Cyber risk feels like an early COVID uncertainty

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:22

   Yeah, look, it's a good question. You know, you're talking to a lawyer, right? So very hard for me to give a technical assessment. But generally speaking, when you have an event followed within 30 minutes by another event, following in an hour by another event, and then so on so on so on every couple of hours it kind of starts feeling like we've crossed some kind of threshold right um and you know this has been expected by many i think um so i wouldn't be surprised if it's happening now it certainly seems to be happening now um maybe i don't know like what what do you expect will be the actual consequence i think like when when people think about cyber apocalypse they have multiple different things in mind you know some people are like oh a bunch of people will get hacked for some period of time and you know you'll have to turn on two-factor

2. 2:21

   authentication for your accounts and if you're not careful like you might get your instagram account stolen or something like that and i think other people are imagining something more like there are critical cyber attacks on like for real for real like physical infrastructure in the world and we get stuff like you know every supermarket in america can no longer refrigerate their food and like logistic systems get taken down and uh your power goes out for weeks or something well yeah that's a really good question so um this kind of reminds me of of uh february 2020 right like when we heard about covet 19 for the first time and everyone was like well how bad is it going to be is it going to be like one of those previous flu epidemics or is it going to be something crazier and there um and i don't think that anyone i mean some people had um very

3. 3:19

   strong opinions one way or the other um i so you know it's dangerous to make predictions on a day like today right but i will try anyway i think that the u.s federal government because they've had access to mythos since basically february of this year i am hoping and praying that they have in the background and secretly from the public have strengthened a lot of the really really critical systems to make sure that some of the worst effects won't happen um but we can't know for sure, right? And I think That right now, anything that is vulnerable is going to be attacked by private groups, by state hackers, what have you. So we'll find out. I highly recommend, as a non-technical person, I highly recommend that everyone listening to the show do as much as they can to secure their personal stuff. Two-factor authentication, like change your passwords, like do as much as you can.

4. 4:26

   Yeah, I think this is going to be a project for me over the next couple of days. Yeah, I mean, it, you know, people say this about, people use the COVID analogy all the time. And I think it's worth remembering for people that COVID was very far from the worst case scenario for what could have happened. Like, looking at the state of COVID-19 in, like, Wuhan, China in, like, November, December of 2019, seeing some of the headlines that were coming out of, like, China and then Italy where it was like, oh, my God, like, they literally are, like, filling up hospitals.

5. 5:05

   They have to, like, build new hospitals because there's so many people getting sick. Like, the morgues are filled up because so many people are dying. And now this is spreading to northern Italy. And, you know, my vacation to Italy got canceled because of that. Um, and like, holy shit, like, what is this going to look like? And it turns out COVID was like on, you know, on the grand historic scale of things that have happened to the world and to specifically the day-to-day lives of people in the developed world, COVID was moderately bad, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as say, world war two.

6. 5:40

   Like it could have been, like it could have killed like 10% of the population of the country or something like that would have been really, really bad. Yeah, it could have been like the Black Plague in the Middle Ages, right? Like, there was no way. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it is, I think that there are lots of analogies to COVID because that was a big expect the unexpected moment for a lot of people, right?

7. 6:06

   Prior to COVID, I think a lot of, at least people in my circle, had this kind of nothing ever happens type of mindset for everything, for everything. Like, whatever happens in the world, whatever, the stock market is going to crash by 2%, 3%. You know, a couple of years later, we're going to be out of it. You know, for me personally, it was the second time something crazy like that happened because my childhood was spent in Eastern Europe under a communist regime.

8. 6:35

   And so we had our own nothing ever happens, right? Right. And, you know, the USSR and all its satellite states were supposed to, you know, last for decades, centuries, like the American intelligence predicted this. And then in the span of a couple of years, it all completely collapsed. The economy collapsed. The regime collapsed. It was chaos everywhere. um and um you know a lot of depths and a lot of civil wars so i am totally prepared for number three uh for me and number two for many of you listeners um you know hard to know where it's gonna go but the best you can do to prepare is is the right move right now i think right i want to shout out our sponsor lovable you know the app you've been meaning to build