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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Craig, welcome aboard to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me Ari.
Speaker 1:You are a Rotarian. What is a Rotarian?
Speaker 2:Rotarian. Rotary is an international service organization. It's found in every country of the world in all the major cities, and it is a community service organization. It's both acting both locally within the communities that they operate within and internationally. A little known fact is that Rotary International has a mission to eradicate polio from the world.
Speaker 2:And they are so, so close. They've partnered up with the Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation to bring the polio vaccine in drops. You have to put the drops in the mouths of the children to vaccinate them against polio. And it was so close, but then
Speaker 1:For wars the audience that doesn't know what polio is, it's an awful disease. This will make you into a cripple basically. So it's a terrible, terrible disease. And you know some people might be thinking, 'Ah, polio is gone from this world', no it's coming back for different reasons, I don't want get political, but polio is coming back and we're seeing resurgences of polio so for some terrible reason this is still a thing forty, fifty years later. So this is not a, this is an awful, awful disease.
Speaker 2:It really is.
Speaker 1:And rotary is not like any other nonprofit. In fact there is no rotary organization. Each club is its own thing.
Speaker 2:Yes. In fact, I'm part of the Portsmouth Rotary Club that just celebrated its one hundredth anniversary as a rotary club. And rotary only has been around one hundred and fifteen years, if I'm not mistaken or so. So Portsmouth was one of the very first in the country of The United States.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think that started in Chicago, I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 2:I remember may I tell one story about rotary? Sure. Sitting at the dinner table, 1985, my dad comes home for dinner. My mom made dinner. She was a nurse, but she, she used to cook dinner for us.
Speaker 2:So we sit down and, so what happened today? Well, went to rotary today. We had three members resign in protest. What do you mean, dad? Well, we admitted our first woman into the Rotary Club of Saint Catharines, Ontario, and three members, old men, said, I'm not having it.
Speaker 2:I will I will resign my position in rotary, and I'm leaving the club. Three, just because one woman came into the club to act as equal footing. Right. And the world has never been the same since. Now Rotary is filled with women of all amazing capabilities and talents and, and men are there.
Speaker 2:And, you know, if you go down the, the non binary, what have you, you have people of all makes shapes and sizes, and it's a beautiful organization that does amazing good work. But I remember that story to this day. And, my father was just, he was kind of upset with these three men because they're like, you don't see the world. We have to have women in this club for it to succeed in the long run. We can't be exclusionary.
Speaker 2:That So was my road experience.
Speaker 1:When was this? What year was this? Do you remember?
Speaker 2:I want to say mid eighties, 1984, 1985. I was probably 10 or 12 then.
Speaker 1:That was, that was quite late in the, in the game. I mean, wasn't, it wasn't the sixties. This was right after the different revolutions that we've had. So that's quite late in the game for those guys to do that. Yes.
Speaker 1:I've got to ask you about my absolute favorite rotary thing.
Speaker 2:What is RILA? Rotary Youth Leadership Award. And it is given as an award to young leaders in the community. You have to apply to your local Rotary Club. And it's usually a weekend long event.
Speaker 2:In my case, I went to a local private school where they housed us for the weekend. And you spend the weekend learning about leadership and what it means to be a leader, but not just any leader, right? You can learn about leadership. And for example, we did a game where we had two groups of individuals in different rooms. And we were negotiating some agreement where if we both cooperated, we both got X a dollar and a dollar.
Speaker 2:But if we double cross the other team, we could get $3 However, if they double crossed us, we double crossed them. Everybody got nothing. And if we all cooperated, we got a dollar each or a dollar 50 each, whatever it was.
Speaker 1:I'll send out as the prisoner's dilemma.
Speaker 2:The prisoner's dilemma. And we learned about the value of win win solutions in that case and how you would be honest and truthful in your negotiations and that sort of thing. There have even been game shows that have been based on that formula. But at the end of the day, those were the kinds of exercises we learned about how to communicate, how to trust each other, how to, find the win win solution in a complex thing. And it was just transformative in my youth.
Speaker 2:It was an amazing experience. I understand you went through it too, Ari. What was your favorite recollection?
Speaker 1:I was, I was actually multiple times a counselor and what I did is called RILA Plus which is the version of it for kids with physical disabilities. So it's an incredibly special program and I think the most special moment in the program is actually at the end and there's a session called You Are Not Alone where the kids basically share, you know, their challenges, their trauma and everybody kind of says, You are not alone and you know, the team supports each other. It's one of the, you never leave that session without, you know, completely in tears and the children very often, you didn't mention this, then become counselors after. So they come back and become counselors. I was one of the old geezer counselors but actually the program is run by the young counselors who were just last year or a few years ago, in the program itself, we just kind of give the guidance from from you know high level.
Speaker 1:They, you know, every single one of those counselors, I actually interviewed, I think it was like 20 something of them and they told me how the program changed their life and it's just crazy in that session they always talk about it and they always cheer up when they talk about that session and the program and all so it's, I think very few people know about rotary, know about Ryla, which is crazy to me because it's changed so many lives for the better. I always appreciate it when we can say a good word about it. Absolutely. And you didn't mention this, but I read that your dad was a Rotarian for fifty years. That's pretty Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's a Paul Harris Fellow, which, for those of you that don't know what that means, if you do it, if you, the motto of Rotary is Service Above Self. Yes. And, and if you do represent that in your work life or in your professional life or in your, just your community service life, you can be recognized as a Paul Harris fellow. And my father was a dentist and he traveled all over the world to do free dentistry with my mom who was a nurse.
Speaker 2:So I could tell you dozens of stories, but he's been to Guatemala and Central America at least a dozen times. He's been to Africa, a half dozen times. He's been to Nepal and India and some of these places just to bring free dental work to sometimes to indigenous people, sometimes to anyone that is in need. And he was recognized and my mom too. My mom is not a Rotarian practicing, but she's been recognized for her service.
Speaker 2:She traveled to India to deliver polio vaccinations as a nurse one time, and she was recognized for that. So, yeah, they're they're all yeah. So he's done quite a bit of
Speaker 1:work So in his we're gonna hit this one last time, I promise, and we'll move The four way test. What is that? Is it the put it right there in your LinkedIn. Why did and, you know, after you explain it, tell us why you put it right there in your LinkedIn. I have a feeling that has significance to you.
Speaker 2:Well, it's words to live by. It's how you, if you run, I I'm a CEO of a company and we're trying to help change the world and bring cyber literacy to the world, to the masses, by teaching you how to protect yourself from attacks that seem to be growing in frequency and damage when they occur.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:so when you think about how you want to run a business, you know, my father taught me a lot about how to run the business from his running a dental practice, we'll say how to treat your customers. You know, when there's someone in your chair, you should be as interested in their purse, their life and their daily experiences as their teeth. And that creates a connection and a, and a relationship. He had, he had multi generational patients. So the fathers and mother came and then the children, then the grandchildren came before he retired.
Speaker 2:But the four way test is just a good way to run your business. So it's been a while for me, so I'll have to see if I can remember it, but it's, is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? And the last one is the last
Speaker 1:one's always hard. I'll help you here. It's will it be beneficial to all concerned?
Speaker 2:Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
Speaker 1:That's So it's It's more than how to run a business. It's a statement of values, right? It's really values to live by. Why did you put it in your LinkedIn? The actual four way test.
Speaker 1:You didn't explain about polio, about rotary. You just put the four way test there. Why did you do that?
Speaker 2:I think it's just a good reminder to myself and it talks, you know, I'll say this, and tell me if you've had the same experience. In your day to day businesses, you come across all sorts of people. The moment I find out someone's a Rotarian, I instantly put a value judgment on that person. Right? They live by the four way test.
Speaker 2:They, know they're not negotiating something. Here's the dynamics of what we're going to experience. I bend over backward to help those people because they bend over backward to help people they don't know. And it's just a way to pay it forward. So having that on my LinkedIn profile just helps people know maybe a little bit more about who they're dealing with, and some of the values judge, the values that I live by.
Speaker 1:This really segues us into is that not everybody lives by the four way test. In fact, organized crime is a thing. Organized crime used to ask for protection money, so I heard, at least that's what I learned from the Godfather. They're doing a few more sophisticated things nowadays. What does it look like?
Speaker 1:What is organized crime doing today, at least as it comes to your profession?
Speaker 2:Right. So organized crime has learned in the recent decade, last decade or so, that, you know, physical crimes are difficult to get away with. There's a lot of cameras, there's a lot of surveillance, there's a lot of difficulty in moving those things around the world. But what's not difficult is to hide your tracks online. And it's not hard to find hackers that you can hire to write your code, to execute your compromises, to ransom the end users for financial gain through Bitcoin, to take those Bitcoins and have it be untraceable back to you.
Speaker 2:Now Bitcoin has proven to be a little bit traceable. If you remember the colonial pipeline ransomware event from about five years ago, the FBI was able to track the wallets down and recover the funds. Many of the hackers of the world are now changing to Monero coin, which is a more decentralized cryptocurrency and is less easy to accomplish those things. Some would say it's nearly impossible. Hackers get better as time goes by.
Speaker 2:But organized crime has decided it's easier, it's less risky, and it's more profitable to perform cybercrimes and make their money that way. They're hiring smart people to write code and to compromise networks and to extort people for money in multiple different ways. If you add in AI, it's getting even better at doing those things. If you add in the cryptocurrencies of the world, getting easier to spend the money that you make. It's so lucrative that the third largest economy by some expert opinions last year was cybercrime.
Speaker 2:So take The United States economy at say 33,000,000,000,000 or so dollars, then China at say $22,000,000,000,000, then cybercrime is the next largest economy in the world, not Germany, not India, not anywhere else. It's cybercrime profitability from all these tragic events with companies and people, individuals is represented anywhere from $10 to $12,000,000,000,000 by some accounts. And what's really scary, Ari, about that fact is that that's what we know about. If you think about the unreported cybercrimes, because let's face it, when is the last time you heard a business stand up and say, Hey, I've been breached. I have had to pay a million dollar or $30,000 or $50,000 ransom, or I wired money to nobody, I don't know who it was, nobody talks about it.
Speaker 2:Nobody reports it. It becomes a line item on a report somewhere. It maybe get missed in that large estimate of value. So the number, the amount of cybercrime that's out there could be even larger. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're probably gonna hide it as an insurance cost or something like that too, they want to be malicious. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right. And so it's attracting more and more people to get into it. Mafia, the organized crime are getting into recognizing the value. And so we all, as good law buying citizens are taking the burden on ourselves, for the simple reason Ari, that, you know, you go to university, you get a degree, you get zero training on cybersecurity literacy training. Might
Speaker 1:even Why learn from your not? And I'm, and I'm kidding on one of your soapboxes, but why university? Why don't we get, get taught this in, in, you know, high school, Right? Why is
Speaker 2:this the first through eighth grade. I remember the day my son came home to me, and he said, dad, somebody emptied my Xbox account. I had $50 in it. It's gone. And I said, well, did you have a password on it?
Speaker 2:He goes, yeah. And it was 13 characters long. And then I spelled out his first and last name. Was it your first and last name? How'd you know?
Speaker 2:Well, I did I knew you were I knew you paid a little attention to what I said about password length, but I don't think you really paid attention to what I was trying to teach you. So, so in grade schools would be the perfect time to start teaching password hygiene, social engineering hygiene, whether it's via an SMS text or an email or a QR code on a parking sign in a major city.
Speaker 1:You got to tell that story. That's that one scared me.
Speaker 2:That one was like, that's brilliant. What's the QR code thing? What are the crooks doing? So I live near Boston and I go in very infrequently, but sometimes to, I'm a big hockey nut and I go to the Boston Bruins game. And if you park in the garden, it costs you $40 for one night.
Speaker 2:So there's other parking lots around and some of them have QR codes on the sign to pay for parking. But occasionally I'll look at the sign and there's a sticker with a QR code on the sign, not the actual printed sign, which you would get from a, from a vendor of signs. And I look at that sticker and I go, gosh, darn it. People are going to be paying the hacker and they're gonna come out and have a fine for not having or their car might not be there. It might've been towed because there was no payment for parking.
Speaker 2:QR code attacks are rampant because you just don't know the vo veracity or the validity of the QR code you're scanning, whether it's in an email, whether it's on a on a When you're on mobile,
Speaker 1:it's even harder to kind of recognize the signals. Right? And is this SSL, is it encrypted? What's the domain? Mobile makes it a little bit harder, so it's even worse.
Speaker 1:Right. That one that one, I'm not even I'm not even sure how to protect myself from that one. What do you do you do? How do you know if the QR code is legit?
Speaker 2:Well, outside of like, and I will throw one parking legitimate parking app under the bus. They were really good about handling their breach, but park mobile was breached about three years ago and they sent multiple emails. Hey, we've had an incident. We've reset your password. We think we've got everything contained, but we wanted you to know.
Speaker 2:So that's the best you can do when you've had a breach. But ParkMobile and all these other parking payments, they usually have an app, not a QR code to pay. And so the apps, if they come from the Google Play Store, the Apple, you know, Play, whatever the Apple Store is called, they can not a 100% be trusted, but 90% trusted. If the app suddenly asks you to listen to your microphone for some reason, it's a parking app, you gotta say, what the heck? No way.
Speaker 2:Don't give it any permissions. But generally speaking, if you're using an app, it's okay. It's the QR codes that really bother me. Right? And you'll see QR codes on, in Downtown Boston a lot of times for this theater or this play or this here to get more information about those things.
Speaker 2:But it would be so easy for someone to put a fake play sign up as a printed, you know, staple it to the, to the advertising boards around Boston. And you're going get people to buy tickets that way, you're giving your money away. So it's really, really hard to know. The thing I would always do is if you say, oh, it's at the music playhouse in Boston, go to Google, go to AI, say, give me the website for the music playhouse. Make sure everything is synced.
Speaker 2:And if you're on the website and it's SSL, it's encrypted and it's, you know, you've got your certificate that is, you know, things are changing with certificates too, Ari. You're going to have shorter and shorter lifespans for certificates in the next few years where you have to renew a certificate every three months in case something bad happens to the domain. It's going to be no, null and void every three months and then even shorter than that. But if it's encrypted, you'd have a pretty reasonable understanding that you're at the right place doing the right thing. And, if, if you're still not sure, call, pick up the phone and call the music playhouse to say.
Speaker 1:And this tactic is applicable in almost every situation. Right? Somebody calls you, hey, this is Chase Bank. Cool. I'll call you right back.
Speaker 1:You don't call them the number that they gave you or texted you. You Google it or you take it from your credit card at the back of your credit card. Chase is right there. If you're, you know, call the, call the theater or call the watch, just make sure that the start, the source of information that you're using is real and verified.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So so so I I love that piece of advice because it can be used in so many different ways. Wonderful. So I have a difficult question for you. If you could change, like you had godly power you could change a law, one law, what would it be? Wow.
Speaker 1:And obviously we're talking cybersecurity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No, I would think about cybersecurity. That I know that capital punishment is not a deterrent to crimes being committed. So that wouldn't be it.
Speaker 2:Right. But the thought crossed my mind. No, that wouldn't work because it, it only, it doesn't really, the, the psychology studies say it doesn't work as a deterrent because in the heat of the moment, are going to still kill each other. They're still going to rob each other irrespective of what the damages are. I guess what it would be is to have more of a victim statement put in front of the criminals that cause these problems to go to grandma Jane, who was at her life savings, emptied from her account, look her in the eye and say, I'm sorry, I stole your life savings and you have nothing to live on.
Speaker 2:And you're now stressed out the wazoo because you can't pay your rent. You can't pay your house, your mortgage, whatever. And maybe it's just to have the victims and the criminals just see each other for the damages caused. And there's something along those lines where just having the ability to know the harm and the damage you're causing, maybe that's a better deterrent or I'm not sure. That's a tough question.
Speaker 2:Don't really have a good answer. Do you have one? Have you thought about it?
Speaker 1:I love your answer because you're seeing the good in human beings and assuming that, you know, even criminals have empathy. I'm not certain that that's true. That might not be true, right? Your answer says so much about you and that's why I love it because you see the good in people. I'm not sure that's true.
Speaker 1:If I had to pass a law, I, you know, I think it would be more about, just eliminating passwords. I would, I would somehow create a mechanism that every single software in the world had to use like 2FA.
Speaker 2:Pass keys are very much that solution right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the Mac's right, the keyboard, your fingerprint, that's a pass key. I use that. I have this believe it or not, which is the Google pass key. It's a physical thing. This is probably the strongest thing you can do right, there's nothing stronger than this but even if it was like mandated that every single software in the world had to turn on 2FA which is a text to your mobile which isn't the most strong thing but it's still so much better than having nothing.
Speaker 1:I think that's the law I would pass.
Speaker 2:Yep. Craig, we have a different law that says, here's what I would do. I would make mandatory basic cyber literacy training a requirement for K through eight grade or K through because the truth of the matter for anyone listening to this, the truth of the matter is that 90% of the breaches out there are, are a lack of a small lack of knowledge paired with a whole bunch of common sense. If you had the knowledge and you had the common sense to put these two together, you wouldn't be taken advantage of in so many of the cases, 90% of the cases.
Speaker 1:Craig, our time unfortunately is over. However, we have one question we ask every single guest. It's a difficult one and it's a personal one. If you had to go back to the hardest moments in your life, whether it was, you know, three months ago or twenty years ago, what advice would you give yourself?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great question. Such a good question. I know we're short on time, so I'll summarize it as follows. Eleven years ago, I was terminated from employment at a company at a large U S bank. I had been competing for eighteen months with one other gentleman for the same single role as a cybersecurity lead in their organization.
Speaker 2:And I did some soul searching and decided to found my company cyber hoop. And I thought, oh my God, I don't know the first thing about all this stuff. I don't know how to incorporate. I don't know how to charge people. I there's so many unknowns.
Speaker 2:And then I said to myself, you know what? You're a pretty smart feller. You are smart enough to figure out the answer to most of the problems you face. And if you give yourself a little bit of a chance, a little bit of time to do it, I think you'll be okay. And I think you'll figure it out.
Speaker 2:And I did. And it was the single best decision of my life was to found my own company, to be my own boss, to build cyber literacy into the world. Today we train a 100,000 people in our platform and we are really making a difference because we're turning an industry focused on punishment and shame of mistakes and preventing clicks into an industry of rewarding the good behaviors we want to see more of, which is just common sense. It's good parenting. It's good dog training.
Speaker 2:It's good cyber literacy training. Reward the things you want to see more of, and they are repeated and internalized. That's the golden rule. So that's the answer to the question. Have faith in yourself and your ability to solve the things you don't know how to solve today, but tomorrow you'll figure it out.
Speaker 1:Correct, Taylor. Thank you so much for joining the show today. I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:It's been my pleasure, Ari. Thank you so much.