Alrighty, so now we're going into the first of the four examples, and that is on software security or cyber security. There's a number of different names for it out there. But it's all generally speaking the same thing. I figured this would be a very easy topic to come into first, because hopefully everyone knows about software. And everyone knows how important security is on that software. So it should be also well known that software is essentially eating the world.

It's creeping into every business into every industry, even ones that traditionally weren't, you know, really seen as particularly computer orientated or needing, you know, apps or computers and all that sort of stuff, something like you know, a coal power plant or something like that. Even those things are really getting, you know, quite ingrained with computer technology. So it's really getting into every industry and no To stop, but it's helping them become more efficient, you know, get better customer bases and all sorts of good stuff. So a lot of industries are taking on computers, which means that along with taking on those computers, you also take on the risks of those computers, which is the security aspect of it. So everything from the more traditional ones such as you know, energy power plants, right up to the absolutely most tech savvy companies like your Google, your, you know, Facebook, all those sorts of things.

They all require a huge amount of software security, and it's becoming increasingly more, you know, important, especially for those really big companies, all those really big ag providers that they have really cool and critical software security. The reason for this is that the bigger the company is essentially the more cyber target they become, you know, as a company usually gets bigger, they become more powerful. They have, you know, control over a larger data set of information about it. Customers they might have control over, you know, particularly large energy source or something like that. It makes them really, really big targets. The same as you know, having a bank with lots of money in it makes it a huge target.

So cybersecurity in itself can encompass a lot of things. And these are, you know, threats and issues such as, you know, you have your basic virus and malware security for your everyday systems like Outlook or word or something like that. You also have breaches of companies, databases, so things like hackers hacking into a company's database and stealing all their customers or their passwords or something like that. You have cyber espionage from both other companies and other nations as well. There's been lots more to talk about that recently. And this can come from anyone by, you know, just a small child in a basement somewhere right up to a completely nation sanctioned attack from dozens and dozens of People, you have ransomware threats that encrypt your data.

So these have also been happening recently without encrypt your entire hard drive and only give you access to your data if you pay them a certain fee or ransom. You have the DDoS attacks or you know anything else that prevents companies from actually operating. So a DDoS attack might actually shut down not shut down your website but make it unable to be accessed by other people. And if people can't access your website, they might not be able to use your services, severely disrupting your company. And and you know, many, many more every company from big to small, now needs essentially world class cyber security and that's a fantastic thing from an employment perspective. So let's get into having a look at that.

Now. This you know threat of cybersecurity and people hacking into systems can really be anything you can even have a huge moment national companies having their entire database stolen simply by one, you know, very small bug and one single person, basically exploiting this bug and getting a hold of, you know, sometimes gigabytes worth of data of customer names, social security numbers, their credit card details, their passwords for all the services, all this sort of really critical data. And it's goes even further than that. Because, you know, whilst you have the original hack, which again, might not be known about for many months, or even years, in some cases, that is obviously very damaging to the company. But it goes beyond that because it also affects people's perception of trust in that company. You know, can I trust this medical provider to take care of my medical doctor and not get hacked?

Do they have proper security, it's something that is ever present and just basically growing exponentially as the power of computers increases, and as computers get more and more integrated into more and more of the system, Things that are out there. The other thing that sort of throws a bit of a, you know, wrench into it is the whole aspect of machine learning and AI. Now, what AI can do is, it can sort of create entirely new threats, but what it's most progressively being used for is to essentially type the old tricks that, you know, might have been very basic and just commonplace and that we now fight against very easily, and sort of put a new spin on it. So a good example of this is just, you know, spam emails or phishing emails, if you don't know what they are. Basically, they're just emails that their sole purpose is to either sell you Viagra or whatever it might be, or to get you to click on a link which then takes you to a website that is, you know, very malicious and downloads, you know, viruses onto your computer or whatever their intent might be.

So these phishing emails might obviously want to try and get you to click on a certain thing and Previously, they have to be very generic. So if they're sending out millions and millions of these emails to everyone all over the world, you know, they just have to be a generic email, you know, hey, john, check out this fantastic cool thing I saw, you know, it's very generic, it's very impersonal, very easy to spot because there's millions of emails, you can't go out and individually typed out all these emails. But with AI and machine learning, you can actually have that combined with each other and, you know, get quite a sort of potent results. So, just as a quick example, you could have that same phishing email, but instead of a banter, you know, hey, john, check out this thing or, you know, very ambiguous type thing.

It could actually scan through any of your publicly available profiles, or your Facebook or your Twitter accounts, anything that's actually personal. Scrape that information, get your name, maybe get one of your contacts that you tweet to really regularly or something like that. And try and impersonate that person in order to try and get you to click on that link, more likely. So instead of it being totally generic, it's good. Say, you know, hey, Bill, this is, you know, Bob from that company that whoever Bob is employed on, I want you to check out this really cool thing on drones, because it seemed that you know, you have a contact called Bob that you tweet with really often. And you also talk about drones really often.

So this whole email looks much less out of place. And this is something that is highly personal, and highly targeted specifically at you, and only you, and the chance of you going, Oh, it's an email from Bob. I'll just click on that link, because I want to find out what that cool thing on drones is about is much, much higher, and they can actually get you to click on that link far more likely than if it was just that old tire generic email that you would look at and go. That's weird. It's obviously a scam. Get rid of it.

Sort of So this sort of marriage of new technology and basically old scamming techniques can really bring about something that's actually quite serious and quite dangerous, even though it's, you know, a very old and quite easy trick. Another recent example was someone who is just essentially curious and decided to do a bit of a scientific study. So they weren't trying to be malicious at all now doing this for research purposes. They actually wrote specialized code and rented out ad space, so they purchased ad space that would be displayed on people's computers. But instead of running an ad, they ran specialized code to mine crypto currencies. So when you went to whatever site it wasn't, it didn't have to be a compromised site or anything.

It was just a site that displayed those ads similar to how you see Google ads or Facebook ads on other sites. It would display that ad, start running the card and start using your computer's power to mine cryptocurrency for that person and their results were very, very successful. And again, this is just, you know, an old sort of trick of inserting specialized code into ads, but with a new twist of using cryptocurrencies to actually make the person money as opposed to, you know, infect the computer with malware or whatever that we're doing previously, 10 years ago. So, these are all examples of just how this you know, new technology, new developments, like AI like cryptocurrencies are really getting used together with those just everyday old tricks to really bring about very serious threats. And this is today as well, you know, it's very widely acknowledged that basically everything is broken, that software is really, really not well secured across many, many different types of things, whether it's your operating system to the actual hardware to even the specialized security, you know, encryption stuff that they had there, and It's a very, very difficult problem to solve and has been for many years.

And that's why it's not solved. And this is all today. We're not even talking about in the future where technology and new systems are poised to exponentially increase and get more integrated and more developed and way smarter. So that's what we'll be covering next, which is this industry's future. So I'll have a chat with you.