Three Decades in Security: Same Old Bugs, New Hype, and the Hacker Mindset

Building a shady app used to need one thing that was surprisingly hard to find: an engineer willing to build it. Engineers are a pretty ethical crowd, and that worked as a safety barrier nobody designed. With AI, nobody has to ask anymore, and nobody pushes back.

In this episode of Root Cause I sit down with Adrianus Warmenhoven, who built one of the first internet businesses in the Netherlands in 1993 and then spent decades in security, at Bitdefender, Tesorion and Nord Security. We first met at BarCamp Yerevan when I was a student, and he is one of the people who made me want to stay in tech. We get to the root cause of why every hype cycle brings back the same old security bugs, and why my problem with AI turns out to be an ethical one, not a technological one.

We talk about why security always arrives after the money, the Home Depot effect of vibe coding, and why a local setup can't compete with racks of H200s. The subsidized subscriptions are a lock-in strategy, but you aren't the target. The big players don't care about your local harness or what you spend. They want enterprises and governments hooked. We get into what people now hand over to AI chats, why data that disappeared from the web 15 years ago still ends up in your profile, and what undress apps say about where our moral boundaries went.

Then the economics. Adrianus estimates that producing code is now five to seven thousand times cheaper than reviewing it, so security has become an insurance question. Like the lock on your front door, it buys you time, not certainty. Targeting has flipped too. Nobody picks you anymore. Your profile grows from a cookie, a leak, an email, until it's big enough, and software selects you. In his words, it's just data.

We also ask whether the internet is dying, how to spot engagement bait questions, what skipping a 15-minute bike tire repair has to do with the subscription economy, and how to live with the anxiety of knowing how all of this works. Then the reasons for cautious optimism: the Internet Archive, an open source chip on the DEF CON badge, and the comeback of the hacker mindset (Iron Man in the cave, not War Machine). Book recommendations: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and the cyberpunk of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

00:00 Introduction of the Episode and the Guest
02:44 Where We Met: BarCamp Yerevan
03:29 The Guild of Grumpy Old Hackers: Same Old Bugs, Every Hype Cycle
05:31 Is AI Different? Security Always Arrives After the Money
07:21 The Home Depot Effect: Vibe Coding vs Real Engineering
10:54 The Most Inefficient Programming Language Ever Invented
11:44 The Engineer Who Said No: A Barrier That's Gone
13:46 Speed vs Safety: Why Local Models Can't Keep Up
17:04 Subsidized Subscriptions and the Lock-In Strategy
18:57 Nobody Cares About Your Local Harness
20:27 From "Don't Share Your Birthday" to Pasting Everything Into AI
24:57 Once It's Online, It Ends Up in Your Profile
25:50 Undress Apps and the Abuse of Generative AI
27:00 How Do You Live With the Anxiety?
29:41 Civic Sense, Online and Offline
31:05 Abundance, 2015 vs Now: Is Defense Keeping Up With the Code?
32:18 Writing Code Is Thousands of Times Cheaper Than Reviewing It
33:13 Security Is Now an Insurance Question
35:01 Pick Your Battles: What Are We Willing to Let Break?
36:46 How Targeting Works Now: It's No Longer About You
40:34 The Hackability Index
41:37 Is the Internet Dying?
42:44 The Opposite of a Zip File
43:48 AI Needs Fresh Training Data
45:33 Engagement Bait Questions and Spotting Bots
47:17 Outsourced Skills: Coffee Machines and Bike Tires
49:49 Convenience Is the Real Root Cause
51:26 How Do We Keep Critical Thinking?
52:02 Not Dying, Changing: LLMs as the Final Interface
54:36 Building Outside the Corporate Sphere: The Internet Archive
56:05 An Open Source Chip on the DEF CON Badge
58:02 Cautious Optimism: Look at the Hacker Communities
01:00:13 Iron Man vs War Machine: Hackers vs Security Personnel
01:03:31 Famous Hackers Are Hackers First
01:04:09 Book Recommendations: The Time Machine, Gibson and Stephenson
01:08:14 Question from Markus Döpke: What Grounds You?
01:09:37 Question for the Next Guest: Are You Having Fun?