Legendary Hacker Matt Suiche on Cyberwar in the Age of AI

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

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Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Joe, you know I have some prepper tendencies?

Joe Weisenthal (0:27)

Yeah, does-

Tracy Alloway (0:28)

Slightly prepper tendencies? Prepper adjacent?

Joe Weisenthal (0:31)

I know you do, because my plan for when everything goes bad is to bring my family over to your place. So I'm relying on you, actually.

Tracy Alloway (0:40)

That's fine, I actually figured that, and I've been building an extra store of supplies.

Joe Weisenthal (0:44)

I'm gonna send you a whole list of things my kids like to eat and stuff like that, just so that we're all ready.

Tracy Alloway (0:51)

Okay. Well, one of the things I saw on a bunch of the prepper boards that I sometimes look at, I don't want people to think that I'm crazy about it, but I find it interesting. I find it interesting seeing how people's insecurities manifest in physical stuff. But anyway, one of the things everyone was saying was, you need to start taking cash out because of the situation in Iran, because we're all expecting a big cyber attack that's going to absolutely destroy the US financial infrastructure.

Joe Weisenthal (1:19)

By the way, have I told you my idea for business? Like I've looked at prepper meals, like prepared meals, and they all look terrible. Like a slightly high-end version for yuppies, I think would be really good. Like something they, you know, like some nice...

Tracy Alloway (1:31)

I think it's a physical limitation on how good you can actually get, like, dry food to taste.

Joe Weisenthal (1:37)

Science can do a lot of things these days. Anyway, let's talk about the actual issue at hand. Yeah, well, are you taking cash out? No, I haven't.

Tracy Alloway (1:45)

I haven't yet. I'm relying on my store of gold and silver. That's right. But I think this raises a legitimate and actually very interesting topic, which is what do we know about Iran's cyber, I guess, facilities, skills, what could happen in this context, and then also everything that's going on with the world of AI, right? Like cyber security, cyber hacking.

It's changing really rapidly given this new technology.

Joe Weisenthal (2:15)

Totally. I mean, also, just within the context of the war itself, setting aside hypothetical doom scenarios, there's a really interesting report in the Financial Times about Israel having been able to hack into all of the traffic lights in Tehran.

Tracy Alloway (2:28)

Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (2:29)

Almost unbelievable and shocking. But there's already within the war itself, or even over the last couple of years, there was the pager attack that Israel had executed. And so, yes, cyber is part of it. And the timing is wild here because, speaking of AI, it was just on Friday. We're recording this March 5th. I'm not exactly sure the date is coming out. But a week ago, basically, there was the news, the complete collapse of the anthropic relationship with the Department of Defense or the Department of War. And so it's all in the mix right now. And how is AI actually going to change warfare? And what are the national security implications of AI? And AI and hacking, there is a lot in this sort of mix that's all happening right now.

Tracy Alloway (3:10)

Absolutely. The thing that really caught my eye was the story about a hacker using Claude to hack into the Mexican government system. Did you see that?

Joe Weisenthal (3:17)

That was really interesting because it seemed like the hacker extracted a bunch of information from Claude itself. You know, I'm pretty sure you cannot go to Claude Code and say, I want to break into the Mexican government website, help me build this app. It won't do that. It's trained to avoid malicious uses. But people find a way to jailbreak them. People find a way to sort of extract information from the AI itself that has in its training and so forth. And there's been examples of leaks where, you know, people upload data to the AI and somehow other people see it. Anyway, there's a lot here that we have to learn more about.

Tracy Alloway (3:53)

We should talk about all of it. And we do, in fact, have the perfect guest, someone who's been on the podcast before, but it's been a while. We're going to be speaking with Matt Suiche. He is the founder of OnDB, which is a data infrastructure startup for Gentic AI. So, honestly, the perfect person...

Joe Weisenthal (4:09)

And a legendary hacker.