00:00:00Introduction to Cybersecurity and Personal Background
00:07:11Understanding Double Checked MSSP and Its Services
00:07:44The Targeting of Small and Medium Businesses
00:44:44Practical Cybersecurity Advice for Everyone
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this episode of Hard Target, host Ben Barrontine speaks with Justin Kane from DoubleChecked, Cyber Security about the evolving landscape of cybersecurity. They discuss the importance of understanding the differences between Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), the challenges faced by small and medium businesses (SMBs) in securing their operations, and the critical role of human behavior in cybersecurity. The conversation also touches on emerging threats, the impact of AI, and practical advice for individuals and businesses to enhance their security posture.
English
United States
SHOW NOTES 🔗
TRANSCRIPT 🔗
Speaker 1:
00:10
Hello, and welcome back to Hard Target where we dig into the world of cyber, physical, and threat intelligence. I'm your host, Ben Barrington, bringing you conversations with today's innovators and tomorrow's experts who are shaping the future of security. This week, we have Justin Kaye with Double Chekked. We're gonna jump in and see what, how he got into the business that he's in, what he's doing to provide services like ours, and then also solutions to small to medium businesses. And then also to just answer any kind of questions, how to demystify what it is that are the challenges going into this year.
Speaker 1:
00:44
So let's jump in and see what it takes to be a hard target. Justin, how's it going?
Speaker 2:
00:49
Great, man. How are you?
Speaker 1:
00:51
Doing well. Doing well. Glad to be 1st episode of the new year. So we got a, over the holidays, obviously, as you can tell with everything that went on with, you know, in the news, the unfortunate shooting with UnitedHealthcare and then all the break ins of the NFL athlete or the the pro athletes. We've just been running a 1000 miles an hour.
Speaker 1:
01:10
It has been it's been truly incredible to see just our organization come together and our industry come together to be able to provide solutions and security to people, at a moment's notice. Right? You always try to you always think about the break the glass moment. Right? And it's it's fun to talk about, and it it's fun to to put all that on a whiteboard, but then, you know, when it happens, how do you actually react?
Speaker 1:
01:35
You know, how is your organization gonna react when something bad does happen or that break in case of emergency happens? And and it's been really cool to see not just us, but our whole organization. But, anyways, yeah. So let's get into it. How, how first off, how were the holidays?
Speaker 1:
01:49
I know we talked a little bit before, but how how it was all about for you?
Speaker 2:
01:52
Oh, man. They were great. The wife and I actually got to take our first, trip in 3 years, with, we have a 20 month old. So we got to take our 1st trip without him, jumped out to Vegas, had a great time for a few days. Very cool.
Speaker 2:
02:04
Yeah. And then came back right, right before Christmas and and just kinda spent the holidays at home. My wife's family is Italian, so there was about 25 plus Italians in the house, and that can be quite loud. Yeah. Really good time.
Speaker 2:
02:17
Good time.
Speaker 1:
02:18
Yeah. I would imagine. That's obviously one of my favorite cultures, cuisines, everything. And, you know, I'm from Alabama. I grew up in DC and a little bit, you know, here and there with my dad being in the military.
Speaker 1:
02:30
But I never went to New York City. I never went to the northeast. It's just that's not somewhere that we went. But since being at 360, I had the privilege of going up there, like, once a month. So once a quarter kind of thing.
Speaker 1:
02:40
And so it's always fascinating just the the massive cultural differences and not just language and, you know, the colloquialisms. But at the end of the day, I've always I've always resonated with that culture because that's how it was when I grew up. It was Yep. You know, a big southern family. Every Sunday after church, we all got together.
Speaker 1:
03:00
My wife and I were actually laughing about this the other day. You know, like, every time someone has a kid, there's 25 people at the hospital waiting. You know? It's just this whole big thing. That that's very cool.
Speaker 1:
03:10
We've we've got a a 2 year old, and I I do get it on the the finally being able to take a trip.
Speaker 2:
03:16
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
03:17
So that's cool. Vegas Vegas is a good place to do that.
Speaker 2:
03:20
It's in and out, you know? Have have a good time in and out and get back.
Speaker 1:
03:24
Dude, absolutely. We you know, I think it was at the early days when we were at the company, where we were we're trying to get our name out there. We were trying to go to every conference we could just as a spectator and, you know, shake as many hands as possible. Mhmm. Because I'm sure you've probably got a number of story doing that too.
Speaker 1:
03:38
I went to Vegas, like, 6 times 1 year, for conferences, which is It's too much. 4 times too many. Yeah. You know? The first time you're like, oh, man.
Speaker 1:
03:46
This is awesome. I really wanna come back. The second time you're like, I should not have come back. And then by the 6th time, I remember just being like, I never wanna come back to
Speaker 2:
03:55
Vegas
Speaker 1:
03:55
again, like, ever. Yeah. But, no, that's good. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
04:00
Absolutely. So, obviously, I know we we know each other. We we go back a little ways, but let's, let's dig in. Just give a little let's do an icebreaker. I don't know if, if you like I said, you listen to a couple of them.
Speaker 1:
04:11
We try to do this, give something back to the audience here. So let's just do an easy one with 2 truths and a lie to get to know Justin Kane, the Justin Kane.
Speaker 2:
04:20
Alright. So number 1, I bit my tongue off as a kid. I hit a dock on a jet ski. Hyper specific. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
04:29
I've met a US president and had a conversation with them. And my wife and I are high school sweethearts for nearly 25 years.
Speaker 1:
04:34
Well, those are good. Those are the 30 best of them. I think I've had some.
Speaker 2:
04:38
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
04:38
Yeah. I don't know. They're all 3 very, very specific. I'm gonna say that you well, I think the tongue I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna say the tongue is false. Right?
Speaker 1:
04:51
No. No?
Speaker 2:
04:52
That's that's a true one.
Speaker 1:
04:53
Okay. Alright. Alright. And then the president and the wife I'm gonna say you have met the president and your wife you and your wife were college sweethearts, not high school sweethearts or something.
Speaker 2:
05:01
Nope. High school sweethearts. There was a present.
Speaker 1:
05:04
Yeah. Alright. Alright. So tell me a little bit about this tongue. How what?
Speaker 1:
05:08
What?
Speaker 2:
05:09
Yeah, man. At a friend's house in, right before graduating 6th grade. Literally, the day before graduating 6th grade, we were at their lake house, was driving a jet ski around their lake, water got in the electronics of the jet ski. And as I was going around the corner, the jet ski cut out. And if you don't know, if you have no power behind the jet ski, you can't steer and went straight into a dock, hit the dock, and, bit my tongue clean clean through.
Speaker 2:
05:36
Clean through. Yeah. They sewed it back on. It's all good. Okay.
Speaker 1:
05:39
I was about to ask because, you know Yeah. I don't know if you'll be able you would be able to talk.
Speaker 2:
05:43
I I don't know.
Speaker 1:
05:44
I just don't know. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a doctor.
Speaker 2:
05:46
Yeah. Yeah. I had I had to do ice cream for ice cream for a solid 6 weeks after that, but, you know, so, yeah, it was a good good time.
Speaker 1:
05:53
It's good to know that they can reattach it though.
Speaker 2:
05:55
They can. Yeah. Grows back normal.
Speaker 1:
05:58
That's Fascinating. Yeah. And then you met your wife. Your wife and I you, you were high school sweetheart. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:
06:03
Yeah. Absolutely. 20 almost 25 years.
Speaker 1:
06:06
Very cool. And then did y'all, I know you're based in Florida, so double check. We'll get into that here in a second. Are based in Florida? Are you from Port Florida originally?
Speaker 1:
06:14
Born and
Speaker 2:
06:14
raised in Jacksonville, Florida. Never left, both of us actually.
Speaker 1:
06:17
Very cool.
Speaker 2:
06:18
Yep. Love the city. It's one of those cities where everyone knows everyone kinda deal, and it's definitely the people that you know Right. In this town. So being born and raised here obviously helps with that.
Speaker 2:
06:30
It's a great city, a lot to do. We've got the river that runs through it. That's where we
Speaker 1:
06:35
You just said that Jacksonville, Florida was a small town. I'm from Fort Payne, Alabama. Okay? That's a real small town.
Speaker 2:
06:42
Right? The biggest small town you'll ever meet. Let's let me rephrase that. Yeah. It's the biggest small town ever.
Speaker 1:
06:48
No. That's that's cool. That was, there's actually one of my my or my best friend. He, his wife. He's from Jacksonville as well.
Speaker 1:
06:56
She was actually a jaguar cheerleader, I think.
Speaker 2:
06:58
Oh, awesome.
Speaker 1:
06:58
In New Jersey sometime. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
07:00
I was gonna say hope hopefully not right now, but it's different.
Speaker 1:
07:02
Different day. Different yeah. But very cool. So let's, what about double check? So how did you get into, you know, one, let's just what is double check?
Speaker 1:
07:11
What do you specialize in? And then we'll get into kinda how'd you get into that field and and why why double check now? Because I did see do some research, you know, you you you kinda progressed up to this, and I think I know the answer, you know, kind of in the end, but I'd love to hear your version of it.
Speaker 2:
07:27
Yeah. For sure. Very much one of those people that, believes that things happen for a reason. And that's definitely how this came in into play. So double checked.
Speaker 2:
07:35
We'll check cybersecurity. We provide, security solutions to small and medium businesses. Right? Practical solutions to help protect them the things that from the attacks that are most common to them, right? Email is a massive attack vector for them.
Speaker 2:
07:50
So we do a lot around that dark web monitoring to make sure that they're protected. They're protecting computers, networks, all of the above. But really, what we do is we demystify a lot of the hype behind some of the sales and marketing out there that some of the larger organizations, it's easy for them to understand, but our small and medium businesses, they just don't, there's too much they don't understand it. And unfortunately, a lot of the vendors out there, as soon as you tag on the word security or cybersecurity, their solutions cost, you know, 1,000 and 1,000 of dollars a month that our client base, that's just not what they can afford. So we specifically focus put together solutions and consulting for them that they can A, understand easily understand what we're doing, but most importantly, can afford to do something to protect themselves.
Speaker 2:
08:40
And that's that's what we do. You know, my my background is for basically my entire career on the technical side. Started at the very bottom, moved all the way up the last 10 years or so of my career. I was actually an owner of an MSP IT company and saw a lot saw a lot of things happening there. You know, as an MSP, we get to see every single facet of the businesses.
Speaker 1:
09:05
And, let me interrupt her. So can you talk to, 1, what does MSSP stand for? What does MSP stand for? And then kind of, you know, what's the major differences between the 2 in your eyes?
Speaker 2:
09:16
Yeah. Absolutely. So and there's a lot of misconception around this too. So MSSP is, managed security services provider, managed security solutions provider, 10 other ways that you can say it, but basically focuses on the security side of things. Whereas the MSP managed services provider typically focuses more on the IT side of the house where we would say the Help Desk, the service desk, my computer's broken, my network's down, you know, we need new servers, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:
09:45
So they typically focus on that. We are seeing a lot now where MSPs are also acting on the MSSP side out of more of a necessity than anything else. And then you also have MSSPs that are focusing on the MSP side. There's a lot of overlap. You know, but realistically, we holistically believe and we are truly a solely an MSSP focusing only on the security aspect.
Speaker 2:
10:12
We we want to do one thing, and we want to do it really well.
Speaker 1:
10:16
Very cool. Yeah. I know that that's gonna help a lot of listeners too because even when we got into this business, you know, I'd always heard MSP and SSB, and people throw that throw, you know, throws out all of these acronyms like crazy. It's it's honestly worse than the military. Okay.
Speaker 1:
10:32
But, yeah, you you listen to a couple of military people talk and it's all in code. You know? Everything is such a colloquial abbreviation of whatever it may be. But then you get into the cyber side, and it's it's almost even worse. Right?
Speaker 1:
10:44
Because it's that's its own vocabulary. It's its own language. And that's honestly one of the reasons why, you know, I wanted to have this podcast. I wanted you to have on have you on this podcast is because a lot of people, you know, they get inundated with all of this vocabulary, all of these, you know, the like you said, the marketing, the sales approaches of, oh, no. We have this problem is so big.
Speaker 1:
11:07
We we have to take care of it for you. Yeah. No one else can do blah blah blah blah. When in reality to your point, 95, 95 to 90% of all day to day attack attacks and that attack surfaces are human enabled. Yep.
Speaker 1:
11:24
It's email. It's it's the, you know, the dark web monitoring. It's things that that are
Speaker 2:
11:30
Clicking on things they shouldn't be?
Speaker 1:
11:32
Exactly. Exactly. People clicking on things that they shouldn't shouldn't be. And what I like to call the common cold of attack vectors. Right?
Speaker 1:
11:40
Yes. You do need if if you think about it this way, yes. You need, what is it? You know, the the polio vaccine for, like, something that's detrimental one time in your life in case something like that happens. But as long as you wash your hands and, you know, clean surfaces, those day to day common colds are gonna put you down for a day or 2.
Speaker 1:
12:01
You're gonna get rid of that, then you're gonna prevent that. And that's where we want to live, and that's where we wanna educate people to be able to do that and, you know, have people like yourselves that can come in and, and take care of that for them.
Speaker 2:
12:13
So Yeah. 100%. And that's what and that and that's what I've seen over my career. Right? It it's unfortunately so many people turning a blind eye to, you know, and and we'll talk about this later, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:
12:24
But, turning a blind eye saying I I'm not I I that's not I'm not gonna get the cold. Right? You know, I hardly ever get the cold. That's not gonna happen to me. Or, you know, I got my I even got I
Speaker 1:
12:34
got strong genes.
Speaker 2:
12:35
Yeah. I even got my flu vaccine, you know, so so I'm good. But, you know, things still happen, and there's new variants that come out and it's gonna happen. Right? And that's that's what's happening today.
Speaker 2:
12:45
And, you know, that's one of the biggest things that we try to we try to handle with our client base is really helping them understand why they are under attack whether they know it or not and breaking down that barrier, that education gap. Yeah. And I
Speaker 1:
13:00
love that too because especially, you know, we'll get into it a little bit later about AI and, you know, the challenges and the forecasting. And everybody wants to talk about AI this and AI that when at the end of the day, I I think I mentioned it last week or on the last episode, it's, you know, one of the best ways you can defend against AI is just to educate yourself on what right looks like. Right? You know? It's the human element.
Speaker 1:
13:21
If we can raise the human intelligence level of interaction with AI, then that's gonna be the best prevention for you. Yes. You're gonna have to have certain things in place. Right? There's certain benchmarks, certain programs you gotta have.
Speaker 1:
13:33
But at the end of the day, you know, you you hate to see it. There's there's the deep fakes where, you know, somebody will put Brad Pitt's face over their face and convince some poor soul that they're in love with them and there goes their life savings. Right? Like, that didn't happen.
Speaker 2:
13:48
What are you talking about, Ben? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
13:50
What do you you too? Yeah. Man, no. Well, good deal. So leading right into these main challenges, what are what have you seen?
Speaker 1:
13:58
You know, we're in the 1st month of 2025. Well, you know, what are what were in 2024 even from double check. Right? So it's through the entire life cycle of where double check is. What have been the most the biggest challenges you've seen for yourself, for your clients, and, you know, what's that the biggest hurdle that they've had or biggest challenge they've had getting over and protecting themselves?
Speaker 2:
14:21
Yeah. Absolutely. Great question. So couple things. One for us, honestly, the hardest thing is keeping up.
Speaker 2:
14:27
It is this this is changing by the day at this point. You know, I'd even say I told some other people by the hour realistically.
Speaker 1:
14:35
Right?
Speaker 2:
14:36
You know, and so keeping up with the new ways that that these things are happening, you know, watching every single event that happens. You mentioned the UnitedHealthcare thing earlier that threw a curveball to everyone. And I think almost every industry, you know, and really understanding what what are the attack back like, what what are the ways that people are gonna get to you? You know, whether they're coming after you, whether they're coming after your business, whether they're coming after your family, whatever it is, you know, and an understanding and keeping up with that. It's it's the hardest challenge.
Speaker 2:
15:09
It's also what we love. It definitely Yeah, I mean, you know, if you I've told people before, if you don't love constant change and constant learning, cybersecurity is not for you. Absolutely. It is not for you.
Speaker 1:
15:23
We had an individual, we had an individual come into the office the other day and, really bright kid who, you know, they're they're asking about some of these roles that we have up. Right? Or whether it's a TAM, a sales engineer, or, you know, some of you know, we have that hype we had that MSP role a couple of years ago type role when we were going out was called the concierge program Mhmm. Where we would go out and we would teach these executives, high profile athletes, you know, whoever be free crap for essentially on how to protect themselves, how to make themselves a hard target, which is a great segue into the kind of what podcast came to be. But at the end of the day, you know, there's no one answer.
Speaker 1:
16:01
It's you have to love to troubleshoot.
Speaker 2:
16:03
Yep. 100% The best
Speaker 1:
16:05
the best IT person, the best cybersecurity person, you know, the best small business entrepreneur is someone who loves troubleshooting. Right? Someone who can who it does need
Speaker 2:
16:16
Every person I've every person I have tried to hire, or hired in the past, that is the number one thing. I don't care what your current skill set is. Can you troubleshoot? Can you do the basics and start at the bottom? You know?
Speaker 2:
16:27
And and especially even when you get it more advanced in your career, it's it's really easy to forget to start with with troubleshooting 101, you know. Did did you reboot, you know, that that age old, adage there, you know, that everybody hates from IT people. But, you know, did you reboot it? Step 1, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
16:46
And it's really easy to forget that as you as you advance specifically. But, yeah, can you troubleshoot? You know, what is the problem? Break it down. And and, you know, and go forward.
Speaker 2:
16:56
Because what is it? I percent of
Speaker 1:
16:57
the time, it's something very simple.
Speaker 2:
16:59
Something. Yeah. Something simple. And if it's not, it's a problem.
Speaker 1:
17:02
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And that's where it's awesome that you brought that up because I I did. I talked about it a couple episodes ago of, you know, when we're trying to hire someone, and it's those intel in, the intelligence professionals that we're they're bringing in.
Speaker 1:
17:14
It's exactly to your point. It's, you know, yeah, you may have been super, you know, a a great service member. You know, you did your country well. You you did all the things the military asked you to do, but at the same time, when you get out, can you still perform at that level without someone telling you where to be at what time and at what uniform? Right?
Speaker 1:
17:33
Can you think on your own? Yep. Can you troubleshoot? So it's interesting that you say that about the cybersecurity space because I'd actually love to get your perspective on, you know, the the bad actors too. Right?
Speaker 1:
17:45
Like, they're preying on someone not being able to troubleshoot. Most of the vulnerabilities that get pushed out are based off of something very, very basic. You know? Hollywood does a really cool job of making our life and jobs look way cooler than what it really is. Yep.
Speaker 1:
18:02
Yep. And so on an offensive and defensive side, right, from an offensive standpoint, quote, unquote, hacking is not that cool. It's not like the movie Swordfish. Right? Like, it's not, you know, it's not like that.
Speaker 1:
18:16
Right? The mister robot kind of stuff. It's, you know, trying to get somebody's someone unfortunate soul to click a link that they, you know, you just keep sending it to them. Yep. But then on the defensive side, it's not having this incredible, incredibly complex firewall and system in place.
Speaker 1:
18:33
99 times, it's do you have a good password? Yep. Do you have 2 factor? You know, do you have a malicious link software filter? You know, whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:
18:40
But yeah. What what's your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:
18:43
Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right. It's we're we're seeing a lot. And this is the education piece I was mentioning, you know, is we see a lot with our clients and our customers that them under understanding what and how these people that are coming after them, how they're trying to get in. And to your point, they're gonna send you a link in your email.
Speaker 2:
19:03
And unfortunately, you're gonna click it. You know, I one of my most recent examples of this, and it's hate to use the word phenomenal, but what they have started doing is they've started sending these phishing emails, the user is going to know without a doubt, it's a phishing email. But they've started putting a button in that email. And that button says report phishing email. Yep.
Speaker 2:
19:23
And that is now the bad link. And so they're clicking on it. It's genius, you know? And we'll get more into this with the AI conversation. But you know, with AI, it's getting easier for them to come up with these tactics, you know, how can this isn't working?
Speaker 2:
19:40
How can I try a different route? And unfortunately, you know, the major AI solutions out there will help them do that. And so, you know, fighting AI with AI is 100% where the world's going. We can talk about that in a little bit. But to your point, yeah, it's protecting them with this, the easy solutions.
Speaker 2:
19:59
And I hate to say it that way, because it makes our job not sound difficult. And it is but protecting with the easy solutions, remove the risk from the user. You know, you mentioned the malicious just URL, the malicious link software. Yeah. Let's scan every email that comes in and out of your system.
Speaker 2:
20:16
And if it has a link in it, let's see what that link does before the user has a chance to get to it. What does that link do? Is it trying to get you to sign into Google? Awesome. That's fine.
Speaker 2:
20:26
But is that a Google domain name? No. Well, guess what? We're gonna pull that email out of the mailbox. Users never gonna see it.
Speaker 2:
20:32
Right? And it's stupid, simple things like that, you know, removing that risk as much as possible from the users really where we're at. You could spend $1,000,000 today on cybersecurity solutions. And if someone really wants to get into your business into your stuff, they're going to, if they're truly coming after you, they're gonna get in, you know, but the 99% that are the random attacks that you know, which is what it is, if it's random, and they're just trying to see can I get in, Let's prevent the 99% and then deal with the 1%
Speaker 1:
21:04
when it happens? Yeah. No. Absolutely. We, on a daily basis, tell our clients we are a risk minimization firm.
Speaker 1:
21:13
Yep. There is no such thing as risk eradication. Not a chance. 25, and it and it hasn't been for a long time. Yep.
Speaker 1:
21:21
No. There's no chance that you're gonna be have a zero risk. Like, that is just it's not gonna happen to your point.
Speaker 2:
21:26
And if anybody is telling you that, look at their terms and conditions. Exactly.
Speaker 1:
21:30
Or just run. Hang up the phone. Right. Right? We used to tell people that when it came to the dark web, you know, we would we'd have clients come to us that, you know, may have been with another firm before and they're like, yeah.
Speaker 1:
21:41
This person you know, they they say that they can take things down from the dark web, but, well, good luck. Unless that's the FBI, you know, or the government. Like, I don't I don't know who you're talking to, but that's not a real thing. Yeah. But no.
Speaker 1:
21:54
That that's that's awesome because more people need to understand that. And we we do find that it's an education piece. Right? We have to educate our clients. It's and it's an unfortunate world because it's a new problem, a new mainstream problem.
Speaker 1:
22:08
Right? You know, it's a newer more people are knowing. It's been a problem for a while, but people are just now becoming aware of it. And so we're we've had this role of I need to educate these people on what the problem is and what stakes is, like, we're also immediately in, like, but I have the solution here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
22:23
This is weird balance of, like, oh, like, I don't wanna be a snake oil salesman. You know, to these people. They're like, well, that doesn't sound right. But in reality, it really is. And so it's just education over time.
Speaker 1:
22:33
And then, obviously, that's a that's a proactive approach. You know, as we've seen over the last month, reactive approach is a lot worse.
Speaker 2:
22:41
Yep.
Speaker 1:
22:42
Right? And but budgets get real big after something bad happens. Absolutely. But we don't want we don't wanna see that, you know, at all. And before we move on, I do wanna ask, you know, they came to mind you.
Speaker 1:
22:53
You said your career IT, career security. So let's talk about since the beginning of your career, I'd love to get a timeline. Right? What did you see early career? What did you see mid, and what are you seeing now?
Speaker 1:
23:07
And how's that evolution of cybersecurity, or just like in your world? What have you seen? And what's been important? What have been like the, what have been, you know, the things that your clients have pushed back on and then they've kinda come full circle?
Speaker 2:
23:20
Oh, yeah. That's a great question. I don't know if we have enough time on this podcast. No. It's it is literal night and day.
Speaker 2:
23:29
You know, I mean, at the beginning of my career, it was, do you have a firewall in place? Yeah. Cool. Okay. Awesome.
Speaker 2:
23:35
You know, do you have antivirus on your computer? Yeah. Alright. Cool. You know, and that was really it, to be honest with you, you know, unless you were really, really big, and you were dealing with government and whatever, but even back, you know, back then, that's what it was, you know, and today, we're talking about things like the dark web, we're talking about things like phishing emails and all of this stuff.
Speaker 2:
23:56
And, you know, the advent of AI and how that's changing things immensely, you know, for good and bad. You know, we're we're using AI and a lot of our solutions because human can't keep up. So, yeah, let's implement AI. It can do things a 100000 times faster or whatever that stat is then then a human can, you know, and and so it's good and bad because they also have those AI solutions. And typically they have a lot more money behind them than than most businesses do.
Speaker 2:
24:28
Yeah. And a lot much larger organization. So, you know, from from the beginning to now, it is night and day, you know, and really I would say the last 5 or 6 years is really where it has started to pick up, you know, where you're seeing it in the news. You're seeing the big breaches you're seeing now. Okay.
Speaker 2:
24:47
Yeah. My small business client saw that, you know, and this was years ago, but saw that target was hacked. And that kind of the first big one that, you know, you kind of remember seeing out there. And so they're, they started asking questions at that time. But even still, they didn't they don't have the budget.
Speaker 2:
25:05
They, you know, they weren't even budgeting at all for for a line item like that. Yeah. Let alone having any sort of budget behind it to put behind it, you know, and we're even still seeing that today. You know, that's that's one of the big things that we were we're facing. And really one of the reasons why I started double check was our clients can't afford the expensive solutions out there.
Speaker 2:
25:27
You know, they can't afford the enterprise level solutions that have a 6 figure price tag behind them. They just can't. So to your point a few minutes ago is how can we remove the most risk possible with with a budget that they are are comfortable with? You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:
25:46
We're not trying to steal every dollar possible. I've seen too many vendors out there. And I love that conversation you were talking about a few minutes ago. You know, I would say that I think that there's some vendors out there that have created solutions to problems that may not have exactly existed. 1000%.
Speaker 2:
26:04
Yeah. You know, and there is a major name brand vendor out there. I won't name that. If you actually do research, they're selling the same exact product under 3 completely different product names that solve the same problem, but 3 different ways. And it's crazy.
Speaker 2:
26:20
So demystifying that helping them understand, implicitly understand what it is that we're trying to protect them from and why we're trying to protect it.
Speaker 1:
26:31
You know? Honestly, in my mind, it's just because the attack vectors have changed. Yeah. Right? They're obviously, they're evolving as with anything.
Speaker 1:
26:38
Right? If you think about pre, pre security cameras, how how easy it was to rob a bank, and then, you know, you implement security cameras. Well, now that the bad guys are just gonna think of ways how they can beat it without it.
Speaker 2:
26:51
So Yep.
Speaker 1:
26:51
It's just this game that's it's never gonna stop. It's not. But I do remember when I went to college and I got behind first laptop, and you had to go to the bookstore, and they had these little, like, books, basically, and it was just like Norton antivirus or McAfee antivirus that came in a book. It was like Yep. 2 inches wide, and it just had a CD in it.
Speaker 1:
27:16
And that was like you but you could you you in order to take classes, I remember you had to have it on, you know, and all this kind of stuff. That was it. To your point, that was like that was it. And now you can get on, like, the dark web and you know how you know, there's, you know, there's SaaS. We talk about that, you know, software as a service.
Speaker 1:
27:33
Mhmm. But there's, like, hacking as a service now that you can buy. And, like, it's a whole e for pennies. Yeah. And it's a whole, like, economy and ecommerce for hacking now where it's used to be you know, I forget what podcast it was.
Speaker 1:
27:47
Maybe hacking humans. Shout out to those guys. But, I think it I was on there. They were talking about, I forget the guy's name, but they the guy was talking about how, you know, back in the day when he first got started, it was you had to be really good, if not the best, at everything Okay. To be a successful hacker.
Speaker 2:
28:07
Yep.
Speaker 1:
28:07
In that in the true sense of the word. And now you can get on YouTube.
Speaker 2:
28:12
Yep.
Speaker 1:
28:12
Right? You can buy an automated screen. You know, obviously, there's, you know, like, strip kitties and all that kind of stuff. But, like, it's just, like, it's a whole world that's evolved.
Speaker 2:
28:20
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
28:21
And what's bad is that blew up. And then I think that we as a society and as, like, an industry, we're catching back up to that. Right? Yep. But it's just humans are weird.
Speaker 1:
28:31
Oh, yeah. Humans are weird, man.
Speaker 2:
28:32
I mean, you can spin up and I I hate giving tips to people that don't know the information already, but you can spin up a phishing campaign in, like, 60 seconds now, you know, and and the whole thing spins up, and you can send out 100 of out 100 of thousands of phishing emails in in minutes.
Speaker 1:
28:48
Minutes. Yeah. Minutes. Yeah. And and To to that point, like, that's where the data brokers and it's just like this full cycle of, you know, where you get the information.
Speaker 2:
28:56
Yep.
Speaker 1:
28:56
But yeah. No. We we like I said, that could be a whole other conversation. Yep. We'll probably do that.
Speaker 1:
29:00
We'll probably bring you back on and we'll we'll just keep talking about it.
Speaker 2:
29:02
But Yeah.
Speaker 1:
29:03
Alright. So we talked about the past. We talked about the the present now, like, what we're talking about. Let's get into the future. What are you you know, 2025.
Speaker 1:
29:09
You know, we talked about AI, whether it's IoT, you know, blockchain. Let's talk through that. What are you seeing on a cybersecurity landscape? For those SMBs specifically, what are those emerging technologies and emerging emerging threats to where where what's that conversion looking like?
Speaker 2:
29:24
Yeah. Absolutely. For first of all, I say, let's demystify a few things. Right? So AI.
Speaker 2:
29:29
People have been using AI for years. They just didn't know it. Right? Now there's a huge thing and and, you know, chat and everything out there, you know, and and now it's a huge keyword and key term. There's also a lot of things behind AI, you know, other things, machine learning, machine vision, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 2:
29:46
You know, you've been using it for years. The thing now is it is just like we were talking about the the, you know, hacking as a service, you know, these hackers threat actors, whatever you wanna call them, they have access to the same things that we do now. And so they are able to use AI, like I mentioned prior, to come up with these ideas to figure out different ways a GPT can spit out PowerShell scripts in seconds that would have taken, you know, a couple weeks or a month before to test and vet and whatever. And now it it'll do it in seconds. So, you know, and and so AI is great.
Speaker 2:
30:25
I think, clearly, we all know AI is here to stay. It's only gonna get better and crazier, which is awesome. But I think the thing is, is that if we as cybersecurity experts, if we as software vendor solutions and businesses as well, if you aren't using it to also combat the bad,
Speaker 1:
30:46
we're gonna
Speaker 2:
30:46
be in trouble. Because if we're not using AI, just like they're using AI, we're gonna be gonna be behind the game. You know? Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
30:55
And that and that's what we're really seeing. And that's why we're trying to wrap AI into as much stuff as possible to keep up with with the threats that are coming through.
Speaker 1:
31:03
It's like it's like in the military. It's an escalation of force. Right? You know, you you only wanna use as much forces as rationally possible to subdue that force. And because, you know, honestly, if we throw everything at them, they're just gonna adjust in 6 months and now they're gonna have something even better to to point there.
Speaker 2:
31:22
Correct. Yeah. You know, I I think this deep fake thing is gonna be a real real problem. I think I actually even sent you a few weeks ago. I sent you on a thing from, Instagram, somebody that I follow.
Speaker 2:
31:32
And, yeah, they they got into real trouble, you know, and such a such a good guy. And somebody went after him, and they're still battling it today. You know, deep fakes are gonna be real, real bad.
Speaker 1:
31:43
And there's gotta be a way to combat those, which I think is being worked on. Absolutely. We've got, you know, we'll there's another part of ours, Lottie. We're actually gonna have them on the podcast there in a couple weeks. They're out in Hollywood, and that's kind of their whole go to market.
Speaker 1:
31:56
Their whole business is looking for the deep fakes because it's become so prevalent. Right? It's and, you know, you have everything from and what's crazy is people are not only are are bad guys making money off of it, but if you think about that whole commerce, it's like, well, if you want to make money off of your name, image, and likeness, well, now you can do it even easier too. Yeah. Like, now this commercial that you're watching, the model may not even have to go.
Speaker 1:
32:24
They she can or that person can just sell their face, and then they can generate it up. That is mind blowing to me.
Speaker 2:
32:30
Oh, and that and again, that's the positive and the negative. That's amazing. That's amazing technology. Yeah. Unfortunately, there's always somebody that's gonna take that amazing technology and use it for bad.
Speaker 2:
32:41
Yeah. You know? And that's where that's gonna come in. So, and just, you know, if you don't know, deep fakes are basically where people can take you your likeness of you. And with AI say whatever they want to say, and basically make you say whatever they want you to say.
Speaker 2:
32:56
And if you think about that, from a business perspective, even as a small business owner or or medium, you know, whatever, somebody's out there on the internet acting as you and make you makes you say XYZ, especially in small and medium businesses reputation is 9 tenths of the battle. Right? How do people know you? And if in a if in an instant someone can get out there and basically de credit you, it's a bad day. Right?
Speaker 2:
33:20
So No.
Speaker 1:
33:20
Absolutely. And you understand this. We understand this because Yeah. We are those, you know, SMBs on the on the backside. Right?
Speaker 1:
33:28
And 3 60 privacy, that's that's how we've grown at the rate that we've grown is surely on reputation. Right? We do what we say we're gonna do. We we've never under deliver. And then if we you know, I think being transparent upfront about saying, like, hey.
Speaker 1:
33:42
We can't do that. Right? Here's what we can do, but we can't do that. We can find you somebody else, yada yada yada. We never wanna be okay at a lot of things.
Speaker 1:
33:51
We wanna be the absolute best at our thing and then be friends with those that are also the best. Right? You know, so we can have this, like, little little tribe of of, you know, Avengers in the security space. But
Speaker 2:
34:04
Are you are you inviting
Speaker 1:
34:05
me to the Avengers team? Come on, Ben. Yeah. Absolutely. Come on.
Speaker 1:
34:09
Come on in. I've got a, yeah, it's just us at this point. No. It's a it's a small
Speaker 2:
34:13
it's a small group. Just depends on which Avenger you are, I guess.
Speaker 1:
34:16
Exactly. Exactly. But no. That that's that's that's interesting that you say that too because SMBs are very different from your fortune 1,000 companies who have those massive budgets and they can, provide, you know, they can provide certain protection, but at the same time, even from my targeting pay phase of life, you know, oftentimes, those targets you know, I would equate those larger those larger organizations and logos to someone, you know, if you are in that targeting sense, someone whose awareness is gonna be much harder. Right?
Speaker 1:
34:51
They're gonna be aware that some people are going after them, and they're gonna have the resources to protect them. Whereas the SMBs are people within that support system. Right? They're not you know, they don't have the resources to protect themselves. They don't have the people around them or the money to have that same level of protection, but oftentimes, they have the same amount of capital and the same amount of liquidity and risk than the the larger organizations.
Speaker 1:
35:15
And that that's why they're as big, if not more of a target, especially from from a target. Right? Because it's the easy target. It's the low hanging fruit that I can go in.
Speaker 2:
35:25
They're more of a target, and and that's what we're seeing now. You know? They're they're absolutely more of a target because those those high those actors hackers know, they don't have the things in place. They don't have the solutions in place. They don't have the the malicious filtering, they're not training their users on what to look for, you know, with SAT, they're not doing phishing campaigns to train their employees and their staff.
Speaker 2:
35:48
They know they're an easier target. That's what we're seeing. They don't have the budgets behind them typically to protect themselves. Now equate that to why is that a big issue? Okay, it's an SMB.
Speaker 2:
35:58
We don't have a whole lot of data, whatever. Okay, but you likely do business with a larger organization. And that's the key. Because they know that if they can get to you, they can get to all of the people that you do business with and circle that back to the reputation. If you're the one that got hacked, and you were the reason that another company got taken down.
Speaker 2:
36:20
You're cooked. You're done. You're cooked. You know, I am not saying shut your doors, but it's a hard it's a hard battle to get back from. And so that's what we're trying to prevent is preventing you from being the problem, you know, because they are coming after the small and medium businesses more than the larger ones.
Speaker 2:
36:36
The larger ones know, they know they have to protect themselves. They've already put stuff in place. And if they haven't, okay. But they're they're putting things in place. They know what to do.
Speaker 2:
36:44
They have teams behind them. They have whole security departments. Whereas the SMB, 8 out of 10 times doesn't even have an IT person. You know? Right.
Speaker 2:
36:52
So
Speaker 1:
36:52
I equate in our on our field, I equate an an SMB in traditional sense to those family offices as well of high net worth individuals. Oh, yeah. Because they'll they'll spin up a family office. And for those listening, we've talked about family offices before, but it's essentially, small organization, 1 to 5 personal organization that is that MSP for a family, a high network family. Right?
Speaker 1:
37:15
They're taking care of finances. They're taking care of security, cybersecurity, utility, like, all these other things that it just essentially, it's a it's more cost efficient to do that than to outsource it somewhere else. However, now you've got an organization of 1 to 5 people generally, never hardly ever more than 5 unless it's like a, a multifamily office. And they're handling 1,000,000,000 if not 1,000,000,000 of personal wealth. Right?
Speaker 1:
37:42
And it's dumb. I I've seen it before. It's sometimes, like, the cousin of the high net worth that, you know, has an accounting degree or, like, you know, someone close to them. It's usually trusted friends, a trusted network Yep. That had this crazy amount of responsibility bestowed upon them.
Speaker 2:
38:02
Using their using their yahoo.com email address.
Speaker 1:
38:05
Using their yahoo.com email. Yeah. It's just it's crazy. You know, we'd go in to do an assessment on something, and it's one of those where it's like, I understand that you need to send these documents. However, I just wanna help you right now because this is scary.
Speaker 1:
38:20
Right? Please stop doing what you're doing at this moment. Like, hey. It's just it's wild. And so when you have something like that, not only is your reputation, but now the reputation is even on an individual.
Speaker 1:
38:32
Right? It's not just an organization. It's Joe Smith is about to lose all the money of this billionaire family. We work a lot very closely with them because of reputation. Right?
Speaker 1:
38:43
Obviously, we're we're 360 comes in. It's we're reducing the risk to your point on the physical security. You know, we're removing the open source intelligence on the inter on the open web so that a bad actor, that hacker can't put together a social media campaign or a phishing campaign, or they can't find the front door. And, actually, you know, a bad actor, not just hacking, but a bad actor can't go and knock on the front door and say, you know, they can break that the 4th wall, if you will, of hacking. And it because everybody at you know, I like to talk about the convergence of physical and cybersecurity.
Speaker 1:
39:16
Right? Because then back in the day, it really was one of the other. You never really you never meet the person that was hacking into your system. Well, nowadays, physical bad actors are using those hackers as a service to find out where you live. Yep.
Speaker 1:
39:29
Right? They're looking online so that way they can get close to you. They can break the 4th wall of going from keyboard to doorknob within a day sometimes. Right?
Speaker 2:
39:38
It's it's that next level of social engineering. You know?
Speaker 1:
39:41
Oh, it's crazy.
Speaker 2:
39:42
Find out where you live and what you do and who your family is and and what they do and where they are. It just gives them all the all the extra necessary information they need to to come after you.
Speaker 1:
39:52
Yeah. Talk about, you know, real world, like, a case study on that. We, you know, there's, you know, reports of, you know, a couple years ago, there was a a a an an organization who, an organization who they were they were hacked. They were phished. They had, you know, you know, about a 150 people, something like that.
Speaker 1:
40:15
And one of the executives, they were all phished. It it was a a pretty basic phishing scam. Mhmm. However, one individual, a soft target. Right?
Speaker 1:
40:23
And he talks about, like, getting back to the basics. Let's bring this whole thing full circle. You know, having good hygiene, having good practices, having things in place that filter for phishing, educating the human beings so they make good decisions that's gonna clean up, you know, the majority of those hacks. All of that would have prevented this because what it what happened was one of the work one of the individuals at the organization clicked the link and it, you know, asked him to to log in. Right?
Speaker 1:
40:47
And and when he went to go log in, they didn't have 2 factor or they I'm sorry. They had 2 factor authentication, in place, but they didn't have it mandated to where you couldn't use security questions. And so he they had an alternate way in. There was a security question that was asked also for I'm gonna say it every episode. If you out there using security questions, never tell the truth.
Speaker 1:
41:07
Right? There are no security question police. You will not get put in security question jail. Never you tell the truth. Right?
Speaker 1:
41:13
No one care. Do not write down anywhere where your mother's your mother's maiden name. Right? That no one no one needs to know that.
Speaker 2:
41:18
I gotta tell this I gotta tell this real quick too because PSA announcement. Right? Those Facebook posts that are out there that have the, like, hey, answer these 10 questions or put a check mark next to these 10 questions. Don't answer those. Do not answer them.
Speaker 2:
41:34
It is
Speaker 1:
41:34
my my mom. Mom, if you're listening to this, do not do that.
Speaker 2:
41:38
Yeah. What was your first car? Okay. What was the color of your first car? What was the make and model of your first car?
Speaker 1:
41:45
What
Speaker 2:
41:45
do you what is the number one question for security password resets? Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 1:
41:49
Yeah. Mother's maiden name. Mother's maiden name. Street you grew up on. Pet Yep.
Speaker 1:
41:53
First pet that you had. Yep. All of those things that people, you know, people just don't understand that that's real. They don't I don't know if they don't want to know that it's real or they, you know, they think it's a game and people just don't understand. I'll tell you.
Speaker 1:
42:03
I used to I I had I had a nickel for every time I've I've had someone in my immediate group, just be like, no one's gonna hack me. You know? Like, I'm nobody. Right. You are technically a nobody in the grand scheme of high net worth, but you are you and a million other nobodies Mhmm.
Speaker 1:
42:21
Is a big sum of money. Right? There's not one big score. It's a 100,000 nobodies that adds up to a a very large score. But yeah.
Speaker 1:
42:29
So to your point, this person used the security question of, back back to the the anecdote. Person used, what was my least favorite vegetable as a child? What do you think it was,
Speaker 2:
42:38
Justin? Broccoli.
Speaker 1:
42:40
Broccoli. Boom. Hacker. Right? And it you know, they they hacked in at 0.25 seconds.
Speaker 1:
42:46
They didn't have a text message verification turned on. So when they got in, the individual this is where it gets real scary. Talk about physical and cyber convergence. The person who was using their work email on their Icloud account Yep. Family share plan.
Speaker 1:
43:01
The kids had Apple devices, Mac devices issued from their school. Mhmm. So the hackers were able to see where the kids were going to school. Find my location. Find my location.
Speaker 1:
43:15
They showed up to the school, gave the kids a letter that said, make sure your daddy pays the ransom. Right? Like, that's goosebumps. That's wild. Right?
Speaker 1:
43:25
Do you ever want that? And it's all because of broccoli. All because of poor basic cyber hygiene. It's just wild. You know?
Speaker 2:
43:33
Well and I and I think this I think that goes back to just real quick. I think that goes back to the vendor side too. You know, the vendors need to help the public. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:
43:42
Maybe it's time that the security question thing isn't a thing anymore. You know? Let's let's come up with a different way to get back into your account if if you lose access, which is very easy to do.
Speaker 1:
43:53
Very easy to do. Right? Yep. That's just wild. You know, that's that's one of the things too.
Speaker 1:
43:59
I'm actually glad you brought that up about the Facebook because I do remember when that happened a couple of years ago, it was really, really prevalent. But now I I I don't I don't get on Facebook anymore, but they, you know, you see it all the time. And it people think it's harmless, but it is very real. You know, there is a there is a room full of underpaid cyber warriors in some 3rd world country somewhere that are just massive mass amount pushing those out.
Speaker 2:
44:24
Yep.
Speaker 1:
44:24
They're just it's just data on a spreadsheet somewhere. Right? And they're gonna eventually, it's gonna come down and it's gonna you're gonna have this little person. It's gonna be a little red line that says, okay. Boom.
Speaker 1:
44:33
This person's a thought target.
Speaker 2:
44:35
Yep.
Speaker 1:
44:35
Right? And that's that's all that that's all that is. Alright. So I know we're we we we we never have enough time to go through all this. I've got I've really gotta push this out to, like, an hour 20, but, I don't know if my millions of followers wanna do that or not.
Speaker 1:
44:48
But alright. So we talked about a little bit of that. And then, you know, kind of going to the future where we where we seeing it. We've seen that. What is in this last 5 minutes here?
Speaker 1:
44:56
Give some advice. You know, what's one last thing that you could leave with? Let's go with something that you would leave the everyday listener. Right? The the kindergarten teacher that may be listening to this that just says, okay.
Speaker 1:
45:07
What can I do myself, all the way to SMBs and those family offices from our, like, a real tangible takeaway from bearing with us for the last 50 minutes?
Speaker 2:
45:17
Oh, guys, it's an easy answer because it is the same across the board. Don't click on links in your email. I don't care what they are. If you don't even if you know who it's from, don't click the link. It's the simplest thing.
Speaker 2:
45:30
Don't do that. The other thing, turn on 2 factor authentication, multifactor authentication, whatever the software calls it, turn it on today. That includes your social media accounts, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever it is that you use TikTok, if it's still around in a week, if Elon buys it, turn on 2 factor authentication. It is and this is our this is kind of our motto is put as many brick walls in place so that if someone's coming after you and they hit a brick wall, I. E.
Speaker 2:
46:01
2 factor authentication or a ridiculously strong password, that they're gonna move on to the next person because that's what they're doing. You know, again, circling this back, you could spend $1,000,000 today on cybersecurity. And if they want to come after you, they're going to, but the 99% random attacks, if they hit a brick wall, they're gonna move to the next person that doesn't have that brick wall in place. And that's really what we try to do. So turn on 2 factor authentication.
Speaker 2:
46:29
You know? And I would a lot of people in the cybersecurity world are gonna be mad at me about this, but I don't even care if it is something as simple as the the text the text message that you get. You know, preferably use an authenticator app on your your device. But, you know, worst case, do the 2 fact do the
Speaker 1:
46:46
the Something in the text or the nothing.
Speaker 2:
46:48
Something. Just do something, you know? And if you are a business, please do something because whether or not you think that you're a target, you are, they're coming after anyone and everyone just to see what they can get or what they can do or who they can get to from you. Right? You may not be their target, but somebody that you do business with may be their target.
Speaker 2:
47:13
Right? So do something. It is affordable. You can do something. It's why we're here.
Speaker 2:
47:19
It's why we exist. Shameless plug. You know, we we we do it reasonably, you know, ethically, if you will. We're not trying to sell you things that you don't need. We're trying to remove that risk.
Speaker 2:
47:30
Just do something. That that's my advice. Just do something because the person that is not doing something is the easier target than The
Speaker 1:
47:38
first person on the list. First one up. First one out.
Speaker 2:
47:40
How you spins, you know, let's bring this back to the podcast. Be a hard target. Right? Hey. Don't don't be an easy don't be an easy target.
Speaker 2:
47:47
And by doing nothing, you're you are a ridiculously easy target.
Speaker 1:
47:51
Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. Before we wrap up here, do you want to, what's a good what place for if anybody at any listener out there that to reach out to you or the organization, double check, how
Speaker 2:
48:03
can they do that? Yeah. Absolutely. Our website's the easiest way, doublechecked.com. It's easy straightforward.
Speaker 2:
48:09
You can always send us an email info@doublecheck.com. All of our contact info is on the website. I book a meeting right there, whatever you want. We're here. We give great advice.
Speaker 2:
48:18
Hopefully, everybody thinks that. But no, we're we're trying to do the right thing for everyone and and and do it the right way. So Awesome.
Speaker 1:
48:26
Well, thank you, Justin, and thank you all for listening to our latest episode of hard target. Check-in next week as we follow-up and find out more on how you and your company can become a hard target. Thanks, Ben. Thank you.
00:10
Hello, and welcome back to Hard Target where we dig into the world of cyber, physical, and threat intelligence. I'm your host, Ben Barrington, bringing you conversations with today's innovators and tomorrow's experts who are shaping the future of security. This week, we have Justin Kaye with Double Chekked. We're gonna jump in and see what, how he got into the business that he's in, what he's doing to provide services like ours, and then also solutions to small to medium businesses. And then also to just answer any kind of questions, how to demystify what it is that are the challenges going into this year.
Speaker 1:
00:44
So let's jump in and see what it takes to be a hard target. Justin, how's it going?
Speaker 2:
00:49
Great, man. How are you?
Speaker 1:
00:51
Doing well. Doing well. Glad to be 1st episode of the new year. So we got a, over the holidays, obviously, as you can tell with everything that went on with, you know, in the news, the unfortunate shooting with UnitedHealthcare and then all the break ins of the NFL athlete or the the pro athletes. We've just been running a 1000 miles an hour.
Speaker 1:
01:10
It has been it's been truly incredible to see just our organization come together and our industry come together to be able to provide solutions and security to people, at a moment's notice. Right? You always try to you always think about the break the glass moment. Right? And it's it's fun to talk about, and it it's fun to to put all that on a whiteboard, but then, you know, when it happens, how do you actually react?
Speaker 1:
01:35
You know, how is your organization gonna react when something bad does happen or that break in case of emergency happens? And and it's been really cool to see not just us, but our whole organization. But, anyways, yeah. So let's get into it. How, how first off, how were the holidays?
Speaker 1:
01:49
I know we talked a little bit before, but how how it was all about for you?
Speaker 2:
01:52
Oh, man. They were great. The wife and I actually got to take our first, trip in 3 years, with, we have a 20 month old. So we got to take our 1st trip without him, jumped out to Vegas, had a great time for a few days. Very cool.
Speaker 2:
02:04
Yeah. And then came back right, right before Christmas and and just kinda spent the holidays at home. My wife's family is Italian, so there was about 25 plus Italians in the house, and that can be quite loud. Yeah. Really good time.
Speaker 2:
02:17
Good time.
Speaker 1:
02:18
Yeah. I would imagine. That's obviously one of my favorite cultures, cuisines, everything. And, you know, I'm from Alabama. I grew up in DC and a little bit, you know, here and there with my dad being in the military.
Speaker 1:
02:30
But I never went to New York City. I never went to the northeast. It's just that's not somewhere that we went. But since being at 360, I had the privilege of going up there, like, once a month. So once a quarter kind of thing.
Speaker 1:
02:40
And so it's always fascinating just the the massive cultural differences and not just language and, you know, the colloquialisms. But at the end of the day, I've always I've always resonated with that culture because that's how it was when I grew up. It was Yep. You know, a big southern family. Every Sunday after church, we all got together.
Speaker 1:
03:00
My wife and I were actually laughing about this the other day. You know, like, every time someone has a kid, there's 25 people at the hospital waiting. You know? It's just this whole big thing. That that's very cool.
Speaker 1:
03:10
We've we've got a a 2 year old, and I I do get it on the the finally being able to take a trip.
Speaker 2:
03:16
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
03:17
So that's cool. Vegas Vegas is a good place to do that.
Speaker 2:
03:20
It's in and out, you know? Have have a good time in and out and get back.
Speaker 1:
03:24
Dude, absolutely. We you know, I think it was at the early days when we were at the company, where we were we're trying to get our name out there. We were trying to go to every conference we could just as a spectator and, you know, shake as many hands as possible. Mhmm. Because I'm sure you've probably got a number of story doing that too.
Speaker 1:
03:38
I went to Vegas, like, 6 times 1 year, for conferences, which is It's too much. 4 times too many. Yeah. You know? The first time you're like, oh, man.
Speaker 1:
03:46
This is awesome. I really wanna come back. The second time you're like, I should not have come back. And then by the 6th time, I remember just being like, I never wanna come back to
Speaker 2:
03:55
Vegas
Speaker 1:
03:55
again, like, ever. Yeah. But, no, that's good. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
04:00
Absolutely. So, obviously, I know we we know each other. We we go back a little ways, but let's, let's dig in. Just give a little let's do an icebreaker. I don't know if, if you like I said, you listen to a couple of them.
Speaker 1:
04:11
We try to do this, give something back to the audience here. So let's just do an easy one with 2 truths and a lie to get to know Justin Kane, the Justin Kane.
Speaker 2:
04:20
Alright. So number 1, I bit my tongue off as a kid. I hit a dock on a jet ski. Hyper specific. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
04:29
I've met a US president and had a conversation with them. And my wife and I are high school sweethearts for nearly 25 years.
Speaker 1:
04:34
Well, those are good. Those are the 30 best of them. I think I've had some.
Speaker 2:
04:38
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
04:38
Yeah. I don't know. They're all 3 very, very specific. I'm gonna say that you well, I think the tongue I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna say the tongue is false. Right?
Speaker 1:
04:51
No. No?
Speaker 2:
04:52
That's that's a true one.
Speaker 1:
04:53
Okay. Alright. Alright. And then the president and the wife I'm gonna say you have met the president and your wife you and your wife were college sweethearts, not high school sweethearts or something.
Speaker 2:
05:01
Nope. High school sweethearts. There was a present.
Speaker 1:
05:04
Yeah. Alright. Alright. So tell me a little bit about this tongue. How what?
Speaker 1:
05:08
What?
Speaker 2:
05:09
Yeah, man. At a friend's house in, right before graduating 6th grade. Literally, the day before graduating 6th grade, we were at their lake house, was driving a jet ski around their lake, water got in the electronics of the jet ski. And as I was going around the corner, the jet ski cut out. And if you don't know, if you have no power behind the jet ski, you can't steer and went straight into a dock, hit the dock, and, bit my tongue clean clean through.
Speaker 2:
05:36
Clean through. Yeah. They sewed it back on. It's all good. Okay.
Speaker 1:
05:39
I was about to ask because, you know Yeah. I don't know if you'll be able you would be able to talk.
Speaker 2:
05:43
I I don't know.
Speaker 1:
05:44
I just don't know. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a doctor.
Speaker 2:
05:46
Yeah. Yeah. I had I had to do ice cream for ice cream for a solid 6 weeks after that, but, you know, so, yeah, it was a good good time.
Speaker 1:
05:53
It's good to know that they can reattach it though.
Speaker 2:
05:55
They can. Yeah. Grows back normal.
Speaker 1:
05:58
That's Fascinating. Yeah. And then you met your wife. Your wife and I you, you were high school sweetheart. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:
06:03
Yeah. Absolutely. 20 almost 25 years.
Speaker 1:
06:06
Very cool. And then did y'all, I know you're based in Florida, so double check. We'll get into that here in a second. Are based in Florida? Are you from Port Florida originally?
Speaker 1:
06:14
Born and
Speaker 2:
06:14
raised in Jacksonville, Florida. Never left, both of us actually.
Speaker 1:
06:17
Very cool.
Speaker 2:
06:18
Yep. Love the city. It's one of those cities where everyone knows everyone kinda deal, and it's definitely the people that you know Right. In this town. So being born and raised here obviously helps with that.
Speaker 2:
06:30
It's a great city, a lot to do. We've got the river that runs through it. That's where we
Speaker 1:
06:35
You just said that Jacksonville, Florida was a small town. I'm from Fort Payne, Alabama. Okay? That's a real small town.
Speaker 2:
06:42
Right? The biggest small town you'll ever meet. Let's let me rephrase that. Yeah. It's the biggest small town ever.
Speaker 1:
06:48
No. That's that's cool. That was, there's actually one of my my or my best friend. He, his wife. He's from Jacksonville as well.
Speaker 1:
06:56
She was actually a jaguar cheerleader, I think.
Speaker 2:
06:58
Oh, awesome.
Speaker 1:
06:58
In New Jersey sometime. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
07:00
I was gonna say hope hopefully not right now, but it's different.
Speaker 1:
07:02
Different day. Different yeah. But very cool. So let's, what about double check? So how did you get into, you know, one, let's just what is double check?
Speaker 1:
07:11
What do you specialize in? And then we'll get into kinda how'd you get into that field and and why why double check now? Because I did see do some research, you know, you you you kinda progressed up to this, and I think I know the answer, you know, kind of in the end, but I'd love to hear your version of it.
Speaker 2:
07:27
Yeah. For sure. Very much one of those people that, believes that things happen for a reason. And that's definitely how this came in into play. So double checked.
Speaker 2:
07:35
We'll check cybersecurity. We provide, security solutions to small and medium businesses. Right? Practical solutions to help protect them the things that from the attacks that are most common to them, right? Email is a massive attack vector for them.
Speaker 2:
07:50
So we do a lot around that dark web monitoring to make sure that they're protected. They're protecting computers, networks, all of the above. But really, what we do is we demystify a lot of the hype behind some of the sales and marketing out there that some of the larger organizations, it's easy for them to understand, but our small and medium businesses, they just don't, there's too much they don't understand it. And unfortunately, a lot of the vendors out there, as soon as you tag on the word security or cybersecurity, their solutions cost, you know, 1,000 and 1,000 of dollars a month that our client base, that's just not what they can afford. So we specifically focus put together solutions and consulting for them that they can A, understand easily understand what we're doing, but most importantly, can afford to do something to protect themselves.
Speaker 2:
08:40
And that's that's what we do. You know, my my background is for basically my entire career on the technical side. Started at the very bottom, moved all the way up the last 10 years or so of my career. I was actually an owner of an MSP IT company and saw a lot saw a lot of things happening there. You know, as an MSP, we get to see every single facet of the businesses.
Speaker 1:
09:05
And, let me interrupt her. So can you talk to, 1, what does MSSP stand for? What does MSP stand for? And then kind of, you know, what's the major differences between the 2 in your eyes?
Speaker 2:
09:16
Yeah. Absolutely. So and there's a lot of misconception around this too. So MSSP is, managed security services provider, managed security solutions provider, 10 other ways that you can say it, but basically focuses on the security side of things. Whereas the MSP managed services provider typically focuses more on the IT side of the house where we would say the Help Desk, the service desk, my computer's broken, my network's down, you know, we need new servers, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:
09:45
So they typically focus on that. We are seeing a lot now where MSPs are also acting on the MSSP side out of more of a necessity than anything else. And then you also have MSSPs that are focusing on the MSP side. There's a lot of overlap. You know, but realistically, we holistically believe and we are truly a solely an MSSP focusing only on the security aspect.
Speaker 2:
10:12
We we want to do one thing, and we want to do it really well.
Speaker 1:
10:16
Very cool. Yeah. I know that that's gonna help a lot of listeners too because even when we got into this business, you know, I'd always heard MSP and SSB, and people throw that throw, you know, throws out all of these acronyms like crazy. It's it's honestly worse than the military. Okay.
Speaker 1:
10:32
But, yeah, you you listen to a couple of military people talk and it's all in code. You know? Everything is such a colloquial abbreviation of whatever it may be. But then you get into the cyber side, and it's it's almost even worse. Right?
Speaker 1:
10:44
Because it's that's its own vocabulary. It's its own language. And that's honestly one of the reasons why, you know, I wanted to have this podcast. I wanted you to have on have you on this podcast is because a lot of people, you know, they get inundated with all of this vocabulary, all of these, you know, the like you said, the marketing, the sales approaches of, oh, no. We have this problem is so big.
Speaker 1:
11:07
We we have to take care of it for you. Yeah. No one else can do blah blah blah blah. When in reality to your point, 95, 95 to 90% of all day to day attack attacks and that attack surfaces are human enabled. Yep.
Speaker 1:
11:24
It's email. It's it's the, you know, the dark web monitoring. It's things that that are
Speaker 2:
11:30
Clicking on things they shouldn't be?
Speaker 1:
11:32
Exactly. Exactly. People clicking on things that they shouldn't shouldn't be. And what I like to call the common cold of attack vectors. Right?
Speaker 1:
11:40
Yes. You do need if if you think about it this way, yes. You need, what is it? You know, the the polio vaccine for, like, something that's detrimental one time in your life in case something like that happens. But as long as you wash your hands and, you know, clean surfaces, those day to day common colds are gonna put you down for a day or 2.
Speaker 1:
12:01
You're gonna get rid of that, then you're gonna prevent that. And that's where we want to live, and that's where we wanna educate people to be able to do that and, you know, have people like yourselves that can come in and, and take care of that for them.
Speaker 2:
12:13
So Yeah. 100%. And that's what and that and that's what I've seen over my career. Right? It it's unfortunately so many people turning a blind eye to, you know, and and we'll talk about this later, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:
12:24
But, turning a blind eye saying I I'm not I I that's not I'm not gonna get the cold. Right? You know, I hardly ever get the cold. That's not gonna happen to me. Or, you know, I got my I even got I
Speaker 1:
12:34
got strong genes.
Speaker 2:
12:35
Yeah. I even got my flu vaccine, you know, so so I'm good. But, you know, things still happen, and there's new variants that come out and it's gonna happen. Right? And that's that's what's happening today.
Speaker 2:
12:45
And, you know, that's one of the biggest things that we try to we try to handle with our client base is really helping them understand why they are under attack whether they know it or not and breaking down that barrier, that education gap. Yeah. And I
Speaker 1:
13:00
love that too because especially, you know, we'll get into it a little bit later about AI and, you know, the challenges and the forecasting. And everybody wants to talk about AI this and AI that when at the end of the day, I I think I mentioned it last week or on the last episode, it's, you know, one of the best ways you can defend against AI is just to educate yourself on what right looks like. Right? You know? It's the human element.
Speaker 1:
13:21
If we can raise the human intelligence level of interaction with AI, then that's gonna be the best prevention for you. Yes. You're gonna have to have certain things in place. Right? There's certain benchmarks, certain programs you gotta have.
Speaker 1:
13:33
But at the end of the day, you know, you you hate to see it. There's there's the deep fakes where, you know, somebody will put Brad Pitt's face over their face and convince some poor soul that they're in love with them and there goes their life savings. Right? Like, that didn't happen.
Speaker 2:
13:48
What are you talking about, Ben? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
13:50
What do you you too? Yeah. Man, no. Well, good deal. So leading right into these main challenges, what are what have you seen?
Speaker 1:
13:58
You know, we're in the 1st month of 2025. Well, you know, what are what were in 2024 even from double check. Right? So it's through the entire life cycle of where double check is. What have been the most the biggest challenges you've seen for yourself, for your clients, and, you know, what's that the biggest hurdle that they've had or biggest challenge they've had getting over and protecting themselves?
Speaker 2:
14:21
Yeah. Absolutely. Great question. So couple things. One for us, honestly, the hardest thing is keeping up.
Speaker 2:
14:27
It is this this is changing by the day at this point. You know, I'd even say I told some other people by the hour realistically.
Speaker 1:
14:35
Right?
Speaker 2:
14:36
You know, and so keeping up with the new ways that that these things are happening, you know, watching every single event that happens. You mentioned the UnitedHealthcare thing earlier that threw a curveball to everyone. And I think almost every industry, you know, and really understanding what what are the attack back like, what what are the ways that people are gonna get to you? You know, whether they're coming after you, whether they're coming after your business, whether they're coming after your family, whatever it is, you know, and an understanding and keeping up with that. It's it's the hardest challenge.
Speaker 2:
15:09
It's also what we love. It definitely Yeah, I mean, you know, if you I've told people before, if you don't love constant change and constant learning, cybersecurity is not for you. Absolutely. It is not for you.
Speaker 1:
15:23
We had an individual, we had an individual come into the office the other day and, really bright kid who, you know, they're they're asking about some of these roles that we have up. Right? Or whether it's a TAM, a sales engineer, or, you know, some of you know, we have that hype we had that MSP role a couple of years ago type role when we were going out was called the concierge program Mhmm. Where we would go out and we would teach these executives, high profile athletes, you know, whoever be free crap for essentially on how to protect themselves, how to make themselves a hard target, which is a great segue into the kind of what podcast came to be. But at the end of the day, you know, there's no one answer.
Speaker 1:
16:01
It's you have to love to troubleshoot.
Speaker 2:
16:03
Yep. 100% The best
Speaker 1:
16:05
the best IT person, the best cybersecurity person, you know, the best small business entrepreneur is someone who loves troubleshooting. Right? Someone who can who it does need
Speaker 2:
16:16
Every person I've every person I have tried to hire, or hired in the past, that is the number one thing. I don't care what your current skill set is. Can you troubleshoot? Can you do the basics and start at the bottom? You know?
Speaker 2:
16:27
And and especially even when you get it more advanced in your career, it's it's really easy to forget to start with with troubleshooting 101, you know. Did did you reboot, you know, that that age old, adage there, you know, that everybody hates from IT people. But, you know, did you reboot it? Step 1, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
16:46
And it's really easy to forget that as you as you advance specifically. But, yeah, can you troubleshoot? You know, what is the problem? Break it down. And and, you know, and go forward.
Speaker 2:
16:56
Because what is it? I percent of
Speaker 1:
16:57
the time, it's something very simple.
Speaker 2:
16:59
Something. Yeah. Something simple. And if it's not, it's a problem.
Speaker 1:
17:02
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And that's where it's awesome that you brought that up because I I did. I talked about it a couple episodes ago of, you know, when we're trying to hire someone, and it's those intel in, the intelligence professionals that we're they're bringing in.
Speaker 1:
17:14
It's exactly to your point. It's, you know, yeah, you may have been super, you know, a a great service member. You know, you did your country well. You you did all the things the military asked you to do, but at the same time, when you get out, can you still perform at that level without someone telling you where to be at what time and at what uniform? Right?
Speaker 1:
17:33
Can you think on your own? Yep. Can you troubleshoot? So it's interesting that you say that about the cybersecurity space because I'd actually love to get your perspective on, you know, the the bad actors too. Right?
Speaker 1:
17:45
Like, they're preying on someone not being able to troubleshoot. Most of the vulnerabilities that get pushed out are based off of something very, very basic. You know? Hollywood does a really cool job of making our life and jobs look way cooler than what it really is. Yep.
Speaker 1:
18:02
Yep. And so on an offensive and defensive side, right, from an offensive standpoint, quote, unquote, hacking is not that cool. It's not like the movie Swordfish. Right? Like, it's not, you know, it's not like that.
Speaker 1:
18:16
Right? The mister robot kind of stuff. It's, you know, trying to get somebody's someone unfortunate soul to click a link that they, you know, you just keep sending it to them. Yep. But then on the defensive side, it's not having this incredible, incredibly complex firewall and system in place.
Speaker 1:
18:33
99 times, it's do you have a good password? Yep. Do you have 2 factor? You know, do you have a malicious link software filter? You know, whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:
18:40
But yeah. What what's your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:
18:43
Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right. It's we're we're seeing a lot. And this is the education piece I was mentioning, you know, is we see a lot with our clients and our customers that them under understanding what and how these people that are coming after them, how they're trying to get in. And to your point, they're gonna send you a link in your email.
Speaker 2:
19:03
And unfortunately, you're gonna click it. You know, I one of my most recent examples of this, and it's hate to use the word phenomenal, but what they have started doing is they've started sending these phishing emails, the user is going to know without a doubt, it's a phishing email. But they've started putting a button in that email. And that button says report phishing email. Yep.
Speaker 2:
19:23
And that is now the bad link. And so they're clicking on it. It's genius, you know? And we'll get more into this with the AI conversation. But you know, with AI, it's getting easier for them to come up with these tactics, you know, how can this isn't working?
Speaker 2:
19:40
How can I try a different route? And unfortunately, you know, the major AI solutions out there will help them do that. And so, you know, fighting AI with AI is 100% where the world's going. We can talk about that in a little bit. But to your point, yeah, it's protecting them with this, the easy solutions.
Speaker 2:
19:59
And I hate to say it that way, because it makes our job not sound difficult. And it is but protecting with the easy solutions, remove the risk from the user. You know, you mentioned the malicious just URL, the malicious link software. Yeah. Let's scan every email that comes in and out of your system.
Speaker 2:
20:16
And if it has a link in it, let's see what that link does before the user has a chance to get to it. What does that link do? Is it trying to get you to sign into Google? Awesome. That's fine.
Speaker 2:
20:26
But is that a Google domain name? No. Well, guess what? We're gonna pull that email out of the mailbox. Users never gonna see it.
Speaker 2:
20:32
Right? And it's stupid, simple things like that, you know, removing that risk as much as possible from the users really where we're at. You could spend $1,000,000 today on cybersecurity solutions. And if someone really wants to get into your business into your stuff, they're going to, if they're truly coming after you, they're gonna get in, you know, but the 99% that are the random attacks that you know, which is what it is, if it's random, and they're just trying to see can I get in, Let's prevent the 99% and then deal with the 1%
Speaker 1:
21:04
when it happens? Yeah. No. Absolutely. We, on a daily basis, tell our clients we are a risk minimization firm.
Speaker 1:
21:13
Yep. There is no such thing as risk eradication. Not a chance. 25, and it and it hasn't been for a long time. Yep.
Speaker 1:
21:21
No. There's no chance that you're gonna be have a zero risk. Like, that is just it's not gonna happen to your point.
Speaker 2:
21:26
And if anybody is telling you that, look at their terms and conditions. Exactly.
Speaker 1:
21:30
Or just run. Hang up the phone. Right. Right? We used to tell people that when it came to the dark web, you know, we would we'd have clients come to us that, you know, may have been with another firm before and they're like, yeah.
Speaker 1:
21:41
This person you know, they they say that they can take things down from the dark web, but, well, good luck. Unless that's the FBI, you know, or the government. Like, I don't I don't know who you're talking to, but that's not a real thing. Yeah. But no.
Speaker 1:
21:54
That that's that's awesome because more people need to understand that. And we we do find that it's an education piece. Right? We have to educate our clients. It's and it's an unfortunate world because it's a new problem, a new mainstream problem.
Speaker 1:
22:08
Right? You know, it's a newer more people are knowing. It's been a problem for a while, but people are just now becoming aware of it. And so we're we've had this role of I need to educate these people on what the problem is and what stakes is, like, we're also immediately in, like, but I have the solution here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
22:23
This is weird balance of, like, oh, like, I don't wanna be a snake oil salesman. You know, to these people. They're like, well, that doesn't sound right. But in reality, it really is. And so it's just education over time.
Speaker 1:
22:33
And then, obviously, that's a that's a proactive approach. You know, as we've seen over the last month, reactive approach is a lot worse.
Speaker 2:
22:41
Yep.
Speaker 1:
22:42
Right? And but budgets get real big after something bad happens. Absolutely. But we don't want we don't wanna see that, you know, at all. And before we move on, I do wanna ask, you know, they came to mind you.
Speaker 1:
22:53
You said your career IT, career security. So let's talk about since the beginning of your career, I'd love to get a timeline. Right? What did you see early career? What did you see mid, and what are you seeing now?
Speaker 1:
23:07
And how's that evolution of cybersecurity, or just like in your world? What have you seen? And what's been important? What have been like the, what have been, you know, the things that your clients have pushed back on and then they've kinda come full circle?
Speaker 2:
23:20
Oh, yeah. That's a great question. I don't know if we have enough time on this podcast. No. It's it is literal night and day.
Speaker 2:
23:29
You know, I mean, at the beginning of my career, it was, do you have a firewall in place? Yeah. Cool. Okay. Awesome.
Speaker 2:
23:35
You know, do you have antivirus on your computer? Yeah. Alright. Cool. You know, and that was really it, to be honest with you, you know, unless you were really, really big, and you were dealing with government and whatever, but even back, you know, back then, that's what it was, you know, and today, we're talking about things like the dark web, we're talking about things like phishing emails and all of this stuff.
Speaker 2:
23:56
And, you know, the advent of AI and how that's changing things immensely, you know, for good and bad. You know, we're we're using AI and a lot of our solutions because human can't keep up. So, yeah, let's implement AI. It can do things a 100000 times faster or whatever that stat is then then a human can, you know, and and so it's good and bad because they also have those AI solutions. And typically they have a lot more money behind them than than most businesses do.
Speaker 2:
24:28
Yeah. And a lot much larger organization. So, you know, from from the beginning to now, it is night and day, you know, and really I would say the last 5 or 6 years is really where it has started to pick up, you know, where you're seeing it in the news. You're seeing the big breaches you're seeing now. Okay.
Speaker 2:
24:47
Yeah. My small business client saw that, you know, and this was years ago, but saw that target was hacked. And that kind of the first big one that, you know, you kind of remember seeing out there. And so they're, they started asking questions at that time. But even still, they didn't they don't have the budget.
Speaker 2:
25:05
They, you know, they weren't even budgeting at all for for a line item like that. Yeah. Let alone having any sort of budget behind it to put behind it, you know, and we're even still seeing that today. You know, that's that's one of the big things that we were we're facing. And really one of the reasons why I started double check was our clients can't afford the expensive solutions out there.
Speaker 2:
25:27
You know, they can't afford the enterprise level solutions that have a 6 figure price tag behind them. They just can't. So to your point a few minutes ago is how can we remove the most risk possible with with a budget that they are are comfortable with? You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:
25:46
We're not trying to steal every dollar possible. I've seen too many vendors out there. And I love that conversation you were talking about a few minutes ago. You know, I would say that I think that there's some vendors out there that have created solutions to problems that may not have exactly existed. 1000%.
Speaker 2:
26:04
Yeah. You know, and there is a major name brand vendor out there. I won't name that. If you actually do research, they're selling the same exact product under 3 completely different product names that solve the same problem, but 3 different ways. And it's crazy.
Speaker 2:
26:20
So demystifying that helping them understand, implicitly understand what it is that we're trying to protect them from and why we're trying to protect it.
Speaker 1:
26:31
You know? Honestly, in my mind, it's just because the attack vectors have changed. Yeah. Right? They're obviously, they're evolving as with anything.
Speaker 1:
26:38
Right? If you think about pre, pre security cameras, how how easy it was to rob a bank, and then, you know, you implement security cameras. Well, now that the bad guys are just gonna think of ways how they can beat it without it.
Speaker 2:
26:51
So Yep.
Speaker 1:
26:51
It's just this game that's it's never gonna stop. It's not. But I do remember when I went to college and I got behind first laptop, and you had to go to the bookstore, and they had these little, like, books, basically, and it was just like Norton antivirus or McAfee antivirus that came in a book. It was like Yep. 2 inches wide, and it just had a CD in it.
Speaker 1:
27:16
And that was like you but you could you you in order to take classes, I remember you had to have it on, you know, and all this kind of stuff. That was it. To your point, that was like that was it. And now you can get on, like, the dark web and you know how you know, there's, you know, there's SaaS. We talk about that, you know, software as a service.
Speaker 1:
27:33
Mhmm. But there's, like, hacking as a service now that you can buy. And, like, it's a whole e for pennies. Yeah. And it's a whole, like, economy and ecommerce for hacking now where it's used to be you know, I forget what podcast it was.
Speaker 1:
27:47
Maybe hacking humans. Shout out to those guys. But, I think it I was on there. They were talking about, I forget the guy's name, but they the guy was talking about how, you know, back in the day when he first got started, it was you had to be really good, if not the best, at everything Okay. To be a successful hacker.
Speaker 2:
28:07
Yep.
Speaker 1:
28:07
In that in the true sense of the word. And now you can get on YouTube.
Speaker 2:
28:12
Yep.
Speaker 1:
28:12
Right? You can buy an automated screen. You know, obviously, there's, you know, like, strip kitties and all that kind of stuff. But, like, it's just, like, it's a whole world that's evolved.
Speaker 2:
28:20
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
28:21
And what's bad is that blew up. And then I think that we as a society and as, like, an industry, we're catching back up to that. Right? Yep. But it's just humans are weird.
Speaker 1:
28:31
Oh, yeah. Humans are weird, man.
Speaker 2:
28:32
I mean, you can spin up and I I hate giving tips to people that don't know the information already, but you can spin up a phishing campaign in, like, 60 seconds now, you know, and and the whole thing spins up, and you can send out 100 of out 100 of thousands of phishing emails in in minutes.
Speaker 1:
28:48
Minutes. Yeah. Minutes. Yeah. And and To to that point, like, that's where the data brokers and it's just like this full cycle of, you know, where you get the information.
Speaker 2:
28:56
Yep.
Speaker 1:
28:56
But yeah. No. We we like I said, that could be a whole other conversation. Yep. We'll probably do that.
Speaker 1:
29:00
We'll probably bring you back on and we'll we'll just keep talking about it.
Speaker 2:
29:02
But Yeah.
Speaker 1:
29:03
Alright. So we talked about the past. We talked about the the present now, like, what we're talking about. Let's get into the future. What are you you know, 2025.
Speaker 1:
29:09
You know, we talked about AI, whether it's IoT, you know, blockchain. Let's talk through that. What are you seeing on a cybersecurity landscape? For those SMBs specifically, what are those emerging technologies and emerging emerging threats to where where what's that conversion looking like?
Speaker 2:
29:24
Yeah. Absolutely. For first of all, I say, let's demystify a few things. Right? So AI.
Speaker 2:
29:29
People have been using AI for years. They just didn't know it. Right? Now there's a huge thing and and, you know, chat and everything out there, you know, and and now it's a huge keyword and key term. There's also a lot of things behind AI, you know, other things, machine learning, machine vision, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 2:
29:46
You know, you've been using it for years. The thing now is it is just like we were talking about the the, you know, hacking as a service, you know, these hackers threat actors, whatever you wanna call them, they have access to the same things that we do now. And so they are able to use AI, like I mentioned prior, to come up with these ideas to figure out different ways a GPT can spit out PowerShell scripts in seconds that would have taken, you know, a couple weeks or a month before to test and vet and whatever. And now it it'll do it in seconds. So, you know, and and so AI is great.
Speaker 2:
30:25
I think, clearly, we all know AI is here to stay. It's only gonna get better and crazier, which is awesome. But I think the thing is, is that if we as cybersecurity experts, if we as software vendor solutions and businesses as well, if you aren't using it to also combat the bad,
Speaker 1:
30:46
we're gonna
Speaker 2:
30:46
be in trouble. Because if we're not using AI, just like they're using AI, we're gonna be gonna be behind the game. You know? Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
30:55
And that and that's what we're really seeing. And that's why we're trying to wrap AI into as much stuff as possible to keep up with with the threats that are coming through.
Speaker 1:
31:03
It's like it's like in the military. It's an escalation of force. Right? You know, you you only wanna use as much forces as rationally possible to subdue that force. And because, you know, honestly, if we throw everything at them, they're just gonna adjust in 6 months and now they're gonna have something even better to to point there.
Speaker 2:
31:22
Correct. Yeah. You know, I I think this deep fake thing is gonna be a real real problem. I think I actually even sent you a few weeks ago. I sent you on a thing from, Instagram, somebody that I follow.
Speaker 2:
31:32
And, yeah, they they got into real trouble, you know, and such a such a good guy. And somebody went after him, and they're still battling it today. You know, deep fakes are gonna be real, real bad.
Speaker 1:
31:43
And there's gotta be a way to combat those, which I think is being worked on. Absolutely. We've got, you know, we'll there's another part of ours, Lottie. We're actually gonna have them on the podcast there in a couple weeks. They're out in Hollywood, and that's kind of their whole go to market.
Speaker 1:
31:56
Their whole business is looking for the deep fakes because it's become so prevalent. Right? It's and, you know, you have everything from and what's crazy is people are not only are are bad guys making money off of it, but if you think about that whole commerce, it's like, well, if you want to make money off of your name, image, and likeness, well, now you can do it even easier too. Yeah. Like, now this commercial that you're watching, the model may not even have to go.
Speaker 1:
32:24
They she can or that person can just sell their face, and then they can generate it up. That is mind blowing to me.
Speaker 2:
32:30
Oh, and that and again, that's the positive and the negative. That's amazing. That's amazing technology. Yeah. Unfortunately, there's always somebody that's gonna take that amazing technology and use it for bad.
Speaker 2:
32:41
Yeah. You know? And that's where that's gonna come in. So, and just, you know, if you don't know, deep fakes are basically where people can take you your likeness of you. And with AI say whatever they want to say, and basically make you say whatever they want you to say.
Speaker 2:
32:56
And if you think about that, from a business perspective, even as a small business owner or or medium, you know, whatever, somebody's out there on the internet acting as you and make you makes you say XYZ, especially in small and medium businesses reputation is 9 tenths of the battle. Right? How do people know you? And if in a if in an instant someone can get out there and basically de credit you, it's a bad day. Right?
Speaker 2:
33:20
So No.
Speaker 1:
33:20
Absolutely. And you understand this. We understand this because Yeah. We are those, you know, SMBs on the on the backside. Right?
Speaker 1:
33:28
And 3 60 privacy, that's that's how we've grown at the rate that we've grown is surely on reputation. Right? We do what we say we're gonna do. We we've never under deliver. And then if we you know, I think being transparent upfront about saying, like, hey.
Speaker 1:
33:42
We can't do that. Right? Here's what we can do, but we can't do that. We can find you somebody else, yada yada yada. We never wanna be okay at a lot of things.
Speaker 1:
33:51
We wanna be the absolute best at our thing and then be friends with those that are also the best. Right? You know, so we can have this, like, little little tribe of of, you know, Avengers in the security space. But
Speaker 2:
34:04
Are you are you inviting
Speaker 1:
34:05
me to the Avengers team? Come on, Ben. Yeah. Absolutely. Come on.
Speaker 1:
34:09
Come on in. I've got a, yeah, it's just us at this point. No. It's a it's a small
Speaker 2:
34:13
it's a small group. Just depends on which Avenger you are, I guess.
Speaker 1:
34:16
Exactly. Exactly. But no. That that's that's that's interesting that you say that too because SMBs are very different from your fortune 1,000 companies who have those massive budgets and they can, provide, you know, they can provide certain protection, but at the same time, even from my targeting pay phase of life, you know, oftentimes, those targets you know, I would equate those larger those larger organizations and logos to someone, you know, if you are in that targeting sense, someone whose awareness is gonna be much harder. Right?
Speaker 1:
34:51
They're gonna be aware that some people are going after them, and they're gonna have the resources to protect them. Whereas the SMBs are people within that support system. Right? They're not you know, they don't have the resources to protect themselves. They don't have the people around them or the money to have that same level of protection, but oftentimes, they have the same amount of capital and the same amount of liquidity and risk than the the larger organizations.
Speaker 1:
35:15
And that that's why they're as big, if not more of a target, especially from from a target. Right? Because it's the easy target. It's the low hanging fruit that I can go in.
Speaker 2:
35:25
They're more of a target, and and that's what we're seeing now. You know? They're they're absolutely more of a target because those those high those actors hackers know, they don't have the things in place. They don't have the solutions in place. They don't have the the malicious filtering, they're not training their users on what to look for, you know, with SAT, they're not doing phishing campaigns to train their employees and their staff.
Speaker 2:
35:48
They know they're an easier target. That's what we're seeing. They don't have the budgets behind them typically to protect themselves. Now equate that to why is that a big issue? Okay, it's an SMB.
Speaker 2:
35:58
We don't have a whole lot of data, whatever. Okay, but you likely do business with a larger organization. And that's the key. Because they know that if they can get to you, they can get to all of the people that you do business with and circle that back to the reputation. If you're the one that got hacked, and you were the reason that another company got taken down.
Speaker 2:
36:20
You're cooked. You're done. You're cooked. You know, I am not saying shut your doors, but it's a hard it's a hard battle to get back from. And so that's what we're trying to prevent is preventing you from being the problem, you know, because they are coming after the small and medium businesses more than the larger ones.
Speaker 2:
36:36
The larger ones know, they know they have to protect themselves. They've already put stuff in place. And if they haven't, okay. But they're they're putting things in place. They know what to do.
Speaker 2:
36:44
They have teams behind them. They have whole security departments. Whereas the SMB, 8 out of 10 times doesn't even have an IT person. You know? Right.
Speaker 2:
36:52
So
Speaker 1:
36:52
I equate in our on our field, I equate an an SMB in traditional sense to those family offices as well of high net worth individuals. Oh, yeah. Because they'll they'll spin up a family office. And for those listening, we've talked about family offices before, but it's essentially, small organization, 1 to 5 personal organization that is that MSP for a family, a high network family. Right?
Speaker 1:
37:15
They're taking care of finances. They're taking care of security, cybersecurity, utility, like, all these other things that it just essentially, it's a it's more cost efficient to do that than to outsource it somewhere else. However, now you've got an organization of 1 to 5 people generally, never hardly ever more than 5 unless it's like a, a multifamily office. And they're handling 1,000,000,000 if not 1,000,000,000 of personal wealth. Right?
Speaker 1:
37:42
And it's dumb. I I've seen it before. It's sometimes, like, the cousin of the high net worth that, you know, has an accounting degree or, like, you know, someone close to them. It's usually trusted friends, a trusted network Yep. That had this crazy amount of responsibility bestowed upon them.
Speaker 2:
38:02
Using their using their yahoo.com email address.
Speaker 1:
38:05
Using their yahoo.com email. Yeah. It's just it's crazy. You know, we'd go in to do an assessment on something, and it's one of those where it's like, I understand that you need to send these documents. However, I just wanna help you right now because this is scary.
Speaker 1:
38:20
Right? Please stop doing what you're doing at this moment. Like, hey. It's just it's wild. And so when you have something like that, not only is your reputation, but now the reputation is even on an individual.
Speaker 1:
38:32
Right? It's not just an organization. It's Joe Smith is about to lose all the money of this billionaire family. We work a lot very closely with them because of reputation. Right?
Speaker 1:
38:43
Obviously, we're we're 360 comes in. It's we're reducing the risk to your point on the physical security. You know, we're removing the open source intelligence on the inter on the open web so that a bad actor, that hacker can't put together a social media campaign or a phishing campaign, or they can't find the front door. And, actually, you know, a bad actor, not just hacking, but a bad actor can't go and knock on the front door and say, you know, they can break that the 4th wall, if you will, of hacking. And it because everybody at you know, I like to talk about the convergence of physical and cybersecurity.
Speaker 1:
39:16
Right? Because then back in the day, it really was one of the other. You never really you never meet the person that was hacking into your system. Well, nowadays, physical bad actors are using those hackers as a service to find out where you live. Yep.
Speaker 1:
39:29
Right? They're looking online so that way they can get close to you. They can break the 4th wall of going from keyboard to doorknob within a day sometimes. Right?
Speaker 2:
39:38
It's it's that next level of social engineering. You know?
Speaker 1:
39:41
Oh, it's crazy.
Speaker 2:
39:42
Find out where you live and what you do and who your family is and and what they do and where they are. It just gives them all the all the extra necessary information they need to to come after you.
Speaker 1:
39:52
Yeah. Talk about, you know, real world, like, a case study on that. We, you know, there's, you know, reports of, you know, a couple years ago, there was a a a an an organization who, an organization who they were they were hacked. They were phished. They had, you know, you know, about a 150 people, something like that.
Speaker 1:
40:15
And one of the executives, they were all phished. It it was a a pretty basic phishing scam. Mhmm. However, one individual, a soft target. Right?
Speaker 1:
40:23
And he talks about, like, getting back to the basics. Let's bring this whole thing full circle. You know, having good hygiene, having good practices, having things in place that filter for phishing, educating the human beings so they make good decisions that's gonna clean up, you know, the majority of those hacks. All of that would have prevented this because what it what happened was one of the work one of the individuals at the organization clicked the link and it, you know, asked him to to log in. Right?
Speaker 1:
40:47
And and when he went to go log in, they didn't have 2 factor or they I'm sorry. They had 2 factor authentication, in place, but they didn't have it mandated to where you couldn't use security questions. And so he they had an alternate way in. There was a security question that was asked also for I'm gonna say it every episode. If you out there using security questions, never tell the truth.
Speaker 1:
41:07
Right? There are no security question police. You will not get put in security question jail. Never you tell the truth. Right?
Speaker 1:
41:13
No one care. Do not write down anywhere where your mother's your mother's maiden name. Right? That no one no one needs to know that.
Speaker 2:
41:18
I gotta tell this I gotta tell this real quick too because PSA announcement. Right? Those Facebook posts that are out there that have the, like, hey, answer these 10 questions or put a check mark next to these 10 questions. Don't answer those. Do not answer them.
Speaker 2:
41:34
It is
Speaker 1:
41:34
my my mom. Mom, if you're listening to this, do not do that.
Speaker 2:
41:38
Yeah. What was your first car? Okay. What was the color of your first car? What was the make and model of your first car?
Speaker 1:
41:45
What
Speaker 2:
41:45
do you what is the number one question for security password resets? Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 1:
41:49
Yeah. Mother's maiden name. Mother's maiden name. Street you grew up on. Pet Yep.
Speaker 1:
41:53
First pet that you had. Yep. All of those things that people, you know, people just don't understand that that's real. They don't I don't know if they don't want to know that it's real or they, you know, they think it's a game and people just don't understand. I'll tell you.
Speaker 1:
42:03
I used to I I had I had a nickel for every time I've I've had someone in my immediate group, just be like, no one's gonna hack me. You know? Like, I'm nobody. Right. You are technically a nobody in the grand scheme of high net worth, but you are you and a million other nobodies Mhmm.
Speaker 1:
42:21
Is a big sum of money. Right? There's not one big score. It's a 100,000 nobodies that adds up to a a very large score. But yeah.
Speaker 1:
42:29
So to your point, this person used the security question of, back back to the the anecdote. Person used, what was my least favorite vegetable as a child? What do you think it was,
Speaker 2:
42:38
Justin? Broccoli.
Speaker 1:
42:40
Broccoli. Boom. Hacker. Right? And it you know, they they hacked in at 0.25 seconds.
Speaker 1:
42:46
They didn't have a text message verification turned on. So when they got in, the individual this is where it gets real scary. Talk about physical and cyber convergence. The person who was using their work email on their Icloud account Yep. Family share plan.
Speaker 1:
43:01
The kids had Apple devices, Mac devices issued from their school. Mhmm. So the hackers were able to see where the kids were going to school. Find my location. Find my location.
Speaker 1:
43:15
They showed up to the school, gave the kids a letter that said, make sure your daddy pays the ransom. Right? Like, that's goosebumps. That's wild. Right?
Speaker 1:
43:25
Do you ever want that? And it's all because of broccoli. All because of poor basic cyber hygiene. It's just wild. You know?
Speaker 2:
43:33
Well and I and I think this I think that goes back to just real quick. I think that goes back to the vendor side too. You know, the vendors need to help the public. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:
43:42
Maybe it's time that the security question thing isn't a thing anymore. You know? Let's let's come up with a different way to get back into your account if if you lose access, which is very easy to do.
Speaker 1:
43:53
Very easy to do. Right? Yep. That's just wild. You know, that's that's one of the things too.
Speaker 1:
43:59
I'm actually glad you brought that up about the Facebook because I do remember when that happened a couple of years ago, it was really, really prevalent. But now I I I don't I don't get on Facebook anymore, but they, you know, you see it all the time. And it people think it's harmless, but it is very real. You know, there is a there is a room full of underpaid cyber warriors in some 3rd world country somewhere that are just massive mass amount pushing those out.
Speaker 2:
44:24
Yep.
Speaker 1:
44:24
They're just it's just data on a spreadsheet somewhere. Right? And they're gonna eventually, it's gonna come down and it's gonna you're gonna have this little person. It's gonna be a little red line that says, okay. Boom.
Speaker 1:
44:33
This person's a thought target.
Speaker 2:
44:35
Yep.
Speaker 1:
44:35
Right? And that's that's all that that's all that is. Alright. So I know we're we we we we never have enough time to go through all this. I've got I've really gotta push this out to, like, an hour 20, but, I don't know if my millions of followers wanna do that or not.
Speaker 1:
44:48
But alright. So we talked about a little bit of that. And then, you know, kind of going to the future where we where we seeing it. We've seen that. What is in this last 5 minutes here?
Speaker 1:
44:56
Give some advice. You know, what's one last thing that you could leave with? Let's go with something that you would leave the everyday listener. Right? The the kindergarten teacher that may be listening to this that just says, okay.
Speaker 1:
45:07
What can I do myself, all the way to SMBs and those family offices from our, like, a real tangible takeaway from bearing with us for the last 50 minutes?
Speaker 2:
45:17
Oh, guys, it's an easy answer because it is the same across the board. Don't click on links in your email. I don't care what they are. If you don't even if you know who it's from, don't click the link. It's the simplest thing.
Speaker 2:
45:30
Don't do that. The other thing, turn on 2 factor authentication, multifactor authentication, whatever the software calls it, turn it on today. That includes your social media accounts, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever it is that you use TikTok, if it's still around in a week, if Elon buys it, turn on 2 factor authentication. It is and this is our this is kind of our motto is put as many brick walls in place so that if someone's coming after you and they hit a brick wall, I. E.
Speaker 2:
46:01
2 factor authentication or a ridiculously strong password, that they're gonna move on to the next person because that's what they're doing. You know, again, circling this back, you could spend $1,000,000 today on cybersecurity. And if they want to come after you, they're going to, but the 99% random attacks, if they hit a brick wall, they're gonna move to the next person that doesn't have that brick wall in place. And that's really what we try to do. So turn on 2 factor authentication.
Speaker 2:
46:29
You know? And I would a lot of people in the cybersecurity world are gonna be mad at me about this, but I don't even care if it is something as simple as the the text the text message that you get. You know, preferably use an authenticator app on your your device. But, you know, worst case, do the 2 fact do the
Speaker 1:
46:46
the Something in the text or the nothing.
Speaker 2:
46:48
Something. Just do something, you know? And if you are a business, please do something because whether or not you think that you're a target, you are, they're coming after anyone and everyone just to see what they can get or what they can do or who they can get to from you. Right? You may not be their target, but somebody that you do business with may be their target.
Speaker 2:
47:13
Right? So do something. It is affordable. You can do something. It's why we're here.
Speaker 2:
47:19
It's why we exist. Shameless plug. You know, we we we do it reasonably, you know, ethically, if you will. We're not trying to sell you things that you don't need. We're trying to remove that risk.
Speaker 2:
47:30
Just do something. That that's my advice. Just do something because the person that is not doing something is the easier target than The
Speaker 1:
47:38
first person on the list. First one up. First one out.
Speaker 2:
47:40
How you spins, you know, let's bring this back to the podcast. Be a hard target. Right? Hey. Don't don't be an easy don't be an easy target.
Speaker 2:
47:47
And by doing nothing, you're you are a ridiculously easy target.
Speaker 1:
47:51
Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. Before we wrap up here, do you want to, what's a good what place for if anybody at any listener out there that to reach out to you or the organization, double check, how
Speaker 2:
48:03
can they do that? Yeah. Absolutely. Our website's the easiest way, doublechecked.com. It's easy straightforward.
Speaker 2:
48:09
You can always send us an email info@doublecheck.com. All of our contact info is on the website. I book a meeting right there, whatever you want. We're here. We give great advice.
Speaker 2:
48:18
Hopefully, everybody thinks that. But no, we're we're trying to do the right thing for everyone and and and do it the right way. So Awesome.
Speaker 1:
48:26
Well, thank you, Justin, and thank you all for listening to our latest episode of hard target. Check-in next week as we follow-up and find out more on how you and your company can become a hard target. Thanks, Ben. Thank you.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Benjamin Barrontine, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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