Hacked - Holiday Retrospective 2022

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

In which we look back on a hack-tacular year, and fail to live up the episode we had Chat GPT write for us by only really talking about two topics. Network access security that scales with your business — NordLayer secures your organization’s traffic and data to provide your colleagues with safe, reliable, remote access. nordlayer.com/hacked Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I don't have an introduction written for our 2022 year-in-review episode, Scott. Do you want me to wing one? Is that what you're asking? You just want me to make this up? Well, I was thinking we just let ChatGPT write it for us. That brilliant idea. I've got a prompt already, like hot in the oven, kind of like a cooking show, ready to go. I fully support this decision. This is maybe the best decision you've ever made. I think this is the future we're getting on it early. All right.

Okay. So can we just use this to write our podcast episodes? I think we're about to find out. Yeah, I think if this plays. Can we just go? I think we just outsource this whole thing. We get that Adobe sweet thing that like reproduces our voices.

We just kind of feed it prompts, let it read our old podcast and figure out, you know, kind of I'm the snappy one and you're like the storyteller one. And it just takes it from there. Yeah, we give it like a breakdown of us as characters. the subject we wanted to write about. And we see how it does. We're putting a lot of faith on this, considering we haven't read a single word

that it has produced for us yet. I too think we can outsource our entire jobs to this artificial intelligence. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. 2020, it's been a wild ride with major data breaches, new advancements in AI in the ongoing debate over privacy and surveillance. In this episode, we'll be discussing

some of the biggest stories of the year, highlighting the major players and offering our insights on where the industry is headed. Okay. That's like a little too commercial for us, but like pretty like I would fully expect to hear that on most podcasts. That sounds about right. I mean, it's a little commercial and it's also making, I'm going to be honest, it's describing a better podcast than we're about to produce.

Like highlighting the major players, I'm like, I don't, I don't have their names written down. I don't, it's writing, it's making promises that we cannot keep. Hey, hey, hey, fake it till you make it, Jordan. Fake it till you make it. Okay, I'm telling it to make it dumber, use made up words like hacktacular. All right, 2020, 2022 year in review. From massive data breaches to sneaky fishing scams, it's been a wild ride. We'll be discussing the major players, the most epic hacks.

and our, it's pretty good, and offering our insights on what the future holds for the hack happy world of technology. Okay, okay. So grab your favorite beverage, Scott. I'm still reading this. Put on your tinfoil hat and join us as we take a deep dive into a hacktacular year. Wow. Not bad.

Definitely like a little too corny, a little more corny than we'd go, but, but wow. I think it's been a pretty hack happy year. year if you ask me. Wow. I can't wait to talk about crypto, you know, like I can't wait to talk about AI. I feel like I take every advantage on this podcast to bash crypto and I feel like I'm like unabatedly doing so and like I think we've seen a few of the crypto bros show up in the podcast reviews. There's been a few like salty ones. So I think the I could I could see it. I could see how people are how people are responding to it, but you know what? I don't care. Yeah, I saw a comment. I mean, that's interesting because some of them might just be legitimate criticisms that maybe I say um and you know a little bit

much, but I like to imagine that it's just people that are salty about their crypto line going down. That's the new story I'm going to tell myself whenever I read those negative little bits of feedback. Well, if you didn't already deduce it, that's exactly what I tell my. myself. Clearly we can do no wrong. It has to be people upset with the line going down. The show is perfect. I'm sorry about your line. And now that we've got AI writing it, it's just going to get better. So talking about a, it was a 2022 hacktacular year in review. I think there's a handful of things we should talk about. I think we should talk about the crypto crash, like you mentioned, specifically FTCX, because I think it's a pretty important, maybe cultural

moment surrounding people's understanding of crypto. I think we got to talk about that for sure. Yeah, I feel like everybody's talking about it, but I do agree. I do agree. I think we should talk about sort of our standard beat, cybersecurity hacking and ransomware. You know, we covered a lot. Jeremy Kirkson, friend of the show, was able to put together a really fantastic whole series about, you know, this being the year of ransomware where it really reached maturity. I think we got to talk about that. Yep, yep. And then probably AI. We opened on that. I think we should talk about that because I was thinking about this.

A calendar year ago, if you brought up the idea of using AI to make media, like making stuff with AI, I wouldn't have known what you meant beyond the individual words in the phrase. And now, if you bring up AI media synthesis, I have to clarify which one you're talking about. So a lot has happened in the last year when it comes to people actually using AI. And that's probably worth talking about. AI based content or AI created content. It's been on the rise. Exactly.

Wouldn't say it's very cybersecurity yet, but I'm sure there'll be an application for it. Yeah. Maybe we can talk about that too. Man, I'm playing around with it. I think there's going to be. When you start seeing the way folks are using it, I don't think there have been any stories where it's been used in cybersecurity, mostly because chatGBT and natural language AI media synthesis

or AI natural language has existed for about a week now. It is pretty young, but I imagine by this time next year, 2023 year in review, there will be a lot of stories of this being used to do some pretty fascinating stuff. One of my favorite things is the amount of sites that are now banning it. Like banning its use in their comments and forums.

Like I think I actually just recently got an email from Stack Overflow, which is kind of like a code question site for developers. And I think they recently banned it from responding. It's like it's kind of, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how they, how they track and remove it. And how much of, how much noise it makes on the internet, I guess. And when I say like noise, I mean like signal noise. Like when you're trying to get to some real data. And all you're reading is like AI generated bits that don't contain the answer you're looking for. Sure, sure.

Well, we already kind of live in a world where most information is buried under an ocean of blogs that were hastily written for pennies a word in order to optimize search engine results. Like there's such a deluge of content getting in the way of a good answer on the internet that this inevitably is going to make. worse. I think a lot of cool stuff's going to come out of it, but I think you bring up a good point that noise is not going to get better. Well, like, think about, think about Googling best food processor 2022. All you get is affiliate marketing sites that have, you know, Fiverr.com articles written and that are just knockoffs of other articles written by somebody else. Sure. That stuff's all just going to get auto generated now. You're going to be able to be like prompt, quezon art food processor review 2022, blah, blah, blah, and bang, it'll like write you the review

content. So like imagine the one minor headache of running an affiliate marketing site is going to just get automated. For sure. Like it's just going to make, it's just going to make the internet unusable. Well, I mean, you just brought up a really interesting. thing which is the scene you just painted describes both side of the discovery process. It starts with a person Googling something and then it switches over to the person who's creating the answer. And I think what's interesting about this is that it touches both sides of that transaction. For sure. Like people are using it at this point essentially as Google, but you can also use it to generate

the content that Google would otherwise be parsing. Correct. The Google thing feels important because of just the sheer numbers of people that are already using it a weekend. I think it was November 30th, Sam Altman over at OpenAI posted a tweet saying, today we'll launch chat GPT. Try talking with it here. That's when it goes live. And then someone broke down. It took Facebook 10 months to reach a million users. It took Spotify five months.

Took Instagram two and a half months. It took chat GPT five days. Lovely. So people are used. not just to create content, but to find answers. And I don't think I'd really anticipate, when you play around with an image creation AI like Dolly or Mid Journey, it's purely generative. You're not thinking about finding information, getting answers through it, but immediately

it became clear that people are using this kind of as they would use Google. And that feels very, very different. So we're going to get a chicken and the egg thing here, where like the AI is going to be generated in the content that the AI then consumes to respond to answers. So you'll be like, hey, AI, what's the best food processor this year? And then it'll be like, well, we've written three million articles about this one. So here you go. Yeah.

At what point does most of the information it's parsing come from itself is going to be a really fascinating conversation. We should also just briefly touch on, has nothing to do with cybersecurity, but touch on the fact that Google became Google by having. having a quality search algorithm that gave you what you looked for when you asked for it. Certainly. The fact that they haven't dealt with affiliate marketing is shocking to me, honestly, and because it's completely ruined any search results. Like you can't find any real information. You have to know where to go to find it.

A lot of those sites now are turning into paywalls because they know that they have good content and everybody wants real content. Sure. honest question in the last like year have you Googled anything where you needed a detailed answer that you didn't tack reddit on the end or some kind of thing to narrow what part of the internet you wanted to go find information from because otherwise google broke itself like it doesn't get me good answers to stuff anymore no totally i have to tell it to go looking through some other site that just happens to have bad search so i'm basically using google's search ability to be able to to navigate some other website for me. I'm not using it to find me the answer, unless it's one of those answers that Google has sort of indexed for itself

and just presents to you before the deluge of ads and affiliate marketing content that follows below. Well, two things. One, no, I typically always tack on Reddit or some forum that I want it to look in. You got to. And two, I'm surprised that affiliate marketers haven't ruined Reddit yet.

because I'm sure we're not the only people out there that are like the only place to find real content about things anymore is coming out of real people's like, you know, fingertips. So that's, yeah, surprising that affiliate marketers just haven't started spamming Reddit. So, you know, I'm sure after this episode, please don't, but I'm sure we'll see more of it. I guess since this is now the chunk of the show where we're talking about this to bring it back to chat GPT and that big shift that, happened in the last week. I guess to try and tie it back to the stuff that we talk about here, bleeping computer did do a pretty cool write-up of some of the stuff that people have started figuring out both good and bad to be done with this tool.

There's really obvious things like take a fishing email, classic thing that we might end up talking about. A lot of the ways that you immediately identify a fake email has to do with the fact that the grammar and spelling probably isn't typically too good. It seems really simple, but you get a person who's not writing in their native language trying to, you know. Convince you that they are their boss. Yeah. That's a pretty good way to tell.

And suddenly you now have a tool to eradicate that. I can type something in very, very, very broken natural language and tell it to fix it, tell it to rewrite it in perfect English grammar. And it will do so. I guess on one hand that you can imagine insidious uses for that. But there's a kind of hopeful part of me that thinks that's pretty incredible for all the people that experience barriers because they don't speak the language that's popular or common where they live, suddenly being able to completely perfect the grammar and spelling of their text instantaneously. Like that feels like it opens up a lot of doors for some people. Let's talk about cheating in university. Oh, man.

Do you think this thing could generate you a paper? So I was reading an article the other day, and it was, I think it was the Guardian. I'll try and find a link to it and put it in the show notes. But it was someone who was a journalist who asked that question and went to talk to a bunch of university professors in different disciplines, some TAs. And the sort of conclusion they came to, I think the headline of the article was, the essay is dead. And it was basically that you can now instantaneously generate about a bunch of topics. about a B. You can produce about a B grade paper.

Instantly. With a click of a button, pretty much instantaneously. So yeah, I think you're probably right to bring up academics as a space where, like, yeah, people were doing some pretty boilerplate writing with pretty high stakes associated with it. And now there's a robot that can do boilerplate writing. Wow. And that's for sure going to change some stuff. What a fascinating time we live in, Jordan. And think we both went to university and actually had to write papers.

Well, here's the thing. Yes, we were idiots for doing that, clearly. The future will judge us harshly for paying money. Man, I majored in English. There's like a John Mullaney bit about that. I was like, I paid money to study a language I already spoke. And now it's to have papers written in that language graded by people that I could have just had grading a robot's paper. But you majored in ComSai.

I did. Where you don't, I don't really know what ratio of stuff you're submitting in natural language versus code. But it brings up the question of what does this thing do for non-natural language? Great question. I'm sure. I'm sure they're working on it. It would be pretty amazing if you could just fire it in a queue and it would spit you out

a template of like the application you're trying to build mostly coded. Sure. And you just customize. it. So I didn't play with this when it comes to a programming language. My brain immediately just went to like markup language websites. And I started, I just wanted to do a little experiment. Let's imagine I have a startup, a little new company, an idea for a product. It's called text reverser. And I want to create a website that reverses text for people. I think there's going to be a huge, huge market for this, Scott. Lots of people need text reversed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm with you. I'm with you. I don't write a lick of HTML. I understand the basic premise of how it works, but I don't write it. Even to do something incredibly simple like that, I would be looking at every individual part. Or I would have to go to a person that knows how to write HTML and ask them how to do it. I have to explain to them my brilliant business idea, right? Which is create an HTML document that has a text box and a button that says enter. And whatever text is written in the box when you say enter, present it back to the user reversed below. That's the idea for the little bit of software I want to write. I could ask a real human being to do that for me, or I could type what I just said into chat GPT and it would

would produce the HTML document that I just slacked to you, which when I open it in a browser works. I'm opening it. I'm very curious. First I'm going to open it in a code editor just to see and make sure there's nothing embedded in it. This was all a long con. I'm actually, this is when I finally try and hack you.

That would be so funny. What a wrap up to the year. Jordan Hacks Scott. Like a three-year deep long con. Wow. I'm looking at it right now, the code. And it's pretty much exactly what you would do to build a proof of a concept of it. And it works. Oh, I also mentioned I had some design prompts. I wanted it to center those assets and put it against a black backdrop and make everything else white. I included that as well. It quite literally wrote the JavaScript for you. And it works. And it works.

Well, I guess it's time to find a new career. or Jordan. I'm sure a person that speaks like I'm sure a person that writes HTML could have done that in not much longer than it took me to tell the computer to do it. But importantly, I don't know how to write HTML and I produce that document. And it works. Like that we always talk about hacking through the lens of like hackers and people doing

duplicitous stuff with technology. But there's that other definition of hacking stuff together and making things from scratch and building stuff. And it feels like a really powerful tool for that kind of hacking, for hacking things together. Yeah. I don't know. It's very, I'm impressed. I got to say. I'm impressed.

It's pretty cool. Like it's not complicated, but it's still generated instantly. Based on three sentences. It says. Based on three sentences. Today's podcast is brought to you by Nordlayer. Nordlayer safeguards your companies network, but it's also a lot more than just a VPN for business.

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all major operating systems. And finally, Nordlayer is easy to scale as you can choose a plan unique to your business requirements and your rate of growth. If you want to secure your business network. Go to Nordlayer.com slash hacked to get your first month free. That's Nordlayer.com slash hacked. I'd say the other big story of this year, which was our big old crypto crash. All of the, all of the crypto crash and the frauds and the cons and the. And the, I do, I do.

We only have so much time. I do love that Sam Bankman. Freed is now just SBF. Like the world knows him as a three-letter acronym. Like I guess that's probably now his largest success is that he's so well known, but he's infamous, not famous. Yeah, he reached like KFC levels of the acronym will suffice. Yeah, brand awareness.

Yeah, exactly. Set a landspeed record for that one. Exactly. Yeah, he kind of, he was sort of the cherry on top at the end of the year because it all started way back, I think in April's when it, the value. value of Bitcoin and Ethereum along with it starts to tank. And it's about June when I think it kind of hits the bottom of that gully. It was down from like a high of about $70,000 per coin.

And I think that's when it bottoms out at about 19 grand, lost most of its value. Yeah. It's been down to that two month chunk. Down to the 15s, I think, this year. But I think in that period, it broke 20 and that was a big news. Really? Yeah, the Bitcoin anyway. We were talking about Bitcoin, not the rest of the alt coins and meme coins and shitcoins and et cetera.

Got caught up in the crypto winter. Yeah, it was really strange. Like, I remember watching it and like, I have a pretty decent knowledge on finance. Like I'm not by no means an expert, but like I'm knowledgeable. You're an econ nerd, I'm an econ nerd. Affectionately. Affectionately. Thank you, Jordan.

Thanks for clarifying. There was this whole movement because like everybody was like, inflation's coming. And like, you know, a lot of people usually buy hard assets to combat that. So they buy gold and things like that. And people were like, no, crypto is the new gold. And I was like, what? Right.

I was like, it just, I don't know where that messaging came from and where that thesis came from. So then you had a bunch of people piling into crypto being like, I need to protect my money. And crypto is the answer here. It's not about making money anymore. It's about wealth preservation. And I was just scratching my head being like, this has to be manipulation. Like somebody has to be out there selling this message to buy them out of their positions before this like implodes. Interesting.

And, you know, here we are. Yeah. It's very, very, very interesting year for the crypto and, well, the economic world, I'd say, but the crypto as attached to that, you know, being a high risk asset. saw a ton of play you know like the a lot of people there was no sports betting during COVID lockdowns and things like that so a lot of people moved to gambling

on the stock market you know people that have that personality trait you know like me they went to the stock market they went to crypto they went to things like that and people were making boat loads of money like the whole meme stock press like at least there was like a structured financial argument for like

you know, GameStop. Like the short positions were so large that like if they could hold the value of the company up high enough, people would have to start clinging those short positions. I don't know if we want to get into a full economic breakdown of what a short position is and how they work. But essentially it costs money to short a company. You pay a carrying interest for the short. And if they could prop the stock up long enough, these like, like I think GameStop at one point was shorted like a hundred percent. of their shares. Like so anyway.

So the gist is if they could prop it up, they could cash out because these people would eventually have to close their short positions. And so I think that was kind of like I wouldn't say a smart play, but at least had a thesis. And the crypto world, I think just benefited from the fact that like it seemed like an easy way to make a blow to money. When you, you mentioned the thesis earlier, which was that this is a hedge. This is such an alternative to the.

traditional markets that if they tank, it's probably not going to affect this because it's totally separate. Totally. And that was revealed to not, that thesis was revealed to be incorrect. And it turned out if you had, you know, elevated inflation, interest rates going up, a land war in Europe and COVID lockdowns and supply chain chaos and all of those things affecting how people want to spend their money and invest, it's also going to affect how they invest in crypto.

Totally. That thesis was proven false. The CEO of J.P. Morgan, Jamie, Dimmon, Diamond, I can't remember how you pronounce his name, came out and said that, like, crypto was essentially just pet rocks. He literally used, he literally used a simile to refer to them as pet rocks. And the thing is, is, like, they were great rocks to own. And, like, a lot of people that own them. Got rich off those rocks.

We're owning them at, well, and we're owning them at, like, crazy margins. You know, so you put $100 in your crypto account, and then you buy $5,000. dollars for the crypto which which buys you little variation like if if the if the price goes down you you get margin called and you lose all your money but if it keeps going up like it did at the beginning of COVID all of a sudden you take that hundred bucks and you make it into 50 grand if you keep you know rebuying and stuff like that maybe even more but then the second it turns against you pop pop pop pop pop margin call margin call it just burns So I think there was a lot of artificial wealth created and then destroyed in like the period of a year.

I know I'm not a gambling man, but man, the idea of buying crypto on margin is just a level of, wow. People buy stocks and options on margin all the time, notably me. But crypto, I don't know. Like it would just, it seemed like, you know, when it went from 20 to 60 or 66 or whatever it was, like I'm sure there were people that, on pro made millions sure and like not financial gurus and hedge fund managers but we're talking like regular everyday people who just like their friend was like buy doge and they're like okay i got 300 bucks and then bang all of a sudden in a series of rebis and a perpetual motion upward they're maybe millionaires they're doge rich yeah they're doge rich they got a lamo with a doge plate

anyway then it all popped you know it turns out that risk assets or risk assets. And when people's portfolios, real world portfolios and stuff started going down, interest rates and their access to capital started to go away. People started selling. And then bang, there it comes down. Same as anything else. When then you get that, that all kicks off at the start of the year. And then you get this sort of trough that we've been in ever since. And then I think it, the year kind of bookended itself with FDX happening. And for as much as, I think for outsiders seeing the value of a thing that's value is famously erratic, being erratic isn't that new for them. The value went down and they go, oh yeah, it goes down, it goes up. Who cares?

But the story of FTX, I think, grounds it for a lot of people in the same way that a lot of people learn something about her economy works by the Bernie Madoff story or about the subprime mortgage crisis. FtX is a story that outsiders can easily grasp. Because for all of the crypto bullshit that's wrapped up inside of it, allegedly. It's allegedly a pretty classic robbing Peter to pay Paul type story. It's pretty easy to grasp when you grasp the basics of it. Well, I think the, I think, you know, the persistence of the crypto, I don't know what you want to call it.

Fraud, scams, Ponzi's unregulated, completely unregulated as an unregulated investment vehicle. I think, I think the real question is, is FTX, you know, know, crypto winter or is it the crypto extinction event? Because I feel like, I think it might, I think it might be an extinction level event in its current form.

Like the government has to stand back and look at this stuff and be like, wow. We have Larry David, Brady. You know, we've got, like Taylor Swift apparently like was in discussions, allegedly into,

yeah, allegedly in discussions for like a hundred million dollar sponsorship from FTCX. So cool. Like, it's being marketed, sold as an investment vehicle, but it's not.

So it's like, I think, I think the libertarian crypto that we know now, I think is at an extinction level event. Like, you know, what I believe

it's value to be inherently, me and the CEO of J.P. Morgan feel the same. But I'll lean on his credibility. Yeah, sure, sure. The, the,

I think that if it's if it's going to stay around the government and the people who are responsible for keeping people safe from from fraud and scams need to are about to show up in a big way sure you think this is going to result in a bunch of regulation yeah could be yeah I think it has to I think it has to interesting like there's there's like you can't like if you and I Jordan decide that we're going to create you know some. AI company. It's going to auto-generate code. Typing this into chat GFTT right now. We have the idea to start this company, and we're going to go out and raise a billion dollars for this company. We can't go knock on your neighbor's door, my neighbor's door, and be like, hey, can we have 500 bucks? Unless they're like an accredited investor.

There's rules about risk capital, and the government doesn't allow you to do things unless you show competency to protect people from situations where, you know, they might get hugely burned. And none of those safeguards have been in place in crypto. This is completely unregulated. If I had to guess, and this is assuming that there isn't a giant onslaught of regulation coming, because I could see that really going either way. There's a part of me that could imagine a world in which everyone goes, nope, we're actually

not going to regulate this. It seems to be ending itself. We'd like to not get in the way of that process. So maybe regulation comes. But if it doesn't, I would guess that the libertarian corners of it are actually all that survives. I think for all the normal folks that were interested investing in it because it seemed like a great way to make your money go up, FTCS was sort of the death knell for those people, that undecided middle of people that weren't sure if they wanted to get into this, didn't quite know enough about it. I think a lot of those people now have SBF's sort of shining face in their brain when they think about cryptocurrency and they go, I've heard there's a lot of fraud in that space now. Like it almost put a face to all of those doubts.

And I think that all you're left over, assuming there isn't a bunch of regulation that axes out the sort of free market libertarian side of things, I think they're really all who's going to be left after all the normies flood out of the room. Yeah. Well, and like the thing is, no, I still think the regulations have to show up. Yeah. Like they have to because the reality is, is like, you look at something like blockfi. It was a company that FTCS owned part of. And they essentially offered ridiculously high interest savings if you like deposited your crypto with them. So you give them your crypto and they give you like weekly compounding 9% interest or something just insane. I think it was annualized 9% interest, but that's still an insane return for doing nothing. Yeah, you can't guarantee that. You can't guarantee that.

Yeah, they're bankrupt now and everybody lost all their money. No surprise. But the thing is, if I'm a person, like I'm a regular person, you're a regular person. We have retirement savings and things like that. Maybe if you buy, I don't know, if you're a mutual funder, like a real regular person, you're looking at like 4% max plus fees usually so all of a sudden you're at you know coffee with your buddy and he's like yeah I made like you know 14% last year staking crypto you're like wow imagine how fast tell me more tell me more and it's like they they they have to step in and

stop that stuff like they they can't let it go there's the returns the whole market is a Ponzi scheme because the only way that those returns are possible is if they can get the crazy uplift in the value of the crypto that they're that we were seeing the second it started going down the whole paper foundation of this house crumbled and lit on fire the line goes up line goes up i think we should also just talk about what happened at ft x because yeah break it down well it's all alleged and based on you know things i've read and i watched the interview with with with espyx BF, I think it was Financial Times, had him at like a conference and he spoke, and they kind of grilled him a bit. And he kept referencing one thing.

He didn't realize how big Almeda's, is the hedge fund, how Almeida's margin position was. So the typical way, and I don't know how many people to listen to this podcast do any kind of investing, especially margin investing, but the typical way margins work is I put in $100, they offer me 50 times that value. and I'd spend $5,000 on, it doesn't have to be 50. It can be two, it can be five, it can be 500 on some places. But I take that inflated amount of money and I buy an asset. The second that asset position moves against me, so if it starts to go down if I'm long, the second, the loss is the equivalent to the amount of money I put in,

exchanges will often instantly close your position just so that you don't go into the negative and you don't owe them money. And it sounds like what happened is that the risk managers and the people who monitored that system essentially turned off the margin call function for All meta.

That's the read I get from the situation. And they let them, they probably were holding billions of dollars of positions that were deep in the negative, so negative in fact that they literally lost everybody's money. Like what are they looking for? $10 billion in missing money at this point.

Something like that. So all of the risk mitigation and risk management systems that they had in place for the regular people, for the use and eyes, they probably disabled for their internal, you know, friendly hedge fund. And I think that's what cost them everything. So why would someone turn off the margin call safety net? I get that they're doing a favor for their someone they're friendly to, allegedly. But why would you do that? How is that doing someone a favor to remove the safety net? Well, essentially what they were doing is not bankrupting Almeida because the second they closed that position,

Almeida would owe them billions of dollars. Right. So as SPF was a part owner of that company or a substantial owner, if I'm not mistaken, he probably didn't want that either. So they probably were betting everything, literally betting everything. And this is all alleged in my own read on the situation. But probably betting everything on a lift in the value of crypto. Right.

If we can just get crypto back to 30, 40K, you know, we'll be right-sided again. And we just need people not, we just need people to stay chill and hold on, hodle on, and buy back in and push the value of this up. And that's not what happened. Right. They got blown up by. Yeah. If we margin call you, it'll, if we margin call you, it'll essentially lock in all of these devastating, bankrupting losses.

So let's just sort of keep the party going a little bit longer, a little bit longer, a little bit longer, and then the whole thing collapses. Exactly. Like, you got to, at least that's what my read is, because he kept, he always keeps mentioning this one margin position. So you know that Almeida ran a huge negative loss. Like it was a huge margin loss. And it wasn't a big deal until they had to call it. Because if they would have called it, Almeida would owe to FTCS, you know, billions of dollars, I assume. and then FTX's books would have been written down billions of dollars.

So it would have just blown up everything, which is essentially what happened. At least that's my read. Think about the last time you heard a breach story on this show. It always starts the same way. Someone somewhere saw something too late. An alert buried, a signal missed, an SOC that just couldn't keep up. Arctic Wolf set out to solve that problem by rebuilding security operations from the ground up for a world. where attackers are already using AI.

They created the Aurora Super Intelligence Platform, a fully agentic system powered by the swarm of experts. Instead of single-purpose bots or lucky-guess LLMs, this swarm is full of deterministic agents that handle whole entire workflows. Humans stay in the loop and on the loop to validate the critical decisions and keep everything trustworthy, and all of this is just off running on their secure operations graph.

A constantly updating intelligence engine fueled by more than 9 trillion telemetry events every week, and over a decade of real-world incident response. The system reasons on real signals and real context, not synthetic training data. And the result is the new Aurora Agent SOC. It's the first SOC that is agent-led by design. You get agents that coordinate,

agents that investigate, agents that respond at machine speed, and hundreds more that automate the repetitive work that normally buries human analysts. Arctic Wolf didn't try and bolt AI onto an old model. They rebuilt the model entirely. What makes it even more effective is how it works with Arctic Wolf's concierge experience.

The team brings customer-specific context directly into the platform so every AI-driven decision reflects your environment instead of generic assumptions. The automation frees your concierge security team to focus on higher value strategy and proactive risk reductions

while the agents handle the grind. If you want to see what trustworthy, production-ready AI and security operations actually looks like, go to arcticwolf.com slash hacked. Never feel like cyber threats are a evolving faster than anyone can keep up. Last year, 2025 was nothing short of a record-breaking year for major breaches,

from sophisticated ransomware operators to AI-enabled attacks to turn defenses on their head. Organizations around the world saw headlines they never expected, and cybersecurity teams were tested like never before. But here's the thing. These incidents aren't just news headlines. They're learning opportunities. And that's why Arctic Wolf is hosting a live webinar on February 5th, diving to the most impactful breaches of 2025.

their field CTO and security leaders are going to unpack not just what happened, but why these attacks succeeded, and most importantly, what businesses can do to fortify their defenses for it's too late. You're going to walk away with real insights in how threat actors are evolving, how defenders are responding, and what strategies can help you stay ahead of the next big breach. It's not fearmongering. It's practical, actionable, intelligence from experts in the trenches. Register now at arcticwolf.com slash hacked. I think we've actually managed to cover a lot of the big stories of the year in episodes we did throughout the year. You know, we talked about the Conti attack against Costa Rica, kind of one of the first big nation-state level attacks against a country involving ransomware.

We talked about Lapsis' sort of big extortion spree. We talked a little bit about Russia and Ukraine hacking. And we've talked a lot about decentralized finance platforms getting hacked. We got in some AI conversation right at the finish line of the year. We hadn't really touched on that too much. But it's been a very busy year on the hacked beat, on the spooky technology stories beat. And I guess I just want to wrap up the year by thanking everyone for coming along with us. Yeah, for sure.

Thanks to everybody. You know, all the listeners, commenters, reviewers, patrons, you know, people that engage with us on social media, even though we're not hyper social media users. We appreciate it all. So you guys are great. You people are great. So we appreciate it. I always love when shows, and I don't normally hear it in the show itself.

It's normally on Twitter or somewhere else. But I always love when shows share numbers a little bit. So just for anyone that's still here, it's looking like our big episode for the year, our top charting one was the chicken drumstick episode. We did with Lorenzo Franceschi Biccari. It was about the Chinese hacking video game hacking gang as a super fun one. Published it kind of start of the year.

It's our, I think our top charting episode for 2022, followed by our episode about our evil, the hacking gang that pretended to die but then just didn't. It came back under a different name. Followed lastly by You Can't Publish Their Names, which was about Lapsis. Those were our top three episodes for the year. It is the Spotify wrap-up season. So we got our Spotify wrap up. And we are a top 1% podcast on Spotify.

So we are one of the top podcasts. So that is, you know, entirely due to you guys and you people and, you know, completely like it. You know, I think we are cruising in year to date to be right around a million downloads. So pretty, pretty solid year for the numbers. So, you know, I think as a collective audience, and creators, you know, I think it's going pretty well. We've done it. So I think the other thing we should take a moment to announce is that we're going to do some merch. We're going to do on that hoodie game. We're going to do some limited edition hack podcast merch. It's not going to be out by

Christmas. Sorry about that. But we will have a merch for in the new year, probably Q1 of the new year. And yeah, so I think that's going to be pretty good. I think we're going to do some pretty standard stuff for our first run. So we're going to do a couple limited edition clothing pieces and then maybe a non-limited edition t-shirt and some coffee mugs. This is like maybe even some some Yeti style tumblers, as I am a fan of using those things. I love a tumbler. Yeah, love a tumbler.

So I think that's big news for us, you know. Since they won't be available for Christmas, should we sell gift? cards. I feel like that. I know a great episode of a podcast that talks about how cool and good gift cards are. Yeah, yeah. I think we'd be silly not to create some kind of system to generate gift cards. Maybe there's points. You can buy hacked points and those points are redeemable for for merchandise. There you go. There you go. In the Hap store. It's all none of it's real. It's all metaverse stuff. It's all digital hoodies, digital tumblers. We'll obfuscate the value through some complex internal currency system and then sell you lit.

My dude's so cryptic. Sell you digital skins. But don't worry, they're going to have an NFT associated with them so you can ensure that you retain true ownership of the digital tumbler you buy. Okay. I know how we end now, which is since you brought up NFT.

December 7th, 2022, it turns out that when FTX crashed, I'm looping us back, just right at the very end. bad storytelling. It turns out that when FTX crashed, NFTs that had been minted on FTX relied on metadata from an API that was hosted at that domain. Earlier this year, the FTX domain was taken over and redirected to a page providing information on the bankruptcy proceedings,

which means that all NFTs, those non-fungible assets, those things that you really truly own forever that were hosted on FTX, the safest of these platforms are now essentially pointed towards 404 pages. So they're all, they're all gone. Nice. Happy 2022, everybody. Thanks for listening, everybody. We recorded this conversation on November 8th, which is why in 20 minutes talking about SBF, we did not mention him being arrested days later because it did not happen. And in the 20 minutes we spent talking about AI, we also didn't talk about the really interesting push over the past week or six. so to allow visual artists to de-index their work from AI databases,

all really interesting stuff we didn't get to chat about. We're going to be posting an episode next week, but just to give herself some time off to relax. It's probably going to be a throwback episode from a previous holiday season, but we're going to be back at it again in the new year. Thanks to our new patrons on Patreon, patreon. patreon.com slash hacked podcast. Great way to support the show.

Stephen Castle, thank you for editing your pledge. Sinclair Coons, thank you for being a patron. Josh Rorty, thank you so much. Zee Glados, I'm a big portal fan. Thank you so much for being a patron. And Brandon Faso, thank you so much. We really appreciate all your support. Thank you so much for listening to this year-in-review episode

where we talked about basically two things, neither of which had anything to do with cybersecurity. And for making it to the end, we will catch you in the next one.