Welcome back to Geek Time advanced. Welcome, Lulu.

Hi, Brad.

So we're gonna continue on with talking about cyber security.

Remember, last time when we were finishing up, I asked a question if there are so many people who are experts in cyber security, why are the attackers still winning in a lot of the situations? Why are they still able to make the attacks successful, so to speak.

Well, one thing that makes it difficult is that they are always looking for new ways. There's always new computer systems. They make a new operating system. Windows does this every like 5 years or so. And whenever they make a new operating system, there is always going to be some flaws in it.

And so basically, while the defenders are out there trying to keep the system defended, the attackers or the bad people are going out there and finding things and then using those exploits to hack into the system. The defenders are always two steps behind the attackers.

Can you not preempt some of these attacks if you already know, or if you already see the potential of a loophole?

You can. And sometimes people will find a loophole before anyone attacks it. Sometimes they don't even know if anyone has attacked it before they find it. So it's always really difficult. There's... whenever they make a new system, they can look for all the loopholes, but they're never going to find them all.

I suppose as the defending side, you have to be all encompassing, all enveloping. You have to really take care of every little detail, but as the attacker, you only need one loophole to be in. I see, so cyber security essentially is ultra important because last time we were talking about it is linked with the integrity of critical infrastructure.

Right. People's livelihood, the stock exchange is all on the internet. People transfer money from bank to bank via their computers. People pay their bills nowadays via computer. Everything is online.

Can I just ask like a I don't know if it's a related question, so talking about who has access to certain internet. Who has like, I don't know if it's called privilege, security clearance, how does that work?

When you work for a company, basically, the idea is to give every user as limited a privilege as possible. We often call this privilege. So basically, they say okay you need access to these rooms, you need access to this data. And We're only going to give you access to those bits of data because that's what you need.

And so limits the liability for the company saying that okay you don't have access to the things you don't need. If you did access those that might be a problem.

So you're breaking the law.

Yeah. Basically the ideas that we want to limit the accessibility to things as much as possible.

Actually talking about breaking the law, based on your understanding, is there I don't know if I'm necessarily talking about China or the US or Japan as you are living in Japan, is there any existing or efficient, effective legislation or law in place to prevent those type of behavior?

There are laws there to prevent people from breaking the law or getting into systems. But oftentimes, at least in the US, the laws are written by people who don't have any understanding of how the internet works.

I see.

I mean like years ago, there was a really big...that basically became a meme. The internet is a bunch of tubes and pipes. I guess that... it can be somewhat of an analogy, but the guy who was talking about the internet and making laws about the internet had no idea what it was or how it worked.

So it's like, why are you making the rules for this? They should have people who actually understand networks and network security, helping you make those laws and legislation.

This is last time when we were talking about your major, one of your majors, cyber security, which is a combination of two faculties. It's basically multidisciplinary. You have part IT but you also have part public administration. So it needs to be an IT expert who's making governmental decisions, essentially legislative decisions.

So talking about studying cyber security, I'm really curious when you did the course, what kind of classes, what kind of courses did you have to pass or did you have to do?

Well. That one of my first classes was talking about like the rules and everything behind cyber security. Basically, it was an interesting class, but one of the first things we did was learn how to decrypt passwords. I was just like, why are we doing this? Right? What I thought it was kind of strange. It was the first thing we were doing.

But it was just to show how easy it is to decrypt some passwords like how long it would take to decrypt a password using brute force, how long it would take to use a few different other types of attacks. But that was like the first thing we did.

I was like really I can break passwords, so all I have to do is learn how to get the passwords and I can break them. But it basically you use the device that it's called like a packet sniffer. And when you use that, you can grab like the password file and then you can say here's the password file, then you decrypt it. It's like very very simple, but...

Yeah, remind me to keep all my devices away from you, keep all my account numbers from you.

Don't worry. I already have them. No kidding.

Yeah. All right.

One of the most fun classes was basically attack and defense. And basically in this class, you learn how to attack and you learn how to defend. In order to learn how to defend, of course, you need to know how to attack, you need to know how people attack.

And so half of the classes you learning, the basic mindset of someone who is an attacker and what they're attacking, why they’re attacking, how they would typically go about it. And then once you learned that, you can learn how to defend against that.

So let me summarize. It's not just the techy side, you also have to get into the mindset. You also have to understand their motive for attacking and sort of... kind of like hacker profiling.

The one thing you do learn about hackers is this, hackers will not stop. Once they want something, they'll continue to go at it day in day out until they get it. And that's the one thing we learn.

Okay, sounds like they have certain type of like personality traits. Last time you also mentioned something called cyber forensics. Is that part of your course?

Yeah. Like 2 of the last courses we took were cyber forensics. And then basically, one course about how to write a reports because one of the most important things is basics, once you do an analysis on a system, you have to be able to write a report for a governing body. But forensics was one of the most fun like we would take photos, we would look at all the data on the photo and look for ‘Has the data been messed with?’.

If a file has been like broken or if the file has been somehow corrupted, we learn how to try to fix it and then maybe try to get access to the data on that file. So we can use that to do some sort of forensics to find out who the criminal is or something like that.

So true cyber detectives.

Exactly. Essentially.

They like cyber forensics is actually probably one of the more regulated sides of cyber security. You can do a lot of cyber security with just a basic type of certification.

But when it comes to cyber forensics, you actually have to get really high level certification in order to get into it, because a lot of times, what you're doing in cyber forensics is something you'd be doing for the police or for the FBI or for the court system. And they need someone who is actually highly certified for that kind of thing.

I see. So it does sound highly regulated. Before we wrap up today's topic, let us move on to a quite serious side that's related to cyber security, which is the potential or not just the potential. It's probably already happening. Cyber warfare就是网络战.

Most people think of 网络战, they probably think about more like social media, like opinion leading, but we're talking about actual technological cyber warfare hacking into systems, collapsing infrastructure that type of situation.

Exactly. So basically, what's going on with cyber warfare is not necessarily that people are attacking each other right now, but they're trying to get a foothold into other countries, systems. And that way when they do, maybe if there is a war between two countries, then they can use that to their advantage.

There's a really famous event that happened called the Stuxnet virus that was when it's alleged that the US CIA had sent a virus to the Iranian basically nuclear material processing centers and as a way to destroy their infrastructure. So they couldn't build nuclear weapons.

It is definitely... I'm sure there are a lot of people who are working with... in places in labs, in places that we're not seeing that probably. I guess they oftentimes it looks all peaceful on the surface. But there are lots of activities going on, but just so that we keep ourselves out of trouble, we're not gonna dig more.

We're gonna wrap up here. Leave us a comment in the comment section if you have anything else to say with regard to cyber security. And you can also request certain techy or geeky subjects that we might be talking about in the future in this segment. Thank you, Brad, for coming to the show.

No problem. Thanks everyone for coming.

We'll see you next time.

See you next time.