Blake Hall
speaker
270 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Blake Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But now that the pandemic's ended, this next evolution is deepfakes, where in 2022, right before AI has three phases, like the LLMs and text, then the media with face and voice. And you've got like Sam Altman and Scarlett Johansson going back and forth about stuff. The Nigerian print scams are like at a whole different level.
So in 2022, we had about 180,000 logins across our wallet that we saw were targeted by scammers for account takeover. The same 90 day window in 2023, it went up to 1.3 million. Holy cow. And so the net of all of this to your original question, which is like, why is identity so critical? What I learned in Iraq, what General McChrystal taught us is that it takes a network to fight a network.
If you have an inherently decentralized enemy that is learning and asymmetric and amorphous against a centralized foe, the decentralized insurgency is just going to crush you. And so the only way to respond is to do what General McChrystal did is empower the edge, give local autonomy, redesign the organization to flood everyone with real time intelligence.
So now your network of good guys can respond in real time. And that's tough to do as a general. That's why he's so remarkable. He said, we need to get the captains and lieutenants and sergeants the tools and push the decision making to them because we're really fighting a network. And this is a network war.
And so as a shared service, we are the network of good guys effectively that are able to see patterns that other folks can't. So for example, we're over at the treasury and then we're over at these unemployment agencies. We were able to see 50,000 identities that have been used for unemployment went over to apply for business owner aid for owners of transportation companies.
Get into like login or are you just contextually, you can't be unemployed and own a transportation business at the same time. But the thing is that signal, as far as what's going on with the same identity at different levels of government, that hadn't existed before.
And so you appreciate this is why we're losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year is that we're getting picked off like one by one, where the attackers are just going to the most vulnerable agency. And unless you have authentication as a shared service to normalize and standardize trust, it's Blockbuster versus Netflix, it's data centers versus GCP or AWS.
You need to have standardization and consistent security and feedback loops if you are going to withstand the assault of organized crime. And we ended up helping NBC News break the story that APT 41, which is China's economic warfare arm, was involved with directly attacking individual Americans to steal their unemployment benefits.
And I've shared some videos now on LinkedIn as well of some of these deep fakes where these Chinese threat groups are targeting individual citizens to try to steal their tax refunds and defraud the Treasury. So the net of it is we're losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Those dollars also represent hundreds of thousands to millions of victims.
and the money is flowing, in many cases, overseas, it's a national security issue. And then the other side is people hate managing logins and passwords. And if we can both make it safer and easier for people to interact online, that's become my life's work.
Time is one of the most important aspects of identity and not just for technology, just for relationships in general. Think about the first time that you met your best friend or your wife or whatever, what you knew about them then and what you know about them now. So time and the frequency of how often you interact with someone and the quality of those interactions really informs relationships.
your perception of their identity as it relates to you, and you have a lot more touch points. For time, you might know, I'll trust this person with anything, and you might know, if I ask this person to do something, I'm gonna prepare myself to be let down. And so what I learned in Iraq was a lot about how telecom networks work,
And the thing about bad guys versus normal people is that bad guys do things that you can see in math related to time that make them stand out. So you're probably not doing SIM swaps and changing your phone to different devices and porting your phone number that often. You probably change your phone every two to three years. You've likely had the same phone number for over 10 years now.
And so that tenure when it comes to identity really matters. If we can look at records and see, oh, Patrick's phone number has been tied to Patrick since he was at Notre Dame. And then you prove possession of that phone number and we can see that the phone number hasn't been ported because we can check with, that's really good.
That'd be, if some bad guy was like setting us up and like from college, it was like the bad guy, like, you know, IRAs. I started seeding this phone number in college and now I'm like 55 and I'm going to hash it in. The long con. Yeah. These guys aren't playing the long game. And so what's really interesting is most folks have a phone number with tenure. Now it's not for everybody.
You'll get to 85 to 90% will have a long relationship. And then you'll have expats coming back to the country. Low income communities tend to switch their phone numbers more often because they're using prepaid devices instead of subscription and maybe avoiding collections calls. So it's not perfect.
But just on that one signal alone, you can go, wow, if you did have a phone number for 20 years and showed possession, we're pretty confident right away that's Patrick. So the basic premise is there's a big theme in security right now about moving away from passwords. And And this is also why you want a shared service to do it.
How long is it going to take each company to figure out how to do pass keys, which is just a fancy name for touch ID or face ID on your device that why can't we use things that are really convenient on our phones and our computers to be able to securely prove that we're the owner of the login credential, it's going to take time.
Whereas if it's more of a SaaS approach where it's already just baked in as capability, if you use a shared service for login, that one capability as we deliver it through our R&D is instantly available to thousands of different organizations. That's a much more efficient way where they just have to say, yeah, please turn that on. Or we turn it on and cool, thanks. So that's log insecurity.
Identity can take many different forms because you've got your legal identity, which is where we focused on proving that you're you. But then you also have different personas. One out of five doctors in the country uses us to prescribe narcotics and other controlled substances. And that is not sufficient for you to be Patrick or me to be Blake.
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