What was your first encounter with the world of counterterrorism, cybersecurity? Like what was the initial thing that happened that just kind of made you tick that drew you in?

So I'll tell you, I had a really weird story I was doing online.

It's actually is working at the ISACs for a little, a brief period.

And the ISACs used to be like, which if you don't know, it's the information sharing analysis centers.

And so most of the major critical infrastructure sectors in the United States have like this center where they share information.

Right.

And back, this is a long time ago, back about 20 years ago, they were very counterterrorism focused.

Who do you think is currently winning the AI race? The threat actors using it as a tool to lower a barrier to entry or the defenders using it to secure?

So I know when you were building out threat intelligence and building protections for some of this, a lot of it was based on Google's own security philosophy for Google, right? So can you tell me a little bit about that and how Google as a whole thinks about securing things and then how you apply that to what you do as you're building tools and that kind of thing?

Well, so, you know, one of the interesting things that's happened since we've come over, I came over from Mania, and we essentially combined with the tag team, which was Google's internal team.

And Google's internal team started in the wake of something called Operation Aurora several years ago.

They had a pretty major incident with a Chinese threat actor, and they really built just a really incredible tool.

But it was a very like googly tool in that it was built with just world-class engineering.

They really know how to depend on and sort of build these incredible systems.

So their team was a lot smaller than my team.

And is this how Google Threat Defense came about?

Here's John Hultquist again.

Interestingly, they were, like, the early adopters of AI because the first applications of AI were really in the social engineering space, right? What it was very good at, at the beginning was fabricating content, right? That's like, uh, you know, started off with fake pictures, right? And then it was sort of fake text, translating things, right? There's a whole family of third-party apps that are based on this technology that offer very specific use cases.

So we could see them using it to brush up their resume or their cover letter.

One of the big ones we could see them use it for was faking identities, right? As AI has gotten better, we could see them progress from these static uses to these dynamic uses.

So not an image, but a video, right? Not just, like, a single translated document, but a conversation where they can essentially do multi turns, and that's really powerful if your play is social engineering, right? 'Cause you imagine, these guys are from Pyongyang, and they're computer nerds from Pyongyang.

So they've got, like, two strikes against them, and their job is to go out, pretend to be an HR person from, like, California.

Right? That's a huge lift.

Here's John Hultquist again.

And the threats of the day could include, you know, war, terrorism threats, most significant cyber threats, criminal threats, and

andWe had a morning where we were learning about an attack against Sony that had to do with a movie about a bunch of pot-smoking journalists called The Interview, not the normal fodder for that morning briefing.

And the director of the FBI at the time brought an agent who had a clip of The Interview, which they showed us in the SIOC, where you normally are seeing infrared satellite photographs, would be the type of thing that you're seeing in that morning briefing.

Instead, we see a movie clip about this movie that had agitated the head of North Korea.

There was, um, notable disbelief in the room that [laughs] we were seeing that preview, even wackier is the only time in my career I have had to brief the President of the United States in the situation room around national security incidents, and it's the only time that I had to start the briefing here to the assembled national security secretaries with a plot synopsis.

Here's John Hultquist again.

It was unprecedented for the FBI to go out and say, "Here's all the little reasons why, like, the solid reasons why we can connect this stuff," right? But there was a, a startup at the time that had this entirely counter theory on what was going on.

They were on the news, and you can imagine from th- those of us who did this for a living, it was infuriating to see that alternate reality being put up on a pedestal and broadcast out to the world.