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We explore the risks arising from the use and misuse of digital devices and electronic communication tools. We interview experts in the fields of cybersafety, cybersecurity, privacy, parenting, and technology and share the wisdom of these experts with you!
Welcome to the Cyber Traps podcast.
I am excited to have Deborah Wells, sorry, Deb Wells.
Excuse me.
If you can call me Deb.
You call me Debra.
If saying Debra, usually with inflection on Debra.
Debra, I know that I'm in trouble.
that I'm in instruction.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, we are here at the Inch 360 conference.
You received an achievement award on behalf of BECU today.
you wanna talk a little bit about that?
Well, very exciting.
I, I didn't really realize, so can I tell you the funny story
Story?
Yes.
I like it.
So I was at inch 360.
Was it last year or year before?
Time flies.
Anyway.
So I had known about this conference and I had thought about coming back and timing wasn't great.
But anyway, I have a colleague out of Spokane Falls Community College, mark, and he was talking, I guess, to Heather or Christina or one of the organizers and says, do you know anybody from BECU?
You know, and Mark.
He's like, Deb.
Deb Wells.
And so that's how I knew about it.
And it was only like a couple weeks ago.
And so the I'm like an award.
That's great.
What's for?
And it's an achievement award, a cyber achievement award.
And all I can think of is BEC U'S been around for a long time.
I mean, even I think Chad mentioned during the presentation of the awards that BECU has been around for 90 years.
It's true.
You know, long And And it we started.
You know, with couple guys the back of their car wanting to have some sort of way to buy tools for Boeing aircraft.
don't tap on the table though.
Oh, okay.
Thanks.
We hear it all.
That's all right.
alright.
I can't hear it.
Okay.
Well good.
so anyway, so I figured, well, achievement award for 90 years, maybe no for, it's a cyber achievement award because BECU takes such great I wanna say
pride is probably not the right word, but you could say pride, but take goes to great links to make sure that our members protected and our employees too.
'cause we have over, what, 3,200 employees now?
And we wanna make sure that it's all protected.
So that's the reason we receive the award.
And also we are a platinum member of inch 360.
So that probably was a little bit, but I think it's more of how much BECU is focusing on cybersecurity for our members, because let's face it, Jethro.
Cyber criminals just love to hit financial institutions 'cause they know they can get elderly folks with scams and things like that.
It's just, it's heart wrenching.
It.
It really is, and it is one of the real tragedies of our day is that.
We have to worry so much about that.
And truly, we put a great, as consumers put a great amount of trust in our financial institutions that they're going to keep our money safe and not have it get taken from us.
Whether that is by our own fault or by someone being a bad actor.
And even when it's, it is our fault, we still want the bank to take care of it.
Right.
Yep
and that puts a tremendous amount of pressure on you as the bank to provide that service.
And BECU does do a good job of that.
And it's one of those things that if I get burned by a financial institution, I'm never gonna go back to them, you know?
And
eavesdropping over here?
That's what talking to.
No, I wasn't,
because you know, there are so many credit unions and banks and things like that people can choose from.
It's not just there's only one available.
There is a multitude, and so you burn that.
The reputation piece that I was talking about in our panel as well is it's irreplaceable.
You and we don't want that.
We want people to say, oh.
BECU.
Yeah, that's where I have my money.
That's where I have my loans.
That's where kind of thing.
Funny.
Can I do another
question?
Yes, please.
So I was flying back from Tukwila, 'cause headquarters of BECU is Tukwila.
And I was in the airport there in Seattle and I was going to, I think it's Anthony Seafood right there.
I dunno if
It's good food.
And I had my BECU cares t-shirt on and the waitress comes up and goes, I'm A-B-E-C-U member.
Her and I said, oh, really?
I'm doing everything I can to protect all your assets.
She gives me a big hug.
I loved it.
We had pictures taken together.
And so, I mean, and that's one of the things, if you can look our members in the eye when I go to the headquarters there and I'm just down in the lobby or at one
of our neighborhood financial centers and just look in our members in the eyes, even though they don't know who I am, I don't have like a big cyber moniker on me.
But, I just look at him, I said, this is my reason.
This is my icky guy.
If you've ever you know, that.
But so yeah.
/
That's awesome.
I appreciate that.
And the thing that I like about this conference specifically is that it brings people like you together locally who are here part of the community.
Because even though we.
We may be part of large institutions or connected to large institutions.
When it comes down to it, we are all people in a specific place.
And that really makes a difference when you are looking into the eyes of other people who are involved in your same community, that things do impact us that happen here.
And so if.
You know, a bank or a medical provider or somebody or a utilities company gets hacked here, or there's ransomware, then it's going to affect all of us because we live here.
And it's not like it's some nameless thing that's gonna happen, oh, that's somebody else somewhere else and we don't need to worry about it.
It's going to impact us even if we don't do anything really with that company.
And so everybody taking it seriously and knowing the other players and being able to network and get to know each other is really valuable.
Would you mind talking a little bit about the panel that you gave today and what your topic was and what your main points were that you wanted to get across, or maybe something that you didn't get to say that you wanted to.
That's okay
I'm usually not a lack for So the panel that I was asked to be on, which at first I scratched my head.
'cause in my part or my roles there at B-E-C-U-I, I don't handle the day-to-day insurance, the cyber insurance.
And some of those I do obviously compliance, 'cause compliance is, everybody is in their space.
But the panel was on basically.
Cyber insurance versus mitigating controls versus audits and kind of how it all kind of melds into each other.
And the neat thing about it is, well, I guess for me to be on something like that, insurance is great, right?
If you need insurance, car insurance, health insurance, if you have it and it covers what you need, perfect.
But you always try to strive to not run a red light to not yeah.
I don't know.
Do something that's not good for your body so that you don't have to rely on that.
And the same thing for insurance.
It's like a safety net if you need it because you can't control everything.
And so you have that insurance that you can go fall back on.
Not a hundred percent, but it's good to have.
But then why not?
Work with our audit and compliance and those folks to make sure that we're not wasting time.
'cause I'm a big efficiency person.
You know, let's not recreate the wheel if we don't have to.
Now do, should we use AI for everything?
No.
And I'm like our guest speaker.
I believe it's pronounced Kane.
He was very good about saying don't just run everything through AI and expect it to hold water in court or even hold water for your
organization.
Because you just and I loved his quote about if it's a broken process, do not automate, because a lot of people think I'll automate, automate, automate for efficiencies.
But that's not always the case because efficiencies for the sake of efficiencies is not always efficient.
I mean, I know that sounds probably stupid,
No.
but the fact is, if you run through something, because I'm gonna run it through AI because I'm gonna save time, and in the end it comes back and bites you in the butt, and then you have to start all over from scratch or then it takes you even more time.
You've lost your efficiency.
Well, and the other thing, Deb, is that maybe you didn't even need to do that thing in the first place.
And that's the question that we need to be asking.
Instead of saying, I could just use AI for that.
Ask yourself, should I even be doing that in the first place?
Because there's a good chance you probably don't even need to.
And so I work a lot with school principals and they are loving AI because it helps them write letters and.
Reply to emails and all this kind of stuff.
And the reality is they probably don't need to do all that stuff.
And we don't need more emails and more stuff coming at us.
What we need are problem solved and people being taken care of and sometimes the emails get in the way of that.
Really what you need to do is just pick up the phone and call somebody or walk down the hall talk in person.
And those things, AI can't help with that.
And they might be able to help you, like brainstorm a way to approach it better, which is fine, but don't even send the email.
Like take a look at that first and make those kind of decisions because you're right, automating a broken process or automating something that is not worthwhile already don't even do it.
It doesn't even need
time and it's not efficient.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And then it comes back to, there's a thread there that I'd like pull on a little bit because you mentioned I talked about our members and look at 'em in the eye and knowing that there are, it's not just a, an account number or a username, right?
It's a person who has financial needs.
But the same thing goes for AI in terms of if I'm going to take the.
My it's gonna take the joy out of what I'm doing, or it doesn't, it can't emulate your personality or for me, the best thing I could ever do is hand write something.
Yeah.
That with my heartfelt, with my mistakes, with maybe my grammar's, not a hundred percent correct.
Because that's the human part of it.
And I, we just, I was on another panel not too long ago with Women in Tech and we talked about using AI in a way to help where you can, but then don't
lose the joy of the journey because I wanna write a book, Jethro, I wanna write a book and you know what, I could hit probably, this is what I want.
You know, if I type it into my, prompt it into ai and it would it would me out a book.
Where is the joy of the journey then?
You lose all that.
Yeah.
Yeah Just because I wanna make money.
No.
Because I want to learn myself and I want to enjoy that adventure of where that book takes me.
Yeah.
So,
So I've written four books and I'm currently working on my doctorate, and I kept trying to get the AI to write my.
Literature review and it could not do it good enough.
I tried three different kinds of ai.
Not one of them could do it in the way that was acceptable to me, and so I had to do it myself, and I really wanted, because it's kind of a hoop to jump through.
I really wanted AI to just do it for me, and it couldn't do it, and so I ended up having to do it.
And what I learned from doing it myself was so valuable and worthwhile.
You don't want to give up on that journey because you do learn a ton and it makes you a better person.
And we don't wanna take that away from ourselves.
We only harm ourselves when we do that.
So really appreciate you that point.
Yeah.
Well, Deb, thank you so much for taking the time to be part of the Cyber Trapps podcast.
I appreciate you being here and appreciate all you've done to support Inch 360 as well.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Have a good afternoon.
You too.