(Techno music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Presenting, Accelerating Automation, with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco (Techno music ends) >> We're back, this is Dave Vellante, and TK Keanini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco. TK, my friend good to see you again. >> How are you? >> Good, I mean you and I were in Barcelona in January, and yeah, we saw this thing coming but we didn't see it coming this way, did we? >> No, no one did. But yeah, that was right before everything happened. >> Well, it's weird. I mean, it was in the back of our minds in January, we started, "Well, Barcelona hasn't really been hit yet." It looked like it was really isolated in China, but wow, what a change. And I guess I'd start with, we're seeing really a secular change in your space, in security; identity, access, management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent. What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. To some degree, it's changed forever. I do a lot of my work remotely, and so being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, remote work, remote education, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect, and the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >> Yeah, and when you see that work from home pivot, I mean, our estimates along with our partner, DTR, about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID, and now it's north of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months, we'll see what happens with the fall surge. But people essentially expect that to at least double, that 16% going forward indefinitely. So what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how organizations are approaching security? >> Yeah, I just think from a mindset standpoint, what was optional maybe last year is no longer optional. And I don't think it's going to go back. I think a lot of people have changed the way they live and the way they work, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases yield more productivity. Again, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is, it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's the balance we need to keep, which is, we need to be extra diligent on how we go about securing infrastructure how we go about securing even our social channels. Because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's become the new norm. >> You've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in theCUBE one time is that the adversary is highly capable, I'll sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you described it is, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guys' return on investment, increase their costs, increase the numerator. But as work shifts from home, I'm in my house. My Wi-Fi and my router, with my dog's name is the password. It's much much harder for me to increase that denominator at home. So (chuckles) how can you help? >> Yeah, I mean, it is truly, when you get into the mind of the adversary and the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business. They're trying to operate with high margins. And so if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll frankly go find something else to do. And again, the shift we experience day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school, and our work is online, but all the groceries we order, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So everything's gone digital. And so the question is, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate and take care of their business? 'Cause it's nasty stuff. >> I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the IT labor problem. We learned a lot from that, and IT organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace that technology scales today. How does that apply to security, and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >> Yeah, it's the topic these days. Businesses, I think realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for businesses, I mean that for education, and everything else now, so are the adversaries. So it's expensive for them to operate at human scale, and they are going to machine scale. Going to machine scale, a necessity is that, you're going to have to harness some level of automation; have the machines work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. And when you do that you can do it safely, or you could do it dangerously. (chuckles) And that's really kind of your choice. Just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should. You want to make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's a tricky thing because, when you take the phrase, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of securing the automation first. >> Yeah, we talked about this in Barcelona where you were explaining that, the the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially weaponizing, using your own tooling which makes them appear safe. Because they're hiding in plain sight. >> Right? >> That's scary. >> Well, they're clever, (chuckles) I'll giving them that. There's this phrase that they they always talk about, called, living off the land. There's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools, and being detected. If they can use the tools that's already there, then they have a higher degree of evading your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed, and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, having the detecting methods available to find their behavioral anomalies, and things like that, become a paramount, but in also having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to minimize their effectiveness, I mean, ideally without human interaction. 'Cause you move faster, you move quicker. And I say that with an asterisk, because if done wrong, frankly, you're just making their job more effective. >> I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit. I'm mean, the security space, cybersecurity, 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infinitesimal component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive GDP. But guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart, because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, "What's your biggest challenge?" They'll say, "Lack of talent." And so what this chart shows, this is from ETR, our survey partner. And on the vertical axis is net score, and that's an indication of spending momentum, on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here, I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. So you can see Cisco highlighted in red. Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter, it's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the conference calls. And so you can see on the horizontal axis you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere. But you're right there in that data set. And then you've got, for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here, and that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is, how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? You guys have done some really interesting token acquisitions, and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there, it's... I had a customer tell me once that, "I came to this trade show looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts." That's the frustration customers have. And I think what Cisco has done really well is, to really focus on outcomes. What is the customer outcome? 'Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. There might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think security in general has just year over year have been just ridden with, "You need to be an expert." "You need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself." And I think those days are behind us, but particularly as security becomes more pervasive. and we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the T-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >> Well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud. People think, "I'll put my data in the cloud I'm safe," but of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Really is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way say, "Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud." Whereas many of us out there saying, "Wow, it's not so great." So what are your thoughts on that whole narrative, and what's Cisco's play in cloud? >> I think cloud, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. No data center required, no distract required, you just get storage. It's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud too is, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems, again, at machine scale. Before, when I write code and I think about "Oh, what computers are going to run on, what servers is it going to run on?" Those thoughts never cross my mind anymore. I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do, and the machines then figure it out. So for instance on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, the system works without fail. And on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you have so much. But there's no way you could staff that. There's just no human-scale approach that gets you there. And that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, it really is the next level of how we do computer science. >> So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code, that's what DevNet is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco, of the the large established enterprise companies, is one of the few if not the only, that really has figured out that developer angle. Because it's practical, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >> Yeah, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into DevNet, the big halls at Cisco Live, it is Cisco as code. Everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation-ready, and frankly, that is the love language of the cloud. It's machines, it's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So it is the, I think necessary maybe not sufficient, but necessary for doing all the machine scale stuff. What's also necessary is to secure, if infrastructure is code, therefore, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? Well we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I talk about how do you do automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code. You test it, you threaten-model you say, "Can my adversary exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go?" So all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >> TK, I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question, and it's really to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma, I don't know if you've had a chance to see it, but that basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads, and creating own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy, and that means good from the standpoint of awareness, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love TikTok, I don't care. But they sort of laid out, this is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that, and can Cisco play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy? I mean, beyond GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act, what do you think? >> Yeah, my humble opinion is, you fix social problems with social tools. You fix technology problems with technology tools. I think there is a social problem that needs to be rectified. We weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. (chuckles) It's just pretty wrong. So yeah that series did really kind of wake up a lot of people, it's probably every day I hear, somebody ask me if I saw it. But I do think it also, with that level of awareness, I think we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Number two, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's solution. And what might be right for one community might be not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >> Yeah, so it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah, technology maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's going to be, society has to really take this on, is your premise. It's a good one. >> When I first started playing online games, I mean going back to the text-based adventure stuff like MUDs and MOOs, I did a talk at MIT one time and this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, we were talking about democracy, and we were talking about the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. Then this guy just gave us the smack-down. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, "You know all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes." He says, "Democracy is completely the opposite which is, you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? If two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic." And that was super interesting to me. >> That's really interesting, you read the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted, he acted with confidence. So to that point. But so what else are you working on these days that is interesting, that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you, are you... >> Yeah, generally speaking, I'm trying to make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme, making it simpler for the common person to our use tools. Again, all of these security tools no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user, so that they can thrive at human scale, and we can do things at machine scale. And kind of looping those two together is sort of the magic recipe. It's not easy, but it is fun. So that's what keeps me engaged. >> I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it, this sort of obviously a heightened organizational awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. It used to be a SecOps team in an Island, "Okay, it's your problem." The CSO can not report into the to the CIO because that's like the fox in the henhouse, a lot of those structures are changing it seems, this responsibilities is becoming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there- >> Yeah, I know, and it's so familiar to me, because I started out as a musician. So, bands are a great analogy, you play bass, I play guitar, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role, and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that analogy I think is coming to, we saw it sort of with DevOps where the developer doesn't just throw their code over the wall and it's somebody else's problem, they move together as a band. And that's what I think organizations are seeing is that, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business, not just, "Here's the product, and here's the rest of the business." (chuckles) That's pretty awesome. I think we see a lot of those patterns, particularly for the high-performance businesses. >> In fact, it's interesting, you have great analogy by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco. You're seeing sort of, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now, I've talked to many of them, they seem to really be more focused on how they're connecting across organizations, and it's increasingly critical in this world of silo busters, isn't it? >> Yeah, no, I mean, as you move further and further away, you can see how ridiculous it was before, it would be like acquiring a band and say, "Okay, all you guitar players, go over here. All you bass players over there. Then I'm like, "What happened to the band?" (both laughing) So that's what I'm talking about. All of those disciplines moving together, and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together, is just so awesome. >> Well, I always feel better after talking to you. I remember Art Coviello used to put out this letter every year, I would read it and I'd get depressed. (chuckles) We spent all this money, now we're less secure. But when I talk to you TK, I feel much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on theCUBE. It's awesome to have you as a guest. >> I love this session, so thanks for inviting me. >> And I miss you, hopefully next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird, like the sign says. >> (talks faintly) Bring my product. >> TK Keanini, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. We really appreciate it, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest, after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from New York City, It's theCUBE. Covering CyberConnect 2017. Brought to you by Centrify, and The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. (synth music tag) >> And government industries together for the first time. A unique kind of collaboration unlike normal events, like black hat or RSA, that are mostly about hacks and really geeky sessions. There's a great place for that, but again, this is the first of its kind, and it's presented by Centrify's theCUBE as an exclusive partner here, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, co-founder of SiliconANGLE, my co-founder, Dave Vellante here. Dave, I mean, Centrify really taking an industry proactive role, not having their own event. Instead, using their money to fund an industry event. This is the trend in digital media. Presented by Centrify, not 'sponsored by' or 'their event'. This, we've seen this in the big data space before where events are sponsored for the community. You know, cyber security, really a big topic. You know, General Keith Alexander, retired general, was on stage as the keynote. Really talking about the crisis in the United States and around the world, around cyber security, cyber war, a whole new reality. This is the thrust of the event. >> Well, they say content is king. Well, context is kind of the empire, and the context here is, the world is changing. And the seriousness of that change is significant. General Alexander, many people may not know, General Keith, former, retired General Keith Alexander, he was the first Head of Chief $of Cyber Security at U.S., appointed by Obama. John, he was appointed Director of the NSA in 2005. Now, you guys remember, I'm sure, Stuxnet was right around 2004, 2005 when it was developed, and it bridged the Bush to the Obama administration. So he had the, all the inside baseball. He didn't talk about Stuxnet, but that was, >> He did share some nice war stories. >> Yeah, but that was the first and most significant, the way they got into Natanz, and he was at the center of all that. And he did share some war stories. He talked about Snowden, he talked about collaboration with the FBI, he talked about saving lives. And basically he said, hey, I stood in front of the ACLU. They basically undressed him, right? And then came back and said, hey, this is one of the most ethical agencies, and law-abiding agencies I've ever, he's seen, so he read that note from the head of the ACLU, it was very proud of that. >> Yeah, and the Stuxnet, it was in the news obviously, just yesterday it was reported, actually the day before November 1st, November 2nd, that Stuxnet was highly underestimated. In fact, the digital certificates that were spoofed were, been hanging around, the malware's been out there. Then again, this is, this is an indictment of the problem that we have, which is, we've got to get the security. Now, the things that the General talked about, I want to get your reaction to, because certainly I honed in on a couple key things. "Foundational tech for common defense." So he talked a lot about the Constitution and the role of government, I did a tweet on that, but what is the role of the government? That's the common defense of the United States, citizens and business. One. Not just protect the Department of Defense. At the same time, he did kind of put a plug in that we need the civil liberties and privacy to be addressed. But this is the biggest crisis we have, and it's a problem that can only be solved by working together. And if you look at, Dave, the trends that we're following on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE and Wikibon, the common thread is community. If you look at blockchain and what's going on in that disruptive, decentralized world, the role of the community is critical. If you look at what's going on in security, it's the role of the community. If you look at open source, the biggest success story of our multiple generations and now impacting the younger generation in the computer science industry and the computer industry, open source software. Community. You're starting to see the role of communities where knowing your neighbor, knowing who's involved with things, is really critical, and you can't highlight it any more than this conference that Centrify's presenting with these gurus, because they're all saying the same thing. You've got to share the data. The community's got to work together. So, common defense, maintaining civil liberties and maintaining privacy at the same time, solving the biggest crisis of our time. >> Well the other big thing and, John, you actually made this prediction to me a couple weeks ago, was that government and industry are going to start working together. It's going, it has to happen. General Alexander basically said that, is it the government's role, job, to protect commercial industry? And it was an emphatic yes, and he pulled out his fake version of the Constitution, and said yes, and he got in front of Panetta, in front of the US Senate, and made the case for that. And I think there's no question about it. Industries control critical infrastructure. And industries aren't in a good position to protect that critical infrastructure. They need help from the government, and the government has some of the most advanced technologies in the world. >> And the other thing we've been hearing from this, the executive at Aetna, is attack, maintaining intelligence on the data and sharing is critical to resolve the problem, but his point was that most people spend time on an attack vector that's usually wrong. He said, quote, "You're better off having people be idle, than chasing down on an attack vector that's wrong." So his point is, report that to the agencies quickly, to, one, reverse-engineer the problem. Most likely you're going to get better intel on the attack, on the vector, then you can start working effectively. So he says a lot of problems that are being solved by unconventional means. >> Well, General Alexander said that when he was head of Cyber Command, his number one challenge was visibility, on the attacks, they could only respond to those attacks. So, my question to you, John, is how will data, big data, machine learning, AI, whatever you want to call it, how will that affect our ability as an industry to proactively identify threats and thwart them, as opposed to just being a response mechanism? >> I think it's going to be critical. I think if you look at the AI and machine learning, AI is basically machine learning on steroids, that's really kind of what it is now, but it hopefully will evolve into bigger things, is really going through the massive amounts of data. One of the points that General Alexander talked about was the speed and velocity of how things are changing, and that most IT departments can't even keep up with that right now, never mind security. So machine learning will allow things to happen that are different analysis faster, rather than relying on data lakes and all kinds of old modeling, it's just not fast enough, so speed. The other thing too is that, as you start looking at security, this decentralized approach, most attacks are coming in on state-sponsored but democratized attacks, meaning you don't have, you can use open source and public domain software to provide attacks. This is what he's been talking about. So the number one thing is the data. Sharing the data, being part of a community approach where companies can work in sectors, because there's a lot of trend data coming out that most attackers will come out, or state-sponsored attacks, will target specific things. First of all, the one problem that can be solved immediately is that there's no way any of the United States military and-or energy grid should be attached to the Internet. And you can mask out all foreign attacks just by saying only people in the US should be accessing. That's one network conventional thing you can do. But getting the data out there is critical, but working in sectors. Most attacks happen like on the financial services industry, so if you sit in there and trying to solve the problem and keeping it on the down-low, you're going to get fired anyway, you know? The business is probably going to get hurt. Report it early, with your peers in the community, share some data, anonymize that data, don't make it, you know, privacy breaching, but get it out there. Number one thing. >> Well, here's the problem is, 80 billion dollars is spent a year on security, and the vast majority of that is still spent on perimeter security, and we heard today that the number one problem is things like credential stuffing, and password, poor user behavior, and our response to that is education. Jim Routh talked about, that's a conventional response. We need unconventional responses. I mean, the bottom line is that there's no silver bullet to security. You talked about, critical infrastructure should not be connected to the internet, but even then, when you have an air gap, you go back to Stuxnet, Natanz had an air gap. Mossad got through the air gap. There's always a way to get through somehow. So there's no one silver bullet. It's a portfolio of approaches and practices, and education, and unconventional processes that you have to apply. And as we talked about, >> Well I mean, there's no silver bullet, but there are solutions. And I think that's what he's saying. He gave it, General Alexander gave specific examples, when he was in charge, of the NSA command center was, you know, terrorist attacks being thwarted. Those are actual secure problems on the terrorism front that were solved. There was a silver bullet for that, it's called technology. So as you generalize it, Dave, I can hear what you're saying, because IT guys want a silver bullet. I want to buy a product that solves my security problem. >> So here's the problem I have with that is, I used to read Art Coviello's, you know, memo every year, >> Yeah. >> It was like, he tried to do like the, and he still does. But I look back every year and I say, Do we feel safer and more secure than we were last year? And every year the answer is no. So we, despite all the technology, and we've talked about this on theCUBE with Pat Gelsinger, security is essentially a do-over. We do need unconventional new ways, >> No debate. >> Of attacking the problem. >> No debate. Well I noticed, I'm just highlighting the point, I mean if you look at it from an IT perspective, the old conventional wisdom was, I want to buy a product. Hey, vendor, sell me your security product. What General's kind of pointing out is, he's kind of pointing out and connecting the dots, is like, hey, what they learned in the NSA was, it's an ongoing iterative thing that's happening in real time. It's not an IT solution anymore. It's a more of a holistic problem. Meaning, if you don't under stand the problem space, you can't attack it. So when they talked about the terrorist attack, they had a phone record, and they had to give it to the FBI. The FBI had to get into it. They discovered the guy in basically 24 hours, and then it took a week to kind of vet the information. Luckily they caught it and saved a subway attack in New York City in 2008 that would have been devastating. Okay, still, they were successful, but, weeks. So machine learning, and to your point, is only going to accelerate those benefits. And again, the real counterpoint as General pointed out is, civil liberties and privacy. >> Well, talk- >> I mean, what do you want? You want subway attacks, or you want to have your email, and your email be clean, or you want to have people read your email, and no subway attacks? I mean, come on. >> Well, you and I have talked about this on theCUBE over a number of years, and talking about Snowden, and General Alexander brought it up, you know, basically saying, hey, he told he story and he was pretty emphatic as to, his job is to protect, not only the citizens of the United States, but the infrastructure, and basically saying that we couldn't have done it without the laws that allowed us to analyze the metadata. >> I think, I think, in my opinion, what I think's going to happen is, we're going to have a completely reimagined situation on government. If you look at the trends with GovCloud, what's going on with AWS, Amazon Web Services, in the federal area, is an acceleration of massive agility and change happening. You're going to see a reimagine of credentials. Reimagining of culture around hiring and firing people that are the right people. You know I said, and I always say, there should be a Navy SEALs for cyber, a West Point for cyber. So I think you're going to start to see a cultural shift from a new generation of leaders, and a new generation of citizens in the US, that are going to look at citizenship differently. So for instance, Centrify, which is putting on this event, has an identity solution. That's an easy solution. Take it out of IT's problem, no one should be patching 1200 different IT systems in the government. Screw it. It's like a driver's license. Here's your credential, you know? >> So, >> So there's new ways to think of it. Radical ways, progressive ways, whatever you want to call it, I think those are going to be coming fast. Blockchains is a solution. >> I was going to ask you about that. So, four out of five breaches are password related. From credential stuffing or just bad password behavior. Everybody uses the same password, because they can remember it, across all these sites. So four out of five of the breaches can be traced back to poor password behavior. So, will things like blockchain or single sign-on, really, the answer, that's about the wrong question. When will, and how will, things like blockchain come to front and center, to solve that problem? >> I don't know, Dave. I mean, all I know is in today's Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler writes a story that if you want to predict the future, it's all about dodgeball. You've got to get in the game and get hit by a few balls to know what's kind of going on around you. >> Dave: So you've got to fail first. >> Everybody has an opinion, nobody actually knows the answer, this has been a premise in the tech business. In my opinion, my opinion is, to reimagine things, you've got to look at it differently. So if you look at Jim Routh, the CSO at Aetna said, he said, look, we're going to solve these problems in a way, and he said, I'm not even a computer science major, I'm a history major, and I'm running Aetna's security practice. And his point was, he's a history major, civilizations crumble when trust crumbles. Okay, so trust is a huge issue, so trust on the government, trust on the systems, trust with email, so that, so he's looking at it and saying, hey, I want systems that don't erode trust, because the civilization of the world will disintegrate. So trust is a big factor, these are the new things that the best minds have to solve. >> I think the other thing, that really important topic that came up is, is public policy, and there was a discussion on sort of the, you know, hacktivists versus state-sponsored terrorism, so the payload, or the signature of a hacktivist malware is dramatically different than that of a state-sponsored initiative. State-sponsored initiatives are much more sophisticated and much more dangerous. And so, Robert Gates, when he was on theCUBE, brought this up, and he said, listen, we have the best technology in the world. The best security in the world. And we apply that largely for defense, and he said, we could go on the offensive. He said the problem is, so can everyone else, and we have, as a nation, a lot more to lose. So when you, we talked about Stuxnet earlier, Stuxnet basically was your tax dollars at work, getting into the hands eventually of the bad guys, who then use that to come back and say, okay, we can attack critical infrastructure, US, so you better be careful. >> It's bigger than that, though, Dave. That's a one, that's an old point, which is a good point, but Stuxnet was the beginning of a movement that state-sponsored actors were doing. In the old days, a state-sponsored actor, in the Iran case, came from a state sponsor, they revealed their hands in their hack a little too early, and we could counter that. But when you look at the specific attacks over the past 15 years, if a state-sponsored attack on the US was happening, it was their, they had to show their hand. That's different now, with WikiLeaks and public domain, states can still remain anonymous and saying "It wasn't us!" And point to these organizations by democratizing hacker tools. So whether it's Stuxnet or something else, you're seeing state-sponsored actors, and I won't, China, Russia, whoever they are, they can actually enable other people who hate the US to attack us. Their signature's not even on it. So by democratizing the hacker tools, increases the number of people that could attack the US. And so the state sponsors aren't even doing anything. >> Well, so, Jim Routh talked about WannaCry and NotPetya, which were, you know, generally believed to be ransomware. He said no, they weren't ransomware. They only collected about 140 thousand from that in US dollars. They were really about state-sponsored political acts. I don't know, sending warnings. We're going to ask him about that when he comes in theCUBE. >> Alright. We've got a big day here. New York City here for CyberConnect 2017, this is the inaugural event presented by Centrify. All the top leaders in the industry and government are here solving the problem, the crisis of our generation's cyber attack security, both government and industry coming together. This is theCUBE, we'll be back, more live coverage after this short break.