Ep.1 - Jordan Wiens aka @psifertex, Co-Founder of Vector35, BinaryNinja

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Like, okay, is this what I want to keep doing? And the answer was absolutely.

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Like, I really I want to keep doing this. Like, I'm not, I don't feel

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like we've solved the problem. Like, IDA is still the major dominant tool, you know,

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technically there's still problems that I want to solve. I

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think we're the product itself is at a spot where it can now,

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replace side up for the vast majority of users. And so now we just gotta

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go, like, show everybody, like, convince them and, like, demonstrate it and be like, hey.

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Listen. You can you get all these advantages. Let's let's let's get

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everybody switched. And so that's super exciting. Like, I feel like

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we've we've done some of the hardest work, and now we can reap the rewards.

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This is Hackers to Founders, a podcast about cybersecurity professionals who

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have reached the pinnacle of their cybersecurity expertise and have a ventured

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into new frontiers. Whether it's launching innovative start ups or making

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impactful investments in our industry. My name is Chris Manistrato,

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and I'm a vulnerability researcher best known for traveling and meeting hackers

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from all around the world. And I'm using what little extrovert

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skills I have to introduce to you hackers that are

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changing the world. Today, we are joined by Jordan Wines, a cofounder of Vector

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35, a long time DEFCON CTF participant and winner of

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multiple years, who will share with us a unique story, a binary

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ninja, its creation, and where it's going to go into the future.

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This is hackers to founders. Alright. Welcome,

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everybody, to the show. My name is Chris Medistrada. I'm joined here with Jordan

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Weins. Did I pronounce that correctly? You got it. You got it. Is

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it German or what's your name? I think it's I think it's originally

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like Wines, but, like, we've always pronounced it Wines, so my family has spelled it

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that way. My grandfather's brothers were born in Germany. But

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Okay. That's so funny. Like, mine's a magistrado, but I think it's, like,

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technically maestrados, but, like, I'm like Yeah. Filipino

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Anglicized. Oh, that's funny. Excellent. Yeah. We

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were just talking about, different processes in in terms of, like,

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starting a business. I'm one of the founders of Vector 35. It'll be 10 years

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this January. Which is bonkers to me.

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But yeah. So there were there were 3 of us originally and,

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like, 3 technical cofounders. 2 of us sort of split all the administrative duties,

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which is I was also really nice. Having another cofounder that, like, could we

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could each be part technical and part administrative actually helped a ton. So we've been

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able to grow, I think, really a lot bigger, you know, like I said, even

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sort of lacking as much administrative as as maybe we could have a lot because

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of that. Because Peter and I split that role and that that helps a ton.

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It's also just nice too to feel like, you know, we're engineers trying to figure

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out marketing and pricing and, you know, contracts and Yeah.

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So like all the books and things and trying Yeah. Especially 10 years ago, there

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was there even a lot of, like, cybersecurity companies,

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startups, or even resources to learn about how to work with governments on

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that? Yeah. It was like, we had well, so what we did have was we

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had a sort of, like, mentor network. So we had Mike Fransen from

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KuduDynamics, who we had

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previously worked with, at at back back at Raytheon before

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that. And, in fact so we got our we got our start as

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a company, working on separate grand challenge. The the DARPA

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CTF, like, robots playing CTF, like, automated. They you know, the the winning winning

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team went to go play in the Defcon finals. So that was, like, our first

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contract. And it basically was a matter of, we were Peter and

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Rusty and I, the 3 cofounders, were all working at Raytheon at the time. And,

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they CGC basically needed help running, like, the

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visualization side. So they had a game company that was contracted to, like, build visualizations,

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but they didn't know anything about capture the flag or security. And so to be

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like, hey. Make a dashboard, make a visualization,

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was was, like, not easy for them, and the people running the game didn't have

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time to, like, translate everything or to, like, babysitter, like, work with not

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babysitter. It's a bad it's a bad way of saying it. Really, to work we're

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closely with the game company. Educate. There we go. It's a much better one. So

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that was we basically got brought on to that. So Rusty and I started on

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that contract, and, like, that was the start of our our our company. So Mike

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Fransen was one of the people working that. We were I remember I don't think

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we directly subcontracted to him, but he really helped us to a ton.

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Gave us his rate card. He's like, here's how you structure it. And here I

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mean, we we had, you know, working right then, we had a lot of some

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intuition. You know, we were we're technical, you know, tech leads,

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so we knew a different contract type, contracting types, and and scheduling

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a proposal process and stuff, but we were not the program managers doing some of

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the details. So we had, you know, a little bit of learning curve, but certainly

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less, I think, than if we had started from scratch. And so it it helped

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that we we we had that kind of basis and and that's yeah. That's why

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we started the company with that contract, basically, paid the bills with that, and

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then, you know, like, it's not like a startup where, like, you grind the startup,

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like, 60 hours a week on your your product or you take on VC money,

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whatever. We did, like, 40 on our contract, and then Rusty

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dropped down to, like, 3 quarters time. And so he was working on Binary Ninja

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on, like, the the other 3 quarters as well as extra time. And so, you

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know, we were both, like, working working extra hours, but, you know, the

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bulk went to the contract to pay the bills. So we, you know, we took

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a salary. We had a nice benefits, and we had a budget, and we had

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a rate card, and then we could do that. So so the the actual product

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for, like, binary binary ninja, was this already in place where, like, you

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guys were developing it and saying, like, we already have Yeah. It's it's part of

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the contract or it's part of a buyer already. It was a part of the

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contract, but it was a part of our design for the company. So we in

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fact, you know, like, that was one of the pitches, like, when Mike first reached

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out to us. He's like, hey. Do you wanna go build that binary ninja thing?

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You've been you've been thinking about it. We're talking about it. So you guys We're

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talking about it. I really wanna build this thing anyway. Well, because it it so

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it existed. Yeah. It actually there in fact, it's there's even an open the the

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original version is is still out there in open source. It was a GPL Python

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version. In fact, we had somebody accuse us of, like, ripping off a Python. Like,

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you know, how dare you rip off this existing project? And we're like, 1, we

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wrote it. And 2, we don't have to we can relicense it however we

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want. And 3, it's rewritten completely. The new one's all c plus plus. So we

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have, like yeah. We had written Binary Ninja for CTF. I don't know, Rusty. First

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started it. Maybe 13 years ago, 12 years ago. Like, it

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was built internally just to help our CTF team. And then

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it had a so so some of, like, the design that kinda carried

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through the name carried through, but that's about it. Like, the actual code

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was, like I said, completely rewritten. It was all Python before, and it was

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completely rewritten in c plus plus. It still has, like, a the Python plug in

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API now, but but the all the analysis is c plus plus. So

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rewriting it basically was our first, you know, order of business, and we

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basically started that. Like, even just, like, right as we started the company, we're

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actually doing that in the side. And then it was about a year after we

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started the company before we launched the first version of it, which I'm almost embarrassed

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now when I look back at, like, the features it had. Like, people paid us

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money for that. Like, we didn't charge a lot less, but, it's crazy how far

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it's come. Nice. Beautiful. And, like, so you guys

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were developing the company and the product app while you guys were still at

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Raytheon? Was No. No. So we yeah. Well, so the Python version.

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Right? Like, the open source Python version was was was built at

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Raytheon, and then, basically, we quit there, started back

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to 35 January something, whatever I guess. And so it's by the way, it's

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vector 35 because we were all 35 years old in 2015.

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So it makes it easy to keep track of the yeah. Yeah. So 2025 will

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be would be a decade. Yeah. But Peter, Rusty, and I were all born in

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1980. So so we, yeah. That's

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that's how we started. And then we we basically rewrote it then,

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ourselves, like, a sort of, you know, clean code base, for the

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ground up after we after we start the new thing. So, like, I know, like,

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like, certain companies, it's like if you do, like, Apple specifically. Like, if you design

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anything while you're working at Apple and then even, like, sometimes it's, like, 5

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years after we started to own that. They owned all that stuff. Yeah. So

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Rusty didn't didn't have that agreement because he started so early.

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His stuff wasn't locked up. And they had they had gotten some people. In fact,

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I didn't have one either. I was I was one of the last people that

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was hired before they started doing that, for employees. So

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we never had those agreements, and so we were pretty flexible,

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with with the IP one. They also had like, you could also declare a thing

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and be like, I built this on my own. It's independent. You don't own it.

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You could submit that paperwork even while you were there for them, which you may

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have even done even though you didn't need to. I don't think. I don't

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remember the the the specifics of it. But, yeah, there was a web. But, yeah,

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Apple is notorious for, like, you don't touch open source while you work for Apple.

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You don't do any other side stuff. Like, you are completely locked down. Yeah. It's

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completely wild. Like, I have I have like friends that are like

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leaving their it's from the security aspect and they're like, yeah, I gotta like wait.

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And this is before I can even make my product and things like that. And

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they'll be like doing red teaming at, at Apple and it's like, yeah, I got

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something good but I gotta wait the 5 years before I can even create it

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which I don't know cycles innovation creativity. But Yeah.

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I they I love Apple products. I'm a huge Apple, like, fan as a

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consumer, but, I don't know that. And and I've heard a lot of good

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there's some good things about the structure with their like, the impact you can

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have when you go work there. There's a lot of great people, a lot of

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good friends that work there, but, yeah, I'm not a huge fan of, like, the

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way that they approach stuff like that. Their secrecy, the, the

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lockdown kind of requirements. I do know one person right now, I'm not gonna

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name, who's trying to, like because there is supposedly a way you can commit contribute

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to open source while you work at Apple. And, like, you can get approval and

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go through a process and give us a second. He's working it. So we'll see.

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We'll see. I wish him I wish him godspeed. But Yeah. I'm I'm happy, like,

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we started this this conversation. We kinda just jumping into it. Yeah. Straight

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in. You We're talking about entrepreneurship. You're talking about your company, back

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to 35, and then even a little bit of government contracting.

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But the audience, maybe they don't know too much about yourself, and, like, how

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you entered into our our industry. And then

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Yeah. Even, like, what you did and where you started at Defcon as well. So,

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like, we'd love to hear a little bit more about your background because there's it's

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been there's a lot here and super interesting. Yeah. Thank you.

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So so I was always into computers. I went to college thinking like,

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oh, well, now I'll get a real degree and do something else. I got a

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lie in my head this was this was a thing. Were you

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playing with computers at your house before college? Like I yeah. I

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just grew up. I grew up. My dad my dad had a computer. I I

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was always I was, like, very straight laced. Like, I never

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smoked like, I was just very, like, straight edge kinda, like, as a kid. And

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so, like, I never did anything illegally, like, hacking wise, but I was always super

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into it. I was really into computers. I was, like, running,

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running Linux at home and, like, you know, I started kinda, like, teach myself

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programming from, like, 3 to 1 contact magazines in the back. So I was kinda

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into What languages was that? Basic. Just like old g

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GW Basic was the beginning. Yeah. I wish you know, it's funny because Rusty, my

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other cofounder, is was highly technical. He wrote his first emulator at the age of,

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like, 14 and it was bought by TI. Like, he Texas Instruments bought

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his emulator because it was better than their official one, like, licensed his

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tech. So he was, like because he was doing the same thing. How did you

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even have a conversation with TI about that? Like they reached out to him as

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as I understand it. Like, yeah. It's it's kinda crazy. You can in fact, you

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can actually find I was writing stuff for the TI, like, all the old, the

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Usenet forums like ticalc.org and the old, forums and

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stuff. But I was running base TI basic programs, and he was in here, like,

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hand coding assembly, writing writing emulators for the

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hardware, like, you know, pre Internet. You also were selling to to TI,

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teenage age as well? No. No. I was just in the same, like, the TI

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calc programming scene, like, writing little apps because, you know, you you would write apps

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and post them on like, at the beginning of the Internet, like, early, like, go

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for even days and use that and that kind of stuff. So I was that

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was kind of part of what got me, like, online a little bit, but I

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was not no. I wasn't nearly as good of our programmers. I I was good

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with computers. I was very good with computers, and I had to, like, a lot

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of, like, IT jobs. My first job was selling dial up Internet accounts from the

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mall. I started doing tech support for them. Or a different variety? It was a

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it literally called Internet in a mall. It was a very brief they went out

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of business long after. It should be a kiosk in the mall, you you do

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it from. And I worked for gateway computer tech support, for a while to, like,

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phone support, which is the worst. So we're, like, an outsourced reseller. So they would

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call up, and we didn't even have the customer database. So we'd have to be

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like, okay. Open up your case and read me serial numbers and look up in

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a physical book to find the model numbers to get the download URLs to, like,

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drivers and stuff. It was it was abysmal. But but

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it was, you know, it's a good learning experience. Actually, I met Jason Street of

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all people who is is active in the security scene. He was, like, my boss.

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And we discovered this, like, 20 years later. We're, like, wait a minute. I know

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you. It just it took us forever to figure it out because we just, like,

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didn't go back far enough. For those who don't know Jason, who's

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Jason? Yeah. Jason Street is, it's very, like,

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famous, pen tester. Does a lot of stuff, in

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the the security community. Just Google j a y s o n street. You can

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see a ton of talk show, man, really. Excellent present, presenter

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as well. Yeah. Great storyteller. Good presenter. Yeah. So,

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so yeah, he was like my boss, like literally in 1996 or

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something. And then, yeah, I went to college

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thought like, okay, I'll get a job. Didn't think about

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computers. I was dual math, computer science, but I started working for the

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university. You said dual math. So are you doing, like, applied

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mathematics? Or It was number theory. I really

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loved so I wanted to work for the NSA.

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I just thought I read a lot of spy

226
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novels as a kid. Yeah. I just, I read a lot. I read a lot.

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I read a ton. I love spy books. And so I studied,

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Mandarin in college. I was a math major and a computer science major. I was

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like, because they hire 4 they at the time, they hired 4 things. I heard

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hardware engineers. I didn't wanna deal with that language, math, and computer

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science. And I was like, well, I got 3 of the 4 covered. I ironically,

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911 happens, and I I dropped off a resume at the booth, like, that came

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to a career for when I was already working for universities. I started working part

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time for university. I turned into a full time job. So I dropped off a

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resume, never heard back. I who knows what what

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happened with it? And then and then years later, I was working for them as

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a contractor. It cost them a whole lot more money. So that would've would've saved

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the government some some cash if they would've just, gone through that. So

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yeah. So I I started working, like, IT jobs at the university, and I had

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a server set up set up this, like, Red Hat Red Hat Linux 5,

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not Red Hat Enterprise Linux, like, Red Hat 5, the old school. It was

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like I still remember that when you set up your sound driver, it would be

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like, my name is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux Linux. Hello.

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This is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux.

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Like, it's Linus, but you pronounce it Linux because there was a big debate.

246
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And Yeah. Yeah. Like, that was the that was the sample file that would play.

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So, yeah, setting up that and, it got popped. Like, somebody

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had, like, a a print server bug that they were that they I set up

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the server, like, overnight, didn't finish the updates or something, came back to work the

250
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next day, and it had been unplugged. There was a note from my boss, like,

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hey. The security coordinator for the university says this was sending spam.

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They got reports that, like, overnight, it was served the weekend or whatever it was.

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It was sending some spam out, and I was I was like the Internet and,

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like, someone on the on the So got it or was it Yeah. It was

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it was Internet. Everything was public IP at the time at the university. There was

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no, like, firewall. Oh, no. This was, like connected. It's public? It's

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public. Yep. Go live. Unless you had your own map. If you unless you unless

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each department like, the universe the dorms had a map, for example, or, like, certain

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departments maybe have, but, like, by default, just, like, yep. It was all

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there. So, it was the Wild West, and and that was, like,

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all that would happen. Like, you, like, you would just send spam. Like, that was

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that was the only, like, malicious thing that would happen basically at the time. It

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wasn't it wasn't even, like, botnet era. So this is, like, 2,000, maybe 2,001.

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And so I was like, woah. I got hacked. This is so cool. And so,

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like, I did some kind of basic forensics and, like, her upload report for my

266
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boss. He forwarded on to Kathy Bergstrom, who was the newly hired, like,

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university security coordinator. And she was trying to hire, like, a security engineer, and she

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was like, oh, are you interested in this position? And then she was like, oh,

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you're a student still. Like, I don't want a student. I'm like, no. No. No.

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Please. Please. The security stuff's amazing. I wanna do this. I've always wanted I just

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never had an excuse to do it. And so, anyway, I talked to her into

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it, and that was my my first security job was doing,

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like, forensics, instant response, network. I got to do, like, the the

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firewall and set up, like, a a had a 10 gig IDS system we

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had built back in the day. I mean, you know, like, we had serious pipes.

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Yeah. So as as a research university, you know, we were on Internet too,

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whatever it was called, a bunch of different names for it. Like, we had

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really high speed, connections. So trying to, like, buy

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a IDS that could even go that fast. We actually built our own. We ended

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up using a bunch of different stuff. We used, you know, row at some

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points and sort and bunch of different things. But, like,

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these NDAIS, I think with the the accelerated video cards, you can actually

283
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put rules on the the the NIC itself and do it like an FPGA, basically,

284
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so you could do line rate, detection and filtering and alerting.

285
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And so, yeah, it was a super fun gig. I got to do kind of

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a lot of, like, a lot of stuff. What was the first task or job

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that they assigned you to as soon as you got the the role? Do you

288
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remember? Oh, that's a good question. I

289
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think the first thing I did was,

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I automated what was the vulnerability scanner? I

291
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I ISS from, like,

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IBM or one of the, like, one of the early, app scanners.

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I it wasn't Nessus. And maybe at one point, we switched out to Nessus, but

294
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I basically, like, did some basic kinda, like, scripting and automation. I wasn't much of

295
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a programmer, but I was really good at, like, scripting and shell scripts and,

296
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like, kinda cobbling things together. And so I automated, like, this always on

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scanner for a couple of things that were, like, really common at the time that

298
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were causing us trouble. And so it would just automatically sweep all of our IP

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space constantly and then either send emails or, you know, take some kind of

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automated action. And then, like, we eventually several of us built,

301
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like, this this sort of, like, automated response system. Like,

302
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I sort of predated SIM or SIM or whatever. It was kind of a little

303
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bit of that where it would pull from, like, pull from the the campus

304
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captive portal logs and pull from, like, the dial up IP logs and pull from,

305
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the map of which network administrators have which IP space and, like, have this

306
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database, and then combine that with abuse complaints or

307
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alerts from our system or the MCA complaints or whatever, like, all this different stuff.

308
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And it would just automatically have a bunch of rules and send emails for us,

309
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like, our little ticketing system internally. So, yeah, just trying to automate as much as

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as much as possible, and then getting to build out, like, the IDS and actually

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go and physically, like, deploy it like all the different pops all over campus.

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You know, this this this IDS box. We had Dragon, IDS way back in the

313
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day, Ron Gula, and that was that was a it was a good idea.

314
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Yes. I enjoyed I enjoyed working on that. But yeah. So that was my network

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defense, my first my first security job. Now I'm building a lot of tools

316
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internally at the at the college and setting it all up and, like Yeah.

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I haven't, like so, like, jet I have, like, 2 questions. 1, like, how difficult

318
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was it to keep those, like, pipes open in terms of, like, the data flowing?

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And then 2, when you left, was it easy to hand over all of the

320
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things that you had built? Because this is, like, a whole, you know,

321
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program. Yeah. Thankfully, there were enough by the time I left, there were about 4

322
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or 5 people on the team. And so we had grown the team, and so

323
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I wasn't, like, the only person running stuff, for quite a while. And so there

324
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were there were definitely enough. I didn't feel like I was leaving them in a

325
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lurch. There were a lot of other people. And that system was still

326
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running up until a couple years ago. I don't even know if it is right

327
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now, but I went back and visited the campus and talked to all the guys

328
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who was still there who who I was has stayed around. That's right. It I

329
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mean, it's both terrifying and it feels good. A little bit a little bit of

330
00:19:06,865 --> 00:19:10,545
both. Yeah. Exactly. Like, it was, I mean, this thing was written in. There was

331
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Pearl in there. There was some shell scripts. There was it was

332
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it was a whole but, like, you know, if it ain't if it ain't broke.

333
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And the concept I think, yeah, to this day remains really solid, like, to

334
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really just get all of your logs. Even, you know, a great example is I

335
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remember at one point we got early flow data and, like, just gather everything. You

336
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never know what's gonna be useful. Like, the the the week that we storage for

337
00:19:30,695 --> 00:19:34,534
it all? So we had decent storage, and we would only keep,

338
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like, a week of it or a couple days of it or whatever. Right? Like,

339
00:19:36,615 --> 00:19:40,134
we didn't need because even even a week worth of full flow data for all

340
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all of campus was fantastic. And it was it wasn't like all the

341
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internal routers, you know, necessarily. It was that, like, some of the main there was

342
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a couple of main main pops, like, on campus that we would we would get

343
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the the c flow d firmed or whatever. And so when we started aggregating all

344
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that, like, we actually had a a loft student who left

345
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a laptop plugged into a, like a podium in a in a

346
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classroom overnight, sent spam for a local club to a bunch of

347
00:20:04,395 --> 00:20:08,235
emails he had harvested from the campus directory, and, then

348
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came back in the next day, pulled it, and and, like, took off with it.

349
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And he had remote controlled it over, like, and he did

350
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something where basically we were able to, like, correlate the,

351
00:20:19,620 --> 00:20:23,060
the only what had happened because he had remote

352
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desktop into it from his, like, campus,

353
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portal account from some routes on campus. Right? So he had, like, use elsewhere on

354
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campus, and he had, like, RDP'd, VNC'd, or whatever it was, into the box. And

355
00:20:33,304 --> 00:20:35,865
we solved that flow, and then we can look up his logger for the original

356
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machine. So it was only because we had like, otherwise, it would've been this ephemeral

357
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IP that shows up since spam is offline. Like, where in the world did that

358
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come from? Right? So Investigations are happening within that week span of, like, when

359
00:20:45,420 --> 00:20:48,540
you have Yeah. Like, I mean, we we got, like, spam a bunch of spam

360
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complaints, like, immediately. We had headers, and we pulled the logs, and we know exactly

361
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where the machine is. We can tell like, this ephemeral thing. The MAC address hasn't

362
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been seen on a wired port before on campus, and, it's gone

363
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again. But then I was, like, oh, we got this new, like, flow data. Let's

364
00:21:00,725 --> 00:21:02,725
go look at it. We can see, sure enough, all the app on us in

365
00:21:02,725 --> 00:21:06,404
DP, and then an inbound RDP, and it's, like, oh, hello

366
00:21:06,404 --> 00:21:10,250
there. I was still disappointed that they apparently like, the guy was, like, not

367
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really punished their that's a lawyer. They they really should have

368
00:21:13,690 --> 00:21:16,810
the the rule book thrown at them. Like, they know better. Like and it was

369
00:21:16,810 --> 00:21:19,290
clear that he knew what he was doing was not okay. Right? Because he he

370
00:21:19,290 --> 00:21:23,125
went to great lengths to obfuscate what he was doing. Right? Like, he didn't just

371
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do this from a machine he was logged in to. He intentionally wired into a

372
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different network, controlled it remotely, and then and did it that way. So I was

373
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a little disappointed that they didn't, the punishment wasn't wasn't particularly

374
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severe, which was a little bit disappointed, but that's what it is.

375
00:21:37,120 --> 00:21:40,640
Yeah. Interesting. Wow. Yeah. The, the my

376
00:21:40,640 --> 00:21:44,480
experience of working at not working. Well, before working. So I was

377
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at Georgia Tech at the Institute of Information Security and Privacy working, like,

378
00:21:48,240 --> 00:21:51,905
a 150 servers for the PhD students that were, either

379
00:21:51,905 --> 00:21:55,585
malware research or vulnerability research and No. Wait. Was that

380
00:21:55,585 --> 00:21:59,184
Georgia Tech Lab the same one that just recently got, in a little bit,

381
00:21:59,424 --> 00:22:01,684
like, the news for NIST 80171,

382
00:22:03,345 --> 00:22:07,158
stuff with the I don't know. I'm gonna reach out to you if I Google

383
00:22:07,158 --> 00:22:09,480
Google Georgia Tech and NIST 800171. It's for what it's worth. I'm on the university

384
00:22:09,480 --> 00:22:12,470
side. That's a whole it's a long story. That's actually, that's a really separate interesting

385
00:22:12,470 --> 00:22:15,830
topic about sort of, like, the over classification slash the creation of, like, this

386
00:22:15,830 --> 00:22:16,330
new,

387
00:22:21,215 --> 00:22:25,055
class of protected data called CUI or CDI, which is really, I think,

388
00:22:25,055 --> 00:22:28,735
a problem for small businesses. Like, the big contractors love it because it's gonna

389
00:22:28,735 --> 00:22:32,435
lock out small businesses from doing, defense contracting.

390
00:22:32,975 --> 00:22:36,710
The here we go. CUI, control, unclassified

391
00:22:37,090 --> 00:22:40,610
information. Is this a new standard or requirement? Yeah. So it's basically a new

392
00:22:40,610 --> 00:22:44,210
requirement that, there was I forgot what it's it's an executive order that

393
00:22:44,210 --> 00:22:47,890
basically was, like, the safeguarding defense material. Like, a lot of I mean, it

394
00:22:47,890 --> 00:22:51,655
came from good intentions. Right? Like, after the, OPM breach and stuff like that,

395
00:22:51,655 --> 00:22:54,635
where they're like, oh, we need to protect information.

396
00:22:55,415 --> 00:22:59,175
The problem is, like, it's unclassified information, but they

397
00:22:59,175 --> 00:23:03,010
still wanna, like, make sure it's taken care of well. And so they asked

398
00:23:03,010 --> 00:23:05,910
NIST to write a whole bunch of, like, rules about,

399
00:23:07,010 --> 00:23:10,450
like, how would you do good comments as practices. And, like, a lot of it's

400
00:23:10,450 --> 00:23:13,970
fine, but the problem is just it's a 122 pages of government

401
00:23:13,970 --> 00:23:17,725
specification that you don't have to read and conform to and, like,

402
00:23:17,725 --> 00:23:21,485
do an audit or self assess and a test. And, you know, it's

403
00:23:21,485 --> 00:23:25,245
like, I I understand how to run a good secure network. But,

404
00:23:25,245 --> 00:23:28,940
like, as a small company, I'm not gonna, like, clap on those

405
00:23:28,940 --> 00:23:32,780
ankle irons to, like, slow down how I do development

406
00:23:32,780 --> 00:23:36,380
or how my, you know, engineers work. So, like,

407
00:23:36,380 --> 00:23:40,140
yes. Two factor auth and everything? Absolutely. Password change policies? Maybe

408
00:23:40,140 --> 00:23:42,860
not yours because, like, there's a lot of debate as to what's a good password

409
00:23:42,860 --> 00:23:46,595
policy, but, audit log and review, certain, like, you have to look

410
00:23:46,595 --> 00:23:49,175
locked out. Yeah. It was just a bunch of stuff that you have to do

411
00:23:49,315 --> 00:23:53,075
that makes makes contracting hard. Anyway, let me back up on my my

412
00:23:53,075 --> 00:23:56,695
my bio for a second too. So, like, that was network defense at UF,

413
00:23:56,915 --> 00:24:00,110
and I started playing Captions Flags. And that's what, like, got me into offense.

414
00:24:01,049 --> 00:24:03,770
I did. Yeah. So I started I went to, like, a Sands conference, like, when

415
00:24:03,770 --> 00:24:07,530
I which I forgot what Sands course it was in Orlando, doing,

416
00:24:07,530 --> 00:24:10,970
like, offensive security stuff. And I was like, oh, yeah. This stuff's fun. Again, I've

417
00:24:10,970 --> 00:24:14,815
always wanted to, like always wanted to do it, but and this

418
00:24:14,815 --> 00:24:18,655
is like a a legal way. Exactly. Exactly. And so, like, that was

419
00:24:18,655 --> 00:24:21,215
super fun. In fact, one of my one of the people in the class was

420
00:24:21,215 --> 00:24:24,895
was Atlas, a dear friend of mine to to this

421
00:24:24,895 --> 00:24:28,650
day. And he, like, went on to play Defcon

422
00:24:28,650 --> 00:24:32,410
CTF that next year. And I was like, dude, how did you like, I met

423
00:24:32,410 --> 00:24:36,250
you. You were not that good. Like, no offense, man, but you were not that

424
00:24:36,250 --> 00:24:38,570
good. He's like, no. Like, I did this whole boot camp. I guess somebody else

425
00:24:38,570 --> 00:24:41,505
mentioned me. I wrote my first exploit and started, like, you know. And so he

426
00:24:41,505 --> 00:24:44,005
kinda described this process, and I was like, I'm in.

427
00:24:45,745 --> 00:24:48,545
It wasn't an official boot camp. It was more like a mentorship program, like, you

428
00:24:48,545 --> 00:24:51,025
got somebody else to, like, just reach out. And he basically offered you the same

429
00:24:51,025 --> 00:24:53,825
to me. He's like, hey. I'll I'll give you, like, some challenges. You can work

430
00:24:53,825 --> 00:24:57,480
through it. Like, you can join I'm putting together a team. And, so we

431
00:24:57,480 --> 00:25:01,160
we started a team and then we play so he he he

432
00:25:01,160 --> 00:25:03,160
played as, like, a road. That was the last year that you could play as

433
00:25:03,160 --> 00:25:06,520
an individual. You could show up and play as an individual at Defcon. From then

434
00:25:06,520 --> 00:25:08,380
on out, last 20 something years,

435
00:25:10,695 --> 00:25:13,195
There were still several 100. I mean, that would have been

436
00:25:14,455 --> 00:25:18,294
actually, you know what? I have a, a, a Google Sheet where I

437
00:25:18,294 --> 00:25:20,715
track the history of DEFCON CTF.

438
00:25:22,615 --> 00:25:26,340
Yeah. I don't know if I've added this last year, but,

439
00:25:27,200 --> 00:25:30,640
out here, it's history of Defcon CTF. Yeah. I'll drop a link, if there's a

440
00:25:30,800 --> 00:25:34,260
yeah. Let's check here. Yeah. Yeah. I see it.

441
00:25:35,755 --> 00:25:38,155
Alright. It says whisper backstage, but there you go. You should be able to see

442
00:25:38,155 --> 00:25:41,914
that. So, let's see. So that would

443
00:25:41,914 --> 00:25:45,615
have been so let's see. The first time I played Defcon CTF

444
00:25:45,914 --> 00:25:49,760
was at the Alexis

445
00:25:49,980 --> 00:25:53,600
Park in 2,000

446
00:25:54,380 --> 00:25:57,920
and 1. Yeah. So I played kind of a one off,

447
00:25:58,380 --> 00:26:02,220
yeah, at DEFCON CTF. Like, I barely just turned 21

448
00:26:02,220 --> 00:26:05,955
even. And, that was, like, pickup. It was a pickup game. You could

449
00:26:05,955 --> 00:26:08,075
just walk in and sit down and, like, go. It was it was kinda wild

450
00:26:08,075 --> 00:26:10,135
and crazy. Right? The

451
00:26:12,914 --> 00:26:16,649
yeah. I mean, it was still a a oh goodness. I don't

452
00:26:16,649 --> 00:26:20,169
know. Yeah. I mean, it was it so the Alexis Park as a hotel was,

453
00:26:20,169 --> 00:26:23,850
like, very different. Right? Like, it was kind of, like, apartment style, like, hotels that

454
00:26:23,850 --> 00:26:27,690
spread out, like, more resource style. And there was, like, literally a tent on

455
00:26:27,690 --> 00:26:31,264
the roof. Like, can you imagine a Vegas? Like, a tent on the roof. That

456
00:26:31,264 --> 00:26:34,304
was the year, like, Cult of the Dakar released, like, I think, b o two

457
00:26:34,304 --> 00:26:38,144
k or something. And they announced that from from

458
00:26:38,144 --> 00:26:41,585
one of the rooms. That was Dimitry Skalirov, the

459
00:26:41,585 --> 00:26:45,390
PDF. He reversed the year that they were, like, rot 13. Like, that

460
00:26:45,470 --> 00:26:48,270
was their encryption, and, like, he was arrested by the FBI. That was that that

461
00:26:48,270 --> 00:26:52,110
same year. Route 13 was the encryption? Yeah. It was basically

462
00:26:52,110 --> 00:26:54,030
it was basically route it was a little more than that, but it was basically

463
00:26:54,030 --> 00:26:57,630
route 13. And then, like, he announced it, and then the FBI arrested them. And

464
00:26:57,630 --> 00:27:01,265
then and people got a ton of flack, and Adobe's like, no. We're not person

465
00:27:01,265 --> 00:27:04,945
charges because they don't like, they suddenly realized it was, like, against the, like, public

466
00:27:04,945 --> 00:27:08,465
perception. But yeah. So it was Defcon 9, 2001. But then I I I didn't

467
00:27:08,465 --> 00:27:11,825
go to it for the next couple of years. And then I came so then

468
00:27:11,825 --> 00:27:15,429
Atlas was 2,005 when he basically soloed, like, played as a as a

469
00:27:15,429 --> 00:27:19,190
Ronin. And then it was 2,006. That was the last year. 2006 was the

470
00:27:19,190 --> 00:27:21,750
year you had to, like, qualify. The only way you could play was to qualify.

471
00:27:21,750 --> 00:27:25,510
It was only teams that, only has teams. So that was the 1st

472
00:27:25,510 --> 00:27:29,255
year I played, and we won that those

473
00:27:29,255 --> 00:27:32,715
next 2 years. And I was also on the team that won in in 20,

474
00:27:33,415 --> 00:27:37,255
2009. So first year you're 3 You just like you you

475
00:27:37,255 --> 00:27:40,690
didn't win, but you were you're getting No. We did. We did win. Yeah. We

476
00:27:40,690 --> 00:27:44,529
actually yeah. I got lucky. Well and so I yeah. I got with smart people.

477
00:27:44,529 --> 00:27:48,049
Right? So again, we had Atlas. We had Doc Brown. We had Burfra, like, a

478
00:27:48,049 --> 00:27:51,190
bunch of really good people in the team. And,

479
00:27:52,205 --> 00:27:55,565
so it was 7 or 8 of us. And yeah. It was like when that

480
00:27:55,565 --> 00:27:59,325
was, like, really when it started to, like, evolve. Like, it

481
00:27:59,325 --> 00:28:03,085
went from, like, it's all sort of own art form. Right? Like, DEF CON

482
00:28:03,085 --> 00:28:06,765
became very kinda, like, more specialized, and, like, the game was getting tuned and tweaked,

483
00:28:06,765 --> 00:28:10,290
and, like, people really kinda, like, honed in on what made Defcon CTF Defcon

484
00:28:10,290 --> 00:28:14,050
CTF. And that was really, I think, when it when it even actually

485
00:28:14,050 --> 00:28:17,330
the year before. I would say, 2005 is when it really started that process when

486
00:28:17,330 --> 00:28:19,990
Ken showed up to take it over. Oh, even get, you know, hackers. Maybe 2,004

487
00:28:20,535 --> 00:28:24,295
began it, and then it but really the game as it existed in 2,000, 2005,

488
00:28:24,295 --> 00:28:27,755
2,006, hasn't substantively

489
00:28:27,975 --> 00:28:31,755
changed. The only real difference was, like, the CGC introduced brokered,

490
00:28:31,975 --> 00:28:35,019
where basically, it it used to be you just got a server and your route

491
00:28:35,100 --> 00:28:37,899
you logged in and you defended your server. Right? And then there was some other

492
00:28:37,899 --> 00:28:41,019
mechanisms that the organizers had. There was that This is for well, this is, like

493
00:28:41,259 --> 00:28:44,700
yeah. So it's always been attack so the actually, the first 5 years or 6

494
00:28:44,700 --> 00:28:47,385
years of it were, like, just kinda, like, show up and plug a machine in.

495
00:28:47,385 --> 00:28:50,825
It was, like, really poorly structured. Like, plug a machine in and see what happens.

496
00:28:50,825 --> 00:28:54,424
Like, that was the CTF. Yeah. Hack each other. Like, run some stuff, I guess.

497
00:28:54,424 --> 00:28:57,544
It was it was a little little weird. And and it was it was the

498
00:28:57,544 --> 00:29:00,105
last year at GitHub Hackers and the 1st year at Kensho. Do when they really

499
00:29:00,105 --> 00:29:03,860
started to, like, no. No. No. We're gonna give you a VM image preconfigured. You

500
00:29:03,860 --> 00:29:07,700
have these services. We've custom written like that happened really then and

501
00:29:07,700 --> 00:29:10,740
started to kinda mature. And then really the only you know, there's been a lot

502
00:29:10,740 --> 00:29:14,435
of changes in, like, OS or network or, you know, stuff over the years. There's

503
00:29:14,435 --> 00:29:17,575
been a couple of new innovations like, King of the Hill style challenges,

504
00:29:18,915 --> 00:29:22,115
where, like, it's you can iteratively, like, whoever solves it with the fewest bytes, and

505
00:29:22,115 --> 00:29:24,515
then you can continually kinda do it. And so there's, like, a sort of a

506
00:29:24,515 --> 00:29:28,035
separate style challenge. But mostly, it's been yeah. Attack depends. You've got a

507
00:29:28,035 --> 00:29:31,570
server, attack it, and defend it at the same time. So you're writing

508
00:29:31,630 --> 00:29:35,230
patches for your binaries. You're you used to be able to put network firewalls in

509
00:29:35,230 --> 00:29:38,350
place. That's part of the game that's changed. They sort of removed that. People got

510
00:29:38,350 --> 00:29:41,970
too good. Like, people figured out too many generic defenses.

511
00:29:42,110 --> 00:29:45,835
Right? Like, if I can just run my server, I'll just virtualize your

512
00:29:45,835 --> 00:29:49,595
entire thing, lift it to something else, and then emulate it or put it in

513
00:29:49,595 --> 00:29:52,875
any kind of thing that's doing Cisco tracing, and I'll block all access to the

514
00:29:52,875 --> 00:29:56,395
key file. Like, ta da. I've secured your server. This is so much of boring,

515
00:29:56,395 --> 00:30:00,150
like, become Superman defenses. And so this the the changes lately

516
00:30:00,610 --> 00:30:04,310
require you to submit your patch to your binary to the game infrastructure

517
00:30:04,370 --> 00:30:08,130
that it's deployed for you. You're not root on your box, so you can't totally

518
00:30:08,130 --> 00:30:10,930
rewrite. Yeah. And often, we'll limit the size of the patch or whatnot. So that's

519
00:30:10,930 --> 00:30:14,625
the trend, the last few years post post CGS. Going

520
00:30:14,625 --> 00:30:18,465
forward in this type of fashion? You know, it's different. I,

521
00:30:18,865 --> 00:30:22,305
it's not better or worse. It's just different. I miss like, there was all sorts

522
00:30:22,305 --> 00:30:25,505
of amazing shenanigans you could pull when you had a full real box in the

523
00:30:25,505 --> 00:30:29,080
full shell. And, and as both an admin and an

524
00:30:29,080 --> 00:30:32,520
attacker, it was so many you'd find things that other teams have forgot or teams

525
00:30:32,520 --> 00:30:36,280
would have wrong permissions or it was all sorts of really cool stuff you

526
00:30:36,280 --> 00:30:39,880
could do, and that's that's gone away, which is sad. But at the same time,

527
00:30:39,880 --> 00:30:43,184
they kinda had to. Because like I said, too many teams had figured out these,

528
00:30:43,184 --> 00:30:46,945
like, just generic Superman defenses that you just could never score them, and that's

529
00:30:46,945 --> 00:30:50,785
really boring. Like, yeah, everybody can do one generic wrapper that just doesn't let

530
00:30:50,785 --> 00:30:53,905
the key get red and then deploy to all their services and poof. You can't

531
00:30:53,905 --> 00:30:57,610
now score on them like that. That's stupid. So, yeah, it's hard to

532
00:30:57,610 --> 00:31:00,970
to to kinda strike that balance. But I do miss I do miss the shell

533
00:31:00,970 --> 00:31:04,250
shunning. I that was my main specialty. I was really good at, like, just weird

534
00:31:04,410 --> 00:31:08,170
oh, yeah. Shenanigans. I loved I loved that stuff. Like like,

535
00:31:08,170 --> 00:31:11,935
when you're, when you're we could log into the scoreboard

536
00:31:12,155 --> 00:31:15,535
using a key that they dropped on our box at the beginning of the game,

537
00:31:16,235 --> 00:31:19,595
and the key existed in 2 places. Like, it was in a database that was

538
00:31:19,595 --> 00:31:22,415
in the file on the file system, and no team

539
00:31:23,680 --> 00:31:26,480
removed it in both places. Like, some people would, like, fix the file permissions to

540
00:31:26,480 --> 00:31:29,360
make it not readable for the file, but they would forget the database. Some people

541
00:31:29,360 --> 00:31:33,120
cleared the database, forgot the file. So we had, basically, everybody's login to their score

542
00:31:33,120 --> 00:31:36,240
server, which, like, I could log in as them and score for them, I guess,

543
00:31:36,240 --> 00:31:38,480
or I could log in you know, it's like, what what can you do on

544
00:31:38,480 --> 00:31:41,565
that? Well, one of the things you could do is reset their overwrite token. Alright.

545
00:31:41,565 --> 00:31:45,005
So you you have an overwrite token that when you exploit somebody to prove you

546
00:31:45,005 --> 00:31:48,765
have write access, not just read access, right, you would take your overwrite token

547
00:31:48,765 --> 00:31:52,045
and put it on top of the flag file, and the hypervisor, whatever's doing the

548
00:31:52,045 --> 00:31:54,660
logging, would would detect that and be like, oh, okay. You get points for an

549
00:31:54,660 --> 00:31:57,620
overwrite. Right? So it was just you could both seal a flag and overwrite or

550
00:31:57,620 --> 00:32:00,840
some services maybe you could only overwrite. Right? Depending on the the challenge.

551
00:32:01,300 --> 00:32:05,059
And, so we, for example, click the button

552
00:32:05,059 --> 00:32:08,725
to, like, refresh the override key from School of Root and we would

553
00:32:08,725 --> 00:32:11,365
watch them and wait till they notice. And, like, 45 minutes later, an hour later,

554
00:32:11,365 --> 00:32:13,605
you see them all, like, looking around. Who who did? Who hit the button? No.

555
00:32:13,605 --> 00:32:15,524
Who did the button? No. They go back to work. Wait till they're not paying

556
00:32:15,524 --> 00:32:19,365
attention again. Do it again. So we denied them, like, overwrite points for

557
00:32:19,365 --> 00:32:21,765
a period of time. Like, you can't, you know, you can't get that back. You've

558
00:32:21,765 --> 00:32:25,220
missed that that that time with us. That was really fun. We also logged in

559
00:32:25,220 --> 00:32:29,059
as a different team and gave them points from us because that was back in

560
00:32:29,059 --> 00:32:32,820
the day where you had, 1st Blood. So the first person to score a particular

561
00:32:32,820 --> 00:32:36,515
service got, like, an extra bonus points, and then it was just over time how

562
00:32:36,515 --> 00:32:40,275
many time slots could you could you score in essentially. And so we intentionally gave

563
00:32:40,275 --> 00:32:43,955
low ranking teams first blood against our services that they

564
00:32:43,955 --> 00:32:47,715
hadn't actually done just to deny those points to other teams because we

565
00:32:47,715 --> 00:32:51,174
knew we couldn't solve those challenges at the time, and we were we were afraid.

566
00:32:51,630 --> 00:32:54,670
Yes. There's a bunch of shenanigans. Like, that one's actually a little questionable, I think,

567
00:32:54,670 --> 00:32:57,310
in hindsight. We did ask the organizers at the time, and they were like and

568
00:32:57,310 --> 00:33:00,750
they were like, well, you you did a hacking thing. You got everyone else's logins.

569
00:33:00,750 --> 00:33:04,030
They didn't secure it properly, and you're using that to get an advantage. Like, it's

570
00:33:04,030 --> 00:33:07,615
fair. So there and I I that one actually didn't matter in the end either,

571
00:33:07,615 --> 00:33:10,654
guy, because it turned out that that none of the other teams were actually close

572
00:33:10,654 --> 00:33:13,294
to solving the ones that we gave those points to. But, you know, sort of

573
00:33:13,294 --> 00:33:16,255
defensively, we we thought it might be. So, yeah, I love that that side of

574
00:33:16,255 --> 00:33:17,955
the the game. It was it was fun.

575
00:33:23,539 --> 00:33:27,220
A lot of people have. Yeah. Absolutely. I never I again, I said, I was

576
00:33:27,220 --> 00:33:30,659
always kinda straight. So, like, if I ever was do I love the shenanigans, but

577
00:33:30,659 --> 00:33:33,940
I would always just ask. I'd be like, hey. I wanna do a thing. Can

578
00:33:33,940 --> 00:33:37,305
I do a thing? And, you know, occasionally, they'd be like, yes. Occasionally, they'd be

579
00:33:37,305 --> 00:33:40,125
like, no. Like, it's we've we've gotten both and so, like, there were years that

580
00:33:40,265 --> 00:33:43,945
1 year, when, legit BS was running at their 1st year, I think,

581
00:33:43,945 --> 00:33:47,705
actually, like, denial of service attacks were kind of a thing. Like, it sort of

582
00:33:47,705 --> 00:33:51,450
unintentionally opened the door to that. And usually, you don't let any DDoS because one,

583
00:33:51,450 --> 00:33:55,290
DDoS is technically uninteresting. Right? And dumb. Like, yes, you can flood your

584
00:33:55,290 --> 00:33:58,809
opponents. Nobody cares. Right? Like, that's not interesting. No. No. No points for

585
00:33:58,809 --> 00:34:01,850
style. And so there's, like, a certain amount of things are just forbidden by rule

586
00:34:01,850 --> 00:34:05,675
and if they catch you, they'll penalize you. And they sort

587
00:34:05,675 --> 00:34:09,275
of, like, one team found a kinda cleverish way of doing a DOS

588
00:34:09,275 --> 00:34:12,955
using infrastructure, and they allowed it, and we're, like, oh, fine. Well,

589
00:34:12,955 --> 00:34:15,594
we have this other thing where we can half close a socket and spoof a

590
00:34:15,594 --> 00:34:18,635
thing from somebody else and, like, trigger it, and it will cause them to flood

591
00:34:18,635 --> 00:34:22,350
somebody else's traffic. Like, sounds like fair game. Right? And they were, like,

592
00:34:23,130 --> 00:34:26,810
yeah. We did sort of open up the rules for that. We're sorry. And they

593
00:34:26,810 --> 00:34:30,650
they ended up basically saying, like, no. You can't do that. We're gonna

594
00:34:30,650 --> 00:34:32,889
give you some points. We're gonna have the other team that's doing the other thing

595
00:34:32,889 --> 00:34:35,145
a little bit of points, and then just stop doing it. Right? So they gave

596
00:34:35,145 --> 00:34:37,945
you a little points for a school idea. No one can now do it. You

597
00:34:37,945 --> 00:34:40,905
had the first person idea. And so, like, that was kinda how they how they

598
00:34:40,905 --> 00:34:44,685
did it. I've seen people get kicked out because they cut courts though. When your

599
00:34:45,225 --> 00:34:48,745
one team was so angry, they've literally went into under the table and cut another

600
00:34:48,745 --> 00:34:52,259
team's court. They were just, like, bad bad manner, and they were they were kicked

601
00:34:52,259 --> 00:34:56,019
out of the they should've been kicked out of the whole whole convention, but at

602
00:34:56,019 --> 00:34:59,779
the time, it was just they were kicked out of the CTF. There have been

603
00:34:59,779 --> 00:35:03,444
people who who explicitly were denial of survey, servicing

604
00:35:03,444 --> 00:35:05,765
before that they were, like, stop it, knock it off and if you don't, we're

605
00:35:05,765 --> 00:35:09,444
gonna kick you out. You're hosting now as well. Right? So you might be, doing

606
00:35:09,444 --> 00:35:11,925
that and that's your host. So you're able to see a lot more of what's

607
00:35:11,925 --> 00:35:15,765
behind the scenes now. Somewhat. Like, I I'm actually I'm so busy with

608
00:35:15,765 --> 00:35:19,340
with so I'm I'm doing live CTF which is, like, sports casted

609
00:35:19,720 --> 00:35:23,560
e sports commentary. Yeah. It was like a 4

610
00:35:23,560 --> 00:35:27,320
hour video too. It was like, oh, it's, it's exhausting. Yeah. And we, thankfully

611
00:35:27,320 --> 00:35:29,640
we have a team of people this year that groups grown a little bit. So

612
00:35:29,640 --> 00:35:33,435
I like the 1st year I was literally on camera the entire time. But now

613
00:35:33,435 --> 00:35:36,155
we can we can we can trade out. Yeah. I just like being, like, you

614
00:35:36,155 --> 00:35:39,995
know, enthusiastic the entire time. Yeah. High energy

615
00:35:39,995 --> 00:35:42,235
and, like, you're you're pretty exhausted by the end. But, I mean, it is it

616
00:35:42,235 --> 00:35:45,035
is exciting. It's fun because you're legit watching some of the best hackers in the

617
00:35:45,035 --> 00:35:48,110
world. You get to watch their screen live. It happens. So, like, it is it's

618
00:35:48,110 --> 00:35:51,950
pretty great. But, like so I'm I'm, like, in with the organizer, you know, the

619
00:35:51,950 --> 00:35:55,650
main, you know, Nautilus Institute team that's running it. I'm not officially

620
00:35:55,710 --> 00:35:58,830
on the team. We do we just kinda like to do our live CTF stuff

621
00:35:58,830 --> 00:36:01,934
sort of sort of separately. We just have enough nothing to worry about. We do

622
00:36:01,934 --> 00:36:05,775
technically have access though to to what they're, to what they're doing. We, you know,

623
00:36:05,775 --> 00:36:08,734
we we talk a fair amount. So we do hear some stuff, but we're just,

624
00:36:08,734 --> 00:36:12,414
yeah, so busy with our little kind of side quest, that that I don't I

625
00:36:12,414 --> 00:36:15,490
don't, I don't worry about that a whole lot. Anyway, I wanted to to go

626
00:36:15,490 --> 00:36:19,250
well, and I'm kinda keeping keeping ear to things. But yeah. So,

627
00:36:19,250 --> 00:36:23,089
like, so so CTF was, like, my my introduction into office. Right?

628
00:36:23,089 --> 00:36:26,055
That was where I was, like, okay. Cool. Like, this is this is fun. I

629
00:36:26,055 --> 00:36:29,494
like write writing exploits. I like reverse engineering. I was starting reverse engineering at the

630
00:36:29,494 --> 00:36:32,695
university for, like, an hour analysis a little bit. Right? Like, I had an audit

631
00:36:32,695 --> 00:36:36,455
copy back then. And I wasn't very good, but, like, I like the idea. Learning,

632
00:36:36,455 --> 00:36:39,734
like, what resources were you using at the time to to start your reverse engineering

633
00:36:39,734 --> 00:36:43,400
journey? I mean, at the time, I don't yeah. I don't remember a whole lot.

634
00:36:43,400 --> 00:36:46,920
Just Here's the details. Right? Like Just kick off the office. No. Literally. I

635
00:36:46,920 --> 00:36:50,680
have I have absolutely highlighted Intel books still sitting on my shelf at the

636
00:36:50,680 --> 00:36:53,560
office, for, like, you know, it used to be a game to find who who

637
00:36:53,560 --> 00:36:56,885
could find the most typos. There's a bunch of like little either typos or like

638
00:36:56,885 --> 00:37:00,325
errors depending on which version of the books you had. And books they don't ever

639
00:37:00,325 --> 00:37:03,845
they don't ever expect people to actually read them. And like they'll just have

640
00:37:03,845 --> 00:37:07,470
like, oh, so this does the thing. Like, don't worry about it kind of thing.

641
00:37:07,470 --> 00:37:11,310
It's like, I wanna learn. I think I think they do. I think they

642
00:37:11,310 --> 00:37:13,869
do. Like, they did fix them. They would you could send them in send them

643
00:37:13,869 --> 00:37:17,070
in, and they did, do a lot of editions of it. And I I don't

644
00:37:17,070 --> 00:37:19,790
know if any of the typos that I found are still still there in the

645
00:37:19,790 --> 00:37:23,295
the online versions. Because the same same docs are now. Still PDFs

646
00:37:23,355 --> 00:37:27,115
online. But yeah. So I like, I literally I I just would

647
00:37:27,115 --> 00:37:30,715
go through and and learn opcodes and, you know, look at

648
00:37:30,715 --> 00:37:33,375
disassembly, look at look at decompilers. And,

649
00:37:34,490 --> 00:37:38,329
I actually I I taught, an assembly language course at when I

650
00:37:38,329 --> 00:37:41,950
was working at Raytheon. But yeah. So so the the story was I went from

651
00:37:42,329 --> 00:37:46,089
network defense at at UF, Sharpen Capture the Flag, and then turn that

652
00:37:46,089 --> 00:37:49,745
into a job at, a small company called

653
00:37:49,745 --> 00:37:53,185
SI Govs, SI Government Solutions, which then Raytheon bought and they

654
00:37:53,185 --> 00:37:57,025
became Raytheon SI, Raytheon CSI, Raytheon

655
00:37:57,025 --> 00:38:00,625
CodEx, and now they're spot Nightwing is like the the company's had a million different

656
00:38:00,625 --> 00:38:04,440
names. That's the origin of Nightwing? Yeah. Nightwing was well, so so

657
00:38:04,440 --> 00:38:08,040
SI was is not is a part of of Nightwing. But

658
00:38:08,040 --> 00:38:11,880
Nightwing Nightwing was, like, all of the cyber business that Raytheon had kinda spun

659
00:38:11,880 --> 00:38:15,080
off. So it was a bigger business unit, but, like, a big chunk of it

660
00:38:15,080 --> 00:38:18,734
is, yeah, is is is what was originally SI Government Solutions.

661
00:38:19,195 --> 00:38:22,635
And they say government solutions, that was reverse engineering? It was all vulnerability

662
00:38:22,635 --> 00:38:25,675
research, reverse engineering. There was a frame out of tool dev and stuff as well.

663
00:38:25,675 --> 00:38:29,515
The thing I loved about about SI, was that, like, back in the

664
00:38:29,515 --> 00:38:32,900
day so even, like, several of the I'm not gonna call it explicitly. People I

665
00:38:32,900 --> 00:38:36,660
was playing CTF against or with, at the time, we're working for

666
00:38:36,660 --> 00:38:40,420
other defense contractors, and we're doing the same kind of work. Right? Like,

667
00:38:40,420 --> 00:38:44,184
there were there were folks involved. And, so even some of the

668
00:38:44,184 --> 00:38:47,464
CTF challenges came from, like, ideas or problems they had or stuff, which is really

669
00:38:47,464 --> 00:38:51,065
fun to kinda, like, you know, find out about that. But the thing that

670
00:38:51,065 --> 00:38:54,905
SI did really differently was and by the 3rd by my 3rd

671
00:38:54,905 --> 00:38:58,529
year, of of winning, the 3rd one I had was with

672
00:38:58,529 --> 00:39:01,910
basically a bunch of SI players. So I I switched kind of

673
00:39:02,130 --> 00:39:05,829
from, the original team I was playing with, and and was playing with them.

674
00:39:06,130 --> 00:39:09,890
And, as I had, like, this focus on tool development, like,

675
00:39:09,890 --> 00:39:13,465
not just find the bugs or, you know, do whatever, but,

676
00:39:13,465 --> 00:39:17,225
like, invested a lot of time into both, like, the analysis harnesses and the

677
00:39:17,225 --> 00:39:20,905
fuzzing tool sets and, like, the fuzzing corpus and fuzzing harp like, was doing

678
00:39:20,905 --> 00:39:24,265
more, like, infrastructure around it, which was really fun. So we actually had a pretty

679
00:39:24,265 --> 00:39:27,630
good sized staff of, like, just raw developers. There's people building

680
00:39:27,630 --> 00:39:31,150
tooling, and then we had it was kind of this internal split, which I think

681
00:39:31,150 --> 00:39:34,430
now there was some some issues with that in terms of, like, the, you know,

682
00:39:34,430 --> 00:39:37,869
the vulnerability research or hacker cool kids were kind of annoying and the developers were

683
00:39:37,869 --> 00:39:41,085
like the adults in the room, like, y'all grow up. And now I'm the developer

684
00:39:41,085 --> 00:39:44,545
going, oh, I'm so embarrassed about the way some of some of us behaved.

685
00:39:45,805 --> 00:39:49,085
But, like, it was but it was great because we did have that that balance,

686
00:39:49,085 --> 00:39:51,805
which I think a lot of a lot of companies didn't. And so that was

687
00:39:51,885 --> 00:39:55,185
and yeah. So they hired me because I was doing tech writing for for magazines.

688
00:39:55,779 --> 00:39:59,059
Yeah. So going to that, I I Yeah. I was reading that and then I

689
00:39:59,059 --> 00:40:02,420
think, there's a talk that you gave recently in Germany at one of the institutions.

690
00:40:02,420 --> 00:40:06,099
I Yeah. That video and I was like, how did you go from,

691
00:40:06,099 --> 00:40:09,700
like, technical writing and say like, oh, I I wanna actually do this. And do

692
00:40:09,700 --> 00:40:13,155
you just run to the manager? I'm like, okay. I'm your guy now. No. The

693
00:40:13,155 --> 00:40:16,755
the funny thing is I didn't even know that was the plan. Like, literally

694
00:40:16,835 --> 00:40:20,275
so what happened was I was, you know, I was playing CTF. I was getting

695
00:40:20,275 --> 00:40:23,259
a security. And at the time, like, SI was like, how do we hire people

696
00:40:23,259 --> 00:40:26,859
who can get clearances and write exploits? Right? Like, that's a pretty rare

697
00:40:27,099 --> 00:40:29,980
it was people that you could write exploits, but maybe they weren't clearable or, you

698
00:40:29,980 --> 00:40:33,819
know, vice versa. Exactly. And that's where our company, Top3d Recruiting,

699
00:40:33,819 --> 00:40:37,655
comes in. Finding the right cybersecurity talent with the necessary clearances

700
00:40:37,795 --> 00:40:41,155
can be a major hurdle. Did you know that it could take 8 to 15

701
00:40:41,155 --> 00:40:44,755
months on average to hire somebody with a TS SEI plus full

702
00:40:44,755 --> 00:40:48,055
polyscope? At top creative recruiting, we have a network of 1,300,000

703
00:40:48,675 --> 00:40:52,490
cleared professionals ranging from CNO developers, reverse engineers,

704
00:40:52,550 --> 00:40:56,150
and data scientists. Whether you're working on offensive operations or

705
00:40:56,150 --> 00:40:59,530
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706
00:40:59,590 --> 00:41:03,190
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707
00:41:03,190 --> 00:41:06,615
you to find the perfect candidate already cleared and ready to

708
00:41:06,615 --> 00:41:07,115
go.

709
00:41:10,375 --> 00:41:13,975
This was in 2,005 maybe or what what time frame is

710
00:41:13,975 --> 00:41:17,355
this? Yeah. So this would have been, I think, 2,007.

711
00:41:20,630 --> 00:41:23,590
Right. Because it was my daughter was yeah. My daughter was 1. So that was

712
00:41:23,590 --> 00:41:25,990
how I that's how I remember it. As I started, it was it was 2,007.

713
00:41:25,990 --> 00:41:29,350
I met a couple people. I can met somebody at at RSA. So I was

714
00:41:29,430 --> 00:41:32,890
I at the university, I it was a there's a guy in town,

715
00:41:33,515 --> 00:41:36,395
who was a writer for a bunch of different magazines, and he would kinda part

716
00:41:36,395 --> 00:41:39,675
with the university because we had lots of data, lots of networks, you know, stuff

717
00:41:39,675 --> 00:41:43,515
to test things on. And so he had a long standing partnership for just, like,

718
00:41:43,515 --> 00:41:45,835
network year to come in and test and work with them. And he started to

719
00:41:45,915 --> 00:41:48,789
when when I was in security stuff, he said, oh, do you wanna write for

720
00:41:48,789 --> 00:41:51,269
some of these magazines? I'm like, yeah. That sounds super fun. So, anyways, it turned

721
00:41:51,269 --> 00:41:54,630
into, like, a sort of side side career of writing for, like,

722
00:41:54,630 --> 00:41:58,150
InfoWorld and Information Week and a bunch of, like, computer

723
00:41:58,549 --> 00:42:01,430
network computing magazine. Bunch of these are all, like, you know, out of print now.

724
00:42:01,430 --> 00:42:03,875
Were these big ones at the time? At the time, they were they were they

725
00:42:03,875 --> 00:42:07,635
were very well known. And they were, like, CMP was the parent company for a

726
00:42:07,635 --> 00:42:09,875
bunch of them. They owned Black Hat at one point. I don't know if that

727
00:42:09,875 --> 00:42:13,635
was still the case, but they were literally, like, bought. Black Hat, the conference was

728
00:42:13,635 --> 00:42:17,070
owned by CMP Media. Yeah. Like, this big media publishing house. I don't I have

729
00:42:17,070 --> 00:42:20,110
no idea if that's still the case, but I I know that, yeah, at one

730
00:42:20,110 --> 00:42:23,950
point that was, they actually bought officially bought it out

731
00:42:23,950 --> 00:42:27,710
from from Jeff. And so, yeah. So, I mean, it was, like

732
00:42:27,790 --> 00:42:30,585
so I I went to, like, Defcon or Black Hat on, like, a press pass

733
00:42:30,585 --> 00:42:33,305
for several years, because I was a I was a reporter. I went to RSA

734
00:42:33,305 --> 00:42:36,744
on on a press pass, because I was it was actually, you know, writing for

735
00:42:36,744 --> 00:42:40,585
magazines. And, in fact, I won, like, there was actually an

736
00:42:40,585 --> 00:42:43,565
early prototype for, like, live CTF, like, a head to head competition

737
00:42:44,105 --> 00:42:47,839
that the the precursor to SI govs was called SI, and

738
00:42:47,839 --> 00:42:51,359
they actually split to do commercial stuff and SI govs went to the government stuff.

739
00:42:51,359 --> 00:42:54,099
And so SI, Security Innovation, ran a,

740
00:42:54,960 --> 00:42:57,839
like a thing at RSA where it's like a web hacking challenge where, like, you

741
00:42:57,839 --> 00:43:00,495
were on screen and your screen's above your head, and you're competing with somebody else

742
00:43:00,495 --> 00:43:03,215
and somebody's, like, with a mic, like, you know, heckling you and talking about what

743
00:43:03,215 --> 00:43:06,415
you're doing and you're racing. I'm like, it's always very similar. It's really what inspired

744
00:43:06,415 --> 00:43:09,375
a lot of the a lot of CTS stuff I've done since. And so I

745
00:43:09,375 --> 00:43:11,935
won that and, like, the headline was, like, literally on slash. That was, like, you

746
00:43:11,935 --> 00:43:15,640
know, network computing reporter when Yeah. With your press

747
00:43:15,640 --> 00:43:19,160
badge, you're like, yeah. Blah blah blah blah. Who is this? Yeah. People were most

748
00:43:19,160 --> 00:43:21,960
of all, like, Jeremiah Grossman at the time was I I became good friends with

749
00:43:21,960 --> 00:43:24,840
him as a result of, like, like, he was he was, like, wait. Yeah. I

750
00:43:24,840 --> 00:43:28,285
interviewed him for the magazine. He's, like, didn't you just, like, do that competition? I

751
00:43:28,285 --> 00:43:30,545
was, like, well, I, like, I do real work too.

752
00:43:32,285 --> 00:43:36,125
Like, but, you know, so I was doing writing. And so the yeah. SI gov

753
00:43:36,125 --> 00:43:39,325
is basically I went down I wasn't even, like, in a formal interview. Like, I

754
00:43:39,325 --> 00:43:41,645
just went to visit. Like, I had talked to them, or at least I didn't

755
00:43:41,645 --> 00:43:45,299
know it was an interview. And, at the time they were maybe 30

756
00:43:45,299 --> 00:43:49,059
people. They looked at my

757
00:43:49,059 --> 00:43:52,260
resume and were like, Oh, he knows security stuff. He's writing for magazines. He'd make

758
00:43:52,260 --> 00:43:56,020
a great tech writer. Taking our reports on vulnerabilities or things we're

759
00:43:56,020 --> 00:43:59,655
doing for government report writing. He could do a really he'd be a really, really

760
00:43:59,655 --> 00:44:03,095
good tech writer. But, like, nobody told me this, and I was like, yeah. I

761
00:44:03,095 --> 00:44:05,895
wanna I wanna write exploits. This sounds great. So as soon as I started, like,

762
00:44:05,895 --> 00:44:09,655
I was in the engineering group. I just they just assigned me to start doing

763
00:44:09,655 --> 00:44:13,290
reverse engineering, start writing exploits, and I wrote my first, like, QuickTime exploit in the

764
00:44:13,290 --> 00:44:16,010
1st, like, week. Because QuickTime, you could just sneeze that and it would fall over

765
00:44:16,010 --> 00:44:18,490
back in the day. Started straight into it. Did you still have to write the

766
00:44:18,490 --> 00:44:21,770
technical part where they wanted you to do? You're just like, oh, I'll do that

767
00:44:21,770 --> 00:44:25,450
too, but then you're also No. Like, literally, the person who thought that never

768
00:44:25,450 --> 00:44:28,183
talked to the engineering lead that I ended up with. I was just a straight

769
00:44:28,183 --> 00:44:31,573
up, like, engineer. I mean, I did I did do some role that they were

770
00:44:31,573 --> 00:44:34,764
looking for originally there. They hired somebody else. We don't really do. They did hire

771
00:44:34,764 --> 00:44:37,755
somebody else. Yeah. No. It was literally, like, a while later that they admitted to

772
00:44:37,755 --> 00:44:40,746
me. They're like, you know, we didn't originally hire you. I was like, what? Like,

773
00:44:40,746 --> 00:44:44,039
I had no idea that that was the intention, but, like, the. Yeah. They,

774
00:44:44,900 --> 00:44:47,380
so, I mean, I I did do some, you know, I did proposal writing and

775
00:44:47,380 --> 00:44:50,500
some other kind of writing, but I was not like, there were other dedicated, tech

776
00:44:50,500 --> 00:44:54,260
writers that were hired afterwards. That's crazy. I I'm trying to figure out if there's

777
00:44:54,260 --> 00:44:57,715
any, like, lesson that, like, if any listeners, like, how do I, you know, get

778
00:44:57,715 --> 00:45:01,555
my first really technical job? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously, like, is there any lesson

779
00:45:01,555 --> 00:45:05,235
you can come from that other than just, like, apply this a technical position

780
00:45:05,395 --> 00:45:09,099
a technical writing position? I don't know. Yeah. But you ship you over? Type

781
00:45:09,099 --> 00:45:12,780
confusion attack and you just get them to, you know, you just start doing the,

782
00:45:12,940 --> 00:45:15,500
the other stuff. Like, I I will say, like, you know, a lot of a

783
00:45:15,500 --> 00:45:18,540
lot of positions become what you make of it. Right? Like, no matter what your

784
00:45:18,540 --> 00:45:21,414
role is, if you demonstrate the skill in something, I feel like you can you

785
00:45:21,414 --> 00:45:24,134
can shove stuff around. I've seen I've seen that happen, you know, more often than

786
00:45:24,134 --> 00:45:27,275
not, where somebody if you're if you're good at it, if you can do it,

787
00:45:27,654 --> 00:45:31,174
just just do it. And the the company will will value it. So Let's let's

788
00:45:31,174 --> 00:45:34,214
dive into that. I feel like some people might actually have questions. Maybe for a

789
00:45:34,214 --> 00:45:37,269
beta, of course, getting the first role, but let's assume, like, they're in a company

790
00:45:37,269 --> 00:45:40,710
and then they're like, okay, now I wanna go over to this this department. What

791
00:45:40,789 --> 00:45:43,670
Yeah. Did you have you seen some people that have shifted over and like how

792
00:45:43,670 --> 00:45:47,269
have they done it? Yeah. Yeah. I've seen I've seen it work, both ways too.

793
00:45:47,269 --> 00:45:49,829
I've also seen people who are technical who get burnt out and go to non

794
00:45:49,829 --> 00:45:53,335
technical roles too. Right? Like, and I think both are are healthy. Right? I've seen

795
00:45:53,335 --> 00:45:56,934
people who are like, you know what? And and, like, for

796
00:45:56,934 --> 00:46:00,615
example, like, QA, for example, can be, like, looked down upon, but really

797
00:46:00,615 --> 00:46:04,230
good QA is super valuable. And so some people, like, find their fit

798
00:46:04,290 --> 00:46:07,970
not doing your the development they were hired for, but in in QA or in

799
00:46:07,970 --> 00:46:10,850
in tech writing or in these other stuff. And then other times, you know, you

800
00:46:10,850 --> 00:46:14,150
see somebody who starts as a as a tech writer and then,

801
00:46:14,850 --> 00:46:18,450
like, very quickly is just writing, you know, hand coding assembly, for

802
00:46:18,450 --> 00:46:22,265
exploits. I yeah. I I don't know if there's,

803
00:46:22,265 --> 00:46:25,865
like, a a manual or a map for it. For for me, I was just

804
00:46:26,025 --> 00:46:28,744
I just did the things that I found fun. Like, if I liked it and

805
00:46:28,744 --> 00:46:30,744
enjoyed it, I just did it when I was doing it. You know? So I

806
00:46:30,744 --> 00:46:34,570
was at home. Yeah. Playing capture the flag and doing things. And when you're,

807
00:46:34,570 --> 00:46:37,470
yeah, doing it, when you have the cape capability,

808
00:46:38,490 --> 00:46:42,250
if you communicate with your with your your management, you're like, no. Like, this is

809
00:46:42,250 --> 00:46:45,610
what I wanna do. I think I think a good manager too, you know,

810
00:46:45,610 --> 00:46:49,005
like, right now, we have we have one on ones occasionally with with employees and,

811
00:46:49,005 --> 00:46:51,885
like, we've sort of 2 different ones. We have, like, status of, like, what's your

812
00:46:52,045 --> 00:46:54,845
on this project, and then we have a separate one that said let let's frequent

813
00:46:54,845 --> 00:46:58,045
interval. It's just more just like, hey. What are you doing? Are you happy overall,

814
00:46:58,045 --> 00:47:01,320
like, with what you're doing? But I think a good a good boss is, like,

815
00:47:01,320 --> 00:47:04,600
your job is to, like, find out does this person wanna take on a leadership

816
00:47:04,600 --> 00:47:07,560
role? Do they wanna take on more technical, less technical? Do they wanna like, they're

817
00:47:07,560 --> 00:47:10,520
not happy with this part of the product they're working on? They wanna do less

818
00:47:10,520 --> 00:47:13,660
of the Python API. They wanna see people else. Yeah. Whatever whatever it is.

819
00:47:14,520 --> 00:47:18,335
But but I think it goes both ways. I think you as an engineer should

820
00:47:18,335 --> 00:47:22,015
be communicating, what you wanna do. Now it's not always

821
00:47:22,015 --> 00:47:25,855
gonna work out. Right? Sometimes you gotta every I've absolutely had to slog through things

822
00:47:25,855 --> 00:47:28,495
I didn't wanna do because it just need to be done. Right? Like, that totally

823
00:47:28,495 --> 00:47:32,200
happens. But, like, over a long enough time frame, don't, like, do

824
00:47:32,200 --> 00:47:35,960
something you don't enjoy. Like, I've I've left my jobs when

825
00:47:35,960 --> 00:47:39,679
they became not enjoyable or when something else presented itself. It's it was

826
00:47:40,039 --> 00:47:43,079
it was, like, 7 to 8 years at the university. 7 to 8 years at

827
00:47:43,079 --> 00:47:46,745
Raytown. That's a long time. Yeah. In general, now in this world,

828
00:47:46,745 --> 00:47:49,785
like, 2 And now year and a half, 2 years people are out. Yeah. And

829
00:47:49,785 --> 00:47:52,825
now it's been 10 years for me at the current one, and I I don't

830
00:47:52,905 --> 00:47:55,625
I this the role has changed. The company is growing. Things are, like, I'm still

831
00:47:55,625 --> 00:47:58,950
so excited about Pioneer and Ninja, what we're doing. We're starting this conference. Like, so,

832
00:47:58,950 --> 00:48:02,710
like, I have no desire to go anywhere else. It's because I just yeah. You

833
00:48:02,710 --> 00:48:05,109
know, it's it's a cliche, but, like, love what you do and you'll never work

834
00:48:05,109 --> 00:48:08,950
it in your life. Like, it's Yeah. Very true. I I'm just very, very

835
00:48:08,950 --> 00:48:12,785
lucky that I've just always loved what I did and that could, you

836
00:48:12,785 --> 00:48:15,424
know it paid the bills. Like, we're you know, pretty much makes sense. Let's let's

837
00:48:15,424 --> 00:48:19,025
get in more into that. So you so the I wanna hear about the origin

838
00:48:19,025 --> 00:48:22,785
of vector 35 and, like, what was the deciding factor? It's

839
00:48:22,785 --> 00:48:26,160
like, let's let's get into this. Let's start building this out and

840
00:48:26,160 --> 00:48:29,300
grow. Mhmm. So so for us,

841
00:48:30,560 --> 00:48:33,840
you know, I could we talked earlier, like, minor engine was like the CTF tool.

842
00:48:33,840 --> 00:48:36,880
Like, we were playing capture the flag a bunch inside the company, and that was

843
00:48:36,880 --> 00:48:39,925
great because, you know, I just love playing capture the flag. It was both my

844
00:48:39,925 --> 00:48:42,724
hobby, but then the skills directly translated when I was doing for work. We used

845
00:48:42,724 --> 00:48:45,925
it for recruiting. Like, we would somebody interviewed me. Like, well, we can't really tell

846
00:48:45,925 --> 00:48:49,765
you, like, exact technical examples of what we're doing. Like, we had multiple pony

847
00:48:49,765 --> 00:48:53,365
award winners that weren't, like, the public version of the ponchies. Like, they were,

848
00:48:53,365 --> 00:48:56,790
like, we either beat a pony award winner to the research and just it was

849
00:48:56,790 --> 00:49:00,549
never public or so, like, you can't, like, you know, show people what you're

850
00:49:00,549 --> 00:49:03,190
doing or you're working for a government contractor, unfortunately. But, like, we could be, like,

851
00:49:03,190 --> 00:49:06,150
yeah, but we won Defcon or we were 2nd place this year or and they

852
00:49:06,150 --> 00:49:09,865
were, like, oh, like, okay. Like, you have legitimate skills. Like, that was, like, a

853
00:49:09,865 --> 00:49:13,545
useful thing to indicate to people. Plus, it was just super fun. It was great

854
00:49:13,545 --> 00:49:17,305
team building. It was great. Like, we tooled that. Like, we

855
00:49:17,305 --> 00:49:21,000
built we built technologies for CTF that we were like,

856
00:49:21,080 --> 00:49:23,960
know, actually, this would be really helpful for this, like, real world problem that we

857
00:49:23,960 --> 00:49:27,320
have over here that we port or rewrite or adapt. I mean, much in the

858
00:49:27,320 --> 00:49:30,620
same way. Again, Binary Ninja was a a sort of toy application

859
00:49:31,080 --> 00:49:34,745
built for CTF, because I you know, it wasn't, at the time,

860
00:49:34,745 --> 00:49:38,505
originally built to be a better decompiler than IDA, but it was meant

861
00:49:38,505 --> 00:49:42,345
to be a faster patching tool and quicker analysis and for triage and, like,

862
00:49:42,345 --> 00:49:45,705
you know, you didn't a lot of people still, back in the day, didn't trust

863
00:49:45,705 --> 00:49:48,825
decompilation anyways. It was more of like a yeah. It's good when it's good, but

864
00:49:48,825 --> 00:49:52,250
something's just wrong. And the, What's the premise on it now? Do people, like,

865
00:49:52,250 --> 00:49:55,450
generally say, like, yeah. It's it's fine. Or they're like, I wanna write my own.

866
00:49:55,450 --> 00:49:59,210
Like Yeah. I think right now, you're relatively foolish if

867
00:49:59,210 --> 00:50:02,330
you never use a decompiler. Like, I mean, there's reasons where you can't because of

868
00:50:02,330 --> 00:50:06,065
an architecture or whatever. But, like, yeah, people that started 20 years

869
00:50:06,065 --> 00:50:09,825
ago, the decompilation quality wasn't very good. Like,

870
00:50:09,825 --> 00:50:13,585
just I mean, and and that was amazing that it worked at all. But there

871
00:50:13,585 --> 00:50:16,625
were all sorts of times where it would just be straight up wrong. Conditional's inverted,

872
00:50:16,625 --> 00:50:20,440
code not shown, code shown, you know, like, just consistently wrong. And so like

873
00:50:20,440 --> 00:50:22,920
the error rate was high enough that people would in fact, actually, I like it

874
00:50:22,920 --> 00:50:26,120
a lot of like AI stuff to the same sort of thing where people are

875
00:50:26,120 --> 00:50:29,960
like, yeah, AI is like wrong all the time. It's like, well, yeah, now. It's

876
00:50:29,960 --> 00:50:33,240
super early. Yeah. I Right? Do the exact same thing. It's like we're we've gone

877
00:50:33,240 --> 00:50:36,055
like through 1 year, and it's like we're already getting to the point of, like,

878
00:50:36,055 --> 00:50:39,595
they're generating videos and images. They're already providing some value.

879
00:50:39,895 --> 00:50:43,575
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's gonna be new wild west with

880
00:50:43,575 --> 00:50:47,339
our guys. And so, like, you know, we're we've got Sidekick, which is our AI

881
00:50:47,339 --> 00:50:50,460
based plugin for binary ninja. We've been working on actually originally, like, 4 or 5

882
00:50:50,460 --> 00:50:53,980
years ago, we started it, internally as as research and finally launched it about a

883
00:50:53,980 --> 00:50:57,740
year ago. So the LLM yourself, you guys just check CPD rap? So we

884
00:50:57,740 --> 00:51:00,945
started we started with all of our own models because there was no opening the

885
00:51:00,945 --> 00:51:04,785
time, and we had, 6 different, like, sort of techniques or models. About, like, half

886
00:51:04,785 --> 00:51:07,265
of them, we sort of threw out when when OpenAI came out because it was

887
00:51:07,265 --> 00:51:10,225
just so much better. So we're, like, oh, we should not be trying to name

888
00:51:10,225 --> 00:51:13,825
variables ourselves or summarize, like, decoupled code. Like, those two

889
00:51:13,825 --> 00:51:17,660
things, we're gonna use the better models. But we

890
00:51:17,660 --> 00:51:21,500
had thankfully, we had enough internal models that was, like, structure recovery and other things

891
00:51:21,500 --> 00:51:25,340
that we were doing that were still better. And so we the

892
00:51:25,340 --> 00:51:27,740
hybrid approach has worked really well for us. We have kind of kind of a

893
00:51:27,740 --> 00:51:30,415
little bit of both. But, like, for people that are sort of, like, a skeptic

894
00:51:30,555 --> 00:51:33,855
in reverse engineering in particular, I I like it to the same thing as decompilers.

895
00:51:33,915 --> 00:51:37,355
Like, do you use a decompiler now? And 9 times out of 10,

896
00:51:37,355 --> 00:51:40,875
9.59 times out of 10, right, it's yes. Like, people use

897
00:51:40,875 --> 00:51:44,130
decompilers because they're just so effective. Like, maybe you do both side by side, but

898
00:51:44,130 --> 00:51:47,730
there's a reason that Ida, Binder Ninja, and Ghidra well, actually, I I might be

899
00:51:47,730 --> 00:51:51,430
the only one that doesn't know. I think about this. Like, default to decompilation. Right?

900
00:51:51,570 --> 00:51:55,415
But, like, to me, the default should be decompilation because it's just that

901
00:51:55,415 --> 00:51:58,055
good. That should just be the default most users want. You could change it but,

902
00:51:58,055 --> 00:52:01,895
like You know, this this actually this actually probably brings up a specific thing

903
00:52:01,895 --> 00:52:05,494
in my learning of, like, reverse engineering because, like, I well, I started with

904
00:52:05,494 --> 00:52:08,695
radar and then I went to Ida. I tried to do both. Yeah. Yeah. I

905
00:52:08,695 --> 00:52:12,440
went to, r2con in, like, 2017, met pancake and

906
00:52:12,520 --> 00:52:16,280
Mhmm. Had a great time. But yeah, like I I would use for DAR and

907
00:52:16,280 --> 00:52:20,040
then I also like try to use IDA and I just never used decompilers because

908
00:52:20,040 --> 00:52:23,720
I can start to defaulting by disassembly. I'm like, okay. Cool. Let me just learn

909
00:52:23,720 --> 00:52:27,475
this. So Yeah. It was just straight assembly. You can you can tell when

910
00:52:27,475 --> 00:52:31,075
somebody started their their career versus engineering based on what they default to. I really

911
00:52:31,075 --> 00:52:34,675
do think it's a sort of generational thing. And then Model that people now especially

912
00:52:34,675 --> 00:52:38,035
with the with the availability like Ghidra. Right? Because Ghidra has just, like, good

913
00:52:38,035 --> 00:52:41,849
decompilation on the box. And and we are gotten better about the in

914
00:52:41,849 --> 00:52:45,069
fact, there's even you know, Cutter's got, like, the GEDRA integration and and for decompilation,

915
00:52:45,210 --> 00:52:48,890
and it's an option now. But it sort of depends on, like, where

916
00:52:48,890 --> 00:52:52,089
you started as to what you prefer. I see the reason that, like, even when

917
00:52:52,089 --> 00:52:55,130
I'm debugging, I have, like, a separate debugger. I don't use Binary Ninja as a

918
00:52:55,130 --> 00:52:58,901
debugger even though it supports it. I know a lot of people who don't use

919
00:52:58,901 --> 00:53:00,295
IDA as a debugger even though it supports it because they're just used to, like,

920
00:53:00,295 --> 00:53:03,895
a debugger and the decompilers being separate tooling. And maybe you'd sync your your

921
00:53:03,895 --> 00:53:07,575
location or whatever, you know, but, like, so there there definitely, I

922
00:53:07,575 --> 00:53:10,890
think, are are sort of, like, generational tells. Yeah. Using Versus

923
00:53:11,190 --> 00:53:15,030
Versus VM? Yeah. Yeah. I I use both. I use both.

924
00:53:15,030 --> 00:53:18,550
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You install install the new of them layer on

925
00:53:18,550 --> 00:53:22,150
Versus Code. Is there is there a layer on

926
00:53:22,150 --> 00:53:25,755
that? Yeah. Yeah. You could tell the use, new of them integrated into Versus code

927
00:53:25,755 --> 00:53:29,515
and get full VIM bindings. It works quite well. Okay. There's very few things that

928
00:53:29,515 --> 00:53:33,195
that I miss from, from real VIM. That's great. I use I

929
00:53:33,195 --> 00:53:36,155
use Space Max for a while. I use lunar VIM on the command line. Like,

930
00:53:36,155 --> 00:53:39,240
I've tried a bunch of bunch of different ones, but so yeah. So, like, the

931
00:53:39,240 --> 00:53:42,540
decoupling, I think, is I I think it makes sense that people are,

932
00:53:43,560 --> 00:53:46,600
going to use it. And I think AI, ultimately, people will be using it more

933
00:53:46,600 --> 00:53:50,360
and more. It but I I get why people are hesitant now because, like,

934
00:53:50,360 --> 00:53:53,565
yeah, it hallucinates sometimes. This is wrong. And, like, the question is

935
00:53:53,805 --> 00:53:57,565
how what does the error rate have to be before it's worth your time? And

936
00:53:57,565 --> 00:53:59,885
it's just a default thing. You can change it. You can override it. Right? So,

937
00:53:59,885 --> 00:54:03,645
like, at what point is it is it is it where

938
00:54:03,645 --> 00:54:06,525
you're gonna be like, oh, nope. I'm just gonna leave this on by default. And

939
00:54:06,525 --> 00:54:09,770
if it makes a mistake, it's fine. Like, no tool is perfect. No disassembler is

940
00:54:09,770 --> 00:54:12,830
perfect. No. You know, even disassembly gets wrong sometimes. So,

941
00:54:13,930 --> 00:54:17,690
there is an error rate. There's an error rate. And, like, it's also,

942
00:54:17,690 --> 00:54:21,355
like, outside of it being, like, error or whatever, I

943
00:54:21,355 --> 00:54:25,195
think like there will be the talk about like how some of them are

944
00:54:25,195 --> 00:54:29,035
political or like like how they will have some political bias in some of

945
00:54:29,035 --> 00:54:32,015
the things that they say or whatever the case. Even though like there's no factual

946
00:54:32,075 --> 00:54:35,769
evidence to suggest one way or the other. A decompiler? No. No. No. I'm sorry.

947
00:54:35,769 --> 00:54:39,529
I'm talking about AI. Alright. I'm really confused. I was really confused. I'm like, I

948
00:54:39,529 --> 00:54:42,650
don't think my decompiler's got a full of compilers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Like

949
00:54:42,650 --> 00:54:46,250
AIs for sure. For sure. I'm talking about like chat gbd. A lot of the

950
00:54:46,250 --> 00:54:49,775
people on one side will say like, oh, this is specifically

951
00:54:49,994 --> 00:54:53,755
providing some type of information or, like, in in skewing. I think I think it

952
00:54:53,755 --> 00:54:57,355
was what was it Bing's or, there's, like,

953
00:54:57,355 --> 00:55:00,714
you you type in, like, the president, like, George Washington, and he would be black.

954
00:55:00,714 --> 00:55:04,240
Like, it was Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody was trying a little too

955
00:55:04,240 --> 00:55:07,200
hard to to to kinda skew it. Yeah. I I, as a kid, I read

956
00:55:07,200 --> 00:55:09,920
a lot of books from authors who I disagree with politically. And I think it's

957
00:55:09,920 --> 00:55:12,880
super important that, like, you're able to, like, consume Do you want some of those

958
00:55:12,880 --> 00:55:16,559
big references? I I don't wanna no. I don't

959
00:55:16,559 --> 00:55:20,135
wanna highlight my bias too much. Well, I'll give you I can give you a

960
00:55:20,135 --> 00:55:22,935
mixture of some I agree with and some I didn't. It ran it ran the

961
00:55:22,935 --> 00:55:26,555
gamut from very, like, libertarian stuff from,

962
00:55:28,215 --> 00:55:31,255
like the the Cobra series. I like all sci fi and fantasy stuff. The Cobra

963
00:55:31,255 --> 00:55:34,890
series was really good, from such as these

964
00:55:34,890 --> 00:55:38,570
dead, Timothy's son, maybe. And then Ellie Modesitt has

965
00:55:38,570 --> 00:55:41,390
very, like, kind of more left leaning,

966
00:55:42,890 --> 00:55:46,675
ecological and economic books that are that are great.

967
00:55:46,675 --> 00:55:50,214
Like, I I like to read things from perspectives

968
00:55:50,355 --> 00:55:54,195
that I don't always agree with because I just think that that's an important

969
00:55:54,195 --> 00:55:57,660
skill in in society that we've that we've lost. So I I don't mind so

970
00:55:57,740 --> 00:56:00,380
much. I think it's funny and stupid and silly when when the a's are doing

971
00:56:00,380 --> 00:56:03,500
and they're skewed that badly. But at the same time, like, again, if you can't

972
00:56:03,500 --> 00:56:07,339
think for yourself, like, you know, like, grow up. It's okay.

973
00:56:07,339 --> 00:56:10,220
You're not gonna agree with everybody whether it's an AI or not. Like, figure it

974
00:56:10,220 --> 00:56:13,694
out. And so, you know, I think you wanna use caution and good

975
00:56:13,694 --> 00:56:16,835
judgment, and, not trust,

976
00:56:17,375 --> 00:56:21,214
the the things. But that, you know, that applies to everything. It applies to

977
00:56:21,214 --> 00:56:24,815
news. It applies to, whatever. You know? Yeah.

978
00:56:24,815 --> 00:56:28,430
So I I don't mind that so much. Like, I I think it's

979
00:56:28,430 --> 00:56:31,790
it's dumb. I think it's definitely it's gonna tell correct. It already has, you know,

980
00:56:31,790 --> 00:56:35,310
just to some degree. I think I think it's quite that crazy anymore, but no.

981
00:56:35,310 --> 00:56:38,145
I I like that I like that that people have the option to do that

982
00:56:38,145 --> 00:56:40,625
now. And I think that, like, that sort of balance of, like, you know, we're

983
00:56:40,625 --> 00:56:44,305
gonna get a bunch and, I I do worry that it's a little bit of

984
00:56:44,305 --> 00:56:47,265
a bubble. Right? And you're gonna get this sort sort of self reinforcing. I it's

985
00:56:47,265 --> 00:56:50,325
an interesting idea if you've heard of, this is a heavy self reinforcing.

986
00:56:50,785 --> 00:56:54,240
Yeah. Everything you say about Chat TV, I wanna have this idea. That's a

987
00:56:54,240 --> 00:56:58,000
great idea. There's never it never tells you it's a bad idea. Right. Like,

988
00:56:58,000 --> 00:57:01,520
oh, the market's fucking really heavy right now. You might need like, you know, few

989
00:57:01,520 --> 00:57:05,200
investors for this. It's like, yes, that's a terrific idea. Go for it. So it's

990
00:57:05,280 --> 00:57:08,560
I don't know. It's it's never that like maybe you should do some more research

991
00:57:08,560 --> 00:57:12,045
on this Like Yeah. Yeah. And so it's a little bit like the the the

992
00:57:12,045 --> 00:57:15,165
sort of fallacy of, like, a ruler or a CEO that only has yes men.

993
00:57:15,165 --> 00:57:17,485
Right? Like, that's what you surround yourself. So I and that's where I think that

994
00:57:17,485 --> 00:57:21,005
people need to be need to be critical, and you need to,

995
00:57:21,005 --> 00:57:24,329
like, embrace not conflict, but differences of opinion.

996
00:57:24,650 --> 00:57:28,490
Even just like so, you know, back to to my company. You know, my cofounder

997
00:57:28,490 --> 00:57:31,950
Peter is much more, like, growth focused and, like, future focused. And I'm much more

998
00:57:32,010 --> 00:57:35,609
here and now focused and the vibes and the ride kind of thing. And so

999
00:57:35,609 --> 00:57:39,405
it's a really healthy, tension between the 2

1000
00:57:39,405 --> 00:57:43,005
because, like, neither one at the extreme is healthy. Both can be extremely

1001
00:57:43,005 --> 00:57:46,605
unhealthy when when you go too far. And so I think that that's

1002
00:57:46,605 --> 00:57:50,450
really, really a good thing to to to look for in in a

1003
00:57:50,450 --> 00:57:53,250
in a cofounder. You want somebody you really can work with and you trust and,

1004
00:57:53,250 --> 00:57:56,849
you know, you have ultimately the same vision for, for the problem you're trying to

1005
00:57:56,849 --> 00:58:00,390
solve and the difference you're trying to make. But, like, not necessarily

1006
00:58:00,690 --> 00:58:03,569
having the same philosophy on how to get there, I think could be could be

1007
00:58:03,569 --> 00:58:03,809
really useful,

1008
00:58:08,305 --> 00:58:10,944
respectfully disagree, and you could figure it out and make a choice and move on

1009
00:58:10,944 --> 00:58:13,905
together and and kinda, like, you know, decide and go. And it's like I said,

1010
00:58:13,905 --> 00:58:17,685
it's 10 year 10 years in, still going strong. It's awesome. Businesses

1011
00:58:17,984 --> 00:58:21,619
generally don't last longer than a few years and, like, gets

1012
00:58:21,779 --> 00:58:25,059
yeah. It's amazing. I'd love to hear, like, a little bit more about where you

1013
00:58:25,059 --> 00:58:28,660
guys are at right now after 10 years in your journey. Yeah. What have you

1014
00:58:28,660 --> 00:58:32,235
guys been doing up to recently? And then we can talk about the future.

1015
00:58:32,475 --> 00:58:36,235
Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, let me start at the

1016
00:58:36,235 --> 00:58:39,595
beginning because the goal was like, our stated goal was,

1017
00:58:39,595 --> 00:58:42,875
like, I I like Ida. I like Hexrays. I actually get along with the the

1018
00:58:42,875 --> 00:58:46,420
team there fairly well. I I'm I nominated, Olafact for his

1019
00:58:46,420 --> 00:58:50,020
pony lifetime pony award a few years ago because I just have a ton of

1020
00:58:50,020 --> 00:58:53,060
respect for what they do. But also, like, our our goal was to dethrone them.

1021
00:58:53,060 --> 00:58:56,740
Like, our goal was like, we really wanna take what we think we can we

1022
00:58:56,740 --> 00:58:59,835
can do this and, like, you know, I've I've I've told them this to their

1023
00:58:59,835 --> 00:59:03,595
face. It's not surprised they know and, you know, sort of wish I I think

1024
00:59:03,595 --> 00:59:06,175
the market as a whole will benefit from from healthy competition.

1025
00:59:07,835 --> 00:59:10,475
But, like, that was our that was our goal. We love that. Yeah. Yeah. That

1026
00:59:10,475 --> 00:59:12,875
was that was our goal. Right? Like, it's out of the out of the gate.

1027
00:59:12,875 --> 00:59:16,510
I wanted to I I thought they had not had enough competition and does

1028
00:59:16,510 --> 00:59:19,869
not force enough innovation out of them. They're seeing and now with Giro by Ninja,

1029
00:59:19,869 --> 00:59:23,710
you're seeing them make tremendous changes to their pricing, to their product

1030
00:59:23,710 --> 00:59:27,230
lines, to they're really really finally reacting. It's gonna be like

1031
00:59:27,230 --> 00:59:30,805
$5,000 for a key for for Ida or something. Right? I mean, it's

1032
00:59:30,805 --> 00:59:34,644
actually it hasn't gotten cheaper unless you're a non commercial student or whatever.

1033
00:59:34,644 --> 00:59:37,605
Like, it actually is in fact, they're about to, I think, do their their,

1034
00:59:38,085 --> 00:59:40,724
subscription pricing, which they've been doing for a while too, which we'll see. I think

1035
00:59:40,724 --> 00:59:43,530
for some people, it'll be cheaper. For some people, it'll be more. The total cost

1036
00:59:43,530 --> 00:59:46,990
will probably go up. I mean, so, you know, they were acquired by PEO,

1037
00:59:47,450 --> 00:59:51,130
last year. Last year or years not long ago. And so, like, you know,

1038
00:59:51,130 --> 00:59:54,730
there's necessarily gonna be a return they're looking to get on that

1039
00:59:54,730 --> 00:59:57,855
investment. And so I think that's gonna make them, you know, make certain choices,

1040
00:59:58,955 --> 01:00:01,595
in in the market. But,

1041
01:00:02,715 --> 01:00:05,035
but but yeah. So that was kind of our goal. Like, we just feel like

1042
01:00:05,035 --> 01:00:08,075
this this market is like, we can we can disrupt it. We can really come

1043
01:00:08,075 --> 01:00:11,890
in, like, do something new and different, and we made some, you know, conscious design

1044
01:00:11,890 --> 01:00:15,730
changes and differences, in in how we built Pioneer Ninja, like, with the goal

1045
01:00:15,730 --> 01:00:18,530
of doing this. And then we had kind of along the way, like, okay. We

1046
01:00:18,530 --> 01:00:21,890
lost the collaboration version. We actually both IDA and Pioneer Ninja announced a

1047
01:00:21,890 --> 01:00:25,090
collaboration plugin, and then ours came out, like, a whole year in advance, basically, of

1048
01:00:25,090 --> 01:00:28,935
theirs. Like, we were much sooner market. Because we had built that in we

1049
01:00:29,015 --> 01:00:32,214
from the beginning, we started the company, like, collaboration's gonna be a killer feature. We're

1050
01:00:32,214 --> 01:00:34,855
gonna put that in an enterprise version of Binary Ninja, and it took us 5

1051
01:00:34,855 --> 01:00:37,355
years or 6 years. But, like, we knew it from the beginning.

1052
01:00:38,600 --> 01:00:42,440
And so For people that don't know what the collaboration part is, what is that

1053
01:00:42,440 --> 01:00:45,240
exactly? Yeah. So it just I mean, much like, you know, with source code, you're

1054
01:00:45,240 --> 01:00:48,520
still, like, get where you can, like, you know, work with multiple people and see

1055
01:00:48,520 --> 01:00:51,900
differences and merge changes and deconflict if there's conflicts.

1056
01:00:52,704 --> 01:00:56,385
That hasn't existed in the reverse engineering space. Ghidra, actually, it

1057
01:00:56,385 --> 01:00:59,025
was the really the first tool to market that had there were actually plugins that

1058
01:00:59,025 --> 01:01:01,505
tried to do it at NIDA. They were very brittle. They would we used them

1059
01:01:01,505 --> 01:01:04,880
back at at at right now. Like, they would corrupt your database consistently because it

1060
01:01:04,880 --> 01:01:07,440
was really wasn't it was, like, hacked on. It wasn't really part of the model

1061
01:01:07,440 --> 01:01:11,200
and didn't didn't work really well. And so Gidra actually

1062
01:01:11,200 --> 01:01:14,240
had really had the first version of this, you know, the open source n s

1063
01:01:14,400 --> 01:01:18,080
NSA tool. And both now IDA and Byterinja have this where you

1064
01:01:18,080 --> 01:01:21,724
can, as a team, collaboratively reverse engineer, on the

1065
01:01:21,724 --> 01:01:24,865
same kind of kind of kind of binary remarking of different pieces of it.

1066
01:01:25,484 --> 01:01:28,525
And so that was, like, you know, sort of our first, like, new product beyond

1067
01:01:28,525 --> 01:01:31,644
just like Binder Ninja. And then we launched our Sidekick, the AI thing a year

1068
01:01:31,644 --> 01:01:35,220
ago, you know, and that was, like, another new product. And so we're we're at

1069
01:01:35,220 --> 01:01:38,020
a really good point now because it it took us 10 years. Like, it took

1070
01:01:38,020 --> 01:01:41,860
us 10 years to really get our decompilation quality, our features that our

1071
01:01:41,860 --> 01:01:45,140
architecture was kind of, like, to where it needed to be to really compete with

1072
01:01:45,140 --> 01:01:48,785
with with IDA originally and now and now Ghidra. And

1073
01:01:48,785 --> 01:01:52,465
so it feels really, like, we're the product is much is

1074
01:01:52,465 --> 01:01:56,225
finally at the maturity level it needs to be, where we can sort of

1075
01:01:56,305 --> 01:01:58,785
like, we're not like a superset. Right? Like, we have things that they don't have.

1076
01:01:58,785 --> 01:02:01,025
They still have, you know, some things that we don't have. We're working on them.

1077
01:02:01,025 --> 01:02:03,285
It's I think it's a small list now at this point. But,

1078
01:02:05,049 --> 01:02:08,410
but, like, now we can really start building on top of it in ways that

1079
01:02:08,410 --> 01:02:12,010
are more interesting and fun, and start solving new problems or problems in a different

1080
01:02:12,010 --> 01:02:15,849
way, and kinda push push beyond it. And so that's that's really exciting.

1081
01:02:15,849 --> 01:02:18,945
And like I said, I like that we've that was always the plan and we

1082
01:02:18,945 --> 01:02:22,065
we did that. Like we said, we did the collaboration, we did it with, you

1083
01:02:22,065 --> 01:02:25,745
know, with with AI integration. Our design of our ILs is this distinct

1084
01:02:25,745 --> 01:02:28,865
nobody has anything like that. And I think, you know, there's a lot of other

1085
01:02:28,865 --> 01:02:32,310
advantages like that, the API. So anyway, it feels like we're at a

1086
01:02:32,310 --> 01:02:35,990
point right now. We're seeing a ton of people switching. We really are

1087
01:02:35,990 --> 01:02:39,670
at a point now where a lot of folks are like. And and Ginter

1088
01:02:39,670 --> 01:02:43,510
makes things tough just as a free price point, but I think having, better

1089
01:02:43,510 --> 01:02:46,994
UI, faster analysis, the real Python API, bindings for other different

1090
01:02:46,994 --> 01:02:50,595
languages, better better API, program analysis, the IOs in between, you know, all these other

1091
01:02:50,595 --> 01:02:53,635
things. People are like, okay. Yeah. This is the so, like, totally worth the the

1092
01:02:53,635 --> 01:02:57,474
1500. If you're a professional, $1500 for a tool that you spend, you

1093
01:02:57,474 --> 01:03:00,510
know, 68 hours a day and it's like like, come on. Like, it's not even

1094
01:03:00,590 --> 01:03:04,270
that's it's underpriced. It really is. And you just have a student discount as well

1095
01:03:04,270 --> 01:03:07,550
for students that want Yeah. So we actually have about it. Right? A hobbyist license

1096
01:03:07,550 --> 01:03:11,150
for $300. So if you're, like, just somebody doing at home, it's $300 so you're

1097
01:03:11,150 --> 01:03:13,790
still professional but just in another field or whatever. And then we have a student

1098
01:03:13,790 --> 01:03:17,045
discount, and you can apply to either one those other two licenses. And that brings

1099
01:03:17,045 --> 01:03:20,184
it out to, like, $75 for the noncommercial student license,

1100
01:03:20,805 --> 01:03:23,924
and then, like, 3.50 or 400, I think, if you're, like, a student that wants

1101
01:03:23,924 --> 01:03:26,345
the there's a couple of features in in commercial

1102
01:03:27,560 --> 01:03:31,320
that that don't exist in in noncommercial, but, like, I think at this point,

1103
01:03:31,320 --> 01:03:33,720
there's only 2. We've actually that's another thing we do well. We set the beginning.

1104
01:03:33,720 --> 01:03:37,160
We had a couple of features in commercial that we trickled down into noncommercial, which

1105
01:03:37,160 --> 01:03:40,040
I'm really, really pleased with. Like, it was like a a promise we made at

1106
01:03:40,040 --> 01:03:43,505
the beginning, and then we we delivered on it. We did over, like, every couple

1107
01:03:43,505 --> 01:03:45,905
years, we add new feature. We drop it down. In fact, for a while, they

1108
01:03:45,905 --> 01:03:48,224
were like, okay. We have to add a new feature in a commercial only. It's

1109
01:03:48,224 --> 01:03:51,444
worth, like, we run out of, like, things to, like, include.

1110
01:03:52,145 --> 01:03:54,865
So when we had a project support, we added that just a just a commercial.

1111
01:03:54,865 --> 01:03:58,619
But, yeah. And so, like, for, like, the vision,

1112
01:03:58,619 --> 01:04:02,300
kinda like where we're going and where we're at, I mean, the the question now

1113
01:04:02,300 --> 01:04:04,460
is, like, how big do we wanna be as a company? What is our you

1114
01:04:04,460 --> 01:04:07,740
know, 19 people, like, if we keep growing, we we need to now, like, kinda

1115
01:04:07,740 --> 01:04:10,285
restructure a look at that. Or do we try to keep, like, at a at

1116
01:04:10,285 --> 01:04:13,085
a flat size where we can, you know, stay this? Or do we try to,

1117
01:04:13,085 --> 01:04:16,605
like, you know, grow bigger but keep it do like a a valve sort of

1118
01:04:16,605 --> 01:04:20,365
thing, right, where they notoriously have, like, a a a very flat no org chart

1119
01:04:20,365 --> 01:04:24,000
and yet a a bigger group. You know, what could that look like?

1120
01:04:24,299 --> 01:04:27,660
So that's, like, our sort of next thing is trying to figure out where do

1121
01:04:27,660 --> 01:04:30,780
we do, where do we go, and then we've got all these ideas for actually,

1122
01:04:30,780 --> 01:04:34,460
we are launching another new sort of product here pretty soon just in the I

1123
01:04:34,460 --> 01:04:37,645
don't we've even maybe public has said this before, but,

1124
01:04:38,265 --> 01:04:40,905
Oh, you're welcome to now if you want. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is it is

1125
01:04:40,905 --> 01:04:43,865
that. It's still I mean, we're very transparent about it, but we've we've we've definitely

1126
01:04:43,865 --> 01:04:47,625
told told a number of folks individually. We started selling a couple

1127
01:04:47,625 --> 01:04:51,400
of architectures as separate architectures just in the last couple releases.

1128
01:04:51,400 --> 01:04:54,280
And that's different from us. So till the very beginning, we took, like, the GEDER,

1129
01:04:54,280 --> 01:04:57,400
like, model of, like, every architecture. You can write your own. You can add your

1130
01:04:57,400 --> 01:05:01,080
own, fully extensible at one price. We didn't do the, like,

1131
01:05:01,080 --> 01:05:03,980
per architecture pricing that that IDA has always done for the decompilation.

1132
01:05:04,895 --> 01:05:07,935
And, we had a couple of people, like, reach out and be like, hey. Can

1133
01:05:07,935 --> 01:05:11,535
you build me an architecture for Nano Mips? Like, I really want this.

1134
01:05:11,935 --> 01:05:15,695
But it, like, just wasn't popular enough that, like, it was

1135
01:05:15,695 --> 01:05:19,234
gonna justify itself by just a few extra $1500 purchases.

1136
01:05:19,410 --> 01:05:22,690
That makes sense. Right? So, like, we were like, well, like, if we do it,

1137
01:05:22,690 --> 01:05:25,170
we have to charge separately. This is the only way it makes sense. And so

1138
01:05:25,170 --> 01:05:28,530
the last two releases, and this will also be true in this release, we're

1139
01:05:28,530 --> 01:05:32,289
releasing one extra architecture in the in the all the products, and then one

1140
01:05:32,289 --> 01:05:35,735
architecture that's only a paid thing. One extra architecture, you know, makes really the same

1141
01:05:35,735 --> 01:05:39,335
thing. So to 2 architectures. We're basically gonna take all those paid

1142
01:05:39,335 --> 01:05:42,215
architectures. We were kind of charging them like a la carte, and we're instead just

1143
01:05:42,215 --> 01:05:45,255
gonna have, like, binary and digital ultimate. We're gonna have, like, a new addition. It'll

1144
01:05:45,255 --> 01:05:49,095
be $3,000 instead of $1500, but it will include these more esoteric niche

1145
01:05:49,095 --> 01:05:52,840
embedded, Tricore, C Sky, and Nanomeps, and we're gonna add, some

1146
01:05:52,840 --> 01:05:56,120
some more as well in the future. So we are gonna have, like, that that

1147
01:05:56,120 --> 01:05:59,320
kinda comes soon. So that's kind of another thing that's on on the horizon. So

1148
01:05:59,320 --> 01:06:02,360
for the things that you're looking at in terms of, like, potential growth into the

1149
01:06:02,360 --> 01:06:04,935
company, are you guys looking at the number of users that are using it and

1150
01:06:04,935 --> 01:06:08,695
paying for on commercial side? Or are you guys also looking at government contracts

1151
01:06:08,695 --> 01:06:11,815
where you guys are bringing more money in through through that? Which one or both

1152
01:06:11,815 --> 01:06:15,335
of those avenues do you guys look at for KPIs? Yeah. That's a that's a

1153
01:06:15,335 --> 01:06:18,920
that's a good question. So our we don't wanna be too skewed,

1154
01:06:18,920 --> 01:06:22,440
basically. Right? Like, we so, yeah, to be clear too, we're we're getting we're fully

1155
01:06:22,440 --> 01:06:26,220
transparent about this. We've we've got some, like, research contracts essentially

1156
01:06:26,359 --> 01:06:30,085
that we're doing prototype development of of capabilities. So

1157
01:06:30,085 --> 01:06:33,925
we demoed, for example, firmware ninja, a few months ago on, like, one of

1158
01:06:33,925 --> 01:06:37,365
my live streams, which is a new plugin. It just does a bunch of firmware,

1159
01:06:37,685 --> 01:06:40,585
specific things, like automatically find MMIO and,

1160
01:06:41,445 --> 01:06:44,300
I don't even remember if I oh, it we actually one of the features that

1161
01:06:44,300 --> 01:06:47,580
we we built for that is now the base product, which is the automatic, base

1162
01:06:47,580 --> 01:06:51,340
address detection. So open up a former blob, and it just will try to

1163
01:06:51,340 --> 01:06:55,095
scan, find pointers, predict base addresses, guess them, check the the string

1164
01:06:55,095 --> 01:06:58,695
references and function references. Like, so it's, it will just find me the base

1165
01:06:58,695 --> 01:07:02,155
address. Right? This is a very useful feature. So that was actually originally

1166
01:07:02,215 --> 01:07:05,655
developed, for prototype on a on one of our research

1167
01:07:05,655 --> 01:07:09,494
contracts. So, you know, we don't do, like, vulnerability research or, like, you know,

1168
01:07:09,494 --> 01:07:13,170
we're not, like, using the tooling. Yeah. Exactly. It's more

1169
01:07:13,170 --> 01:07:16,089
like we we have done occasionally a couple of those contracts before. Actually, it tend

1170
01:07:16,089 --> 01:07:18,450
to be commercial as well too. Every now and then, we'll we'll pick up one

1171
01:07:18,450 --> 01:07:21,250
of those because it's it's nice to force yourself just to use the tool to

1172
01:07:21,250 --> 01:07:24,770
get things done occasionally and just and kinda keep the skills fresh. So very occasionally,

1173
01:07:24,770 --> 01:07:28,244
but we really don't usually we actually often turn down work work like

1174
01:07:28,244 --> 01:07:32,005
that. But, like, yeah, we've got a number of research contracts. We're building these prototypes.

1175
01:07:32,005 --> 01:07:34,964
And then if it works well, like, we still have the rights to be able

1176
01:07:34,964 --> 01:07:37,845
to ship the product or ship us a new plugin or a free plugin. So

1177
01:07:37,845 --> 01:07:41,560
several of our our architectures and plugins, you know, that we've least open source

1178
01:07:41,560 --> 01:07:44,920
were were, you know, basically funded on these research contracts in the past. So we

1179
01:07:44,920 --> 01:07:48,359
do have, you know, about half the company, doing

1180
01:07:48,359 --> 01:07:51,880
researchy things on that. Even though half the time there's research to think

1181
01:07:51,880 --> 01:07:55,525
just our features or plugins or stuff that goes you know, it's all all

1182
01:07:55,525 --> 01:07:59,365
binary ninja focused. So as long as we keep getting these contracts that are,

1183
01:07:59,365 --> 01:08:02,565
like, the government's happy to pay us to build a prototype for a thing that

1184
01:08:02,565 --> 01:08:06,325
we can then roll into the commercial product, we'll probably keep going. It's just funded

1185
01:08:06,325 --> 01:08:09,990
r and d. But we do yeah. We don't wanna exceed it too

1186
01:08:09,990 --> 01:08:13,830
much. If 80% of our team is just doing that kind of stuff and 20%

1187
01:08:13,830 --> 01:08:17,109
is doing product, that feels like an unhealthy split. So we really try to keep

1188
01:08:17,109 --> 01:08:20,630
it kinda kinda 5050. That's really what difficult balancing act,

1189
01:08:20,950 --> 01:08:24,345
to the last 10 years of doing so. Right? It's been it's not been too

1190
01:08:24,345 --> 01:08:27,785
bad, because mostly, we we just say no to a lot of things. Like, people

1191
01:08:27,785 --> 01:08:29,785
will be like, oh, hey. There's this new contract. I want you to come help

1192
01:08:29,785 --> 01:08:32,024
me do this thing. We're like, well, if we don't have a good idea for

1193
01:08:32,024 --> 01:08:35,305
a binge of feature or analysis or plugin that we would build to solve that

1194
01:08:35,305 --> 01:08:38,469
problem, like, it doesn't make sense for it. Like, we just yeah. It was really

1195
01:08:38,630 --> 01:08:40,949
it give us a lot of clarity for the type of work that we do

1196
01:08:40,949 --> 01:08:44,310
and don't do. I think if you're just starting a general defense contractor, you're like,

1197
01:08:44,310 --> 01:08:47,989
you're like, hey. Whatever we can get, it's it's serve you know, it's just a

1198
01:08:47,989 --> 01:08:51,705
labor based contract, and you get your your, you know, markup on

1199
01:08:51,705 --> 01:08:55,385
top of that. And and yeah. Because we had this kind of very specific vision,

1200
01:08:55,385 --> 01:08:59,225
we just said no a fair amount, to things. Like, no. We're full or we're

1201
01:08:59,225 --> 01:09:01,865
good. Or even so now the work is good, and we're like, yeah. But we

1202
01:09:01,865 --> 01:09:05,200
don't have the people to do it, and I don't wanna, like, lower the bar,

1203
01:09:05,200 --> 01:09:07,760
and I just hire anybody just to get it done. Like, we're we, you know,

1204
01:09:07,760 --> 01:09:11,439
very beneficial about our growth. And so so some of that limits us,

1205
01:09:11,760 --> 01:09:15,040
that limits us as well. So it's kinda a case by case basis. It depends

1206
01:09:15,040 --> 01:09:18,560
on the contracts. It depends on what comes up. It depends on,

1207
01:09:19,895 --> 01:09:22,935
yeah. And but and then, you know, how the how the sales are going. All

1208
01:09:23,015 --> 01:09:26,215
I would love to be able to just just do the product. Right? And let

1209
01:09:26,215 --> 01:09:29,895
the contracts kinda go. Because even at their best, they're still you gotta do

1210
01:09:29,895 --> 01:09:33,420
monthly reports and, you know, invoicing. Like, it it's

1211
01:09:33,420 --> 01:09:36,460
kinda nice to just have a product where you're just sort of, like, it's separate

1212
01:09:36,460 --> 01:09:39,260
from, like, development and the the road map, and you can just as long as

1213
01:09:39,260 --> 01:09:43,040
people still kinda buy and renew, you just keep going, keep building and adding stuff.

1214
01:09:44,380 --> 01:09:47,865
Whereas, you don't have quite as much flexibility to contracts, but

1215
01:09:48,105 --> 01:09:51,865
it's worked so well and, you know, everyone's as every kind of wins, the government

1216
01:09:51,865 --> 01:09:55,245
gets, like, a prototype that a lot of these, like, research contracts,

1217
01:09:56,185 --> 01:09:59,705
it's like a one off thing that doesn't go anywhere, never transitions, nothing ever happens

1218
01:09:59,705 --> 01:10:02,960
to it. It's, like, mostly DARPA work too to to to be clear. Like, a

1219
01:10:02,960 --> 01:10:05,460
lot of these a lot of the work that we've done. And,

1220
01:10:06,800 --> 01:10:10,320
it's nice that we are able to, like, have it be something that will be

1221
01:10:10,320 --> 01:10:13,520
around for 5 or 10 years. Right? Like, they have a a sense that Right.

1222
01:10:13,607 --> 01:10:16,175
Any built up under ninja is gonna last. It's not gonna be like this one

1223
01:10:16,175 --> 01:10:19,775
off prototype, which happens unfortunately more times than than, you

1224
01:10:19,775 --> 01:10:23,054
know, you might like as a citizen when the government pays for some research that,

1225
01:10:23,054 --> 01:10:26,415
like, this contract when they built the thing and then it disappears. Nothing ever happens.

1226
01:10:26,415 --> 01:10:30,120
So it happens far too often. And so when they when they purchase

1227
01:10:30,340 --> 01:10:33,540
your guys' research and then of a prototype or something and you guys integrate into

1228
01:10:33,540 --> 01:10:36,680
your tool, do they then purchase your tool, afterwards?

1229
01:10:37,300 --> 01:10:40,660
So so when it's DARPA, not necessarily. Right? Because their whole job is to, like,

1230
01:10:40,660 --> 01:10:44,025
cause it to happen and then it's other people within the government that they want.

1231
01:10:44,025 --> 01:10:47,785
Like, their job is just to get the DOD or other people

1232
01:10:47,785 --> 01:10:51,545
in the the government to to be using the research that they develop. They

1233
01:10:51,545 --> 01:10:54,665
don't aren't direct consumers of, and they might use it like in some follow on

1234
01:10:54,665 --> 01:10:58,205
research contract or something. But generally, like, DARPA wins

1235
01:10:58,745 --> 01:11:02,590
if they get a bunch of other groups within the government using

1236
01:11:02,590 --> 01:11:06,110
the things they've developed. If they transition and it now is a follow on contract

1237
01:11:06,110 --> 01:11:09,870
in the Navy or the Air Force or whoever, whatever has, like, some other

1238
01:11:09,870 --> 01:11:12,990
contract that they will sign to get you to, like, continue to do that thing

1239
01:11:12,990 --> 01:11:16,325
or just buy if you're yeah. They're buying Miner Ninja, and then the thing that

1240
01:11:16,325 --> 01:11:19,765
the research contract paid for is now available as a plug in. That's even better

1241
01:11:19,765 --> 01:11:23,285
for them because it's cheaper than a government contract. Right? So Right. Yeah. Like, that's

1242
01:11:23,285 --> 01:11:26,405
what winning looks like for them to a large extent. If they're if they're really

1243
01:11:26,405 --> 01:11:30,159
improving this data, if they're solving problems that their community has and and getting

1244
01:11:30,159 --> 01:11:33,619
that stuff actively into the hands of of other government people.

1245
01:11:34,480 --> 01:11:38,159
Got it. So, what what's next for Vectrus 35? And what's

1246
01:11:38,159 --> 01:11:41,280
gonna be on the road map for the next how how deep do you guys

1247
01:11:41,280 --> 01:11:45,065
look? You got, like, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years?

1248
01:11:45,525 --> 01:11:49,304
So, I mean, on the one hand, we have had, like, you know,

1249
01:11:50,324 --> 01:11:54,005
Sidekick has been a 5 year thing. We knew 5 years ago, we were gonna

1250
01:11:54,005 --> 01:11:57,219
have a some AI based thing. And what was that gonna look like, and how's

1251
01:11:57,219 --> 01:11:59,540
it gonna work? And let's just go plug it away. So for the 1st 3

1252
01:11:59,540 --> 01:12:03,219
years internally, and then finally get some customers to get prototype and, you know, iterate

1253
01:12:03,219 --> 01:12:06,980
on it. So sometimes we have we have stuff like that out there. We have

1254
01:12:06,980 --> 01:12:10,805
right now on our road map, I feel like it's a little more near term

1255
01:12:10,805 --> 01:12:13,365
than it's ever been just because we're kind of, like, we've been burned through a

1256
01:12:13,365 --> 01:12:17,205
lot of this stuff. Mhmm. And and so now it really becomes a

1257
01:12:17,205 --> 01:12:20,965
question of, like, we have a lot of ideas for business problems we could

1258
01:12:20,965 --> 01:12:24,610
solve with our technology. And do we now

1259
01:12:24,610 --> 01:12:27,990
pivot or do we license or do we work with other companies to, like,

1260
01:12:28,530 --> 01:12:31,430
build, you know, wrap binary inside of other products,

1261
01:12:31,970 --> 01:12:35,570
or or sell an enterprise security product that is been powered

1262
01:12:35,570 --> 01:12:39,095
in in some way. Do we do that? Do we partner? Do we license? Like,

1263
01:12:39,095 --> 01:12:42,795
what does that look like? So that's something that we're continually

1264
01:12:43,095 --> 01:12:46,375
kinda kinda tinkering with and talking to folks, and we've had several different kind of,

1265
01:12:46,375 --> 01:12:49,335
you know, experiments like and we build it from the beginning to do that. Like,

1266
01:12:49,335 --> 01:12:52,350
from the very beginning, Binge is just a library that you can, like, easily wrap,

1267
01:12:52,350 --> 01:12:55,790
and so that's that's really I like IDA has 9.0 coming with, so it's gonna

1268
01:12:55,790 --> 01:12:59,550
have headless mode. Like, that's been, like, 10 years ago. That was that

1269
01:12:59,550 --> 01:13:02,990
was a part of the core design. Right? And it's first class. It works great

1270
01:13:02,990 --> 01:13:06,755
like that. We have one API. We don't have, like, a public private API, and,

1271
01:13:07,155 --> 01:13:10,595
and so it really it it works well for for exactly situations like

1272
01:13:10,595 --> 01:13:14,035
that. So, yeah, we might see some some integrations of

1273
01:13:14,035 --> 01:13:17,555
partnerships. You know, I think there's a lot of

1274
01:13:18,160 --> 01:13:21,840
there's a lot more to be done in terms of integrating AI. I think we

1275
01:13:21,840 --> 01:13:25,440
are absolutely the most mature thing in the space. Like, most the other like, any

1276
01:13:25,440 --> 01:13:28,720
other AI plugins. Like, well, we decompiled it and we copied and paste the decompilation

1277
01:13:28,720 --> 01:13:32,315
into an LN, then we asked the question. Like, okay. That's cute. But that's not,

1278
01:13:32,315 --> 01:13:36,075
like, really you know, that's just the very, very beginning.

1279
01:13:36,075 --> 01:13:39,755
We have a lot more deep integrations already, but I think we've we're still barely

1280
01:13:39,755 --> 01:13:43,355
scratching the surface. You know, how can we integrate an LOM, for

1281
01:13:43,355 --> 01:13:47,070
example, into changing 2 things that are equivalent

1282
01:13:47,070 --> 01:13:49,710
into the one that's more readable. Right? If I have an if statement or if

1283
01:13:49,710 --> 01:13:52,510
I have a switch statement, now I'm reordering the blocks and things like you can

1284
01:13:52,510 --> 01:13:56,030
do is a lot of things you can do to improve readability that

1285
01:13:56,030 --> 01:13:59,815
are, semantically equivalent, like, they're they're the same thing, but, like,

1286
01:13:59,815 --> 01:14:03,655
one of them just more intuitive or more readable. Little stuff like, you know, is

1287
01:14:03,655 --> 01:14:07,255
it less than or, is it greater than or equal to, to 1 or is

1288
01:14:07,255 --> 01:14:11,095
it greater than 0. Right? Like, which one is more understandable? Well, it depends

1289
01:14:11,095 --> 01:14:13,540
on the context of what the thing you're talking about is, and whether it's in

1290
01:14:13,540 --> 01:14:17,300
Erika, you know, there I don't know. It depends. And so that's where I feel

1291
01:14:17,300 --> 01:14:20,900
like that there's a lot of interesting things potentially that we can leverage, machine

1292
01:14:20,900 --> 01:14:24,660
learning and integrate it more deeply into the the

1293
01:14:24,660 --> 01:14:28,054
decompilation, like, at different stages of analysis, which is also where, like, our

1294
01:14:28,054 --> 01:14:31,735
exposed, ILs and, like, the

1295
01:14:31,735 --> 01:14:35,255
stack of them that we have make us really well suited towards that. So I

1296
01:14:35,255 --> 01:14:39,094
think that's that's gonna be particularly interesting, but we were really worried about export

1297
01:14:39,094 --> 01:14:42,930
controls on decompiler technology, and then the NSA open source to put on

1298
01:14:42,930 --> 01:14:46,530
GitHub either. We're like, okay. Oh, we should be fine. Yeah.

1299
01:14:46,530 --> 01:14:49,970
Clearly clearly, the the government doesn't think that this is a,

1300
01:14:50,210 --> 01:14:54,050
export control technology if they're open sourcing it on GitHub. So, so

1301
01:14:54,050 --> 01:14:57,054
that was actually that was that was kinda great. Yeah. In terms of AI, I

1302
01:14:57,054 --> 01:14:59,775
I don't think so. I you know, we'll we'll see what happens with it. But

1303
01:15:00,094 --> 01:15:03,534
Yeah. Let's let me ask you a little bit more about the the most difficult

1304
01:15:03,534 --> 01:15:06,594
challenges you had in Vector 35, like, as an entrepreneur

1305
01:15:07,054 --> 01:15:10,675
and shifting from very, very technical.

1306
01:15:10,860 --> 01:15:13,580
I mean, you've been a technical lead as well. So you've been able to have

1307
01:15:13,580 --> 01:15:17,360
different types of leadership as well. But there's there's, like, a mentality

1308
01:15:17,580 --> 01:15:21,020
shift of, like, okay, I'm a technical person. Now I gotta put on my business

1309
01:15:21,020 --> 01:15:24,795
hat and then the sales hat and then, like, how has that been in

1310
01:15:24,795 --> 01:15:28,155
that transition? And what are some of the challenges that you've faced as the

1311
01:15:28,155 --> 01:15:31,835
entrepreneur or the cofounder of your company? Yeah. I think some of the hardest

1312
01:15:31,835 --> 01:15:35,525
things for us were around pricing and marketing. Pricing and

1313
01:15:35,525 --> 01:15:38,290
marketing? What does that look like? We have zero experience

1314
01:15:38,990 --> 01:15:42,030
competitors out there to be like, okay, we know them and them. That's like, yeah.

1315
01:15:42,030 --> 01:15:45,870
Right? Yeah. Yeah. We've got GEDRA and X rays. That's that's exactly it. One's

1316
01:15:45,870 --> 01:15:49,150
free. And the other one's been around for 30 years. Like, okay, what does this

1317
01:15:49,150 --> 01:15:52,605
look like? So I, I think it's, you know, this is one where, where, you

1318
01:15:52,605 --> 01:15:55,804
know, we can read books, but like, I don't know how much their advice is

1319
01:15:55,804 --> 01:15:59,645
really all that relevant a lot of the time. And so that's been super

1320
01:15:59,645 --> 01:16:03,405
challenging figuring out how we do our, you know, there's definitely, there was certain bits

1321
01:16:03,405 --> 01:16:06,750
of advice we got like, that sounds good. Let's try that. Like, never discount. Like,

1322
01:16:06,750 --> 01:16:08,989
you know, there's a lot of different theories in discounting or whatever. And I think

1323
01:16:08,989 --> 01:16:12,030
there's sort of 2 ways either you really bake in discounting and have a, you

1324
01:16:12,030 --> 01:16:14,909
know, a high initial price and then you can, you know, segment your market that

1325
01:16:14,909 --> 01:16:18,375
way with with discounts of sales and you can get people or just never ever

1326
01:16:18,375 --> 01:16:21,494
discount at all because that way people know that's just the price and that's just

1327
01:16:21,494 --> 01:16:25,255
locked in, and we've kind of gone on that route. But I don't think it's

1328
01:16:25,255 --> 01:16:28,775
this inherently right or wrong. I just we're like, yeah. That sounds good, and it

1329
01:16:28,775 --> 01:16:32,580
also sounds easier because I don't like negotiating them too hard. Like, I'll just give

1330
01:16:32,580 --> 01:16:35,639
things away. So, like, just just lock it in.

1331
01:16:36,900 --> 01:16:39,619
So I think, like, for and yeah. Pricing in particular as we move to the

1332
01:16:39,619 --> 01:16:43,380
higher ends of the market, move to our enterprise tier and and some, you know,

1333
01:16:43,380 --> 01:16:47,060
more much more expensive versions, like, dealing with business sales practices that we're

1334
01:16:47,060 --> 01:16:50,865
still figuring that out and still learning. You have to negotiate

1335
01:16:50,865 --> 01:16:53,025
on you know, at the lower price point. I will say one of the lessons

1336
01:16:53,025 --> 01:16:56,165
we learned, I wish we'd learned earlier is when I'm selling a $1500

1337
01:16:56,625 --> 01:17:00,420
license, don't negotiate ever on anything. No. Like,

1338
01:17:00,420 --> 01:17:03,300
we would have companies early on, but, well, we can't agree to your standard EULA.

1339
01:17:03,300 --> 01:17:06,820
You need to sign our custom terms. And I would I would read them or

1340
01:17:06,820 --> 01:17:10,500
I would hire my, like, outside consultant contractor, my lawyer to, like, review the thing.

1341
01:17:10,500 --> 01:17:13,540
And it's like, no. If you don't spend so now we have a minimum and

1342
01:17:13,540 --> 01:17:16,945
we keep raising it. Right? It's like $15,000 now. If you're not spending $15,000,

1343
01:17:17,405 --> 01:17:20,605
I will not review your terms. Take it or leave it. Because 9 times out

1344
01:17:20,605 --> 01:17:24,285
of 10, they're gonna take it. Like, they just want Binary Ninja, and they're gonna

1345
01:17:24,285 --> 01:17:27,645
get them a reseller or somebody else or go down for. Right? It's it's not

1346
01:17:27,645 --> 01:17:30,120
even so much that they will go down. It's just that there's parts of, like,

1347
01:17:30,120 --> 01:17:33,240
you know, the engineer just wants it, and then there's the purchasing department that just

1348
01:17:33,240 --> 01:17:37,080
has all the stuff that they're required to do and required to try to to

1349
01:17:37,080 --> 01:17:39,720
to make people agree to. And so, yeah, they want you to agree to all

1350
01:17:39,720 --> 01:17:41,960
this stuff. And so we just say, like, nope. This is our policy. We will

1351
01:17:41,960 --> 01:17:45,745
not fill out your paperwork below a certain dollar threshold. That was liberating. That was

1352
01:17:45,745 --> 01:17:48,805
so huge because that freed up so much of our time that we were wasting.

1353
01:17:49,105 --> 01:17:52,645
Like, it is I remember in particular, there was one large financial,

1354
01:17:52,865 --> 01:17:54,965
a very large well known financial,

1355
01:17:56,385 --> 01:17:59,930
bank that's, it also was very British.

1356
01:18:00,286 --> 01:18:03,837
It really narrow really narrows it down. Yeah. But

1357
01:18:03,837 --> 01:18:07,388
they Bank. We had there was some good

1358
01:18:07,388 --> 01:18:10,940
engineers and some people I really respected, like, in the

1359
01:18:10,940 --> 01:18:14,574
engineering, but I've never worked with a more dysfunctional purchasing system. Like

1360
01:18:14,574 --> 01:18:18,195
in the course of them buying a product, it's like 6 to 9 months.

1361
01:18:18,495 --> 01:18:22,114
And it feel like it would turn out Is that normal? No,

1362
01:18:22,574 --> 01:18:26,280
no, no, no, no. Very, very few. Right? And and, I mean, if you're selling

1363
01:18:26,280 --> 01:18:30,040
a $100,000 or several $100,000, sure. 6 to 9 months.

1364
01:18:30,040 --> 01:18:33,720
Okay? And you got the negotiation, whatever. And they bought 2 licenses. So they paid,

1365
01:18:33,720 --> 01:18:36,920
like, $3,000. Right? To be clear. Maybe me at the time, maybe even have been.

1366
01:18:36,920 --> 01:18:39,675
Right? Alright. Like, you put your credit card and go swipe it and move on.

1367
01:18:39,675 --> 01:18:42,074
Like, what are you guys doing? And this is where we first were like, this

1368
01:18:42,074 --> 01:18:44,554
is insane. What are we doing? Because we literally have email threads of over a

1369
01:18:44,554 --> 01:18:47,355
100 emails of, like, this back and forth. And what happened is the person that

1370
01:18:47,355 --> 01:18:51,180
purchasing would quit. A new person would come. We would have to reteach them everything

1371
01:18:51,180 --> 01:18:54,300
we had already taught the old person because they can't read the email thread apparently.

1372
01:18:54,300 --> 01:18:57,760
And, like, it was the most painful they want us to agree to their

1373
01:18:58,380 --> 01:19:02,220
their human rights violations ethics documents. Like, you as a subcontractor. I'm like,

1374
01:19:02,220 --> 01:19:05,475
I'm not a subcontractor. You're just licensing my software. Please just purchase

1375
01:19:06,035 --> 01:19:09,735
and move on. But they literally wanted, like, hundreds of pages of, like, documentation

1376
01:19:09,875 --> 01:19:13,555
read and approved. And and and that was the last one where I was

1377
01:19:13,555 --> 01:19:17,395
like, never again. No. I'm not even go I will not even

1378
01:19:17,395 --> 01:19:20,675
look at your paperwork below this threshold. And even above that, I'm much more willing

1379
01:19:20,675 --> 01:19:24,210
to just be like, nope. Have you calculated the amount of time and hours, like,

1380
01:19:24,210 --> 01:19:27,890
it took for you guys to I $6,000 deal? Refused

1381
01:19:27,890 --> 01:19:30,690
to because it would be depressing. We learned we lost a lot of money. And

1382
01:19:30,690 --> 01:19:34,235
it was like, not even 6. It was less. Right? So, like, yeah, it, it,

1383
01:19:34,235 --> 01:19:37,835
it was, that was, that was a really important lesson to learn is it's at

1384
01:19:37,835 --> 01:19:40,955
the beginning, you feel like every sale super matters and you have to get everything

1385
01:19:40,955 --> 01:19:44,795
in that, you know, you you do. But like also and it helped for

1386
01:19:44,795 --> 01:19:47,630
us to be cheaper too. Right? Because we didn't come out of the gate with

1387
01:19:47,630 --> 01:19:51,389
a 6 figure or 5 figure product at the beginning. We were 3 or, you

1388
01:19:51,389 --> 01:19:55,150
know, 4 digits, initially. That helped a lot too. It's

1389
01:19:55,150 --> 01:19:58,830
it's the realization that, like, wait. Why would we bother to no. We're just not

1390
01:19:58,830 --> 01:20:01,665
gonna do that. That was that was probably the most important lesson I think that

1391
01:20:01,665 --> 01:20:04,344
that we learned. And I wish I wish we would have done it sooner because

1392
01:20:04,344 --> 01:20:08,185
it would have saved a lot of headache with that particular organization. Yeah.

1393
01:20:08,185 --> 01:20:11,645
A lot of people, though, looking in market share by releasing a product for

1394
01:20:12,105 --> 01:20:15,840
cheap or free. I think that's what PayPal did and they Absolutely. The market

1395
01:20:15,840 --> 01:20:19,540
went on eBay. And then by the time they integrate integrated,

1396
01:20:19,680 --> 01:20:23,520
like, 2%, 3% fee, then everyone have already been started using it.

1397
01:20:23,520 --> 01:20:26,560
They were like Yeah. So that depends exactly on your pricing strategy. Right? Like, if

1398
01:20:26,560 --> 01:20:29,760
you are gonna start with just enterprise deals and sales where you're you're 5 or

1399
01:20:29,760 --> 01:20:33,585
6 from the beginning digits, you know, sales, then you don't really have that

1400
01:20:33,585 --> 01:20:36,864
flexibility. Like, you're gonna have to deal with the lawyers and the purchasing department contracts.

1401
01:20:36,864 --> 01:20:39,264
So it's gonna take 6 to 9 months, and that's just I mean, depending on

1402
01:20:39,264 --> 01:20:42,165
exactly where in that, like, lower fives, maybe not, depends on,

1403
01:20:43,320 --> 01:20:47,080
depends on who who you're you're selling to. But that's definitely something that that

1404
01:20:47,080 --> 01:20:50,120
that we've we've we've we've had to learn. What have been some of your, like,

1405
01:20:50,120 --> 01:20:53,800
biggest contracts, that that you've gone through and worked on in

1406
01:20:53,800 --> 01:20:57,275
terms of, like, selling in bulk for you guys' software?

1407
01:20:58,295 --> 01:21:01,975
I think we have a a particular telecom company, which

1408
01:21:01,975 --> 01:21:04,615
kinda out of the blue reached out and got, like, 40 licenses a couple years

1409
01:21:04,615 --> 01:21:08,160
ago, which is a pretty large one. We have

1410
01:21:08,240 --> 01:21:12,080
nowadays, it's larger, not so much in total seats of licenses, but

1411
01:21:12,080 --> 01:21:14,960
it'll be like an enterprise customer with, like, 10 floating licenses. Right? So I don't

1412
01:21:15,040 --> 01:21:17,920
they could have 50 people. They could have 10 people. I don't know exactly how

1413
01:21:17,920 --> 01:21:21,655
big they are. But they're but they're buying the enterprise with floating

1414
01:21:21,655 --> 01:21:24,935
licenses and so it's a much higher price point, it's a higher support tier. Is

1415
01:21:24,935 --> 01:21:27,835
the majority of the the revenue on the product side

1416
01:21:28,295 --> 01:21:31,915
commercial versus non commercial?

1417
01:21:32,770 --> 01:21:36,370
So historic oh, you know, I should pull I should pull that spreadsheet

1418
01:21:36,370 --> 01:21:40,050
up. Let me see here. We do

1419
01:21:40,050 --> 01:21:43,810
have a like an active license count that shows that the

1420
01:21:43,810 --> 01:21:47,515
splits between commercial versus noncommercial. And this

1421
01:21:47,515 --> 01:21:51,355
and this is interesting too, especially when you when you look at, like,

1422
01:21:51,355 --> 01:21:54,155
GEDRs it back to the market too. Right? Because, you know, our sort of, like,

1423
01:21:54,155 --> 01:21:57,275
part of our game plan yeah. Part of our part of our game plan initially

1424
01:21:57,275 --> 01:22:00,635
was, like, look, if we just get students and hobbyists and just

1425
01:22:00,635 --> 01:22:04,440
wait, we'll take over. That was 100% our strategy.

1426
01:22:04,440 --> 01:22:07,719
Right? It gets the item from the very beginning. And then that is where really

1427
01:22:07,719 --> 01:22:11,400
Geter really hurt us the most. Right? Now there are absolutely professional and corporate

1428
01:22:11,400 --> 01:22:13,960
environments. They're still using it and we're we're kind of competing with because again free

1429
01:22:13,960 --> 01:22:17,695
is hard to compete with. But, like, yeah, that was

1430
01:22:17,695 --> 01:22:21,535
where, like, we like, 1 year, like, Seesaw as, you know, CTF for

1431
01:22:21,535 --> 01:22:24,335
for students. It was, like, Binja was, like, taking over, and I was so excited.

1432
01:22:24,335 --> 01:22:28,094
The next year, it was, like, all Ghidra. And actually, after that, ironically, it

1433
01:22:28,094 --> 01:22:31,440
was actually back to, like, Ida and Ghidra, because it was more it's, kinda, more

1434
01:22:31,440 --> 01:22:35,040
chaotic. It was sort of a mix, which is interesting, as as things change.

1435
01:22:35,040 --> 01:22:38,560
But, yeah. That's where, like, it can really making sure that

1436
01:22:38,560 --> 01:22:42,355
we're active. The student discount has helped a bunch, and so we do

1437
01:22:42,395 --> 01:22:46,235
we have a surprising volume of, student discounts. We've really thought about,

1438
01:22:46,235 --> 01:22:50,075
like, should students be free? Should we just get free student licenses? We've really wrestled

1439
01:22:50,075 --> 01:22:53,435
with that. Yeah. Like, incorporating it into,

1440
01:22:53,435 --> 01:22:57,010
like like, education systems or or institutions where the teacher

1441
01:22:57,010 --> 01:23:00,770
then utilizes it and teaches it with it. So that way, upon leaving,

1442
01:23:00,770 --> 01:23:03,650
everyone's already using it. You know? Yeah. And like I said, early on, that was

1443
01:23:03,650 --> 01:23:06,530
our sort of strategy, but we didn't make it totally free. We still made it

1444
01:23:06,530 --> 01:23:10,225
cost something cost because I I just sort of ended. I'm kind of a stickler

1445
01:23:10,225 --> 01:23:13,345
on, like, I wanted to have some value, in particular if you're a student. If

1446
01:23:13,345 --> 01:23:16,545
it's super discounted and you get a student discount, but you've paid your real money

1447
01:23:16,545 --> 01:23:18,864
on it, you're gonna put the time in to actually use it and evaluate it.

1448
01:23:18,864 --> 01:23:22,480
And if it's just, like, oh, just totally free, well, more

1449
01:23:22,480 --> 01:23:26,160
likely. You're you're much more likely to because that money is much that money has,

1450
01:23:26,160 --> 01:23:28,320
like, real value to you for the most part. Like, you I would say. That

1451
01:23:28,320 --> 01:23:30,800
was, like, $75 you had to pay. You know, that's that's a that's a PS

1452
01:23:30,800 --> 01:23:34,560
5 game. Right? So, like Yeah. You know, that like, I I at least

1453
01:23:34,560 --> 01:23:37,995
that's theoretically. That's my that's my logic on why we we still

1454
01:23:37,995 --> 01:23:41,055
charge. And and, like, so we have,

1455
01:23:42,715 --> 01:23:45,135
about 1.5 times

1456
01:23:46,155 --> 01:23:49,900
the commercial licenses and noncommercial licenses.

1457
01:23:50,920 --> 01:23:54,120
Okay. So you guys are heavy in noncommercial. So we have more noncommercial. But, again,

1458
01:23:54,120 --> 01:23:57,800
by revenue, commercial is way more. Right? Because commercial is 2 x.

1459
01:23:57,800 --> 01:24:00,955
Right. The or no more than that way more than that. It is like, 4

1460
01:24:00,955 --> 01:24:03,355
x. Like, it used to be 2 x at one point, and we just randomly

1461
01:24:03,355 --> 01:24:06,395
doubled the price of commercial, left noncommercial alone. And we're like, let's see what happens.

1462
01:24:06,395 --> 01:24:09,835
I do think there are a lot of, commercial company. We we'll see a commercial

1463
01:24:09,835 --> 01:24:13,275
email go bought fast on a noncommercial license occasionally, and we'll shoot them a note

1464
01:24:13,275 --> 01:24:16,650
and be like, just so you know, like, you're using it. Like, you it might

1465
01:24:16,650 --> 01:24:19,450
be fine because depending on the the terms of, like, how you're using it, you

1466
01:24:19,450 --> 01:24:22,970
you can use it at work. And we have, like, specific terms, like, describe, like,

1467
01:24:22,970 --> 01:24:26,730
okay. This is considered commercial. It's considered not commercial. We'll

1468
01:24:26,730 --> 01:24:30,445
just kinda kinda let people know. But, but yeah. And it

1469
01:24:30,445 --> 01:24:34,045
actually it looks like it looks like noncommercial continues to

1470
01:24:34,045 --> 01:24:37,505
actually grow at a faster rate than commercial, which is interesting. So that's been

1471
01:24:38,045 --> 01:24:41,325
even in the face of GEDRA kinda flat for a while, and then it's it

1472
01:24:41,325 --> 01:24:45,120
sort of picked up again post GEDRA. Can you see, like, the

1473
01:24:45,180 --> 01:24:48,940
the the point when, like, Gija was there and then if you guys grew was

1474
01:24:48,940 --> 01:24:52,700
pretty much the same or dipped? Oh, yeah. No. It totally it

1475
01:24:52,700 --> 01:24:56,400
was about 6 to 9 months of flat growth, like, no growth whatsoever.

1476
01:24:56,615 --> 01:25:00,255
Right? So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We went for, like, 10, 20%, like, consistent growth.

1477
01:25:00,375 --> 01:25:02,875
Feeling and thinking at that time? Well,

1478
01:25:04,215 --> 01:25:07,335
that was that was the time which we took on a very small outside investment

1479
01:25:07,335 --> 01:25:11,130
for equity just for, like, 5% of the company in just so we

1480
01:25:11,130 --> 01:25:14,590
have more in the bank because we were really worried about, like, do we need,

1481
01:25:15,130 --> 01:25:18,410
in hindsight, we didn't need to do that. So it wasn't,

1482
01:25:18,650 --> 01:25:21,790
wasn't totally required, but we thought that maybe we would.

1483
01:25:22,895 --> 01:25:25,315
And so we we kept a little more kind of in the coffers.

1484
01:25:26,895 --> 01:25:30,195
Would you advise, entrepreneurs to

1485
01:25:30,815 --> 01:25:34,255
to do that same move or maybe adjust? Yeah. That's be

1486
01:25:34,255 --> 01:25:37,810
different. That's so hard to say. Right? Like, you know, our

1487
01:25:37,810 --> 01:25:40,930
product was technically far enough along that we looked at Gator and we thought, okay.

1488
01:25:40,930 --> 01:25:43,370
I think we can weather this. Like, if that happened a year even a year

1489
01:25:43,370 --> 01:25:47,010
or 2 earlier, we probably wouldn't have been able to. But we had, you

1490
01:25:47,010 --> 01:25:50,850
know, 6 years of of development. The product was already mature enough. We had, you

1491
01:25:50,850 --> 01:25:54,445
know, enough things out there. Like, okay. I think we have enough advantages over

1492
01:25:54,445 --> 01:25:58,285
it. But, it was, yeah, it was it was

1493
01:25:58,285 --> 01:26:01,985
a little it was it was very concerning for sure. We were we're definitely kinda

1494
01:26:02,285 --> 01:26:05,325
keeping an eye out for it. I you know, I feel like every situation is

1495
01:26:05,325 --> 01:26:08,160
different. Whether you should be pivoting, whether you should it depends on what, like, we're

1496
01:26:08,160 --> 01:26:11,520
like, VINJA is our our baby. It's our passion. It's why we, like, we could

1497
01:26:11,520 --> 01:26:15,040
be making way more money, like, working for any of the

1498
01:26:15,040 --> 01:26:18,640
major tech companies. Like, everybody at my company is highly

1499
01:26:18,640 --> 01:26:22,320
skilled. We're very good at development, reversing their security. Like, we have skill sets

1500
01:26:22,320 --> 01:26:26,145
that could actively double our salary maybe

1501
01:26:26,145 --> 01:26:29,824
somewhere else. Like, no question. But, like, we all

1502
01:26:29,824 --> 01:26:33,585
really like what we're doing, and, like, who we're

1503
01:26:33,585 --> 01:26:37,185
doing it with, what the problems we're getting to solve. And, you know, like, as

1504
01:26:37,185 --> 01:26:39,950
the product is better, we get bigger bonuses. Right? So the goal of the dream

1505
01:26:39,950 --> 01:26:43,430
has always been, like, well, just get, like, more product sales, without growing the size

1506
01:26:43,430 --> 01:26:46,670
of the team, and then we can just continue to to bump everybody's salary up,

1507
01:26:46,750 --> 01:26:50,110
which is, you know, this year is looking is looking really good for. So it's

1508
01:26:50,110 --> 01:26:53,495
been nice to to, you know, see that kinda dream coming to to fruition.

1509
01:26:53,495 --> 01:26:57,015
So we're we're gonna keep doing it. We've talked

1510
01:26:57,015 --> 01:27:00,775
about the the origins. We've talked about the what's happening right now.

1511
01:27:00,775 --> 01:27:04,535
We've also talked about the future. What's the future for you? What what

1512
01:27:04,535 --> 01:27:07,170
what are you what are you gonna do in the next 5 to 10 years?

1513
01:27:07,330 --> 01:27:11,170
Yeah. I I really took a it surprised me last year

1514
01:27:11,170 --> 01:27:14,290
when it was, like, you know, eight and a half years. I was like, oh,

1515
01:27:14,290 --> 01:27:18,050
wait a minute. Didn't I leave my last few jobs after 7 years? And,

1516
01:27:18,050 --> 01:27:20,585
like, am I Was that like a wake up or, like, am I gonna do

1517
01:27:20,585 --> 01:27:23,825
it again kind of thing? It was just to, like yeah. Like, me, I took

1518
01:27:23,825 --> 01:27:26,145
stock. Right? I stepped back. I was like, okay. Is this what I wanna keep

1519
01:27:26,145 --> 01:27:29,905
doing? And the answer was absolutely. Like, I really I wanna keep doing this. Like,

1520
01:27:29,905 --> 01:27:33,185
I'm not, I don't feel like we've solved the problem. Like, Ida is still the

1521
01:27:33,185 --> 01:27:36,820
major dominant tool. You know, technically, there's still problems that I wanna

1522
01:27:36,820 --> 01:27:40,660
solve. I think we're the product itself is at a spot

1523
01:27:40,660 --> 01:27:44,500
where it can now, replace Ida for the vast majority of users. And

1524
01:27:44,500 --> 01:27:47,219
so now we just gotta go, like, show everybody. Like, convince them and, like, demonstrate

1525
01:27:47,219 --> 01:27:51,025
it and be like, hey. Listen. You can you get all these advantages. Let's let's

1526
01:27:51,025 --> 01:27:54,865
let's get everybody switched. And so that's super exciting. Like, I

1527
01:27:54,865 --> 01:27:58,065
feel like we we've done some of the hardest work and now we can reap

1528
01:27:58,065 --> 01:28:01,585
the rewards. But I also don't feel bored. Like, I feel like, you know, we're

1529
01:28:01,585 --> 01:28:05,420
launching a conference just next year. Tell us more about the conference. Where's

1530
01:28:05,420 --> 01:28:09,260
it gonna be? What's it gonna be about? Speaker, CFP So sort of thing.

1531
01:28:09,260 --> 01:28:12,860
Yeah. Reverse, r e dash verse dot I

1532
01:28:12,860 --> 01:28:16,620
o is, is the conference name. We just yesterday put the

1533
01:28:16,620 --> 01:28:20,375
website live and, the the CFP is open starting

1534
01:28:20,375 --> 01:28:23,895
immediately. You can go submit your your talks, please. Submit talks. It's gonna be in

1535
01:28:23,895 --> 01:28:27,735
Orlando, Florida, March, sorry. February 28th to March

1536
01:28:27,735 --> 01:28:31,335
1st is the conference. In hindsight, we really hate that it splits. It's really annoying

1537
01:28:31,335 --> 01:28:34,330
to have to split 2 months for the the date, but it was it was

1538
01:28:34,330 --> 01:28:38,090
very weekend for the hotel. So, it's it's it's a little bit

1539
01:28:38,090 --> 01:28:41,930
like infiltrate, really. We just took a lot of inspiration from, like, how infiltrate was

1540
01:28:41,930 --> 01:28:45,610
run. How did you run? There was a an event. In fact, we

1541
01:28:45,610 --> 01:28:49,335
hired the event coordinator in Belinda who ran outside event.

1542
01:28:49,335 --> 01:28:51,815
So, yeah, we very much were like, oh, hey, Linda. You wanna you wanna go

1543
01:28:51,815 --> 01:28:54,935
do this? And she was excited because she loved she loved Infiltrate, the community, the

1544
01:28:54,935 --> 01:28:58,695
people involved. So it's gonna be, it's gonna be more reverse engineering focused. The Infiltrate

1545
01:28:58,695 --> 01:29:02,460
was very offensive, security focused, so exploits vulnerability research. Ours will

1546
01:29:02,460 --> 01:29:05,420
have some of that, but it'll have also malware analysis and hardware reverse you know,

1547
01:29:05,420 --> 01:29:09,120
reverse engineering will be a little bit more just reverse engineering. It's not Bingeacon.

1548
01:29:09,260 --> 01:29:12,380
So to be clear, like, you know, several of our trainers are using Ghidra. Tox

1549
01:29:12,380 --> 01:29:15,600
can use either a Ghidra or a Ghidra. Like, that's totally fine. We're not,

1550
01:29:16,175 --> 01:29:19,935
not just trying to show show binary energy here. We want literally the

1551
01:29:19,935 --> 01:29:23,375
best, you know, the research and presentations. But but the thing that that

1552
01:29:23,375 --> 01:29:26,755
Infiltrate did 2 things really well. 1,

1553
01:29:27,055 --> 01:29:30,889
like, the hotel, the food, everything was top notch. It was really

1554
01:29:30,889 --> 01:29:34,409
well done. We're going to have really good, like,

1555
01:29:34,409 --> 01:29:38,170
logistics and planning, and you didn't so infiltrate was in South

1556
01:29:38,170 --> 01:29:41,850
Beach. You didn't leave the hotel because everybody stayed there. There was meals

1557
01:29:41,850 --> 01:29:45,684
there. There was, like, big gatherings out in the open lawn, which is beautiful in

1558
01:29:45,684 --> 01:29:48,264
Florida in February. Right? It was, like, a nice time of year to be outside.

1559
01:29:49,045 --> 01:29:52,744
And so, you know, it was really a good time

1560
01:29:52,885 --> 01:29:56,244
for, like, just connecting with other people that were at the conference. Like, it was

1561
01:29:56,244 --> 01:29:59,860
very, like, close knit. And that sort of vibe, I

1562
01:29:59,860 --> 01:30:03,380
think, is really, really important. And then the second thing that Infiltrate did super well,

1563
01:30:03,380 --> 01:30:06,900
which I thought was great, is not a lot of conferences forced dry

1564
01:30:06,900 --> 01:30:10,739
runs beforehand of the presenters. Every accepted speaker has to do a

1565
01:30:10,739 --> 01:30:14,445
dry run a month before the talk, the actual conference, and

1566
01:30:14,445 --> 01:30:18,125
then the review board or the conference organizer gets

1567
01:30:18,125 --> 01:30:20,605
basically a feedback. I'm like, oh, you should do this, or what about this question,

1568
01:30:20,605 --> 01:30:23,165
or what about this, or, you know, this slide is hard to read, or, like,

1569
01:30:23,165 --> 01:30:27,000
just all that stuff. And so just that little I mean, just having

1570
01:30:27,060 --> 01:30:30,820
me being forced to have your slides done in advance is a little bit

1571
01:30:30,820 --> 01:30:34,500
right. Just like you're always making changes, but if you have an internal deadline that's

1572
01:30:34,500 --> 01:30:37,220
earlier than the conference, because if you know, I do this all the time. If

1573
01:30:37,220 --> 01:30:39,975
I have a deadline, I will, right up to that deadline, be working on it.

1574
01:30:40,535 --> 01:30:43,735
But by forcing people to do it earlier, you just get so much higher quality

1575
01:30:43,735 --> 01:30:47,495
presentations. And so that's another another thing that we're we're we're

1576
01:30:47,495 --> 01:30:50,135
bringing back as well is I really I really there's just a ton about you.

1577
01:30:50,135 --> 01:30:53,255
And even as somebody who present a ton, like, I'm a very good presenter. I

1578
01:30:53,255 --> 01:30:55,930
can off the cuff, I can just do something quickly live. I could put together

1579
01:30:55,930 --> 01:30:59,470
the week before. It'll be a a good presentation. It's still important

1580
01:30:59,850 --> 01:31:02,730
to have had that earlier deadline to go through and try run it once. And

1581
01:31:02,730 --> 01:31:06,570
so, like, I'm not gonna name names. I remember somebody, like, do you knew who

1582
01:31:06,570 --> 01:31:09,915
I am? Like, your presentation's all the time back during the infiltrate days, basically, was

1583
01:31:09,915 --> 01:31:13,755
was saying this for that process. And sorry. Like, this is

1584
01:31:13,755 --> 01:31:17,514
to your benefit as well as the audience's. Everybody wins when when you

1585
01:31:17,514 --> 01:31:21,114
have to do this. So yeah. You said that you wanna keep it

1586
01:31:21,114 --> 01:31:24,390
very community and tight knit. Is there, like, a certain number of tickets you're gonna

1587
01:31:24,390 --> 01:31:28,230
sell? We we, offensive con, and there's only a certain amount of

1588
01:31:28,230 --> 01:31:31,030
tickets that always sold. Yeah. So Offensive con sells out real fast. Offensive con, I

1589
01:31:31,030 --> 01:31:33,750
think, is about 600. So they're a little bit bigger for our 1st year. We're

1590
01:31:33,750 --> 01:31:36,730
we're sticking it at even 400. So even a little bit smaller than that.

1591
01:31:37,755 --> 01:31:41,594
And so I'd rather sell out and really have it be be

1592
01:31:41,594 --> 01:31:45,435
tight. We might if there's a ton of interest that sells out, well, you know,

1593
01:31:45,435 --> 01:31:48,074
we'll see. We could go a little bit. The space we're in could actually grow

1594
01:31:48,074 --> 01:31:50,955
much bigger. But, like, you know, probably because it was our 1st year, probably just

1595
01:31:50,955 --> 01:31:54,550
because again, yeah. Like, I don't want it to be some huge Defcon like experience.

1596
01:31:54,550 --> 01:31:58,250
Like, Defcon is fun for other reasons, but it's not a community. Right? It's

1597
01:31:58,390 --> 01:32:02,230
hundreds of communities that are all kinda, like, you know, colocated. That's

1598
01:32:02,230 --> 01:32:05,190
probably a better way to put it. I I would say that Defcon is a

1599
01:32:05,190 --> 01:32:08,917
community just because of the comparison to Black Hat. Like, I don't Sure. That's

1600
01:32:08,917 --> 01:32:12,540
fair. Feels about community at all, but Defcon does feel. But you're a

1601
01:32:12,540 --> 01:32:16,162
100% right that the micro communities are not the size of what Defcon used

1602
01:32:16,162 --> 01:32:19,784
to be. Exactly. All the villages itself. Right? Oh, yeah. No. Every

1603
01:32:19,784 --> 01:32:23,380
village there is is as big or bigger than, like, that It's its own conference

1604
01:32:23,380 --> 01:32:26,579
at that point. So Yeah. They they have their own agendas and track and speakers

1605
01:32:26,579 --> 01:32:30,179
and awards, and, like, they they're a 100%. It's dozens of

1606
01:32:30,179 --> 01:32:34,005
separate cons kind of kind of in one. So Yes. Yeah. But this

1607
01:32:34,005 --> 01:32:37,685
is this is meant to be kinda small. It's meant to be, sort of more

1608
01:32:37,685 --> 01:32:41,284
boutique, really, really nice high end. It's also Florida in the summer, which is a

1609
01:32:41,284 --> 01:32:44,885
great time to visit right near Disney and Just in the summer? You said Yes.

1610
01:32:44,885 --> 01:32:47,364
Not in the summer. No. Sorry. Not summer. It's no. Florida in the summer is

1611
01:32:47,364 --> 01:32:50,660
when the worst time to visit because it's too hot. Yes. Florida in the winter

1612
01:32:50,660 --> 01:32:53,640
when it's a great time to get out of cold climates and come visit Florida.

1613
01:32:55,140 --> 01:32:58,840
So Track 1 track, 2 tracks. One track. Yeah.

1614
01:32:58,900 --> 01:33:02,535
One track for now. I remain really skeptical

1615
01:33:02,535 --> 01:33:06,375
of 2 tracks. I love again, product community, knowing everybody is there for the same

1616
01:33:06,375 --> 01:33:09,815
talk and the same thing. Same talk. Yeah. Maybe we could do some fireside or

1617
01:33:09,815 --> 01:33:12,535
some workshops, some other thing eventually. But I think for 1st year in particular, we're

1618
01:33:12,535 --> 01:33:15,969
gonna keep it simple. I I like One Track. And if there's a topic you're

1619
01:33:15,969 --> 01:33:18,449
not interested in, well, you can go outside, and that's a good time to talk

1620
01:33:18,449 --> 01:33:22,290
to people. And, but just knowing that everybody is is sort

1621
01:33:22,290 --> 01:33:25,250
of there for the the same stuff, I think is I think is is valuable.

1622
01:33:25,250 --> 01:33:28,915
So that's part of the part of the appeal. What you know, little other

1623
01:33:28,915 --> 01:33:32,275
stuff that, like, a viewing room outside, right, where you can also listen to the

1624
01:33:32,275 --> 01:33:34,755
talk, not in the main conference room. You wanna talk to people, but you still

1625
01:33:34,755 --> 01:33:38,275
wanna hear the talk that's going on or occasionally tune in. Offensive Condos, like, great.

1626
01:33:38,275 --> 01:33:41,530
I think that's another thing that we we love. You know, so there's a lot

1627
01:33:41,530 --> 01:33:44,010
of little stuff we've been thinking about. We've been talking about doing this for for

1628
01:33:44,090 --> 01:33:47,370
since we started the company. It's really been something we've been toying with. Yeah. Move

1629
01:33:47,370 --> 01:33:50,490
for you guys. It's a very exciting thing to to be doing. Feels like it's

1630
01:33:50,490 --> 01:33:54,250
it's time. Yeah. We're we're we're ready to do it. So, hopefully, we'll and it's

1631
01:33:54,250 --> 01:33:56,985
it's just there's been, you know, a lot of conferences in the US have shut

1632
01:33:56,985 --> 01:34:00,824
down. Shubukan last year is is coming up. Yeah. Infiltrate. Oh, they're just

1633
01:34:00,824 --> 01:34:04,025
burnt out, I think. They've been running that thing for so long. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

1634
01:34:04,025 --> 01:34:06,665
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I like it. And, actually, I ran the CTF for,

1635
01:34:06,665 --> 01:34:09,864
like, 6 years, back in the day with with Heidi and Bruce. They're fantastic to

1636
01:34:09,864 --> 01:34:13,230
work with, but it is just a huge investment of of

1637
01:34:13,370 --> 01:34:17,210
energy and, time and they're, you know, they run is like a it's a nonprofit

1638
01:34:17,210 --> 01:34:20,650
too. And so, it's like their their

1639
01:34:20,650 --> 01:34:23,850
laborer's costs are covered, but, like, every year they sort of start fresh, kind of,

1640
01:34:23,850 --> 01:34:27,517
with with the budget and with, you know, just yeah. It's

1641
01:34:27,517 --> 01:34:31,163
it's just a ton of work. They've done it. It's been a very good

1642
01:34:31,163 --> 01:34:34,809
benefit. So there's DistroCon too, I wanna shout out. There's another conference starting up

1643
01:34:34,809 --> 01:34:38,455
actually just a week before ours in DC, which they're kinda trying to, like,

1644
01:34:38,455 --> 01:34:42,060
inherit the ShmooCon mantle. We kinda wanna inherit the infiltrate mantle. So that's that's

1645
01:34:42,060 --> 01:34:45,180
kind of the the, you know, but I think both are needed. I think there's

1646
01:34:45,180 --> 01:34:48,480
a lot of value in, in more cons in the US because

1647
01:34:48,700 --> 01:34:52,540
Hexagon, offensive con, recon, a lot of the best conferences right now are not

1648
01:34:52,540 --> 01:34:56,060
in the US. So I'd love to At least offensively. Kinda return that. Reverse

1649
01:34:56,060 --> 01:34:59,605
engineering. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even even, like,

1650
01:34:59,605 --> 01:35:03,145
just the kind of a, you know, technical detailed depth, like, there's b sides.

1651
01:35:03,925 --> 01:35:07,605
And in the US, like, you just don't see as many as many conferences I

1652
01:35:07,605 --> 01:35:11,364
feel like. Oh, you have a massive amount of b sides. Sometimes you

1653
01:35:11,364 --> 01:35:14,690
get good technical talks. You do. But, like, I sometimes say, you don't have, like,

1654
01:35:14,690 --> 01:35:18,290
the like, I just feel like if you look at tops info site

1655
01:35:18,290 --> 01:35:22,130
conferences, Blackhat and Defcon are really some

1656
01:35:22,130 --> 01:35:25,730
of the only ones you see in the US. It's just not can you think

1657
01:35:25,810 --> 01:35:27,969
I yeah. What can you think of? Like, can you think of a good

1658
01:35:29,785 --> 01:35:32,665
really I mean, a summer con is more of a drinking con. It's fantastic and

1659
01:35:32,665 --> 01:35:36,105
fun, but it's not, you know, the it's explicitly not the highest

1660
01:35:36,105 --> 01:35:39,785
technical content, talks. It's a you know, another we're

1661
01:35:39,785 --> 01:35:43,510
actually talking about, like, conferences and talks and and and, other places to go

1662
01:35:43,510 --> 01:35:46,950
drink at, like, it's really divided between because I've I've given

1663
01:35:46,950 --> 01:35:50,710
talks nationally and internationally at, you

1664
01:35:50,710 --> 01:35:54,550
know, conferences, but then also at camps. So like Yes. And it also depends on

1665
01:35:54,550 --> 01:35:57,905
the the the audience that you're looking for, right? So if you're talking and I

1666
01:35:57,905 --> 01:36:01,585
think it's like split between like, commercial based

1667
01:36:01,585 --> 01:36:05,365
things, government based things, and then more grassroots,

1668
01:36:06,465 --> 01:36:10,160
Yeah, Yeah. Community. Exactly. Hacker. The old school. Yeah. What Defcon

1669
01:36:10,160 --> 01:36:13,440
was a long time ago and hasn't been for years. Like the fact that, like,

1670
01:36:13,440 --> 01:36:16,960
there's sponsors being tweeted out for I literally tweeted those recently. Like how weird it

1671
01:36:16,960 --> 01:36:20,560
is that, like, Defcon villages tweet out sponsor lists. And this is

1672
01:36:20,560 --> 01:36:23,985
bizarre to me when, like, you know, corporate logos were

1673
01:36:23,985 --> 01:36:27,825
anathema for the longest time at DEF CON. It really was, you know,

1674
01:36:27,825 --> 01:36:31,425
a counterculture thing. And it it clearly hasn't been for you know, it's just it's

1675
01:36:31,425 --> 01:36:34,705
changed so much. And again, I don't make it as as a judgment. I don't

1676
01:36:34,705 --> 01:36:38,440
think there's it's inherently better or it's just very different than than it

1677
01:36:38,440 --> 01:36:41,720
used to be. Are you guys having sponsors at your guys' conference? We we do.

1678
01:36:41,720 --> 01:36:45,000
In fact, we already have, 4 that like, it's crazy to me. We actually 4

1679
01:36:45,000 --> 01:36:48,645
signed up before we even launched the website. People who are like, yes. We're excited

1680
01:36:48,645 --> 01:36:51,625
for a conference. So we've got binaurali as our platinum sponsor,

1681
01:36:53,205 --> 01:36:56,265
celebrate, Ursa secure, and,

1682
01:36:57,045 --> 01:37:00,485
our II research innovations is the, the, the other one. So

1683
01:37:00,645 --> 01:37:04,310
Perfect. Yeah. Give them give them their plug now. But yeah. No.

1684
01:37:04,310 --> 01:37:07,849
It's it's cool that, like, people were willing to sponsor us, like,

1685
01:37:07,989 --> 01:37:10,790
sort of sight unseen. Right? Just trusting that we would we would do it. So

1686
01:37:10,790 --> 01:37:13,270
that felt that felt really good. It's building the brand. That's that's the 10 years

1687
01:37:13,270 --> 01:37:16,469
of building guys' brand up and and being a salesman in the industry. Yeah. I

1688
01:37:16,469 --> 01:37:20,215
think that's exactly right. Is there anything else that you'd like to share? The only

1689
01:37:20,215 --> 01:37:23,175
other hobby I do is speed cubing and I haven't been practicing as much lately.

1690
01:37:23,175 --> 01:37:27,014
So Speed cubing? Have you been doing competitions for speed cubing? There's not enough in

1691
01:37:27,014 --> 01:37:30,375
Florida, but, yeah. Like, I I go to most of the ones in Florida. But

1692
01:37:30,375 --> 01:37:32,934
the the last was in Tallahassee. It was just too far of a drive, so

1693
01:37:32,934 --> 01:37:36,099
I didn't didn't go. State champion yet? Not even no. I'm an old man. Are

1694
01:37:36,099 --> 01:37:39,940
you kidding me? Like, there's literally a separate league for people over 40. Like, there's

1695
01:37:39,940 --> 01:37:43,780
actually a separate scoreboard because I, at one point, was like 69th

1696
01:37:43,780 --> 01:37:47,000
in the world, over 40, but, like,

1697
01:37:47,219 --> 01:37:50,994
I'm 30 thousandth or something if you count everybody. Like,

1698
01:37:50,994 --> 01:37:54,755
I am very slow. Yeah. Like, relative to like, my fastest times

1699
01:37:54,755 --> 01:37:58,594
are like 12, 13 seconds usually. And, like, that's not even

1700
01:37:58,594 --> 01:38:02,320
enough. It's doing 6 seconds, 5, and 4? They're down in the

1701
01:38:02,320 --> 01:38:06,160
fours. Yeah. They're down in the fours for, like, yeah. The top the

1702
01:38:06,160 --> 01:38:09,880
top the the top spots, but any any regional It's just

1703
01:38:10,000 --> 01:38:13,840
there's no, like, algorithm, like, advantage. Everyone knows the algorithm

1704
01:38:13,840 --> 01:38:16,735
of the fastest way to do it. Right? Or

1705
01:38:18,094 --> 01:38:21,855
yeah. For the most part, yeah. What what what, there are you can

1706
01:38:21,855 --> 01:38:24,675
memorize more and more algorithms. And the more you memorize,

1707
01:38:26,735 --> 01:38:30,400
the the more options you sort of have available to you. But, also Okay. At

1708
01:38:30,400 --> 01:38:33,040
first, the more it takes to recognize which other game you should do. Can they

1709
01:38:33,040 --> 01:38:36,720
can't just lay you down? So there's that trade off. The best people know all

1710
01:38:36,720 --> 01:38:40,000
the algorithms and also have zero pauses and just go straight from one of the

1711
01:38:40,000 --> 01:38:43,040
other. There is a little bit of creativity in one of the earlier sections. It's

1712
01:38:43,040 --> 01:38:46,425
it's kind of fun in terms of decision making choices. Like, there's absolutely strategy. It's

1713
01:38:46,425 --> 01:38:48,985
not just a hard and fast. This is the optimal way always, and you know

1714
01:38:48,985 --> 01:38:52,505
it. There's a lot of, like, different techniques, and different people will solve

1715
01:38:52,505 --> 01:38:56,105
it, a little bit in the earlier in the earlier phases. Towards the end, it

1716
01:38:56,105 --> 01:38:59,890
tends to look very, very similar, with exceptions for, like, how

1717
01:38:59,890 --> 01:39:03,650
many memorized algorithms you have memorized. But common algorithms just, like, you know, sequences

1718
01:39:03,650 --> 01:39:07,410
and moves for particular cases, like case case case solves. But, no.

1719
01:39:07,410 --> 01:39:10,130
It's fine. It's it's been my and now it's happy. It's been a been a

1720
01:39:10,130 --> 01:39:11,452
good thing to pick up and It's been a good thing to pick up and

1721
01:39:11,467 --> 01:39:12,690
It's been a good thing to pick up and It's been a good thing, like,

1722
01:39:12,690 --> 01:39:16,445
I've I've wanted to do my I remember one of my best friends in

1723
01:39:16,445 --> 01:39:19,325
high school, he knew it, how to do he solved it and I was like

1724
01:39:19,325 --> 01:39:22,685
I wanna learn, but I wanna learn on my own. I

1725
01:39:22,685 --> 01:39:26,365
don't wanna follow an algorithm. And then I just now I'm 30

1726
01:39:26,365 --> 01:39:29,005
what? 3? Whatever? 30? I don't know. And now I haven't done it and I'm

1727
01:39:29,005 --> 01:39:31,540
like ah, shit. I maybe I should just learn the algorithm. Shouldn't just learn it.

1728
01:39:31,540 --> 01:39:35,380
I can do it. Rusty, my my my third cofounder, did that

1729
01:39:35,380 --> 01:39:38,820
where he was, like, I wanna learn, like, intuitively. I wanna get a sense for

1730
01:39:38,900 --> 01:39:41,715
I just wanna play with it for a month or so. So he he did

1731
01:39:41,715 --> 01:39:44,195
that. Like, I was just straight up, like, I was just gonna memorize. He didn't

1732
01:39:44,195 --> 01:39:46,675
solve it though. That's the thing is he made it to the last layer and

1733
01:39:46,675 --> 01:39:50,514
it's it gets exponentially more difficult. Really? The because

1734
01:39:50,514 --> 01:39:54,275
because the the closer you get to being solved, the less freedom you

1735
01:39:54,275 --> 01:39:58,100
have to, like, make moves without disrupting what you've already solved. And so that's where

1736
01:39:58,100 --> 01:40:01,940
it becomes easier to, like, just memorize an algorithm or look

1737
01:40:01,940 --> 01:40:05,060
up the correct answer to, like, get those last those last little bits. But, like,

1738
01:40:05,060 --> 01:40:08,820
the first two anybody can and should just play with it for a couple

1739
01:40:08,820 --> 01:40:11,829
weeks, and you can learn enough to get the first two layers. Like, to get

1740
01:40:11,829 --> 01:40:15,164
a whole lot of face and to get like the size and the edge. Like,

1741
01:40:15,164 --> 01:40:18,943
you can figure out just by I got that part. Doing that. Yeah. Exactly. Then

1742
01:40:18,943 --> 01:40:22,500
the last layer, it's obviously, there's people who figured out their own. It's been solved

1743
01:40:22,500 --> 01:40:26,057
before by people at that point, but I'm not one of them and that's yeah.

1744
01:40:26,057 --> 01:40:29,239
So so I just memorized. A lot of good old ones.

1745
01:40:29,800 --> 01:40:33,400
About games. So, like, do do you

1746
01:40:33,400 --> 01:40:37,239
do you get any interest in playing, like, games like mafia or werewolf where you

1747
01:40:37,239 --> 01:40:41,014
have to, like, pretend to be someone? Yeah. My son is a huge he's literally

1748
01:40:41,014 --> 01:40:44,135
right now is playing that out of school. Every day at lunch break, they play

1749
01:40:44,135 --> 01:40:47,494
they play werewolf. Yeah. We have all of the variants at home. This new one,

1750
01:40:47,494 --> 01:40:50,455
by the way, if you haven't looked at the Kickstarter called, either werewolf in the

1751
01:40:50,455 --> 01:40:53,350
dark or mafia in the dark. I think that looks really, really fun. It's like

1752
01:40:53,350 --> 01:40:57,190
an in person kinda big group gameplay. Anyway, yeah. So I'm

1753
01:40:57,190 --> 01:41:00,790
very familiar with with with those games. Do you play these ones as well? Do

1754
01:41:00,790 --> 01:41:04,230
you like these ones? I I do to a certain point. I'm a pretty good

1755
01:41:04,230 --> 01:41:07,844
liar. Like, when I when I need to be, which is weird

1756
01:41:07,844 --> 01:41:11,625
because I'm not naturally a liar. Like, I'm very like, I just am super

1757
01:41:11,925 --> 01:41:15,204
I default to the truth just all the time, which is also part of what

1758
01:41:15,204 --> 01:41:18,804
I do. Because it's like long term relationship, something else. It's never worth

1759
01:41:18,804 --> 01:41:22,440
it. It's almost not yeah. It's like yes. Exactly. So

1760
01:41:22,520 --> 01:41:25,320
If somebody, like, will ask me my opinion, I'm gonna tell you my opinion. Even

1761
01:41:25,320 --> 01:41:28,679
if it you don't like it. Because I'd rather you know the truth now than

1762
01:41:28,679 --> 01:41:31,480
it, like, it just it's one of those things that we're just practically speaking. I

1763
01:41:31,480 --> 01:41:34,805
think it's always best to tell the truth. Always. And so I'm scrupulously

1764
01:41:34,945 --> 01:41:38,305
truthful and even just how we run the company, we're very transparent. We have a

1765
01:41:38,305 --> 01:41:41,505
GitHub database with all of our issues and our roadmap in future. Like, we don't

1766
01:41:41,505 --> 01:41:44,465
hide or have secret plans. Like, we just we do everything in the open as

1767
01:41:44,465 --> 01:41:47,025
much as we can. It's just kinda like our philosophy on doing this. I really

1768
01:41:47,025 --> 01:41:50,670
think that's just a better way to do things, but, Yeah. No. I

1769
01:41:50,750 --> 01:41:54,510
I'm usually pretty good at mafia, like, in lying, about, like,

1770
01:41:54,510 --> 01:41:58,110
whatever. I can I can keep a pretty good face? Yeah. I prefer I I

1771
01:41:58,110 --> 01:42:01,790
like it a lot too. I've noticed we've been playing I got, like, Catan right

1772
01:42:01,790 --> 01:42:05,505
here. We've been I taught my girl Catan. And she loves

1773
01:42:05,505 --> 01:42:09,105
it. She loves playing it. And I've what I've realized is if you

1774
01:42:09,105 --> 01:42:11,665
are like let's say let's say I go to your house and I'm playing with

1775
01:42:11,665 --> 01:42:15,425
you. Right? I'm more likely to screw you over because I know

1776
01:42:15,425 --> 01:42:18,385
you and I don't really wanna screw anybody else over because I don't know them.

1777
01:42:18,385 --> 01:42:22,200
Yeah. So, like Yeah. The person that you invite over always screws you over. Not

1778
01:42:22,200 --> 01:42:25,240
always, but most of the time will you over more so. So you already you

1779
01:42:25,240 --> 01:42:28,040
have this, like, disadvantage. Like, as soon as the game starts, I've noticed. I was

1780
01:42:28,040 --> 01:42:31,720
like it's a it's just one of these, like, quirky things about, like, how the

1781
01:42:31,720 --> 01:42:35,175
game dynamic's set up and, like, how human human behavior is,

1782
01:42:35,574 --> 01:42:38,534
regardless of the rules in the games. It's it's interesting to do with some people,

1783
01:42:38,534 --> 01:42:42,054
like, my mother despises mafia or werewolf or any of those

1784
01:42:42,054 --> 01:42:45,755
games. She just because she always gets mafia and she hates it. She just doesn't

1785
01:42:45,895 --> 01:42:49,415
like lying. She doesn't like being the one that's gotta hide what she is. She

1786
01:42:49,415 --> 01:42:53,210
just it is the most painful. And she literally just for the her mental

1787
01:42:53,210 --> 01:42:56,970
health. We just stopped her. Yeah. Exactly. She's just too nice. Like, it just doesn't

1788
01:42:57,130 --> 01:43:00,010
so she just refused to play now. So now we'll like, big family gatherings will

1789
01:43:00,010 --> 01:43:03,855
always play play around the mafia. And, she is

1790
01:43:03,855 --> 01:43:07,695
she is excited. Play. Nope. Grandma grandma doesn't play. She just and it's

1791
01:43:07,695 --> 01:43:11,535
everyone's just that's fine. Grandma doesn't play. But all the cousins, all my my

1792
01:43:11,535 --> 01:43:14,975
my siblings, and my, you know, my dad will will do it. So

1793
01:43:15,197 --> 01:43:19,020
yeah. We'll play games. We we always play family games as well and whether I'm

1794
01:43:19,020 --> 01:43:21,900
playing fam actually it's when I play games with new people. If I if it's

1795
01:43:21,900 --> 01:43:25,580
a game that like I almost a 100% sure very very confident that

1796
01:43:25,580 --> 01:43:29,355
I'll win. Sometimes I'll like decide if like I'll just purposely lose

1797
01:43:29,355 --> 01:43:33,034
so Yeah. That the next time in series that we play They wanna play. Yeah.

1798
01:43:33,034 --> 01:43:36,875
Yeah. They wanna play. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's just another level of I

1799
01:43:36,875 --> 01:43:39,914
like I like co op ones. Table co op like there's a castle panic and

1800
01:43:39,914 --> 01:43:43,054
there's, you know, there's a couple of the the the tabletop games that are explicitly

1801
01:43:43,114 --> 01:43:46,659
like cooperative. I think that's a really fun genre. There's a there's a bunch of

1802
01:43:46,659 --> 01:43:50,500
those which I I really enjoy. I I am I'd like to see some of

1803
01:43:50,500 --> 01:43:54,020
those and learn about those. I we've never done those. By by nature, I'm too

1804
01:43:54,020 --> 01:43:57,455
competitive. If I so I I could that that by just not caring and not

1805
01:43:57,455 --> 01:44:01,215
not be competitive at all. Because, like, once I start being a little competitive, it's

1806
01:44:01,215 --> 01:44:04,735
bad. Like, so I've I sort of, like, have had to, like, over the years,

1807
01:44:04,735 --> 01:44:08,015
I've mellowed out and I just I don't try because once I, like, it's, like,

1808
01:44:08,015 --> 01:44:11,739
I'm either on or off and, like, I Yeah. Yeah. Just better if that happens.

1809
01:44:11,820 --> 01:44:15,659
After the game is done and you're like, that's you're like Some years ago this

1810
01:44:15,659 --> 01:44:19,500
guy No. For me, no. I'm I'm very I can disconnect, but other

1811
01:44:19,500 --> 01:44:22,935
people Not perfect. No. Because I I was the person that ruined it. So like

1812
01:44:23,415 --> 01:44:27,095
there are consequences afterwards even if they're not direct to my Oh,

1813
01:44:27,095 --> 01:44:30,695
right. Yeah. Right? I've had this too. I played a game or whatever and then

1814
01:44:30,695 --> 01:44:34,055
like I don't trust Chris because Ever again. He did something with this game. I

1815
01:44:34,055 --> 01:44:37,690
was like, we're playing a game. Yeah. Yeah. So that

1816
01:44:37,770 --> 01:44:40,489
that's the consequence. You gotta you gotta watch out for that. Yeah. You gotta look

1817
01:44:40,489 --> 01:44:44,250
out for that. But, alright. I don't wanna take out too

1818
01:44:44,250 --> 01:44:47,770
much of your time. I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm hoping, a lot of people

1819
01:44:47,770 --> 01:44:51,265
also gained a lot of insight from this. Well, I think what the plan is

1820
01:44:51,265 --> 01:44:55,105
what I'll do is, we're gonna get a few episodes, created, then we'll start

1821
01:44:55,105 --> 01:44:57,585
rolling them out so that way I can, like, push one out. It could be

1822
01:44:57,585 --> 01:45:00,465
something like that. But Yep. Schedule now. We'll keep you in the loop and Sounds

1823
01:45:00,465 --> 01:45:03,790
great. Everything like that. So Jordan, thank you so much for your time, man. Really

1824
01:45:03,790 --> 01:45:07,550
appreciate you being on here. We're excited to, you know, see what

1825
01:45:07,630 --> 01:45:11,310
more comes from Vector 35, yourself as well, and then your conference coming up.

1826
01:45:11,310 --> 01:45:14,990
So I appreciate it. Hopefully, we'll sit there. Thanks. Take care. Of course. Bye

1827
01:45:14,990 --> 01:45:15,970
bye. Cheers, brother.