#1617 - Mike Baker

Mike Baker (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:06)

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Mike Baker (0:20)

Hey, Del.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

Good to see you, buddy. What's happening?

Mike Baker (0:22)

Good to be seen. Good to be seen.

You know, not much going on in these times of ours.

Joe Rogan (0:28)

I'm very excited to talk to you because I had a guy on, Jamie Metzler, a scientist who scared the shit out of me, talking about China.

He was talking about China. We were talking about China amassing naval power. China's taking over tech companies and how huge they're getting and how much influence they have over their people as opposed to the way we do it.

Mike Baker (0:51)

Well, he's not wrong. No. Yeah, I can't spot the line in what you just said. But I mean, look, I mean, there's so much we can we can talk about. But if you think about it, just in the past handful of months, there was this solar winds hack, right, by the Russians. So the Russians go in, they hack into a company called SolarWinds. That is an IT management software company that happens to be fairly deep into government organizations, agencies, Treasury and a variety of others throughout the US government.

And they're also into parts of the Intel community, Defense Department, and a lot of commercial sectors. So anyway, the Russians figure this out. Now, round about December or January, Microsoft identified this as a problem. And I think it was the head of Microsoft said, it looks like the most sophisticated attack we've ever seen. So this is December, January timeframe. And they're still trying to figure out the depth of this hack by Russians.

At the same time, and going back months and months and months and months before, the Chinese had been engaged in a more sophisticated attack that while everyone is focused on what's going on and so fully aware that we got problems from nation states out there who don't like us, everybody's talking about SolarWinds. And now they've just now released information about the Chinese attack against Microsoft Exchange servers, running the Exchange email systems, and this thing is enormous. And so the Chinese, yeah, I mean, we've been so focused for four years on the Russians, and they're out there to cause us all sorts of problems, so we should be focused on them.

But it's China that's the biggest problem. And so this guy is absolutely right. Jamie's right.

Joe Rogan (2:47)

It was terrifying.

Listen to what he was talking about, the way he was explaining how they have this plan. I think he said 2049 to be the global superpower of the world and essentially be take the place of what America used to be, do it their way.

Mike Baker (3:04)

And do it their way, which means we're going to bypass all the costs and the heavy lift of research and development over the years, which could steal everything. And they've been doing it for decades. So people think, oh, China, it's a problem. We've talked about this before, this idea that perhaps this is just something relatively new or it's popped up during the previous administration of Trump.

And honest to God's truth is it's been going on for decades. And they decided that that's how they're going to get to the top of the food chain, is by stealing shit, because it's a lot easier to hoover up everything and then reverse engineer it.

And the technology has made it even easier. It used to be old school. They'd go out and recruit somebody. They'd find some Chinese American working for a company here in the States. They'd appeal to sort of, you know, you got to help the motherland.

And they would. And that was the old school way of doing it. But cyber theft is, it's incredible what they're able to do. And this latest attack, they're still trying to sort out the mess, right?

Joe Rogan (4:02)

So when they do this, so if they get into this email server, are they targeting anything specific? Is there specific companies, are they just like throwing a net out there and seeing what they catch?

Mike Baker (4:15)

Yes, is the answer to both of those.

It looks like what happened here was that their initial point of attack or the initial focus was intelligence, right? So then it branched out and it branched out very, very quickly, right? To hit everything, small companies, medium sized companies.

And that's kind of the MO for the Chinese, the Chinese regime and their intel operations.

They've got this long vision and they've also got the resources and they've got the desire to hoover up everything and then sort it out later. We take, as a country, we take a very sort of targeted approach, we say, okay, this is a piece of information that's a priority tasking for the US, for our national security. We're going to go out, we're going to figure out who has access to it. We're going to develop a very sort of surgical strike to figure out how do we get to somebody who's got this piece of information. That's typically how we or some of our allies would operate. The Russians, the Chinese have always had a different approach. I mean, the Russians is less elegant. The Russians are just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, right? But the Chinese, they've got this long view, and they've also got this ability. And so in this particular attack that they're still trying to assess, that was perpetrated by Chinese state-sponsored hackers based in China, they're just going to take everything and then they'll sift through it. They'll figure out what they got. A lot of it's going to be just chafed, not of interest, but they're going to find a lot of gold in there too. And they're willing to do that because they've got the patience to do it. They'll develop a target, they'll develop a potential recruit for years and years and years, or they'll infiltrate a society or an organization, right?