Speaker 1: I read this report in the Wall Street Journal saying
Speaker 1: that US officials and private experts are warned about being
Speaker 1: warned about possible cyber attacks as a reciprocation from Iran.
Speaker 1: So I thought i'd run this by futurist Skeeve Stevens,
Speaker 1: who's on the phone. Good morning to you. Iran's capability
Speaker 1: is it any good or is it we compared to
Speaker 1: the others.
Speaker 2: When we talk about significant, we're talking about significant as
Speaker 2: they are a nation state.
Speaker 3: What that means is do they have a lot of capabilities?
Speaker 2: Do they have a limited money to do this sort
Speaker 2: of things? Yes, they do, but when it comes down
Speaker 2: to things like versus Israel or the United States, they're
Speaker 2: in a kindergarten level, right. Iran essentially causes chaos, not damage.
Speaker 3: So what they can do is I run around and.
Speaker 2: They're mostly using things like social media, fake person personalities,
Speaker 2: try to mess things up, muddle things up. So the
Speaker 2: example of throwing from the shadows, meaning they can just
Speaker 2: cause mess, but they don't really cause damage and significant damage,
Speaker 2: but they can cause a bit of problems.
Speaker 1: Because I'm led to believe that they have been doing
Speaker 1: cyber attacks for a while.
Speaker 3: So they just like to cause chaos and a certain things.
Speaker 2: So they've like they've done things in the past where
Speaker 2: they've hacked some of the water supply in Israel. But
Speaker 2: you know, every time suddenly happens in Israel, they get
Speaker 2: even better and better and better at it. I mean,
Speaker 2: Israel's potentially I would classify as number one in the
Speaker 2: planet in cyber warfare capabilities. So most of the time Israel,
Speaker 2: sorry to Israel, Iran likes to use their proxies. So
Speaker 2: that's even with hacking groups and things like that. So
Speaker 2: Hezblah has their little cyber activist units and so they're
Speaker 2: mostly their proxies or people that believe in their sort
Speaker 2: of I guess their philosophy, like to do little attacks
Speaker 2: here and there where I mean in the previously the
Speaker 2: time that banks where they've like caused malware problems. They
Speaker 2: like to face websites and do simple denial of service attacks.
Speaker 3: It's basically chaos. This is the way I refer to
Speaker 3: it as it's like.
Speaker 2: Messing things up as opposed to taking things like the
Speaker 2: United States.
Speaker 3: And Israel and even to a certain degree Australia.
Speaker 2: If we attack someone's infrastructure, they're literally off the Internet,
Speaker 2: they're going to be destroyed for a significant period of time.
Speaker 1: So it's less strategic and more problematic. Then, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what I would say.
Speaker 2: It's less strategic, and I mean they're more opportunistic as
Speaker 2: opposed to strategic, meaning if they can break into some
Speaker 2: supermarket websites or cause chaos and maybe take down with
Speaker 2: the denial of service attack like either a bank or
Speaker 2: some political websites during an election. That's the sort of
Speaker 2: things I like to do. It's just like think of
Speaker 2: them as you know, those protesters that are just run
Speaker 2: around the streets breaking things.
Speaker 3: That's the way that I run.
Speaker 2: I run works from a cyber perspective, but it does
Speaker 2: cause annoyance.
Speaker 3: To a certain degree.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they're not in the same league. Is Russia, say,
Speaker 1: China or North Korea in places like that, then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean North Carea is quite limited, but Russia
Speaker 2: and China they do have significant resources. If places like
Speaker 2: that are going to a take you let's say they
Speaker 2: were going to attack Australia, they would be going after
Speaker 2: electricity supplies, gas supplies, water supplies, those sort of things.
Speaker 3: So it's I've.
Speaker 2: Always said for many years now, the next war will
Speaker 2: not be with soldiers on the front line.
Speaker 3: It'll be you and me sitting in our homes when
Speaker 3: the power goes out or the gas goes out.
Speaker 2: I remember many years ago, many many years ago, on
Speaker 2: a union in Melbourne, the gas supply infrastructure in Victoria
Speaker 2: went out and we literally had to have like cold
Speaker 2: showers for about two weeks as they repaired it. So
Speaker 2: that's the sort of thing that they could take out now.
Speaker 2: It's also one of the things people don't understand is
Speaker 2: while there are lots of remote attacks, attributing blame is
Speaker 2: quite difficult because very rarely well a remote states such
Speaker 2: as Iran, Russia, China attack from.
Speaker 3: Their own country.
Speaker 2: It's very easy for us to actually block traffic from
Speaker 2: those countries.
Speaker 3: But what they do is they hack something in Germany.
Speaker 2: That Germany server will hack something in Singapore at Singapore
Speaker 2: service will has something in Australia, so the hack will
Speaker 2: actually look like it comes.
Speaker 3: From Australia itself.
Speaker 2: So trying to say, oh, we're blocking all traffic from
Speaker 2: xyz country when everyone says that, I just kind of
Speaker 2: blob and go, yeah, Really, the Internet is designed not
Speaker 2: to ever be affected, and you cannot take the Internet down.
Speaker 1: I was in Queensland in the eighties when Sea queb
Speaker 1: the Southeast Queensland Electricity Board we're having issues with the
Speaker 1: Jobi occupedis and government and they intermittently cut off the
Speaker 1: power and people were just going nuts. And I did
Speaker 1: read that after seventy two hours, that's when people really
Speaker 1: start to lose their mind if they haven't got electricity
Speaker 1: and they haven't got hot water, like you said, so
Speaker 1: something even for that minimal amount of time does cause
Speaker 1: a huge amount of disruption.
Speaker 3: Absolutely does.
Speaker 1: We have.
Speaker 3: It's a weird psychological effect.
Speaker 2: If you're sitting in your house, like I'm sitting here
Speaker 2: right now, if my power goes out.
Speaker 3: I go, what the hell? What's going on?
Speaker 2: And then if I walk outside though, and I see
Speaker 2: the entire streets out, I go, okay, shared suffering, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, that's right. We sort of chill out a bit.
Speaker 3: But after a.
Speaker 2: Period with electricity, especially when you lose start to lose
Speaker 2: monetary value, like all the items in your freezer and
Speaker 2: things like that, that's when people start to get upset.
Speaker 3: But the thing that affects us the most is the
Speaker 3: things that we never think about.
Speaker 2: You don't sit here turning your tap on going, oh,
Speaker 2: look at that, My taft's awesome.
Speaker 3: I look at my phone. Until you don't have this exactly.
Speaker 2: Until these things that are just air to us, that
Speaker 2: that we just breed daily, until they got to take
Speaker 2: it away from us, we don't realize. But this is
Speaker 2: how we are going to be on the front line.
Speaker 2: But also all of the countries and I'm sure Australia
Speaker 2: to we have operatives in all these other countries. This
Speaker 2: is they all operators here, so they don't this is
Speaker 2: just have to attack remotely siberly.
Speaker 3: From far far away. They can do things here too.
Speaker 1: I did see that the Wall Street Journal ran a
Speaker 1: story about how regulators and governments were issuing warnings to
Speaker 1: businesses to check their defenses. Are the usual defenses we've
Speaker 1: got in place? Okay? Is there anything else that we
Speaker 1: need to do in terms of what security we've got.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry to say this, Shire, but we are probably
Speaker 2: one percent of what we need. Most people try to
Speaker 2: do things themselves. It's like having backups. When was the
Speaker 2: last time you even heard about people backing up servers? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Right? And like people just related to rely on the cloud.
Speaker 2: They relying whatever product they buy, and they also rely
Speaker 2: on whatever it's.
Speaker 3: It integrator is telling them. Are we vulnerable?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, We don't change the passwords of our routers. Like
Speaker 2: I did a talk the other day about accessing web cameras,
Speaker 2: and the problem is it is so easy, and people
Speaker 2: just keep the same factory default settings where you can
Speaker 2: look into people's cameras, to their bedrooms, their bathrooms, their offices,
Speaker 2: and you can see what's going on.
Speaker 3: Because people don't bother. They just assume that technology is safe.
Speaker 3: Now with everything from a few years ago is very
Speaker 3: different now.
Speaker 2: If you go to Bunning's website and look for the
Speaker 2: term grid connect, you will see fans, heaters, light switches, power.
Speaker 3: Everything is smart now. Everything has an IP address.
Speaker 2: And I think it was last year that I was
Speaker 2: messing with my neighbor because he would have bought a
Speaker 2: fan and.
Speaker 3: He didn't realize I was a smart fan and I
Speaker 3: was working on my network at the time, and I
Speaker 3: didn't do it. It's on purpose.
Speaker 2: I went, oh, I don't know what's going on here.
Speaker 2: There's a fan added itself to my network. So I
Speaker 2: was turning his van on and off at three o'clock
Speaker 2: in the morning and he didn't even realize I was
Speaker 2: a smart fan and didn't know what was happening. Now,
Speaker 2: imagine if that was like one of those little twenty
Speaker 2: dollars powerpoints with an IP address in it, and I'm
Speaker 2: turning on and off something that's actually quite critical. Wow,
Speaker 2: everything is smart. Now, everything is smart.
Speaker 1: I wonder what people would be more annoyed at losing
Speaker 1: a hot shower or the Internet.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the Internet these days are kind
Speaker 2: of ubiquitous. I mean, I sit here, I'm using starlink,
Speaker 2: so you can't cut my cables. But then most people
Speaker 2: are on five five G and mobile phones, so to
Speaker 2: take out most people's.
Speaker 3: Internet today, you'd actually have to take out the cellular
Speaker 3: their works. So it's quite hard these days to do
Speaker 3: a lot of that.
Speaker 2: And the Internet's designed specifically to within built innate failover. Now,
Speaker 2: this is the sad thing is your house might not work,
Speaker 2: your fridge might not work. You can't do anything, but
Speaker 2: you can still post on TikTok.
Speaker 1: Well, maybe I should have rephrased the question, what do
Speaker 1: you think people would be more afraid to lose Facebook
Speaker 1: or toilet paper?
Speaker 3: Facebook probably made always good to do it. You Thank
Speaker 3: you so much. No problem will