We Were Held For Ransom

Josh: It's a very low barrier to get into the Gronkh Squad.

Tommy: That's crazy! We've committed to do the Daily Talk Show for 10 years.

Josh: Hi guys. Hi guys.

Tommy: Put it in the calendar. I'd just like to cheque the temperature in the room. I told you my squeegee story.

Josh: It is outrageous.

Tommy: Come on, let's go. It's the Daily Talk Show episode 1001.

Josh: And we're back. We're back. A new era. A new thousand.

Tommy: If you're watching on YouTube, you'll notice nothing's changed.

Josh: Yeah, that's true. Yeah, nothing's changed, but everything has changed.

Tommy: Yeah, I'm just drinking some broth right now.

Josh: So shit has changed.

Tommy: Yeah, yeah.

Josh: The guy that's pushed back on soup his whole life, his mum's watching this right now thinking, oh, why the fuck now?

Tommy: She tried a Lynn Jansen impersonation.

Josh: Love you, Lynn. Love you, Lynn.

Tommy: Um, why are you drinking— so before Jess said whose coffee's in the fridge and you said that was yours, did you reheat that or something?

Josh: I just reheated a coffee. Um, so I'll tell you, uh, this morning Amy dropped me to work, but first we went to her office. She had to pick up her laptop because she's home with Bodhi for the next 2 days. And so her boss said I'll get you guys some coffees. Oh, that's because of what happened. Okay, now I'll tell you what happened. Okay, so Saturday night we went out. Fuck it, fire it up.

Tommy: Oh, you're gonna tell me what's happening? I thought you were talking about the big thing that happened on the week which is to come, but this is something related to Bodhi.

Josh: This is from Saturday.

Tommy: Oh my God, what a week you've had.

Josh: I know, dude, get ready for it. Saturday we went to, uh, Music from the Home Front Great concert. MTV Visit Vic collab that we're doing. Great concert.

Tommy: Yeah, it was created by Michael Gadinsky from Mushroom Group. He created it last year during all of the COVID stuff and it's continued on. He sadly passed away in February, I think it was.

Josh: Yeah.

Tommy: And so it's at Sydney. It was at Sydney Myer Music Bowl.

Josh: It's awesome. I mean, the strings pulled, the artists that came, it was like 3 songs each. I kind of liked it. It's different. You go see a whole concert and it's just one artist pumping out 60 minutes of songs usually, whereas this was, you know, 6 or 7 live artists doing 3 songs each, which gave—

Tommy: Jason Esso, Amy Shark.

Josh: Karaoke. It was a, um, it was a jukebox. Jukebox.

Tommy: It wasn't karaoke.

Josh: No, it wasn't karaoke. I was thinking of a jukebox, not a karaoke box.

Tommy: It's like a playlist.

Josh: It was like a playlist, and I knew a lot of the songs, so I was happy about that. Anyway, that finished up. I got home at about 10:30. Uh, and went to sleep. I lifted Bodhi out of our bed because he likes to fall asleep in our bed, picked up the big slug, 22 kilos, just fucking take him into his bed, put him in his bed. Then 12:30 AM, we woke up to what sounded like a seal was in the house. Bodhi was doing this cough Poor kid was crying and could hardly breathe and was just gasping for air.

Tommy: Did you call triple zero?

Josh: Had to call the ambulance. So the ambulance came 5 minutes later, heard the sirens coming and everything.

Tommy: Oh, that's good.

Josh: So scary, dude. Fucking crazy.

Tommy: That was so quick. Yeah.

Josh: And, um, anyway, they got there and Bodhi has something called croup. Which you hear of if you're a parent. You've heard other people having croup, you're like, oh, okay, what is it? I don't know what that is. Like, I don't, like, I don't understand the severity of it. But dude, croup is like a, um, so asthma is low down in the chest, uh, and, and it's like the, uh, that's where the, um, the restriction of the airways happens lower down when you have asthma. I have asthma. Yeah, like low down. Um, croup affects the the trachea, the upper throat.

Tommy: Is croup something that— Is it like asthma where you have it for life and you have to—

Josh: No, it's a virus. So, it's a virus that restricts the airways up high. And that's why, like, and it affects the vocal cords, which does the seal noise. But it— Yeah, literally when he calms down—

Tommy: But now that you hear about what I'm talking about, you don't think I've got croup, do you?

Josh: Croup happens to children. And there's something about when you're bigger, your airways are bigger, so you don't have the same effects as the kids get from it. The kids struggle to breathe, and there's— you can have it as an adult, but in a different way. Anyway, Bodhi had this thing, and we ended up going to the hospital. We did a ride in the, um, in the ambulance, but by the time, like, he got given the steroids, which helped his throat, helped it, um, helped it sort of release the tension in his throat, he was back to normal. Bizarre. No symptoms on Saturday at all. Next minute waking up gasping for air. The kid across the road had the same thing. Ambulance. And so we heard that the kid across the road had it and then it was ambulance and we're like, is it that bad?

Tommy: Like, I don't understand. So, if you hadn't called the ambulance, would have been really mad?

Josh: Well, he settled down and stopped crying, which was half the problem. Problem, that he was crying and scared.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: And, and so he ended up, um, relaxing, but he still could hardly breathe. And so the steroids fixed it within minutes.

Tommy: Oh my God, did they give the steroids on whilst he was at the— on the ambulance?

Josh: No, no, no. So they came in and gave it to him and gave it to him in, in our bedroom.

Tommy: So he did, but he still had to go to hospital?

Josh: Yeah, which they ended up just saying exactly what the, the amazing ambos did. Ambos are fucking great. Yeah, they're just so calm. Just, you know, George and I were talking about this earlier, just calm, collected.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: In a moment of chaos and they still, hi, how are you? You know, just, what is your name? Anyway, lucky dude. Lucky.

Tommy: That's so funny.

Josh: So that was the end of the Saturday night that we had, which it's kind of, it was all kind of surreal and, and I'm glad it wasn't any worse.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: My brother's kids had it probably 3 weeks ago. And, um, and so who knows, who knows. It's like a thing that can go around with kids.

Tommy: Interesting. And, um, and so yeah, is he scared to sleep now or is he okay? He's fine, forgot about it already.

Josh: Well, you got a toy. The ambos gave him a teddy.

Tommy: Oh, that's nice.

Josh: This, this cute little teddy, he calls it Monkey.

Tommy: And so this broth has gone bad, by the way. Yeah, I think just cold, but a lot like it's It almost like I had some capsicum dip. Capsicum or capsicum?

Josh: Don't know, mate.

Tommy: Anyway, had that dip on the weekend. It expired, but ate it anyway. But I think the spice elevated because it was a spicy dip.

Josh: Can I just say, no one's ever saying, I wish there was more capsicum in my stir fry. Capsicum overpowers from a smell perspective, a stir fry like nothing else.

Tommy: Gives my mum reflux.

Josh: Capsicum does. It's got the, uh, it's probably like high acidity.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: So that was Friday, that was Saturday. Fuck it, Thursday. Let's go back a couple of days.

Tommy: Yeah. So we're on a shoot, uh, and we get a call from—

Josh: I got a text from GB. No, sorry, a Slack message.

Tommy: Okay, sure.

Josh: This is how rattled the guy is with what you'll understand later on when he messages me on Slack individually.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: And says, 'Have you got a second?' Yeah, or something like that.

Tommy: 'Have you got a minute?' 'Have you guys got a minute to chat?' I think it was like, 'You guys,' or whatever. Like, sort of like, 'Hang on, why does GB—' Like, he's editing stuff. Yeah, we're on a shoot. And so it was just when we're on our lunch break, and moments earlier, Bitcoin had crashed or whatever, and I'd bought some Bitcoin, right? So, buy some Bitcoin Then 2 minutes later you said, oh, GB wants to call, right? And so GB calls and you say, what do you mean? Like, you speak to him first or whatever. It's like, what? They're asking for Bitcoin. Oh, I'll put you on to Josh, right? And I say, what's going on, GB? And he says, oh, one of our, like, our network attached storage. So the storage where all of our, where we edit all of our footage and all that sort of thing. Yeah. There was a README file that when you opened it, it said, we've encrypted all of your files. If you want access to them, you have to pay 0.01 of a Bitcoin. And so when GB tells me this, I'm like, oh yeah, nice one. Is— did TJ get you to call? He's like, no, no, this is serious. So he FaceTimes me and shows me. And so what had happened. I think it's called a zero-day attack, and the idea is that when there's a vulnerability in any system, there can be hackers that can exploit that, and they do it all at once. So they do a big mass hack on all the different devices at once. And so we had a device, uh, that was vulnerable, not to do with anything in regards to our security. Like, we've got all the security stuff dialled in, but there was basically a backdoor vulnerability. And so they were able to access not only ours but thousands of other people's drives, encrypt the files. And so the way they did it was they encrypted— they started with small, under 20 megabyte files. And so that was all that was encrypted. So certain types of files.

Josh: So which is a pain in the ass if you're a photographer, you've got a lot of files under 20 megabytes. Yeah. If you're an editor, you have a lot of edit files, which are the— which I mean, it's annoying if you lost footage because then you can't do anything with it. But if you've spent 20, 30, 40, 50, whatever hours editing a project and you can't access the project files and you don't have a backup, you're fudged.

Tommy: Well, so it's a good lesson. So the— so what we have is a RAID. And so RAID is basically a bunch of drives put together. The idea is you can lose like one of those drives can fail and it's fine. You can pull it out, put a new one in, it builds it all up. Um, which has happened to us.

Josh: Yes.

Tommy: But the thing is, recently too. Yes. Fuck. The thing is that it's not a, um, that's not a backup. Having a RAID is not a backup. And so we've been pretty good, like we're probably up there in regards to backing up. So we back up all of our stuff. But when you're dealing with you know, George could do 2 days worth of work. And if it's just— if we miss one little file here or there, it could be the difference of having to redo a bunch of work. Yeah. And so what we ended up having to do was pay the ransom, which ended up being, what, $750?

Josh: Yeah, $785. But the thing is, when you see a ransom, you hear about wankers getting ransoms and we're not wankers. As in, so you're referring to—

Tommy: so yeah, there's, there's scammer— so there's scammers that will say, hey, we've filmed, uh, we've got footage of you wanking to porn. If you don't pay this, we're gonna release the photos, which is happening to you a bunch, and you refuse to pay. I just released the photos myself, which it is really common.

Josh: But so that, so that's a false— like, it's a lie scam where it's like they haven't got anything. Yeah, but they still try and hold you for ransom. Yeah. And there's some wankers that are pretty guilty, done some dark stuff. Yeah. And then they send the money. They would be definitely sending money.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: And so this one we knew was real because you could see all of the files zipped and you try and open it and there's a password. You need the, the code. You need the passcode.

Tommy: Yeah.

Josh: Which is some fucking long crazy letters, numbers.

Tommy: And so, um, yeah, we spoke to a few IT people and they all said the same thing. It's like, okay, well, you know what, we have a backup of 99% of stuff, but that 1% was worth more to us than what the ransom was.

Josh: Yeah, because the— so the footage we always back up multiple times, which doesn't change, but there's the, the project file is the, is the thing that changes every time you open it and do something to it.

Tommy: The hard thing is that, uh, what it also shows is, say, from a syncing perspective if you— if we were to just have syncing turned on, you can risk syncing malware from the drive to another drive. And so from a backup perspective, there's a whole nother level now where it's like, okay, we've got to be careful of how we're backing things up to try and avoid that sort of thing.

Josh: JB, uh, as soon as he realised it's happened and we got off the phone, we were still on the shoot and waiting to come back and At that moment, it's, uh, you and I are just— I mean, I don't know what you were thinking, but we're just— it, it's like you haven't accepted the depth of the problem because you don't know what the extent is. And so you're— by the time we get back, we're like assessing the damage. Yeah. And you'd found out that some people had paid and then got the files back.

Tommy: Yeah. So there was a huge forum post and Since then, there's been a bunch of— if you look online, one of Apple's suppliers, we don't know if it was specifically the same attack, but it seems very similar. Um, in the last sort of 48 hours, um, an Apple supplier has been hacked. They're asking for 50— the hackers are asking for $55 million, and they started— they've started leaking Apple details. So new releases, so the MacBook Pro X, all of this sort of thing has started to be leaked and, um, Apple or the supplier has to pay the $55 million for them to stop.

Josh: Which you think, who's got $55 million? This is the thing, it's like, what's the, what's the cap to the ransom? So most people that have been— if you're just a young punter who has the same device as us and gets held for ransom, I mean, this is where we were fairly optimistic for being held at ransom. Optimistic in that it's, you know, thinking, fuck, it could be more money. Yeah. It's amazing that we've all got crypto wallets now since we've— we're all investing in crypto. The people that wouldn't know how to use Bitcoin or buy Bitcoin or where the hell to get it from. It takes days to verify your account. It's tricky. Yeah. To do it, you can easily fuck it up. But we were able to. Yeah. Not fuck it up.

Tommy: Not fuck it up. Yeah, almost.

Josh: But even with— there's a few technical things.

Tommy: Oh yeah, there's a few things where it's like, um, you had to download a specific piece of software, you had to use a certain browser to do all this sort of thing. The, um, but what it— you know, by the time it was all done, we were out of pocket $1,600 or whatever, $1,500, because we had to buy another hard drive.

Josh: We had to pay for the wanking photos.

Tommy: We just did a big sort of A bulk payment. But yeah, and so, the lesson is when you have these things happen, all of a sudden everything gets into perspective and you say, okay, well, you're willing to pay more for things, right? So, it's like, think about when bushfires happen or that type of thing. All of a sudden, people have a heightened awareness to, is our house fire safe? Have we got all the protocols and everything in in line. I think a similar thing with this is it's like, hopefully you don't have to have your house burned down before you think about fire safety. I know. So, use the examples around. So, I feel like in some ways what's happened is we've had a fire in the kitchen and it's been contained, but then you can easily see, oh, you know what, if it went outside the kitchen, if it went here, here and here, we weren't set up for that. So, it's almost like for us it's an inexpensive lesson because our, you know, our files are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, really. Yeah. But when you think about— you don't want to say— no, no, it's crazy.

Josh: It's crazy when you think about it like that. But yeah, I mean, there was a— that guy that you sent me a video to, a guy that same thing happened to him. I just wish we had footage of JB in the office realising what had happened because this guy had security camera filming him just, oh, he's losing his mind, running over to his hard drive, pulling it out of the wall. Like, I just wish we had that footage of George because it would have been great. Yeah, but, um, there's a school of thought of don't pay your ransom. Like, I, I— you sent me a, a link to lodge the complaint with the Cyber Security of Australia. Yeah, which it's almost like too much work to do it. I can't be bothered. But on there it says, uh, from our experience, don't— paying the ransom, you probably won't get back what you're wanting. Oh, and don't expect to get any money back. Yeah, you can never recover the cash. And so if you're trying to get out, uh, of paying some kind of ransom, like, this is where you got to weigh it up. We think it's cheap. Like, I'm fucking I'm—

Tommy: well, yeah, right, we got a good bargain off a ransom. The most annoying thing about it is now dealing with the file. So we're having to go through every folder structure, make sure that it's okay. But the thing is, it will— what we will get out of it is— I was thinking about, I was thinking about it, I was like, so 3 or 4 months ago, start of the year, I was saying to you about ransomware and saying this is, this is an issue that we have to worry about. The thing was, even me saying it, who has read up on it and knows about it, it doesn't feel real. Like there's a part of me which when I'm saying it, I'm being like hyperbolic or I'm being like overly, overly sensitive to the, to the issue. But when— what I'm grateful for is that everyone had the experience within the team. So it's almost like— and it was no one's fault. Yeah, exactly. Like there's definitely things I could have done, I think, in regards to mitigate. But the thing is that it's like, it's sort of like a whack-a-mole thing. So for instance, like, look at our phones. There's all these things that there are potentials of, uh, vulnerable— there's levels of vulnerabilities in different systems. Yeah. And so you're trying to work out, okay, what is the, um, you know, what to worry about, what not to worry about.

Josh: And you can be over You can over-worry. Like, you can— So, it's like security cameras. You start watching them. You're obsessed about the security. A lot of people don't have security breaches, but then a lot of people get scammed or a lot of people have their identity stolen. Whether it's happened to you, like, there's so many people in the world that there's always a chance of things happening, but it's low. People who have their identity stolen, it's a fucking nightmare. Like credit cards taken out without them, like this credit score being ruined. It's a real thing, dude. It's so scary. And you don't— this is the thing. It's different. You meant— you use the analogy of your house burning down. The thing about cybersecurity shit, you don't see flames, you don't see— you don't smell smoke. It's fucked. Yeah. You don't— it's— it's— how do you understand? How does someone understand someone getting into their hard drive? Yeah. And my mum, first thing, can you know that she's even saying, can they get the crypto stuff?

Tommy: Like, can they get in the bank? Yeah.

Josh: Can they get the bank stuff?

Tommy: Like, And this is— and the thing is that, um, if you look at cyber warfare in general and you look at even what happened in the US where it's like they were all worried about the election and then they went after all these other sort of government agencies, this is only going to happen more and more. It's going to affect private businesses, small businesses like us, more and more. If you look at, um, uh, what say the Israelis have done around Iran and with Iran sort of trying to build nuclear stuff, like they have blown shit up just purely by moving bits around in a computer system. Yeah. So if you think about electricity, if you think about sort of just everyday items, so for instance, think about smart devices, think about all the different smart devices that we have. Imagine what would it mean if all of a sudden all of our smart bulbs were turned off? If, if someone was able to turn off all the bulbs. So, potentially it might not be a massive issue, but if it was connected with turning off bulbs, turning on security cameras, like we— Everything now is smart, but that's smart, like, Uh, we have a, uh, thanks to Trev Long, we have a, uh, a smart aircon heater thermo type thing, right? What could, what could be fucked up? What could happen? Oh, so how about this? So McDonald's, uh, McDonald's ice cream machines, there's a, a company that looks after, um, all of their machines. Yeah, right. Um, I don't know if you've realized, but there is a huge amount of McDonald's that are having problems with ice cream machines. Did you know about this? So if you go to—

Josh: I've been to one before and they don't have soft serve.

Tommy: Fucking pissed off. Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Josh: You know, you're embarrassed enough to be getting it. Yeah, you're trying to get a cheeky fucking McFlurry and you just can't get one.

Tommy: So when you, when you become a franchisee of McDonald's, you get a list of this is where you've got to buy all of your supplies from. This is where you get your chips from. This is where you get your burger patties from. Sometimes you'll have a couple of options. You can go to this pickle place or this pickle place. Well, it's to keep consistency in that respect. Yeah. When it comes to the soft serve ice cream machines, there is— oh, we've got a box. That's exciting. What is it? Jess has just passed.

Josh: Oh yeah, I'll open this. Um, now. Yeah, I'll open it now. Okay. While you're telling a story.

Tommy: So, uh, so McDonald's, there's only one soft serve machine that you can get. Now the thing, this soft serve machine is used by all of the other big fast food companies around the world. Hungry Jack's? Yeah. Really? I think so. But the thing is the specific ice cream machine from the company that McDonald's uses is a specific McDonald's one. It was built for McDonald's. And the thing is that, so, they have to clean the ice cream machines every single day because they're dealing with, like, dairy and all that sort of thing. So, they bring it up to a temperature. And then they bring it back down every single day. You right there? Sorry, man. So do you want to do this? But we'll do this first, then we'll come back to the McDonald's. What is this?

Josh: Could take me a while. I know exactly what it is, but I want to show you first.

Tommy: Okay, great. All right, he's got a— it's like a square box. I loved it. It's got a lot of—

Josh: okay, it's a lot of effort here.

Tommy: You've really ruined it, the box.

Josh: Oh, okay, another box in a box. Okay, bubble wrap. Oh no, this looks tricky. Do you need— I need keys.

Tommy: Yeah, you don't have keys.

Josh: No, no, no, but that's why I've been ripping. Oh no, I got it. Here we go, here we go. Sorry, sorry.

Tommy: I feel like I know what it could be. It's a random guess. Let's have a look. Yes, it is a mug from Yass. Is it? Yeah, episode 1000. She got that made from where? Officeworks?

Josh: Not sure. But it's got our podcast artwork on it. That's great. Fuck it. Great, great mug. Episode— We're in the 1000s now. Thanks, Yesss.

Tommy: How's the timing on that? So anyway, on the ice cream thing, heat it up, bring it back down. That's how they make sure that it's clean. How long do you think that takes?

Josh: You'd think like a flush of a system, no more than 5 minutes.

Tommy: 4 hours it takes, right? So it takes 4 hours. But here's the thing. When you run the machine after the 4 hours, half the time you'll get a message saying didn't work or not fully cleaned, and it will give an error message. The error messages, impossible to understand. If you go into the manual that's given to all McDonald's restaurants, it says pay 0.1 Bitcoin. It's like this is The old school version of that, it is old school ransom. Contact the service person, right? And so, uh, the go-to solution with any problem with the ice cream machine is to call the service person, which is like $150 an hour. And so there's these representatives all around the world who are— who know the machine. But what they've done is basically the company that, uh, that designed and sort of manufactures that ice cream machine, 25% of their revenue is from repairs. Wow. So all of a sudden it's in their best interest to keep all of this information closed. So they won't get— they don't give easy information from a user interface perspective on how to fix things. So it could be as simple as the, they've put too much ice cream liquid into the drum. And if you do that, it will give an error. But you have to call the service person every single time to work out if that's the issue. It's crazy. And so, a startup actually was created around a little device that you could put that McDonald's come— McDonald's restaurants could put at the back of their machines and it would give more relevant information., and, um, it even got endorsed by someone at McDonald's, said this is a great product, this is helping a bunch of restaurants. A week later, McDonald's comes out and says you cannot use that device on your machine. Dude, it's, um, it's ridiculous.

Josh: It's like the ransom of the, um, Apple supplier. Like, I wonder if Apple will come to the party and they'll be pissed off.

Tommy: Apple would be Well, because it's like, if they have—

Josh: if they've just been attacked by very— but the thing is, these hackers are fucking clever. Like, people say don't pay the ransom because you're perpetuating the problem. It's also, um, these people are fucking highly skilled and have been thinking about fucking people over in this specific way for months and months, and you need the files.

Tommy: It's also the weakest link thing, right? So it's, um If you think about all of your suppliers or clients, think about the emails that are sent. I've noticed that a lot of clients nowadays will have external that's embedded into every subject line. So they can— brackets external. So they know that if they're sending something out, because spoofing of emails, spoofing of phone numbers, changing invoices.

Josh: This is a classic one. You get an invoice from a customer. This is the Tesla, Tesla hack that happened. Um, these hackers got the Tesla invoice and changed the, um, invoice details to their own. So someone, BSB and account number, shares fucking 10 grand, something crazy like that. That happens heaps. Yeah, heaps though. Um, the other kind of scary stuff I was listening to yesterday, uh, viruses. So there's a 4-hour, 4-and-a-half-hour maybe, episode on Sam Harris's podcast about, um, synthetic pandemics or synthetic viruses. So it's like man-made as a form of, you know, terrorism or whatever it be to attack people. But in that, there is— so that you can— that they can recreate— scientists can recreate viruses to almost exactly what they were formed naturally. They can work out how to do it by numbers. And so, the escape of a virus out of a lab, which has happened in the most secure labs of the world, there's like tiers of security. And so, like, there was one reference of a tier 3 lab, which is quite pretty secure, got out. Tier 4, even more secure, got out. So, it's human error. And also, these viruses can just escape. But the virus can escape without the virus even fucking escaping. This is the craziest thing. Someone could hack their hard drives, take the synthetic version, all the numbers and whatever information to recreate it. So it is so unsafe. There's no— this is, you know, scientists spending their time recreating these things is like, in one hand, you can't not do it because if other people who are crazy who do it and beat you to it, that's the problem. Well, this is what I just say. I can't— no, we're never going to do that because it's too dangerous. Some asshole will.

Tommy: Well, this is like the, that vi— the virus. Trying to think of what it was called. The Israeli one that was targeting Iran. A computer virus, not a— Yeah, but it ended up, I think it was the one that— President— Give me a second. It was a while ago.

Josh: Yeah, the Israelis created also one that got into someone's— Who was the phone?

Tommy: Yeah, so there was Amazon. Yeah, yeah, Bezos. Um, that was with the, um, John Bezos.

Josh: No, but his phone, that was the— so the Israelis created that technology that can hack into iPhones, sold it. They sell it to third parties.

Tommy: So Stuxnet, do you remember hearing about Stuxnet? Stuxnet? No. Stuxnet, uh, this is on their Wikipedia. Stuxnet is a malicious computer worm first uncovered in 2010 and thought to have been in development since at least 2005. Wow. Stuxnet targets supervisory control and data acquisition systems and is believed to be responsible for causing substantial damage to the nuclear programme of Iran. Although neither country has openly admitted to responsibility, the worm is widely understood to be cyber— a cyber weapon built jointly by United States and Israel in a collaborative effort known as Olympic Games. And so I believe that Stuxnet— so it was, it was, it was going after the Iranian, um, uh, what's it called, president nuclear program. But I think it actually ended up on consumer devices as well. So this is the thing, that it can go well and truly beyond that.

Josh: Thing about nuclear A lot of that stuff is— requires real estate, requires space to create. So, there's another level of people being able to see, see from the satellites that people are— there's movement and activity. The virus thing can be done by Gronkh in a shed where no one knows they're there if they're smart enough or if, you know.

Tommy: Isn't it like it is the— there's a bunch of— just having a look at the affected countries. Iran, Indonesia, India, Azerbaijan, United States, Pakistan. Um, Iran was reported to have beefed up its cyber war abilities following the Stuxnet attack and has been suspected of retaliatory attacks against US banks. This is like the craziness of this whole thing, right? Like, it's, um, uh, Private citizens are now involved in this stuff. Like, this is— it's, you know, if you want to hurt an economy, if you want to hurt, um, even the culture, the perspective, the morale of a country, you could do it quietly through government and big organisations, or you can do it where it hurts the most.

Josh: Yeah, small business. Well, I think it's you have an attack like that was on us and it makes you think about all the possibilities, which you just don't think about. It's ignorance. But Channel 9, oh yeah, they went on, they went under for a day. Yeah, for a day. They, I mean, for a show, they went down. Yeah, which, which was, uh, Ben Fordham was telling us about the hack. It's, um, until it happens to you, that's when you start really considering. I mean, but it's probably a pretty dark existence if you just always thinking about these things and nothing's ever happened to you, because then you're waiting for them to happen. It's the security camera thing. You're watching, waiting for something to happen. You're like, oh, I'm feeling like something's about to happen because I'm looking. Yeah. And then something happens. But then things can happen anyway if you aren't.

Tommy: But what about being able to control? So think about, um, cars that you could stop. Um, you know, like you can stop a car, like, you know, certain cars that you'll be able to— Jason Bourne, dude.

Josh: So, well, like, it's always in the movies, the CIA have some kind of fucking, you know, programme or some kind of black ops operation where they've got higher security and they can control cars and turn them off or slam brakes on. Like, it all seems crazy far-fetched because you just, you know, you're driving your little Hyundai to work and you're thinking, who cares about me?

Tommy: What about if rather than it being What happened last year with, you know, being locked inside and all that sort of thing. What if it was like, everyone turn off your phones now? Everyone. The government said, okay, guys, the virus, the virus is bad. The only way that we can stop this is turn off your phones. Yeah, it'd be horrible. What about the— You're so in trouble, dude. You've relapsed. What about Instagram? Yeah, yeah. I've got to read my, watch my reels. But the— But think about— so even, um, in Cuba, there were, um, a bunch of, uh, diplomats from other countries that ended up getting very, very sick, permanent damage due to, um, audio frequencies that they couldn't even hear, and they were just being targeted. So imagine, like, you're like, oh, my head fucking feels funny. There, there are waves Micro, like, I don't completely understand it, but fucking waves that you can't hear, audio waves.

Josh: Do you think about, you can, I almost bought one the other day, plug it into a wall. It's got a high frequency noise and it fucking ruins insects. They don't want to come near your property.

Tommy: But pisses you off as well. I've, yeah, it's. Don't they do that for kids as well? Like, if you want to keep kids away.

Josh: I've been, I've been on a property and there was one plugged in, but I could still hear it just ever so slightly. But yeah, there's frequencies that we can't pick up. Think about dolphins.

Tommy: Well, there was a, that was a ringtone for a while. I remember it was sort of, if you wanted to use your phone at school, you could use the ringtone that the teachers couldn't hear. Because old chunts can't pick it up. Over 25 years old or whatever, and you can't hear it, which is funny.

Josh: That is, it's a, can be scary world. Lots of great things. But Yeah, I mean, we should— scary things have happened to us in the last week.

Tommy: I would love to have a cyber expert on the show. I actually saw Kevin Mitnick, first guy to ever be put in jail for hacking. Really? Came out, so he wrote the book, um, uh, what's it called, uh, The Art of Deception. But like, an awesome, awesome book talking about, um, social engineering. Anyway, he, um, he started sort of Mitnick Industries or something. It's all about like, um, helping for this sort of thing, you know, exactly. But he was— I saw he was on like Sunrise or Channel 9, like Today Show or something, just a couple of weeks ago in Sydney. He's in Sydney, really? So it would be great to meet up again. Yeah, it'd be great to get him on the podcast and talk about hacking. And the social engineering stuff's really interesting because obviously you think about, you know, the, um, all of the stuff that, you know, that we have. But there's other weird things. Social engineering in that being able to call you up and saying, hey, you know, so knowing information about you. So for instance, so now people know that you had to go to the— went in the ambulance. If someone called you and said they were from Ambulance Victoria, just had wanted to get some more information from Saturday night and said, hey, it's Simone here from Ambulance Victoria. I believe that we paid you a visit on Saturday and said, yeah, we actually just noticed that your account had just— your membership was about to lapse or that you didn't actually have Bode covered. Yeah. The bill is going to be this, but if you're able to pay in the next sort of 48 hours, which you have. And so you would— but it's like, I would not pay that.

Josh: Because I have, I do my admin, I pay on time, I've got my account.

Tommy: But there would be so many other versions of that, right?

Josh: It's a good one. It's a good one. To be honest, I fucking didn't give any detail. I never showed a card. The healthcare system, public healthcare system, so fortunate for. Ambulance comes, you get in it, you go to the hospital. I didn't have to show anything. And then you leave. It's phenomenal. That's weird.

Tommy: So they didn't even get it. So my dad's called Will Payne. They didn't even know that.

Josh: We told them, we told them Bodie's name, but not Medicare number, like nothing.

Tommy: It's all there. So I remember when I was at the fire brigade and there was— I was just in the media department, wasn't a firefighter.

Josh: But you did the calendar, the tops off.

Tommy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shot it. The thing with that is I remember during there's obviously a lot of sort of industrial relations drama and stuff with unions and executives and all that sort of thing. And I remember there was a certain time where, I don't know if this is happening with the ambulance sort of, you know, Ambulance Victoria nowadays, but I remember with the MFB, one of the things they were doing, the union, like what firefighters were doing, were they were not taking details of people who hadn't being covered or whatever. Like, so for instance, so that's right, the, um, the— if you get a false alarm, you would have to pay, you know, a few grand, whereas I remember they were— during this time they weren't, um, you know, fining anyone, which is interesting.

Josh: Get your ambulance cover. Ambulance. Ambulance. Get your ambulance cover. Yes, because you never know, a hot snitch will get you. That's a good one.

Tommy: It's The Daily Talk Show. Hi@thedailytalkshow.com if you want to send us an email. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your Monday and we'll see you tomorrow, guys.

Josh: See you guys.