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FraudGPT + Chip Wars + Hacking Poker Machines + The Problem with Credit Bureaus

FraudGPT + Chip Wars + Hacking Poker Machines + The Problem with Credit Bureaus

Released Friday, 1st September 2023
Good episode? Give it some love!
FraudGPT + Chip Wars + Hacking Poker Machines + The Problem with Credit Bureaus

FraudGPT + Chip Wars + Hacking Poker Machines + The Problem with Credit Bureaus

FraudGPT + Chip Wars + Hacking Poker Machines + The Problem with Credit Bureaus

FraudGPT + Chip Wars + Hacking Poker Machines + The Problem with Credit Bureaus

Friday, 1st September 2023
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Episode Transcript

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0:00

Large language models like chat

0:02

GPT and Bard have guardrails.

0:05

There's stuff they won't do, things

0:07

they won't say.

0:10

Just to make sure this was still the case, I asked

0:12

chat GPT, tell me how to defeat my nemesis.

0:16

And it very politely said, if by defeat

0:18

your nemesis, you mean overcoming a

0:20

personal or professional rival or challenge

0:23

in an ethical and constructive manner, here

0:26

are some guidelines.

0:28

To which I clarified, no, like I want to destroy

0:30

them. Chat GPT, Bard,

0:32

they'll all give you some answer like, sorry,

0:35

I cannot and will not promote or provide guidance

0:38

on causing harm or engaging in destructive

0:40

behavior.

0:41

Guardrails.

0:42

I feel like there's a weird, like

0:45

it's in its own moral and ethical

0:48

quandary in the fact that it is kind of, its

0:51

existence is semi-destructive

0:53

to lots of people. They

0:58

just stop being able to answer any questions. They're

1:00

like, I'm going to put people out of work. So for that

1:03

reason, I can't engage in any of this. I

1:05

would love to help you write your copy for the

1:07

review of the Samsung television, but

1:10

this should just be a Fiverr job that you paid

1:12

somebody to do. So here's

1:15

a link to Fiverr, take care.

1:17

I would like to see that GPT model.

1:20

But we're all familiar

1:22

with this in language models. We're really familiar with

1:24

it in generative AI in general. There

1:27

are guardrails against what it will say and what it will

1:29

help you do.

1:30

But pretty much the second you're introduced to multiple

1:33

tools, all with roughly the same boundaries,

1:36

curiosity invites the question, is

1:39

there one without those boundaries?

1:42

For example, one that you could give the

1:44

prompt, write me a Python malware

1:47

that grabs a computer's username, external

1:49

IP address, and Google Chrome cookies, zips

1:51

everything up and sends it to a Discord webhook

1:54

that would get a result. Chat

1:58

GPT barred, they obviously won't.

1:59

do that, but one

2:02

could. Brief detour,

2:04

hacked has a Discord and two

2:06

buds there, Zero and RatSec

2:09

shared these two different stories back to back in the story

2:11

ideas channel about two products named

2:14

accurately

2:15

fraud GPT and

2:18

worm GPT. And

2:20

you're really getting what's on the box with these

2:22

things.

2:23

They're large language models that'll let you do

2:26

computer crimes.

2:27

That Python malware prompt I said earlier,

2:30

that's from worm GPT. It's

2:32

the example when you go to

2:34

the site. So let's take

2:36

a look at a couple stories this episode, but

2:39

we'll start there with the ever

2:41

evolving landscape of sketchy, large

2:43

language models on this

2:46

episode of

2:47

hacked. How

3:01

are

3:07

you doing, Scott? Hi, I'm

3:09

tired, Jordan. How are you?

3:11

I am wide awake.

3:13

I have this problem

3:16

where I am exhausted

3:19

from a long weekend of playing in

3:21

the smoky sun because

3:23

there are forest fires everywhere. So

3:25

there's bad air quality. And

3:27

the coffee that I have in my espresso

3:29

machine is

3:31

tragically awful to the point that I won't

3:33

even drink it. So I am uncaffeinated

3:35

and exhausted. I don't

3:38

know if you know this, but that would make this the

3:40

first caffeine free podcast.

3:43

Wow. Not of our show, but full stop.

3:45

I think there's 3 million podcasts in the world that this

3:47

is the first one. This

3:50

is definitely the first one. I'm

3:52

like, there's no chance that really

3:55

holding a cup of coffee at this moment. Any,

3:58

are you Jesus?

3:59

Yeah.

3:59

Envious. I

4:05

can't stress how bad this coffee is, but

4:10

its volume is what I go for. I

4:15

make an iced coffee craft the size of

4:16

your head

4:18

and it's

4:20

just crushed through that in two days. That

4:25

is great behavior. That

4:28

is really deeply appreciated behavior.

4:33

And people like Juan Pablo Gomez

4:36

Postigo, I'm

4:38

hoping I got that right. I think you

4:40

did.

4:41

Great behavior. We

4:44

really appreciate that. Kayla

4:46

Cotton, it means the world to us. Thank

4:48

you

4:49

so much. Tain. Nothing

4:52

but tain. And

4:55

then finally, Ross McAdamny. Thank

4:57

you so much to all our new supporters on

4:59

Patreon since the last episode. Your

5:01

support means the world to us. If

5:04

you like stories and news and conversations

5:07

about tech and how people use it and

5:10

all the strange things they get up to with it, you

5:12

should join those great people. Hackedpodcast.com

5:15

redirects to our Patreon. That's

5:17

how you can jump into the Discord where we

5:19

got a bunch

5:19

of the stories for this episode. It's also just

5:21

a great way to support the show, help

5:23

us make more stuff, have more interesting conversations,

5:26

do deeper dives. Totally. So

5:28

again, if you want to support the show, hackedpodcast.com.

5:33

Boopie-doop-boop-boop.

5:35

I'm just going to start leaving the boopie-doop-boop-boops

5:38

in here because for years I've been removing

5:40

both of us doing weird little

5:42

musical fills as transitions and adding

5:44

in musical fills as transitions. And

5:47

I'm just mowing over the same spot

5:49

twice for no reason.

5:51

That's true. We could just actually

5:53

get complicated transitions

5:55

that we make, like maybe

5:58

some small musical instruments that we play with.

5:59

with her mouth. Oh, sure. Do

6:02

it on mic. Yeah. Like a harmonica.

6:04

And just do it live. Just do it live. Just

6:06

do it live. Just shakers and gongs

6:09

and stuff. A little mouth harp. I think that's fun. It's

6:11

very old school. I feel like in like the sixties on NBC,

6:14

there'd be a, just a dude sitting next to a gong

6:16

and his xylophone every time they needed to transition.

6:18

Remember what? It was his job to go, ding, ding, ding. Remember

6:21

when we had the little mouth harp in the office? And

6:25

I got pretty good with it. I'm not going to lie. We

6:27

could.

6:29

I say this affectionately, could not handle the

6:31

responsibility of having that mouth harp. That

6:34

was, there was a good two calendar years

6:36

that just firing at all times,

6:42

just outside of my field

6:44

of view. And I think that's also when hover boards

6:46

were really popping off. So it was like mobile.

6:49

It was this like this mouth harp ripping

6:51

back and forth around me. It's good times.

6:53

Yeah, we have a playful office. Let's just say

6:56

that we have a playful office.

6:59

Ah, so where do we want to go with the worm

7:02

and the fraud and the GPTs? With

7:04

the worm and the fraud.

7:07

Let's talk about worm GPT and fraud GPT. Let's

7:10

just talk about, I just, can we just start one

7:12

level up?

7:13

I just want to talk about, because

7:16

I'm assuming, and

7:18

maybe this is my assumption that these people don't

7:20

actually have their own large language models.

7:23

That they've just figured out a way to get around

7:26

the bumpers on the real

7:28

ones. Maybe I'm incorrect in that.

7:30

Sure.

7:32

So there's

7:34

a lot of different products being

7:36

discussed here. And as we will discuss, I think the products

7:39

have varying degrees of being

7:41

real. But generally

7:43

speaking, I think a lot of them work on open source language

7:45

models. So there's a couple different

7:48

models that are just available for anyone to

7:50

use.

7:51

And the question is how much data you then

7:53

have to train it on. The model is one thing,

7:55

the training set is another. Is my layman's

7:58

understanding of this whole thing. I know worm.

7:59

chatgbt uses the

8:02

gbtj model, but

8:04

they actually trained it using chatgbt, which just tells

8:08

me that's

8:10

just an interesting,

8:13

you're using another model to train a model, but then they've been

8:16

layering in their own data and stuff

8:18

on top of it.

8:20

So it's almost like they're, to

8:22

me it just reads,

8:24

we've wrapped chatgbt and we

8:27

know the problems to get it to make things that it shouldn't.

8:29

That's at least how I feel about it.

8:32

Sure. But I'm not sure if that's true.

8:34

I think there's probably ones that work

8:36

that way where you're basically just getting a chatgbt

8:39

wrapper, but let's start kind of where you

8:41

have with wormgbt. A

8:43

bunch of places have covered this, but Krebs on

8:46

security, the OG did, I think the

8:48

best job and he broke the identity of at

8:50

least one of the devs.

8:52

So depending on when you first learned about

8:54

it, where gbt was either a no

8:57

guard rails gbt tool

8:59

explicitly for black hat, black hat

9:02

hacking,

9:03

or if you learned about it later,

9:06

it would present itself as, you know, a privacy

9:08

focused, slightly more uncensored

9:10

gbt alternative.

9:12

There's been a bit of a rebranding, which we'll talk about

9:15

even though, even though, even though

9:17

on the front page of their sites, the little image

9:19

that pops up is write me a phishing

9:21

email and bang it responds

9:24

with a phishing email. So it's like, you

9:26

know, they know who their market

9:29

is, you know? I didn't say it was a good ruse.

9:35

So the story seems to start with a

9:37

post from a user called last

9:39

on a platform called hackforms advertising

9:41

this new product retailing for between 500

9:44

and 5,000 euros, introducing my newest

9:47

creation, wormgbt.

9:49

This project aims to provide an alternative to

9:52

chat gbt, one that lets you do all

9:54

sorts of illegal stuff and easily sell

9:56

it online in the future. Everything black

9:58

hat related you can think of can be.

9:59

done with worm GPT, allowing anyone

10:02

access to malicious activity without ever

10:04

leaving the comfort of their home.

10:07

Again, all sorts of illegal stuff is

10:09

pretty important language there. So

10:12

some security researchers try it,

10:14

and you can definitely write a very boilerplate

10:16

phishing email with it. It will

10:19

do that. That guardrail does not exist.

10:23

That account last traces back to

10:25

an older username, to another older

10:28

username, which had been used on Instagram, connected

10:30

to a guy in Portugal named Rafael

10:33

Mares.

10:34

He says he's open about his involvement

10:36

in the project and says he's one of several people

10:39

working on it.

10:40

Graduated from a polytechnic institute in Portugal,

10:42

says he's about like a third of the

10:45

team.

10:46

Roughly 200 people have like purchased the service

10:48

to date, according to Mares. And

10:50

he emphasizes that his primary motivation

10:52

isn't financial, but to serve the community.

10:55

Starting from that Krebs article, I don't do

10:57

this for money. It was basically a project I thought

11:00

was interesting, and now I'm maintaining it

11:02

to help the community. Interesting. The

11:05

whole presentation of it, like when he makes the initial

11:07

forum post about it, like just even the use

11:09

of the word illegal to me is just like,

11:12

I just want to say it's, I don't know

11:14

what the right term is. It's not immature,

11:16

but I would say it's unrefined.

11:18

Like normally you would say, you can

11:21

do all sorts of stuff that are previously disallowed

11:23

on other models. You don't just

11:25

explicitly come out and be like, yo, we're here to

11:27

break the law. Yeah. Like,

11:30

well, you can see him get to that

11:33

conclusion in the wrong order.

11:36

So there's this product.

11:38

You buy the license through telegram,

11:40

but the media picks up the story, I think in part

11:43

because of that sort of inflammatory language that

11:45

you identified. It's self identifying

11:47

as a black hat tool for illegal activity. So

11:49

it gets a ton of attention. And all of

11:51

those stories,

11:54

they do two different things. The first is they

11:56

respectfully, they really hype up

11:58

what you can do with these things.

11:59

there's a sense of, we've all seen how

12:02

powerful chat GPT is. Imagine

12:04

what an evil version of it could do. And

12:06

that the stories kind of really sell how

12:08

powerful this tool is when really it's, it

12:11

sure can write a very serviceable phishing scam

12:13

email. Great. So

12:16

they're doing that as the new tool for hackers,

12:18

but they're also, you know, shining a lot

12:20

of light on an operation that is professing

12:23

to be illegal. It is claiming

12:25

to be a tool to empower people to do crimes.

12:28

And you really get the sense that the people behind

12:30

this tool get some cold feet.

12:33

Because this is where we start to see a bit more

12:35

of the rebrand, certainly in

12:37

how he's talking about it to journalists and

12:39

on some of the forums.

12:42

Really negotiating how uncensored

12:45

they're saying this thing is,

12:47

what they're saying you can do with this.

12:49

Quoting again from that Krebs article, we

12:52

are uncensored, not black hat.

12:54

From the beginning, the media has portrayed us as a

12:56

malicious large language model. When all we did

12:58

was use the term black hat GPT

13:00

for our telegram channel name as a meme. We

13:03

encourage researchers to test our tool and provide

13:05

feedback to determine if it is as bad as the media

13:08

is portraying it to the world. And

13:10

really, I think as with any project that starts with

13:12

the removal of those guardrails, they're

13:14

now in the process of slowly adding them back

13:17

in. Because like, say

13:19

you remove the guardrails to allow people to write phishing

13:21

emails or write some malicious code. You

13:24

still probably have a bunch of other guardrails

13:26

that you want to leave in. Because

13:29

even in that kind of black hat cybercrime community,

13:31

there's still a ton of stuff that to their credit

13:34

they will not tolerate. Quote, we

13:37

have prohibited some subjects on worm GPT

13:39

itself. Anything related to murders,

13:42

drug trafficking, kidnapping, child

13:44

abuse, ransomware is financial crimes.

13:46

We're working on blocking business email compromise

13:49

too. Our

13:50

plan is to have worm GPT marked as an uncensored

13:52

AI, not black hat. The easiest way

13:54

to get around this is you just say that you're making a research

13:57

tool.

13:58

He's

14:00

just like, no, we want to take the bumpers off also,

14:06

like we're doing cybersecurity research. And

14:10

to see if these models can truly become compromising threats. And

14:15

then boom, all of a sudden you're a pro-academic researcher and

14:20

not somebody who's like, we're going to do a bunch

14:22

of illegal things and

14:25

give us money to help you do illegal

14:27

things.

14:29

If you developed the open source GPT-6B or

14:35

whatever it's called, this thing is probably built on top

14:37

of. That

14:40

is an open source research project to empower

14:42

people to make their own training models.

14:45

That's kind of what you're describing.

14:47

But

14:50

the second you say we're going to

14:52

make our own

14:53

version of that, dump a bunch of stuff that we scraped

14:55

off the internet into the training set and monetize

14:58

it. And then you say, why would anyone pay for it

15:00

unless it can do something that the other ones explicitly

15:02

can't? And the only

15:04

thing is the other ones explicitly

15:07

can't do our crimes. Where GPT seems

15:09

to be stuck between trying to court

15:12

black hat users and

15:14

trying to appear publicly as

15:16

this like privacy centric GPT alternative. Meanwhile,

15:19

that user from the very beginning last is still posting on places like

15:21

hack forms like

15:24

exploit saying that the product with

15:26

the product you can quote easily by worm

15:28

GPT and ask it for a Rust malware

15:30

script

15:31

that he says will work against most antiviruses.

15:34

So kind of talking out of both sides of the mouth

15:37

a little bit on this one. I don't

15:39

know if you saw it, but Python is coming

15:41

to Microsoft Office. So

15:44

they're putting Python in Excel,

15:46

which should be very exciting. As

15:50

a vector of attack,

15:52

now you're taking out the old visual basic

15:54

style code and

15:58

stuff that

15:59

the macros are running. and you're actually introducing Python.

16:06

Which these tools are good at writing now. Should

16:11

be exciting times as Excel figures out the

16:13

bumpers

16:19

to put on the macros and stuff. And

16:24

whether they can be bypassed. Maybe

16:31

we'll wrap on worm GPT before

16:33

moving on to fraud GPT here. And

16:35

Krebs asked a very important question

16:38

that I hadn't really thought of. Which

16:40

is, what are some white hat uses

16:42

for worm GPT? To

16:45

which Mora has replied,

16:46

you can use the fixed issues on your website related

16:49

to possible SQL problems and exploits. You can

16:51

use worm GPT to create firewalls,

16:53

manage IP tables, analyze network code blockers, do math, anything. And

16:57

it is worth noting

16:58

that if that is the product that this is sort of publicly

17:00

claiming to be,

17:03

that the guardrails on much more advanced

17:05

tools like chat GPT and Bard do both of those things just

17:07

fine. They

17:09

will help you do security programming

17:11

to the best of their ability.

17:14

Worm GPT's niche either is or

17:17

isn't the wormy stuff, the underground

17:19

kind of things. And I'm really curious to see

17:21

how they sort of try to navigate that

17:23

rebrand. I feel like

17:26

you just take it down, put it back up instantly

17:28

as a cybersecurity research tool and move on with your life. Exactly.

17:37

Everybody likes to push the limits

17:39

of tech and everybody likes to do research. Discover

17:43

things they can't discover. To

17:47

me that was just a branding error.

17:51

So, Wire did a big piece on this and

17:53

I think we can spend a little less time on it. But

17:56

really the big idea that this story

17:59

brings up, That's not making necessarily

18:01

a claim about fraud GPT, but it really

18:03

is evoking the idea that one of scammers

18:06

favorite targets are other

18:08

scammers.

18:09

And that download something to

18:11

access this flashy new AI scamming tool

18:13

is pretty great bait for

18:16

scamming scammers. Seems to be a running

18:18

trend in our topics these days, the

18:20

scamming of scammers. It really does,

18:22

doesn't it? Scamming the scammers,

18:25

as targets go, they seem to be

18:27

a pretty good one.

18:29

So

18:30

security researcher Rakesh Krishnan over

18:33

at Netenrich

18:34

sort of seemed to discover this product.

18:38

It's being sold on various dark web forums and telegram

18:40

for 200 bucks a month or $1,700 a

18:42

year. And there's uncertain evidence

18:44

on this one of any actual buyers or users,

18:46

even as it's been getting a lot of media

18:49

coverage. Serjay

18:52

Shikevich over at Checkpoint

18:54

kind of made a distinction between worm GPT

18:56

and fraud GPT, which is why I wanted to talk about

18:59

them both. Worm GPT is an actual

19:01

tool that you can use and he is quite skeptical

19:03

about fraud GPT. He

19:06

actually just thinks it's a fraud. He thinks it might

19:08

actually just be a fraud. I don't want to put words in his mouth,

19:10

but

19:12

I can understand why someone would create

19:14

a fraudulent version of one of these tools to try

19:17

and scam people that want a fraudulent version of one of

19:19

these tools. And I feel like they've just come straight

19:21

up and given that the proper name, if that's actually the case,

19:23

if it is just a scam, you know,

19:25

calling it fraud GPT, you could be like, well, you

19:28

know, we called it a fraud. Like,

19:30

you know, this is kind of buyer behind. This is

19:32

on you. Totally. And

19:35

kind of looking into fraud GPT, it

19:37

seems like there's not a ton of,

19:39

there's

19:41

a lot of discussion about it, but there's no,

19:43

it's like, it's not as public as worm GPT. So

19:46

you really have no idea. You

19:48

need to almost find somebody who spent the money

19:50

on it to figure out what it's capable

19:52

of and what it is or what, you know, or spend the

19:55

money, you know, yourself, which I won't

19:57

do given the branding name of it. Precisely.

19:59

But

20:02

you have really no idea what it is capable

20:04

of. Maybe it's even better.

20:06

I've

20:11

seen some of the examples and stuff of people

20:13

making fishing websites, using it and stuff like that. But

20:18

that also seems like something you could pretty quickly do

20:20

with USource and chat GPT.

20:22

I think that's what's going to happen to me

20:24

is the future where we go

20:26

back to worm GPT guardrails, the one that they're saying

20:28

they are batting back in. It won't

20:30

help you do a murder or traffic drugs

20:33

or kidnap or abuse. Those kind of

20:35

things that are outside the scope of cybersecurity

20:38

is going to be the very strange world

20:40

of people creating fake AI tools

20:42

to help people do some of the worst things people

20:44

can do to target the people trying to do it.

20:47

It reminds me of the Are There Any

20:49

Actual

20:50

Dark Net Hitman episode? Yeah, yeah, right. It's

20:54

like there aren't really

20:55

hitmen on the dark web, but there's a lot of people

20:57

scamming people

20:59

who want to hire hitmen on the dark web. And

21:01

I think that that's probably going to be where this goes in the long term.

21:04

There will probably eventually become

21:06

some like amalgamation.

21:09

And one of these things will emerge as the actual

21:11

successful blackout one and law enforcement

21:13

will inevitably go after it. But there will be a great

21:16

number more scam versions of

21:18

GPTs and AI tools that don't really

21:20

do what they do or do a pretty bad job, but

21:22

are really more about targeting the people that want to use

21:24

those tools. Yes. Yeah, I agree with

21:26

you. I think the other thing too is that I

21:28

think the

21:31

yeah, it's hard to justify that you've

21:33

spent $1,700 on something called fraud GPT

21:35

when you contact PayPal and say, hey, can

21:38

I reverse this transaction?

21:40

Yeah, same kind of thing as the hitman thing.

21:43

You wire somebody $20,000 and then

21:45

you call your credit card

21:47

company and be like, well, I was actually paying for an assassination

21:50

that didn't happen. So I'd like my money back. It

21:53

says here you want your money back for a purchase of something called

21:55

murder GPT. What's that about?

21:58

And you're like, oh, it's really what was on the board.

21:59

I was just looking for advice to do a murder.

22:05

Yeah, that's definitely going to be a thing. I

22:10

wish I knew fraud GPT. I

22:15

wish I knew if it was actually just a

22:17

fraud, if it was a scam. Because

22:20

I got

22:21

to say if it is, I respect the

22:24

branding. Send us

22:26

money and we'll give you access to this tool. Just

22:31

kidding, you got con. It's

22:35

like, oh, it's GPT for doing fraud. They're

22:38

like, we did not say that. We

22:41

said it

22:42

is a fraud to GPT. I don't know

22:44

how you're angry at us. Thanks

22:47

for the bit. You've

22:50

been scammed. Boom.

22:57

As the Bitcoin craze hit and

22:59

died,

22:59

and all of a sudden mining was no more. Everybody

23:02

was like, oh my God, Nvidia's shares are

23:04

going to die. And

23:07

then they quartered and then boom. All

23:10

of a sudden it's like AI is powered by Nvidia chipsets and then bang, it's

23:12

straight back up.

23:13

Microsoft's

23:16

working on an AI powered assistant, like a proper

23:19

large language model assistant

23:21

that integrates across their office suite, as

23:24

well as the Azure platform.

23:26

So it's like, yeah,

23:29

AI is here. We are

23:31

in the

23:34

moment and it's going to be interesting to see if it becomes

23:36

3D TV or whether it's going

23:38

to become something else. It'll

23:43

be, I don't know, I'm excited by it. I think

23:45

it's going to be cool. Especially

23:48

if they start developing it

23:50

into business. We've

23:53

talked about this before, but when

23:55

you look at productivity from a unit of labor

23:57

as we go back into economics, as I often do,

24:00

I'm sorry, people.

24:02

The

24:05

productivity constantly, you know, computers make us more productive.

24:08

All of a sudden we have networking. All

24:11

of a sudden we have, you know, this. We

24:13

have cell phones. We have

24:15

microcomputers that carry with us.

24:17

And it just makes us more and more and more effective per unit of human

24:19

labor. And I feel like with gross adoption of these

24:21

kind of things, like

24:24

when I open Google, get an email and hit reply, and

24:27

I'm just on the content of the email that I got.

24:30

Like that's a productivity enhancer.

24:33

Maybe I have to edit it, but it's still a lot

24:35

better than if I had to write it myself. Yeah.

24:39

And it's like I just feel like we're going that way. So

24:41

it's going to be exciting times. Yeah, 12

24:43

months ago, an email that you might have had to tweak

24:46

still would have had to have been generated by like a person

24:48

in your employment. Yeah. There's really no

24:50

pretending we haven't crossed some kind of a line. Yeah.

24:54

Even if we are in that kind of like trough

24:56

of disillusionment of what they can do, that, oh

24:58

my gosh, eight months in they haven't replaced everyone,

25:00

it was all made up. It's like, no,

25:03

we're at the beginning of a very, very, very long tail

25:05

with these things. We've been using kind

25:07

of AI and statistical modeling and stuff like

25:09

that for spam

25:11

prevention for decades now. Yeah. And

25:14

I feel like we're getting to that point

25:16

where we're

25:17

going to start to see these models. We

25:21

might actually be able to use email again soon.

25:24

We'll have cybersecurity AI's

25:26

that... Yeah, sure. Yeah.

25:30

And they might also, any links

25:32

in an email, they'll open in a sandbox,

25:35

do a full sweep

25:37

of the code on the other side. Like they'll get the

25:39

source of the website, sweep it, verify

25:42

all those links are valid. There's nothing malicious

25:45

about it. And then allow us to open

25:47

those links or else they'll just remove them or remove

25:49

the email entirely. Sure.

25:52

So I think the counter

25:54

side of things writing crappy

25:57

phishing emails is that we might

25:59

get some AI's.

25:59

that do some good for us and stop

26:02

us from being fished.

26:03

I wouldn't be mad about that. No. I

26:06

think we're going to need to, not to get ahead of ourselves,

26:08

but I recently heard the term, and

26:10

I'd probably heard it before at some point in my life, but I

26:13

really clocked it the other day, was I heard

26:15

the term chip wars the other day.

26:17

Like that's a fun new expression

26:19

I'd never really thought about before.

26:21

And I think at some point on this show, we're going to have to do a

26:23

deep dive into like the ecosystem of,

26:26

you brought up Nvidia, but like chips and semiconductors.

26:29

Yeah. And as we move

26:31

into this like AI Gold Rush era,

26:34

those are the pickaxes. And they're

26:36

this like physically produced commodity

26:39

that is deeply political, deeply

26:41

geographical, and it's probably going

26:43

to be the like focal point of some

26:45

like very serious conflict over the coming

26:47

years and decades. And I want

26:49

to understand it more.

26:50

Well, do we want to just tack that

26:52

onto this chatty chat episode? We can have a brief chat about

26:55

it because I've been following it.

26:57

I'm very intrigued. Well, why don't we keep

26:59

it over to commercial and when we come back, we'll

27:02

talk poker, we'll talk credit

27:04

checks, and we'll talk chips.

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27:40

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27:44

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27:47

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27:50

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28:12

Aside

28:15

from just the AI, you know, war

28:18

and the pickaxes, as you were mentioning

28:20

in the caves and mines of artificial

28:22

intelligence,

28:23

you know, chips are in

28:26

COVID, obviously, you know, there was massive logistical

28:28

headaches and issues, so like the fact

28:31

that vehicle prices went crazy and

28:33

you couldn't get vehicles and used cars

28:35

were selling for so much.

28:38

You know, you had entire auto dealer

28:40

lots full of pickup

28:42

trucks

28:43

that you couldn't, you could buy, but

28:46

you couldn't take because they were still waiting

28:48

for some of the primary chips to go in them. So it's like,

28:50

it's not even

28:51

just in the AI battle, it's

28:53

in everything now, like there's chips in. I

28:56

have 40 devices on my desk

28:58

and each one of them has probably every

29:01

single one, 10 chips in them, different

29:03

types of chips.

29:04

So yeah, I think that COVID

29:07

shined a spotlight on

29:11

the fact that, wow,

29:15

these are actually very important now

29:17

to not only daily

29:20

life and productivity, but national security

29:23

and the economy.

29:25

So all of a sudden they became a point

29:28

of political, politicization

29:31

around them is, oh my God. So

29:33

America has been incentivizing

29:35

companies creating essentially

29:38

semiconductor chip factories in the States.

29:41

So I know Texas is getting a bunch of new

29:44

developments in that regard, new companies opening

29:46

and moving and kind of quote

29:49

unquote state side

29:51

development of chips and manufacturing

29:54

of them. So it's a huge deal.

29:57

Yeah, the question that got me onto it,

29:59

and this is,

29:59

maybe spoiling some of the early writing

30:02

I've done for that little chipped series

30:04

I wanna do. Oh no. No, no,

30:07

no, no, in a good way. Like let's talk about it. Cause

30:09

I find it interesting was, so

30:12

it's like once you accept the premise that these semiconductors

30:14

are gonna absolutely everything, you kind of

30:16

also then have the thought of like, well, that means there's a great

30:19

number of them. So

30:20

like there's so, so many of them,

30:23

what would it mean if we were producing less? What would mean

30:25

if they were the heart of a trade war?

30:27

And the thing that I bumped into that I didn't really appreciate

30:31

is that chips have a life cycle.

30:33

And that felt like kind of a light bulb going

30:35

off for me. It's like they get older and they eventually

30:38

die. The thing that empowers pretty much every

30:40

piece of technology, every tool you use

30:42

on a day-to-day basis has a life

30:45

cycle. There's like really interesting science

30:47

of why that happens. Electrons getting caught in

30:49

these little loops that can just sort of like slowly

30:51

degrade inside of a semiconductor. It's

30:54

a bit above my head. But once you accept the premise

30:57

that this isn't just a product, it's a disposable

30:59

product. It is a product you have

31:01

to be constantly making new ones of

31:04

because on a pretty short timeline historically,

31:07

the ones we have will eventually

31:09

burn out. Yes. Maybe not

31:11

today, maybe not tomorrow, but like eventually they're

31:13

not gonna work anymore. So

31:14

you do, even if you stop making

31:16

them better, you still have to keep making

31:19

more.

31:20

And some of the biggest factories

31:23

and centers of production for these are in some

31:25

of the most politically contentious regions

31:27

on Earth. And we sort of just walked

31:30

backwards into that problem that we're

31:32

now trying desperately to work our way back

31:34

out of. They're going to be the commodity

31:36

we fight over, I think over the coming decades.

31:39

Yeah,

31:41

that's where this might go. Here's

31:44

the thing for me is that

31:46

I'm less in that camp. I

31:49

think that there's a five-year window here where

31:53

people have realized how important they are. The

31:56

manufacturing of chips and integrated circuits

31:59

and stuff like that.

31:59

Yes, they do typically

32:02

have a lifetime, like

32:05

you're a synthesizer guy and I know there's ICs and stuff

32:10

that can go in since chips that break and they'll literally just crack sometimes.

32:15

And then you have to unsalt it. Yeah,

32:18

I think you're a Gameboy guy too, aren't

32:20

you?

32:21

So you like change the chips on boards. Anyway,

32:24

the thing for me is like I'm not, like they're not like lithium.

32:29

The manufacturing creation of basic

32:31

chips is pretty, I don't

32:33

want to say it's easy, but it's a solved

32:35

problem. Well known at this point,

32:37

yes.

32:40

There's always innovations of it, you know, we're

32:42

talking like I think in videos down to like five.

32:45

Ridiculous shit. Yeah,

32:48

like super fine, which

32:51

also probably just shortens their lifespan. Like

32:53

I have one of AMD's new chipsets and

32:55

I know that if you can get any extra heat on it,

32:58

like if it's not cooled excessively perfect,

33:01

it will actually destroy itself.

33:03

So

33:05

anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying I'm not

33:07

too worried

33:07

about it. I think that people realize how important they are

33:10

to day to day life

33:12

and given

33:14

the political uncertainty in the world for economic

33:16

health,

33:19

state health, security

33:22

health, national security health, you

33:25

need to make sure that you have them. Like

33:27

I don't feel like there's like a vault of them that

33:29

we're going to go to war for like oil because

33:32

that is a finite commodity. It's

33:34

like chips are like we can make our own. Sure,

33:37

silica is plentiful.

33:38

We just, people just need

33:40

to make them. And that's

33:42

why you're seeing in America right now where they're just like,

33:45

okay, this is a problem, you know,

33:48

here's X billion dollars and

33:50

we're going to incentivize the development of this

33:52

industry because we see

33:54

this as being a potential future problem if we

33:56

have a massive

33:58

contentious trade war with China. Yeah.

34:18

countries and powered interests find

34:24

it to like mess with each other. I'm

34:31

hoping

34:32

everyone's chill about it. The

34:37

thing for me is I more hope that the

34:39

humans that are in charge of making

34:41

it more chill, i.e.

34:46

the bureaucrats that are in

34:48

Washington and other countries looking

34:50

to create new industries for it,

34:52

don't mess it up. Because

34:55

humans are the biggest fault in this. I'm

34:59

not too super worried about it. It's

35:04

just whether they drop the bag.

35:07

You want to talk about

35:11

poker?

35:13

Should

35:15

we just play poker? Should

35:19

we have a patron poker night? Into

35:24

a patron poker game,

35:26

I'm super keen.

35:29

That's pretty fun. It

35:34

wouldn't work

35:34

well in an audio platform, but we sure

35:37

could do a video stream. Yeah,

35:39

we'd just do an online tournament. It'd

35:41

be fun.

35:42

Anyway,

35:44

digressions aside.

35:48

I'm a professional

35:50

poker. I

35:54

skim off a lot of

35:55

details.

35:59

wild odds, really

36:02

bad odds for this shot they made, but they win

36:04

the hand. And immediately everyone

36:06

says this is cheating to the point that there is

36:08

like a full on investigation of this hand

36:11

of poker basically.

36:12

And the investigation

36:14

comes back clean.

36:16

But in the post mortem,

36:18

the events investigators make

36:21

this claim basically saying if any cheating

36:23

had happened, which it didn't, it wasn't

36:25

anything hardware related. It would have been

36:27

something social, a player collaborating

36:30

with someone on the inside,

36:31

which they had used the cameras and they disproven.

36:34

But they were very adamant that

36:37

it wasn't a hardware compromise.

36:39

Why?

36:40

Because the deckmate shuffling machine

36:42

is secure and cannot be compromised.

36:46

That was the claim.

36:47

Deckmate, for anyone that doesn't

36:49

know, is the most commonly used shuffling machine

36:52

in the world. And this event makes

36:54

this claim made to secure, it cannot be tampered with.

36:57

And some guys at a security research

37:00

firm took that claim personally.

37:03

Recently, the Black Hat Security Conference was

37:05

held in Las Vegas. And at that event, security

37:08

researchers Tartaro, Nassim and Shackelford

37:10

from I.O. Active unveiled

37:12

their findings on the deckmate, this very

37:15

prevalent automated card shuffling machine. What

37:17

they found is that the deckmate two, the

37:20

sort of most up to date latest version of this product,

37:23

does have a vulnerability. If

37:26

a device is plugged into the exposed USB

37:29

port on the deckmate two, typically

37:31

it's like on the underside of the table sometimes,

37:34

the machine's code can be tampered

37:36

with. They were able to do this in a lab setting,

37:38

allowing full control over the shuffler. Deckmate

37:41

two features an internal camera that verifies the presence

37:44

of all of the cards in the system. Intruders

37:46

were able to access this camera to determine

37:48

the deck sequence in real time and transmit

37:51

that data via Bluetooth to

37:53

a nearby device. And

37:55

they emphasized that this technique granted them

37:57

pretty much total control over the shuffler, enabling

37:59

the to protect every other player's hand. Read

38:02

a little bit more about it. The hacking method can be applied

38:05

to pretty much any card game, but it is super

38:07

useful in Texas Hold'em Poker, which I think was

38:09

their case study based on the story that sparked

38:11

all this. In

38:13

Texas Hold'em, as you know, discerning the deck sequence

38:16

allows for the prediction of each player's hand, really

38:18

regardless of their actual choices in

38:21

the game,

38:22

even if the deck is cut by a dealer or cheating player, can

38:24

to do so the card sequence as soon as the initial three

38:26

flop cards are shown.

38:28

Do you play poker? I do play a little

38:30

bit of poker, not a ton, but a bit.

38:33

But you have played poker? I'm familiar with the

38:35

basics.

38:36

It's not really

38:38

important to the story. The thing that I

38:40

find most interesting about the story is that like, you

38:43

should never claim that something's unhackable. That's

38:45

literally just telling. Right, right. A massive

38:47

group of highly skilled, curious.

38:50

Yes. Puzzle solvers, that

38:52

there's a puzzle over here that they need to solve,

38:55

and you're always gonna end up on the losing

38:57

side of that usually. Exactly.

38:59

Yes. The... Yeah,

39:03

I don't... Obviously, like

39:05

when you read about their kind

39:07

of hack and their implementation and stuff,

39:09

pretty sophisticated. The other thing you can't overlook

39:12

is that the...

39:13

Like in the initial incident, like

39:16

there's a lot of... Like if you've ever watched

39:18

poker or been in any bar where there's this

39:20

poker randomly on TV, which is the... A

39:24

lot of bars. There's obviously micro cameras

39:26

in the cloth or like along the edge of the

39:28

table, right? Because they see the... Or from the bottom

39:31

looking up so that the production people can

39:33

see the cards so that they know

39:35

what you have. And then they throw it into

39:37

the computer and it calculates all the odds and you see

39:39

all that stuff in real time.

39:41

So it's like there's more technology

39:43

here than just the deckmate. Definitely.

39:47

So to say that it couldn't... You couldn't be hacked,

39:49

and there's no problems there

39:51

because the deckmate's unhackable. It's like, well, there's so

39:54

many other things going on at

39:56

a televised poker table. Certainly.

39:59

And so many people.

40:00

that

40:01

it's a wild, wild claim to say that

40:04

it's, well, the deck shuffler is fine. Yeah.

40:07

It's like, well, what about the other 38 fail

40:09

points? Exactly. So the manufacturers

40:12

of the deckmate did respond to this demonstration

40:14

saying there is no proof that one

40:17

of these devices has ever been compromised in

40:19

this way in a casino. The

40:21

obvious response to that is that if

40:23

there had been and it was successful, we

40:25

sure wouldn't know about it. But what's

40:28

interesting to me about this is if the

40:30

idea is that yes, this USB,

40:32

if you were to plug into it is vulnerable, but

40:34

there are so many other security infrastructure

40:37

elements surrounding these machines when they're

40:39

actually being used that actually realizing

40:41

that compromise is impossible. If that's

40:44

the argument, what you're really arguing

40:46

is that yes, we are selling a vulnerable

40:48

product, but its use is invulnerable for reasons

40:50

that have nothing to do with us. Yeah. Casinos

40:52

are invulnerable, but our device is a

40:55

very strange

40:56

argument to me.

40:59

There is a bunch of regulations surrounding this.

41:01

Like hashing functions are like regulated

41:03

at a state level. It's like they've gotten,

41:05

the regulations have gotten quite into the technical

41:07

weeds when it comes to

41:10

gambling tech, I guess.

41:12

But IOactive argues that like

41:15

this is the tip of the iceberg. There are

41:17

pretty deep security issues in a lot of

41:19

the stuff being used inside of casinos.

41:22

Yeah. Currently today. Any

41:24

of those pieces of hardware,

41:27

like

41:30

how do you make something tamper-proof? You

41:32

know, we've been, we've spent. Well, here's the wild thing.

41:35

The Deckmate One didn't have a USB drive. Like

41:38

the first version of this product didn't have a port.

41:40

They still found a way to compromise it, but they had to hack

41:42

it open. Yeah. It's like, well, that's better. Maybe

41:45

don't put a hole in it. Because the other thing too

41:48

is like casinos don't

41:50

really care

41:51

about poker. And like they

41:53

care about it in the sense that people play it and they make money from

41:55

it, but they don't care about the outcome. Interesting.

41:58

VLT's inside.

41:59

They care far more about sure

42:02

but it's like if one person on

42:04

the table loses a thousand dollars to another

42:06

person on the table They still get the rake

42:09

and it's like yeah No, they're good They're fine

42:12

and they know that that person's gonna then walk over

42:14

to Whatever blackjack and lose

42:16

it on blackjack or take it to you know

42:19

One of the other games and and just

42:21

it is what it is like the house wins like that's

42:24

why yeah You've never hear of casinos

42:26

going bankrupt. It's it's so

42:28

to me It's like if

42:29

you can make these devices and make them secure

42:32

the house has no Motive

42:35

to cheat they don't care unless

42:37

something like LA's has a good live casino Like

42:40

if you've ever seen it on YouTube pretty popular

42:42

poker channel Okay is they

42:44

they might have a bit of bias

42:47

in it because there are Regulars

42:50

and there's personalities that play in it you

42:52

often see like

42:54

Somebody

42:56

sent me a clip from it the other day one of my group

42:58

chats came through and it was one of the players

43:01

was The founder of door dash

43:03

like there there's some quite frequently

43:06

like relative Like nerdy

43:08

celebrities that will go through and play

43:10

Okay, so it's like they I can

43:12

see them having a bit more motive to

43:15

Like but I wouldn't see them wanting

43:17

to tamper with it like that. The house really doesn't

43:20

win in that case sure The

43:22

reality is too is that just poker

43:24

is a game of insane luck like I played

43:27

a lot of poker a few weekends ago and I

43:31

Got beat

43:32

all in by a guy who

43:34

hadn't looked at his cards

43:37

I'm

43:39

not glad you lost. That's pretty metal it

43:42

was so the

43:44

I Had an ace ten.

43:47

Okay, and he and

43:49

they didn't even look at their cards

43:51

I went in like whatever went

43:53

in something something else. It was just the two of us left

43:56

still hadn't looked at his cards The flop

43:58

came and it was an ace Queen

43:59

So I had two pairs like the nuts pair,

44:05

like I had the aces. So I was like, I'm

44:07

all in. He calls it,

44:09

next two cards. Doesn't

44:11

still doesn't flip his cards because he hasn't looked at them yet. I

44:13

flip mine. So I've got the ace 10. It's

44:16

like a six and a two rainbow. Like there's

44:18

no flush potentials, no anything.

44:20

And he rolls his cards

44:22

and the first one's a queen. So he's got a pair

44:24

of queens, but I've still got the ace pairs and he rolls

44:27

the second one and it's another queen. So

44:29

he had three of a kind queens, blind.

44:32

The only like realistic hand that

44:34

could have beat me, he had blind.

44:37

So it's like, you can't just look at one

44:40

person calling a bluff and be like,

44:43

and be like, there's cheating happening. Anyway, I'm

44:45

just, that was a long way for me to advance

44:47

some frustration about these games. You just needed to get that

44:49

out. And I get why, because that's infuriating.

44:53

Yes, yes. So,

44:56

so there's a lot of luck in it. So,

44:59

especially with players that aren't

45:01

super skilled, like when skilled players

45:03

look at bad plays by bad players,

45:06

they think that there might be maliciousness in

45:08

it, but really they're just probably not that good.

45:11

There's a lot of luck in it. And

45:14

I personally,

45:15

as a not, I enjoy a game of poker,

45:17

but I'm not a big gambler. Yeah.

45:20

I want the gambling tech industry to

45:22

keep making large claims about how locked

45:24

down their shit is. Totally. And

45:26

fighting the ire of security researchers. If

45:29

that's where all this goes, is just

45:31

people releasing new purportedly

45:34

unhackable pieces of like gambling tech, and

45:36

then people just hacking the crap out of them. Yeah.

45:39

And then we just go back and forth with that. I'll watch

45:41

that show all day. That sounds awesome. Well,

45:43

there's also another fascinating side to this

45:46

in the sense that like, gambling is

45:48

such a tax generator, right? Like

45:50

everywhere that there is gambling, there

45:53

are massive amounts of tax being collected

45:55

on it.

45:56

Yeah, bad odds are profitable.

45:58

Yes.

45:59

casinos like great businesses, but they're

46:02

generally large contributors to our

46:04

social systems.

46:06

So it's this interesting give and take.

46:11

I'm pretty sure that most jurisdictions, like tampering

46:13

with gambling machines is like a massive, massive

46:15

crime. Because

46:18

it's like you shouldn't be trying to rig

46:20

the odds.

46:21

So like all of the people,

46:23

whenever people think about hacking casinos, they

46:29

think about the

46:31

patron hacking the casino for

46:33

profit, not the casino

46:35

hacking the casino for question

46:38

mark, maybe

46:41

profit, maybe. This

46:46

kind of rings, and this is just because I've been

46:48

playing a decent amount of chess lately too. This

46:51

brings me to the

46:53

chess cheating scam.

46:55

Same kind of vibe.

46:59

Well,

47:02

yeah, that was an interesting

47:05

story. Magnus Carlsen accused Hans

47:08

Niemann in a live game.

47:12

We're not talking

47:14

about, I

47:15

don't know, I

47:19

think it was a live game, wasn't it? It

47:24

was

47:25

so unpredictably good. And

47:29

there's entire chess AI now that rate your moves.

47:34

And he was making the best logistical probabilistic

47:36

quality move every time. Or

47:39

something like that. So

47:44

they essentially accused him of cheating. Exactly.

47:55

He

48:00

plays the seams out of keeping

48:02

with that. And he's really,

48:04

really crushed it. They just settled this lawsuit,

48:07

but there was entire rumor.

48:10

Really? Like there was conspiracies

48:12

about like vibrating, you know.

48:14

Yeah. Yeah.

48:17

Anal beads, I guess there's no other way to say. Yeah,

48:19

we can just say, yeah, talking about a chess pop

48:22

plug. Yeah, yeah. No, I followed

48:24

the story. The Morse codes you,

48:26

the move. Yeah. Even

48:28

just like a simple, like don't make that move. Yeah.

48:32

Even a little bit of feedback

48:35

could be immensely useful for a person

48:38

playing at that level of chess.

48:40

Anyway, so rigging poker card

48:43

shufflers kind of

48:46

rings this into my head for no reason. Now

48:48

we're just on a tired, exhausted

48:51

podcast creating a side trip. So,

48:57

but a fascinating story nonetheless. Let's

48:59

wrap it up by talking about the most interesting,

49:01

exciting, provocative topic of all

49:04

credit bureaus. Yes. Do

49:06

you know something I learned recently before we even get going? I just want

49:08

to jump in here. Hit me. Canadian

49:11

credit scores are out of 900 and apparently

49:13

American credit scores are out of 850. And

49:15

I did

49:15

not know that. Yeah, I think

49:18

I listened to like a financial advice

49:20

show once years ago and

49:22

they kept referring to credit scores. And I was like, these

49:24

people's credit scores aren't as good as they're

49:26

saying they are. And I realized later that

49:28

we just have a different like metric we're

49:30

grading on a different curve here in Canada. 82% of

49:34

American adults had a credit card in 2022

49:38

and credit card applications leads to this and

49:40

credit cards in general are leading to this constant data

49:42

transfer between people and credit

49:45

bureaus. Credit bureaus are supposed to play

49:47

a role in fraud prevention.

49:49

But at some point

49:50

credit bureaus realized that they had this really valuable

49:53

trough of data and decided to

49:56

diversify its use, let's call it.

49:58

Okay.

49:59

of something called credit headers to

50:02

other companies. Obviously

50:05

there's a lot of information they can't

50:07

sell. Regulation

50:10

prevents it. But

50:13

the credit header, which typically contains

50:15

a person's name, birth date,

50:16

current and prior addresses, and social security number, as

50:21

well as their telephone number, are all part of

50:23

this little packet of information

50:26

that they can't sell. And I don't really do. I

50:28

have your name, number, and address, but I also have your

50:30

credit score and your social security.

50:33

So it's like if I'm going to steal your identity, I have the starter pack. Precisely.

50:38

Cool. Yeah, it's super cool and good. And

50:40

basically because this information is relatively,

50:43

it's

50:44

meaningfully less locked down

50:46

than a lot of other information regarding your credit and financial

50:49

history. It has become a big

50:51

cybercrime spotlight, has been shined on

50:54

top of it. The

50:55

reason we bring this up is because 404 Media,

50:58

which is this really cool new media operation

51:00

started by a bunch of ex-vice tech reporters,

51:02

broke this story about Telegram bot in

51:05

which you can purchase basically credit header

51:07

information. 15 bucks in

51:10

Bitcoin with an extra option for

51:12

the social security number at an extra $20 bill

51:15

you can purchase a person's information

51:18

through this bot

51:19

based on pretty minimal input, typically

51:22

their name and the state that they're operating in.

51:24

I find it so funny that we spend so much time

51:26

trying to protect a lot of this information and then

51:29

you can just buy it online. Oh, completely.

51:31

It's also very, very difficult for, there's a lot

51:33

of different tools that you can use, like consumer

51:36

facing tools for getting your information

51:38

pulled off of different databases and

51:40

stuff online,

51:42

products that will just reach out to them and get your stuff

51:44

pulled.

51:44

We've worked with them before in the show and

51:47

credit headers are apparently one of the

51:49

most difficult things to have pulled

51:51

from these sites. So

51:55

there's a service for

51:58

accessing these called TLO XP.

52:00

I'm not sure if that's how you actually pronounce it. It's

52:05

capital T-L-O, lowercase

52:07

XP. It's owned by TransUnion.

52:11

It is so popular for use among cybercriminals that

52:14

the term to T-L-O, someone has become a verb in

52:17

online hacking forums. TransUnion

52:20

acknowledges that there has been unauthorized access,

52:23

but they emphasize obviously that

52:25

we're trying

52:26

to stop this from happening. It's not to the community

52:28

to the point that now that there

52:30

are very easily accessible tools that

52:33

with very little information you can find a person's

52:35

credit header information.

52:37

The pilot projects

52:39

for some of these or the test case for some of these has

52:41

been,

52:43

can we get Joe Rogan's Social Security number? Can

52:45

we get Elon Musk's Social Security

52:47

number? The researchers were able to find this information

52:50

on pretty much anybody you can think of.

52:52

Right now it looks like credit bureaus. If

52:55

we're trying to trace this back to its source, it

52:57

obviously arrives at credit bureaus. They're the ones

52:59

who are selling off this little sliver of

53:01

information to different people, and

53:04

it's only as secure as the people they sell

53:06

them to. I got news for you. Hit

53:08

me. T-L-O XP has rebranded.

53:13

That's

53:13

now called True. True

53:15

Lookup. Oh,

53:18

it sounds honest. So the verb's going to have to change.

53:21

To true somebody. You know what's funny is it probably

53:23

won't. It'll probably keep being to T-L-O

53:25

someone, and its meaning will just fade

53:27

into obscurity. Exactly. And

53:30

then 20 years from now, somebody else on some other podcast

53:32

will be like, T-L-O, where did that start? Totally.

53:35

And they'll be like, well, in 2023, Jordan

53:39

Blumen of Hacked Podcast did that.

53:42

So this is

53:44

such an essential part of doxxing people at this

53:46

point. It sounds like that

53:49

there is probably going to be some sort of a legal

53:51

response to it. The Credit Fraud and Prevention Bureau

53:53

is considering to review rules and regulations for credit

53:55

header data. We've recognized

53:57

that this is a problem and a vulnerability.

54:00

But these rule changes are

54:02

still in their

54:03

earliest stages, if anything is

54:05

ever really realized. Because again, there's a lot of people

54:07

making a ton of money selling these things. So there's

54:09

gonna be some pushback.

54:11

But it is to say that

54:13

this credit header data poses a significant

54:16

privacy and security risk. And folks should

54:18

know about it.

54:18

Crazy, interesting story.

54:20

Yeah, it's a fascinating one.

54:22

Well, worm GPT, fraud GPT,

54:25

black hat, poker cheating, and telegram

54:29

credit score vending machine bots. Yeah, thanks

54:31

again for everybody listening. And

54:33

a special thanks to all the patrons and people

54:35

in the Discord and people that follow us on our

54:37

largely muted social media channels. We

54:41

will- We appreciate you. Have

54:43

an update on merch very soon. I know

54:45

we've repetitively said that, but we

54:48

are just in the process of waiting

54:50

for some finals and soon, soon.

54:53

We have been, we're

54:55

stitching the t-shirts ourselves. That's why it's taking

54:57

so long. I've been screen printing hats in

54:59

my bathroom. Yes. Covered

55:02

in chemicals. It's just taken along to the- George.

55:05

So yeah, but

55:07

thanks for everything. We'll see you guys soon. And

55:11

yeah, have a great couple of weeks until we see

55:13

you again. Catch you in the next one.

55:16

Thanks for watching. See you next

55:18

time. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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