations with law enforcement, they're going to come up with stories that you were like, "Whoa, I'm an engineer. I never thought of that scam." So you start to figure out, you know, what can you build from a technological point of view to prevent that. So I would say it's a, it's a fair equal amount.
48:19 Chuck Nice? So, you know what? I think we would be remiss if we didn't leave our viewers and listeners having you at our disposal at least one or two of the top things they should do to protect themselves from a cybersecurity incident.
48:36 Speaker 04 So we were discussing about passwords. So that would be like the main thing. Get the password manager, make him take care of your passwords, and try to remember all those accounts that I'm pretty sure are connected to your present accounts, but you no longer use them. They're still active, they're still there, they can still back hacked if they're not already, right? And second, still for consumers, minimize your footprint, your internet footprint. Don't post stupid stuff, okay?
49:07 Chuck Nice? Now you tell me.
49:10 Speaker 04 I'm pretty happy I'm a dinosaur 41 years, so I don't have online all the stupid shit I did.
49:16 Chuck Nice? Oh, don't post stupid things that you did.
49:18 Speaker 04 Exactly.
49:19 Chuck Nice? Oh, I got it. No, no, I don't do that.
49:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. And for, for enterprises, there is a wide range of tips and tricks. But the idea is that since ransomware is the number one threat right now, make sure you have backups and make sure you have systems that are going to log things that happen in your organization. So when we come in and say, "Let's see how you were hacked."
49:43 Chuck Nice? If you have blogs, we're gonna tell you how. If you don't, we're gonna say, well, it happened.
49:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm. Wow. Mm-hmm. Wow. All right. Well, those are lessons for the ages, really.
49:54 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
49:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Actually, for the current age.
49:55 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
49:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Six months.
49:57 Chuck Nice? They're lessons for the next couple of years. Yeah.
50:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Maybe even that. Maybe even that. So Alex, great having you on StarTalk Special Edition on a topic that we all care about. Gary, thanks for putting that together.
50:09 Gary O'Reilly? My pleasure. Thank you, Alex.
50:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good. All right. And Chuck, thanks for doing nothing.
50:15 Chuck Nice? Someone hug Chuck.
50:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, thanks for showing up. Okay.
50:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking out.
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