Eric O'Neill
speaker
191 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 20 Dec
Eric O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
So I'll look forward to the next time.
That's great.
It's my pleasure. It's great to be back on the program.
Yeah, Iran has been a threat actor against the United States for a long time. They really don't like us. And they made that very obvious, not just by chanting death to America in the streets. Their cyber campaign has been top tier. One of my biggest concerns is their ability to attack U.S. critical infrastructure. Over the past decade, they've been caught in the U.S.
power grid, launching what's called probe attacks. And in those attacks, a cyber attacker, this is cyber espionage, really, will see how deep they can get within a network that manages the flow and connections of our power. And what they want to do is they want to find a way in. They want to hide there and do what's called maintain persistence.
And the idea, of course, is if there is any future conflict or they just want to hurt us, they can trigger an attack that could cause some sort of cascade attack.
They're very aggressive. And you add in North Korea, too, and you've got the big four. Those are the big four countries that are coming after the U.S. with cyber attacks, espionage-related cyber attacks more than any other country. And Iran is up there. I mean, it's the way they can hurt us. It's the only real way they can hurt us.
Well, they don't like Trump. They haven't liked Trump since 2020 when the attack resulted in the successful killing of Qasem Soleimani. They're still angry about that. And look, when a nation state doesn't like a certain political candidate, they get involved in the election and find a way to maybe hurt that person. And they've been going after the Trump campaign since the summer.
Two of the members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were indicted for an attack in August of this year. And they were indicted in September for an attack in August. And now the most recent attack, you know, the most high profile one they're going after all Trump and his associates was the the nominee for the FBI director or something.
You know, I'm really interested in Kash Patel as Trump's pick for the FBI director. And he was directly targeted in a Iranian cyber attack. And I can promise you we're going to see a lot more of this.
Well, there are a couple of reasons for an intelligence group to launch attacks against a campaign. One is they want to uncover policy decisions. They want to look at communications. And from what we know from the attack on Patel, it looks like they were able to access some of his private communications and get into his data. That could be email. It could be his phone records.
Because they want to know what the future FBI director is going to do, you know, against the Iranian threat here on our soil or in cyberspace. That's very helpful to any country who is in conflict with us. You know, they also probably want to create disinformation campaigns, you know, encourage Americans to lose faith in the Trump campaign and, you know, in the future presidency.
That's right around the corner, starting right around the corner. And, you know, Russia does this, China does this, and Iran also plays in the same game.
Every single campaign, every four years, and even in the two-year congressional campaign seasons, there is an alert by the FBI and CIA and others saying that there are attacks that are coming. be prepared, be ready, upgrade your cybersecurity. But these attacks always are successful in one shape or form. I'm not surprised.
I wish I could say I was surprised, but some of these attacks are insidious and they're very hard to defend against. Yes, we should see them coming, I don't blame him for being breached. Now, it is a little embarrassing. And, you know, there's a feather in the cap for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, their cyber attack group, to say that we got the potential future director of the FBI.
I am worried about what data they did steal because they could use it to embarrass him or undermine him if he does take the seat as the director in the Hoover building. But I think we need to do better. We need to do better across not only government and future government, but all industries and defending against a very persistent and current threat in nation state cyber attacks.
It should be better and they need to do better. And every four years we have to do better. I'm just, every four years we don't. And so that's why I'm not surprised.
Yeah, the Bureau has a group called the IC3, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, but it is also a threat researcher. They do an enormous amount of outreach about potential attacks, attacks you need to prepare for. They will even give hashes or information about the specific malware that is upcoming and how to defend against it. There are all sorts of resources.
And there is very good communication between government and corporations and cybersecurity companies about the threats. Obviously, government, we have the FBI and the NSA and the CIA are able to see a lot of this before it hits the streets. And the faster that can be rolled out for the threat hunters, for the cybersecurity professionals, the better.
So it is out there and the FBI does do a pretty good job of getting the notice out. I know all the campaigns are warned. that the threat is coming. I think that Trump campaign has been told by a bunch of different groups, including Microsoft and other big tech companies saying that they have stopped massive amounts of phishing attempts against their personal accounts and their business accounts.
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