Following the Money: Cybercrime & Money Laundering Exposed, with Geoff White

Luke Connolly Welcome to the Cyber Insider, Emsisoft's podcast all about cybersecurity. Your hosts today are Brett Callow, threat analyst here at Emsisoft and I'm Luke Connolly, partner manager. Today we have Geoff White as our guest. From billion dollar cyber heists to global money laundering rings and crypto gangsters, Geoff White has covered it all as an author, speaker, investigative journalist, and podcast creator.

His work has been featured by, to name a few, Penguin, the BBC, Audible, Sky News, and Sunday Times. 0:00:44 Luke Connolly His work has covered a wide range of topics, including the dark web, the Lazarus cybercrime group. Geoff, welcome to the Cyber Insider, and thanks for taking the time to be with us today. 0:00:55 Geoff White Thanks for having me.

I appreciate it. 0:00:56 Luke Connolly So aside from the really quick introduction that I did, maybe you can give some more detail on your background. 0:01:02 Geoff White Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I'm an investigative journalist, and what I mainly cover is organized crime and technology.

So whatever organized crime and tech come together, that tends to be where I hang out. So, yes, obviously, lots of cybercrime, lots of computer hacking, but also, increasingly, most organized crime groups are starting to use technology in some way or other. So things like cartel drug dealing and prostitution and fraud and money laundering are all things I've started to get into as I've sort of explored that kind of organized crime and technology space. 0:01:31 Brett Callow You have a new book as rinsed.

Can you do something about that? 0:01:35 Geoff White Yeah, it's interesting. So covering a lot of the cybercrime activity, the interview, but one of the things that I found interesting was that it starts out covering cybercrime, but very quickly, in quite a lot of the investigations, you're doing that classic journalistic thing of following the money. And that's where things get really interesting, because obviously, the hackers, the criminals, know that journalists, and perhaps more importantly, law enforcement are doing exactly that, are trying to trace the path of the money and follow the money.

0:02:01 Geoff White And so what they're trying to do is to outpace the people who are following them and following the money, and that's money laundering. So a lot of the cases I'd investigated and stories I looked into, including those north korean, famous north korean heists, I'd end up actually looking at the process of money laundering. Famously, North Korea tried to steal a billion dollars from the National bank of Bangladesh. 0:02:22 Geoff White And the way they tried to launder it was through casinos in the Philippines.

So there's a whole chapter about how that works. And so for the new book, I wanted to really drill down into that industry. How does the money laundering industry work, and how is technology changing it? Because those money launderers, they're high tech people.

As money's become increasingly digital, as banking has gone online, as cryptocurrency has been created, the people who launder money have moved with the times. They've become technically very skilled people. And it's not just computer hackers they're working with. They're laundering the proceeds from all types of crime enterprise.

You know, I say cartel, drug dealing and prostitution and all those heavyweight crimes that make a lot of money. 0:02:59 Geoff White That money's being put into digital channels so it can be laundered. So that's what I want to do in the new book was just write all about that and could cover that whole side of the industry. 0:03:07 Luke Connolly I haven't yet read rinsed, which is due out this month, I believe.

But I did read the Lazarus heist, which is an earlier book, and it's a great read, by the way. I definitely recommend it. 0:03:17 Geoff White Thank you. 0:03:18 Luke Connolly For the benefit of our listeners who may not have read it, can you explain what it's about?

0:03:23 Geoff White Yeah, exactly. Well, the title, the Lazarus Heist, is taken from the Lazarus group he mentioned earlier. This is a group of hackers who are believed to be working on behalf of the north korean government. They certainly hail from North Korea.

And if you're in North Korea and you're doing hacking, it's very hard to see how you could do that without the government sanctioning it in a very direct way. 0:03:42 Geoff White So the largest group are believed to be the sort of elite hacking group within North Korea, and they're accused of all sorts of crimes. I've already mentioned the hacking of Bangladesh bank, the attempted theft of a billion dollars. That was back in 2015, 2016, the raid on Sony Pictures Entertainment, which pretty much brought Sony to its knees, and also the WannaCry cyber attack, the ransomware attack from 2017, along with lots of other attacks on things like cryptocurrency businesses.

0:04:07 Geoff White The idea of all this is to sort of buy North Korea some income in a situation finds itself where it struggles to get income. 0:04:15 Brett Callow Are there objectives purely financial, or do they appear to have other motivations, too? 0:04:21 Geoff White No, I mean, North Korea has government hackers, and it's fair to say almost every single country. Does.

Any country worth its sold? Certainly the UK, the US, Canada, they have government hackers. It's an extension of what we've always done as states, which is espionage, only now it's done through cyber means. So employing government hackers to effectively spy on your enemies and in some cases, your friends to work out your informational advantage has been a thing for a while.

And North Korea does that the same as everybody else does, as best as it can. 0:04:51 Geoff White The difference with North Korea is that because of its missile tests and its nuclear weapons tests, North Korea has been put under international financial sanctions. And it's quite hard to see how North Korea could sort of make money in a legitimate way. I mean, the sanctions are so heavy, importing and exporting is largely off the books, off the cards for North Korea.

And so the country is faced with a dilemma. Well, how do we make money? How can we actually exist as a country and trade? 0:05:18 Geoff White Well, the accusation is that those government hackers have been put on the send for money.

They're meant to, as part of their remit, go and steal money and bring that back so that the regime can use it. 0:05:29 Luke Connolly How is it possible that such a small nation state, like their population, I think, is less than 30 million, that exists under crippling international sanctions? How can they command such an outsized amount of our attention? 0:05:41 Geoff White It's interesting, and that's almost certainly a deliberate strategy by North Korea.

Look, frankly, North Korea is a country, as you say. I think it's 25, 26 million or so of the population. It's a small country. It's not particularly wealthy in terms of resources beyond lots of other countries, frankly, there's no real reason for us, is there, to pay attention to North Korea.

The reason we do is twofold. Firstly, North Korea is an aspiring nuclear power and is getting hold of nuclear weapons technology and testing it in a very belligerent way. So it's endangering the world that brings it to our attention. 0:06:13 Geoff White And North Korea likes it like that.

Or at least the leadership in North Korea likes it like that. Having those nuclear weapons buys them a seat at the international table. They sit opposite to the US president. Countries like Burkina Faso don't have that because they don't have nukes, so they don't get that seat at the table.

But the other thing is obviously cybercrime and cyber activity, as I say, that springs off the back of the sanctions, have been put in place because of the nuclear weapons aspirations of North Korea. And those cyber attacks have really put North Korea on the radar. 0:06:43 Geoff White It certainly packs a punch. It's got an outsized impact.

And we can talk, if you like, about why that happens. Why in north korean society, they've managed to make that work. But certainly in terms of cyber threats in the UK, for example, intelligence agencies will tell you there's four big cyber threats, nation state cyber threats. The UK number one, and two, unsurprisingly, China and Russia number three.

And four, Iran and North Korea. And so North Korea has got almost to the top of, if you like, the Premier league table of nation states when it comes to cyber activity, which is quite a surprising turn of events, to say the least. 0:07:18 Brett Callow A lot of your work is focused on cybercrime. What made you decide to follow that route?

0:07:25 Geoff White It's interesting. So I started Channel four news that would have been 15 ish years ago, covering technology. And at that time, it was a sort of era of the kind of Apple product launches. Steve Jobs was still alive at the time, would hold up the latest gadget that they'd launch, or it was video games.

Technology was seen as being this sort of almost an end of the program. Funny, the idea that serious stories could live inside technology, and that a technology correspondent should do serious news, I don't think was widely sort of absorbed within newsrooms. So I started trying to change that, because I started going to these tech security conferences and realizing what was going on. The RSA hack happened around that time.

0:08:04 Geoff White This is serious stuff. This is part of the great game. It's part of international warfare. It's also part of organized crime.

I started seeing people losing huge amounts of money to hackers. And so I thought technology deserves a place higher up the news agenda. And so that's what I started trying to do, was to look at the dynamics, where this is coming from, who's behind cybercrime, who's doing the nation state stuff. And then from then on, really, stuff just kept amplifying.

We had WikiLeaks, we had the anonymous movement, we had the Edward Snowden thing, we had Sony, we had WannaCry. It just seems the blocks have been building. And I think really the 2016 presidential election really focused attention on this, because suddenly it appeared that the hackers had crossed over from just doing criminal bad stuff that you could kind of ignore if you closed your eyes and put your fingers in your ears. Suddenly they're interfering with elections.

And that really, really matters. And so I think that was a kind of a watershed moment. 0:08:54 Geoff White That election process, dealing with cyber criminals. 0:08:56 Luke Connolly And shining a light on their activities isn't without risk.

Have you ever had a reason to feel concern for your own personal safety? 0:09:03 Geoff White Touch wood. No. We do take this very, very seriously.

I mean, the book, I'm putting out winced is published by Penguin, as was the previous one. Lazarus heist. Penguin take this stuff very, very seriously. They have a security team at Penguin, the podcast which I co hosted with Gene Lee, who spent time in North Korea that was overseen by the BBC.

They have a high risk team who deal with all of their most risky assignments. And so we take these risks very seriously. I guess one advantage I maybe have is that I'm talking to victims of hacking, or at least covering victims of hacking quite often. And so in terms of the ways that hackers will try and manipulate you and social engineer you and trick you are things that are kind of uppermost in my mind because im speaking to people whove fallen for those tricks.

So hopefully that helps me spot stuff that comes across my radar that is suspicious and that needs sort of flagging up. 0:09:53 Geoff White But at the moment, not so much for me. I have to say there are investigative journalists out there who are covering stuff thats way more close to line and way more dangerous for them than I am, far, far more dangerous in lots of countries around the world. So in a way, the kind of crime I cover, how I cover it, and where I cover it from gives me a lot of advantages, a bit more safety, I think, than a lot of the investigative journalists who are really on the front line.

0:10:14 Brett Callow What's the weirdest story that you've covered so far, or what fact that you've come across as surprised you the most? 0:10:22 Geoff White I think it was the dark web series that we did for Audible. We did a series called the Dark Web for Audible, which talks about the dark web, what this thing is and where it comes from, what it's used for. Because I'd covered the dark web before, I knew that it was invented by the us government.

I had this sense that it had come from the us government somehow. But actually drilling down into that and hearing how that had worked was just absolutely astonishing. 0:10:45 Geoff White And back in the sort of early part of the nineties, I think it was the US Navy, the naval research laboratory, saw the growth of the early Internet and thought, well, this is great. It's great for surveillance.

We can spy on people using this thing potentially, but we could also send secret information back and forth. So, you know, the traditional James Bond plot where James Bond's hired to break into some castle and steal the microfilm, we could do that over the Internet. It'd be a lot cheaper than hiring James Bond. 0:11:13 Geoff White And so they saw the idea that you could use the Internet to send information back and forth, but they didn't want to do that over the open Internet, because in one of their secrets about that, so what they did was created the dark web, or at least the technology that sits behind the dark web, so called onion routing, which encrypts your traffic as you move around the Internet.

And that was remarkable. I spoke to one of the chaps who created that software, and it was really interesting. I sort of said, well, isn't it a bit ironic that you at the Naval Research Laboratory have helped create this for the us government, and yet your colleagues over in the Department of Justice and at the FBI and so on are now basically dealing with the fallout of this thing that you built? And he made an interesting point.

He said, when you invent something, the earliest adopters are always tending to be criminals and so on. So, you know, he talked about the invention of the car. And, you know, when the car was first invented, crime gangs would use it to hold up banks and drive off super fast, and the police, you know, couldn't keep up. But obviously, the solution wasn't to outlaw cars.

The solution was to give the cops cars as well. So his idea was that, you know, illicit use of technology happens at first, and then society sort of catches up and takes it on. I say in the dark web, I'm not sure whether he's been proved right, because it's still. 0:12:22 Geoff White A lot of the use for the dark web are still illicit.

But the idea was that eventually society will catch up and the benefits for that, all of us will spread around. I just found that actually remarkable, that idea. Oh, and the other thing that happened was they'd invented this dark web technology. But of course, if the only people using it is the us government, then it's obvious that this is dodgy traffic, encrypted traffic.

It must be the spies. 0:12:44 Geoff White So they needed to spread it so that everybody was using it. As many people as possible were using this dark web technology. And that way the spies in the us government could sneak in, hide among the crowd.

So they gave it to the electronic Frontier foundation, which is a sort of civil liberties body. And obviously, privacy, being private online, is close to the EFF's heart. And at the time, there was a guy called John Perry Barlow who actually wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, the sort of folk rock band in the US. 0:13:12 Geoff White And so John Perry Barlow was sort of running the electronic Frontier foundation, had a bunch of people coming from the US Naval Research Laboratory with this technology, and then the likes of John Perry Barlow, with tired eyed shirts and long hair, having a conversation about privacy online.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall. 0:13:30 Luke Connolly At that meeting you talked about the Lazarus group laundering some of its illegal money through Philippines casinos. And I can see how thatll work for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. How could it work for the millions and even billions that are being stolen?

0:13:46 Geoff White Yeah, well, that's really interesting. So the way it worked was north korean hackers were accused of breaking into the National bank of Bangladesh. They then found that the bank had money stashed in an account in New York, a billion dollars. And the idea was they were going to transfer the billion dollars out of that bank in New York and then launder it.

Now where that money ended up moving was the Philippines. 0:14:07 Geoff White They didn't get all billion of it. The bank spotted some suspicious transactions and stopped most of them, $81 million found its way to the Philippines and was transferred in cash. Were talking grand piano sized amounts of cash put into the casinos.

And the gamblers in the casinos would gamble over the tables. Now, they werent gambling out in the kind of areas that you and I would go to. They were gambling in private rooms. And these private rooms were administered by people working on this laundering exercise.

0:14:38 Geoff White And they made very sure that when one person gambled one amount, they would offset it against another person gambling another amount. So they could effectively make sure they got back about 90% of what they put in. That was how the sort of gambling laundering scheme worked. But just laundering that $81 million, which, by the way, they did successfully, they gambled it back and forth over the tables, recouped their 90 ish percent and then walked out of the casino with it.

That took weeks. 0:15:03 Geoff White And that's what's interesting for me about that case is the idea was to steal a billion dollars, 951 millionft precise. Now, laundering just 81 million of it took weeks at the casinos. It would have taken years, possibly years, multiple years to launder that money.

It never really made sense to me why they went to the casinos. And in the story in the Lazarus heist, there's a side issue where some of the money goes to Sri Lanka and is meant to be washed via a charity. So 20 million of this stolen 951 million goes to Sri Lanka. 0:15:38 Geoff White It enters a charity and it gets spotted by the bank being transferred to this charity and stopped.

The transaction gets stopped. And this was always seen as being a bit of a little winkle on the side of this exercise. Why were they sending 20 million to Sri Lanka? Because the bulk of the money obviously went to the Philippines.

I actually now believe that the original plan was to send all 951 million through Sri Lanka, through the charity, and then onwards to use the charity in Sri Lanka to launder the whole lot in one go, because it makes a hell of a lot more sense than sending all of it to the Philippines and then trying to launder it bit by bit over the casino tables over a year. So I suspect that the casinos plan was plan b and that plan a washing the sri lankan charity. But, yeah, these days, of course, we're talking about vastly more larger amounts of money being stolen by North Korea, $600 million in one recent case allegedly being carried out by them.

0:16:33 Geoff White But that's all in the form of cryptocurrency. So suddenly, into this new world of crypto and laundering, it is, depending on how you look at it, easier or harder. 0:16:43 Brett Callow Do you have any insights into how other cyber criminals, ransomware gangs, say, launder their crypto, convert it to cash? 0:16:52 Geoff White Yeah, there's a whole sort of economy around this.

And what's interesting is I get the feeling a lot of the conduits for this money are sort of run by the same people. So you talked there about ransomware. Ransomware. Obviously, when you pay the ransom, the hackers scramble your files, charge your ransom to unscramble them.

That ransom you pay, if you choose to pay it, will be paid in bitcoin, almost always in bitcoin. 0:17:14 Geoff White I've also covered in the book cases of drug dealers, heroin dealers in the UK, transferring their cash, their street cash, from the street transactions of heroin into cryptocurrencies. So cryptocurrency is a conduit through which a lot of this criminal money is moving. In the ransomware case, for example, it's really interesting in that they don't have the problem that the Philippines guys had, where they've got truckloads of cash and they've got to find somewhere to put it.

It's already digital. It's in cryptocurrency. 0:17:43 Geoff White The problem with cryptocurrency, as anybody who's looked into it will know. Bitcoin transactions, for example, move across a thing called the blockchain, which is an open public ledger of every transfer from every bitcoin wallet to every other bitcoin wallet.

Now, you can't always link those wallets back to the person who owns them, but you can see the transactions moving. And so for the investigators who look into ransomware, one option is to try and freeze the money. So if, for example, you commit a ransomware crime and you run off with those bitcoin and you try and transfer them to, let's say, binance or cracker or coinbase, any of the big exchanges. 0:18:16 Geoff White So you can change your stolen bitcoin to pounds and dollars.

Well, the FBI can phone up that exchange and say, hey, that money that's just come to you, that's stolen money, that's ransomware money. Don't let them change it, and your money can be frozen in the exchange. So the game now has become, how can I take my stolen crypto, move it through maybe multiple different cryptocurrencies, manage to take it out, give it to somebody who will then pay me back in cash for it. There's all these different systems that people are using to try and launder their money and stay one step ahead of the investigators.

And as we said, it's a multi, multi, multi million dollar enterprise. And so there's no shortage of people coming up with smart ways to launder all of that money. 0:18:55 Brett Callow What do you see as the future of cryptocurrency? Does this have a valid use, or is it just a digital casino chip and a tool of crime?

0:19:05 Geoff White A lot of people, I think, are tempted to look at it through the latter lens, and certainly there is criminality goes on in the crypto world. What's interesting is assessing how much cryptocurrency is illicit. There are companies that sort of do these maths and try and come out with numbers, and generally they'll come out with some quite surprisingly low numbers. As far as a lot of people are concerned, less than 1% or only a few percent of crypto being illicit.

The problem is how you reach that conclusion. 0:19:31 Geoff White So a lot of these crypto tracing companies will be looking at, for example, ransomware. When a ransom gets paid, the crypto tracing company will look at what wallet it's been transferred to and go, right, that's a ransomware gangs wallet. So any of the money going in and out of that, we know that's dodgy money.

And so they start adding up the amounts sloshing about in those dodgy wallets that they can see. 0:19:51 Geoff White And that's how you get to this number. Less than 1% or around 1% or whatever, being illicit use of crypto. The problem with that is it doesn't take into account crypto that you didn't know was dodgy and can't identify then as dodgy.

So I talked about drug gangs putting their money into cryptocurrency. Well, the way that works is I sell heroin on the street, I take the cash, I give it to a broker who converts it into crypto for me for a fee. 0:20:16 Geoff White I then have crypto and I can move it around. But of course, the tracing firms have no idea that the crypto that just got bought for cash was bought with drug cash.

And so those estimates of sort of how much money is sort of illicit are probably an underestimate. However, there are some really good reasons for people to use cryptocurrency. One of the examples that's frequently cited is remittances. If you work abroad and you want to send money back home, over the counter money broking services, particularly sending it to countries in the global south, they'll charge you a fee and sometimes quite a hefty fee.

0:20:46 Geoff White Whereas if you can get your money into cryptocurrency, you can zip it across the other side of the world, and you don't have the significant fees that you have for sort of over the counter money remittance services. So remittances is part of it. There is a concern around the decline of cash and what happens next. There is a large amount of worry, I think, from people about the idea of transactions being surveilled.

0:21:11 Geoff White You come across this when people talk about a central bank digital currency, the idea that in future, somehow, a central bank will, instead of issuing pound notes and coins, will be issuing currency digitally and trackably and traceably. And theres a lot of worry about that, because does the government then know where I spend all of my money, and can they use that in some way? Again, cryptocurrency potentially has an answer to that, which is to say, well, with crypto, yes, everythings transferred over the blockchain, but you can, if you use it correctly, you can try and do that anonymously, and you can use these systems to, to prevent surveillance, if you use them properly.

So as for where it goes, it's not going away. I have read bitcoins obituary every year since it was invented. Somebody said, this is going to crash. It's not going to go anywhere.

It's still here. 0:21:58 Geoff White And more and more institutions are starting to get into this. We've seen companies like Deutsche bank recently talking about holding, actually possessing cryptocurrency on behalf of their customers. We've had a big announcement in the US about, called an exchange traded fund, a big finance invention that's allowing normal mom and dad investors to invest in bitcoin.

So the thing's not going away. It's like it or not, if you think it's a nest of crime, fine, but it's here to stay. 0:22:24 Luke Connolly Talking about the cybercrime groups. Again, even if an individual or an organization isn't specifically targeted, it's possible that they can be directly impacted by the activities of a criminal group.

You give some examples in the Lazarus heist. Can you talk about this and why everyone should be concerned? 0:22:42 Geoff White The issue obviously is supply chains can get hit. The hackers can go after a supply chain, and even if you're one step removed from the entity that gets hit, your supplier gets hit, and a, it can ruin your service.

You're not able to provide your service to anyone anymore, or b, the hackers may use that supply chain company as a bridgehead to get into your company. The other things happened recently, notably in the case of things like SolarWinds. Is hackers breaking into a company, actually accessing the software development area of that company, changing the software to include their own viruses? 0:23:13 Geoff White And that way, when the legitimate company ships an update, or upgrades or updates their software, its customers who download the latest version of software are inadvertently downloading some of the hackers viruses.

So again, you can get caught up in these huge sort of hacks because so hackers are getting increasingly good at working out where the sort of, where's the watering hole where everybody drinks? If I can poison the watering hole, then I infect everybody, as opposed to trying to go and infect a thousand victims. 0:23:39 Brett Callow You've also written about AI in the past. What's your take on the risk that poses?

Is it being overstated or is it a serious significance risk? 0:23:55 Geoff White It's one to keep an eye on, definitely. But I think the idea that AI was going to be a sort of computer hacker's dream, I think that is probably overstating it. We're seeing.

Interestingly, Microsoft put out a report recently about nation states using AI for cyber attacks. And I got very excited and I downloaded the report thinking, this is great. This is what I've been trying to find. Let's get some detail on what's actually being used as opposed to just theories about what might be used.

0:24:21 Geoff White And the Microsoft report was good, but the uses that the crime gangs are putting AI to were very everyday uses. They use it for auditing code. So do a lot of programmers. They use it for scouting victims, surveil victims, and work out who to hit.

Well, yeah, that's okay. That's quite interesting, I suppose. Not particularly advanced. They might use it for crafting phishing emails, to make the phishing emails more convincing.

So the hackers are sort of using AI, but in the same way that lots of people are sort of using it. 0:24:49 Geoff White To tweak what they already sort of do. What we haven't, as far as I'm aware, what we haven't seen is a sort of AI attack at scale. I'm talking about ransomware.

Ransomware has become an industry because it scales. The more victims you hit with ransomware, you invent one strain of ransomware, that's it, you're done. You just infect as many people as possible with that and you get return on your investment. 0:25:09 Geoff White Some of these AI things that are going on, things like the deepfakes, it's not very scalable.

A deepfake attack has to be quite targeted. You know, if you're going to impersonate a CEO, for example, and try and trick their finance department to transfer money, well, you've got to create a deepfake of that person, and you can't just use that deepfake again on another company. You've got to create a whole new deepfake of a whole new company's CEO. So we're not, as far as I'm aware, seeing sort of mass use of AI.

It will become a tool in the army for cybercrime gangs, certainly. 0:25:38 Geoff White But in terms of this complete switch in tactics, there's a new crime type, a new criminology. I haven't seen AI generate that. Conversely, on the side of the defenders, and this is the good news bit, is machine learning has been a thing in cybersecurity for a very long time, and we call it AI.

Spotting all of those infections coming through, spotting the signal among the noise, is something AI is very good at. And there's a lot of cybersecurity defense companies and cybersecurity prevention companies using it. So I feel actually, the running is on the defender side at the moment in terms of AI and usefulness of AIh. 0:26:11 Luke Connolly Your book, one of your books, artificial intelligence, friend or foe, was released about five years ago.

Now, how do you think AI has evolved today versus how you saw it evolving five years ago? 0:26:23 Geoff White We were painfully ahead of our time doing that series. Unfortunately, had we done it in the last two years, it would have been more popular. We were trying to tap into where artificial intelligence comes from and the different applications and different uses for it.

And it has to be said, when that series went out and we were still in an environment where different types of AI research were going on in different ways. So there was AI drone research, there was AI image and pattern recognition research. 0:26:49 Geoff White There was a certain amount of generative AI research going on. So we talked to a media company who use AI to generate sports journalism and business journalism.

So after a football match, the AI would come out with a report about the football match. Player X scored a goal in the third minute against player Y. And so there were these different things. What I think's happened as far as more of the AI world in the last few years is all of these different research areas have started to come together and they've all realized that what they're all really doing is pattern spotting.

They're all trying to work out what is the pattern here, and how do we then replicate that pattern? 0:27:26 Geoff White Whether it's. If you're recognizing an image of a giraffe, the pattern is long neck, yellow and brown sort of spots. So if you're trying to spot what a giraffe looks like, that's the pattern you're looking for.

If you're trying to generate text, what's the pattern? What word comes after the word that you've just put? So pattern spotting seemed to be the thing everybody was doing. And as soon as that happened, an innovation in one area of AI research, image recognition, for example, could suddenly be applied over somewhere else in generative AI land.

0:27:54 Geoff White And so all those innovations started being spread. As far as I'm aware, that's what sort of turbo boosted things. And that, amazingly, has happened, certainly in the few years since we put that series are unaudible. 0:28:04 Brett Callow Finally, a question that we ask all our guests.

Do you think ransom payments should be banned? 0:28:10 Geoff White On the face of it, yes. The obvious and logical unethical answer is yes, we should not pay criminals a ransom. However, as soon as you say that, and you say, we're going to ban ransomware payments, there's almost a sort of what happens the day after conversation.

Right, okay, you banned ransomware payments. Tell me how that's going to work. Are you going to. Is it going to be prison sentences for people who pay ransoms?

In which case, aren't you punishing the victim there? How do you actually spot the ransomware payments being made to ban them? 0:28:39 Geoff White What do you do then for an organization that doesn't have access to its data? There's all these interesting things to work out afterwards.

So if I could wave a magic wand, ban ransomware payments today and sort out all of the problems that would cause brilliance, I would do it. But you almost can't do that. You've got to say, ban ransomware payments and then this, and solve all those other queries for anyone interested in this. By the way, there's a superb discussion at Rusi, the Royal United Services Institute with a set of panelists, including Kieran Martin, who used to run the National Cybersecurity center in the UK.

0:29:10 Geoff White And I thought that panel discussion was fantastic, because it does exactly that. It says, okay, let's imagine we decide to do it. How would we actually enact that? And the discussion starts to make you realize that although the logical answer to it is, of course, yes, we should ban it, there's a whole bunch of other conversations you have to have around that, which is a classic journalist's answer, though I don't think I'll answer the question.

0:29:30 Luke Connolly And with that, I'd like to thank you, Jep, for taking the time to join us here today. And as always, we'd like to thank our listeners for tuning in to stay up to date on the latest in cybersecurity. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast. Thanks, Jeff.

0:29:42 Geoff White Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.