Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:29:46 · Nilay Patel, S3
[00:29:46] S2: Right? [00:29:47] S3: Because, you know, we're we're frozen in time while while they're, you know, thinking that incredible machine speed. And so you could totally have them rewrite the Linux kernel with this, you know, not quite formal verification. Please, if you're listening and you work at Google or Amazon, go go pitch us. Anyway, here's my pitch. [00:30:03] S2: I'm just saying, I know Jason's listening. So if you you heard it, I'm not even gonna say who [00:30:07] S3: I am. I'm sorry to hear that. I... But I'd say, like, that is the kind of thinking we're gonna need to make it through this. Right? It's like, you you can't... We can't just patch our way through this because it's killing us. And because the other thing that's killing us is companies can't... We are not set up as... You you talk about, like, how we do security, like, for the last twenty years. Kind of the assumption is is, like, we can get a patch and apply the patch, and you're okay. And what's happened is is the exploitation time lines are so incredibly fast that that does not work. That's what we just saw with the PHP bug is we got incredibly lucky that the PHP bug turned out to be really hard to exploit in the wild. If it was a much more wormable bug, it would be a disaster. And so that was the kinda near miss asteroid thing that now the world should, you know, build an asteroid. [00:30:56] S2: Wait. Can I ask you about this? Yes. Yeah. We should definitely put Bruce Willis on a space shuttle. [00:31:02] S3: Don't wanna miss a thing.
00:31:02 · S3, Nilay Patel
[00:31:02] S3: Don't wanna miss a thing. [00:31:04] S2: There's a lot going on in this conversation already. Yeah. I... My pessimism about all these things is very simply expressed. We are... As Americans in particular, we are very bad at doing anything until a bad thing happens. Right? We are... We we love a cure. We hate prevention. A lot of bad things have happened. There's the hugging face attack. You actually... I think you recently said you were happy that happened. It woke people up. There's the PHP bug that, you know, we've we've just had a crazy month of all these breaches. It doesn't seem like that has led to a whole of industry response or a regulatory response or Sundar calling Andy and being like, we're we're doing Linux. What's it gonna take? How bad does it have to get?
00:31:47 · S3
[00:31:47] S3: The Hugging Face incident was good, and it did wake up a lot of people in security. We are a little bit better off because Hugging Face happened, and we saw what was going to be possible a couple months later in open source. But you're totally right. As Americans... And Americans are the only ones, honestly, who can lead the world on this. We're the ones building the AI for the most part. We're the ones who lead the cybersecurity industry. The Chinese are mostly enabling the attackers, not the defenders. They should enable defense. They they want to be participants in the global economy. They they wanna be leaders. They should be doing more on the defensive side, not just enabling the attackers, but that's not happening. So, anyway... But we need to be proactive. And, look, I... Something I have learned now working at, like, in... At Cognition at an AI startup, you can just do things. Like, we need to... Like, seriously, you can just go do things, and we just need to have more agency as a tech industry. We should just go do things. That should be the lesson of the AI era, and we should not be so risk adverse in doing the right things security wise. And I think that's what security teams... If I if I had a a message for other CISOs, is just go do the right thing. Because CISOs are... By our nature, we are risk averse. We are the people who manage downside risk. We have all l and no p in the p and l. Yeah. And I have had to personally, like, break through that natural inclination because, like, you just... You can't just play defense.
00:33:23 · Nilay Patel, S3
[00:33:23] S2: This... But this is my prevention versus cure. Right? The the prevention is cheap, but it's all loss on the p and l statement. Right? It's all just cost. Yeah. If the bad thing happens, like, well, we have to do anything to fix this because there's economic benefit to having a functional business again. And it seems like in this moment, even though... So sort of like basic understanding of that risk versus cost is totally scrambled and no one has quite figured it out yet. [00:33:48] S3: Yeah. I totally agree. So, like, I'll give you a a very practical example of of of a way CISOs and their bosses are going to have to change on this. Every company in the next... I was gonna say six months, but really in the next ninety days is going to have to RTX themselves. You're just going to have You're gonna [00:34:05] S2: have to run the attack on yourself.
00:34:06 · S3
[00:34:06] S3: Yes. If not with real RTX, you're going to have to use a AI red teaming product that is functional equivalent, or you're going to have to hire a company to do that for yourself. If you do not, you will get breached. Yeah. It just... It That's terrifying. Right? Because these things are completely nondeterministic by definition. They are very smart. They are very fast. They are so fast that no matter what... If you hire, like, an AI pen test, AI red team company, they will promise you verbally, oh, it is completely safe. And then they will give you a contract that says, our product will give you cancer, will emanatize the eschaton, and will likely end the human race, and you hold us harmless when any of these things happen. Right? So there is a disconnect between what they will say verbally to you and what their lawyers have written. Right? Because that company has, by definition, only existed for six months or at least the product has existed for six months if it is an older company. They have no idea what their product is going to do when it meets your your software. They have no idea whatever they say to you, but you have to do it because some dude is going to do it to you, and you need to know what is going to happen and and fix it because at least maybe those people will break your system. They might cause downtime, but at least what they're not going to do is steal your data and ransom it or intentionally shut down your blood bank refrigerators. That is what happened in France. Right? So that is exactly the kind of thing that a CISO... A conservative CISO would never even ask to do, and a conservative company, even if they have a risk taking CISO, would never let their CISO do. And so what they're... What's gonna happen next six months? A ton of companies are gonna get breached by some 19 year old running RTX and then buying tokens off OpenRouter or running it locally on their gaming PC. Right? They're gonna turn off Call of Duty, run RTX, then turn Call of Duty back on. Right? And while they did that, they broke into a bank who their policy said, oh, we can never red team ourselves. Or they said yes, but they ended up in a thirty day negotiation because their lawyers are like, I want to have... You have to have a $100,000,000 in insurance, and we wanna have, you know, this kind of...
00:36:21 · S3, S4
Like, they say yes, but their vendor risk management process and their legal process is so onerous. There's no possible way they could actually accept the risk. That is my message also. You are going to have to take that risk to actively red team yourself, to front run the bad guys who are going to be... Who are doing that right now, right now, as we speak, and as people are listening to this twenty four hours from now, you are possibly have an AI system who is trying every single API endpoint and website that you pass... You might not know you have because it was like a marketing site that was set up a year ago for an for an executive event, and is gonna find a bug and get in, and then it's gonna move incredibly fast through your network. So you'd rather pay somebody or have your own team do that. You need to accept that risk. And almost no company larger than a couple 100 people has a risk management framework that allow them to do that. Ad[00:37:25] S4: Support for the show comes from CrowdStrike. Here on Decoder, we're peering beyond the traditional tech realm and into all the places AI is shaking things Cybersecurity is key to that conversation. CrowdStrike gets that. That's why AI detection and response or AIDR is emerging as a new category of cybersecurity for the AI era. It helps organizations see, monitor, and secure AI across the enterprise. CrowdStrike. We secure AI. We stop breaches. Go to crowdstrike.com/decoder to learn more.