With the clay season done and dusted, we now go to the grass season, which is coming up over the next couple of weeks. What are the shorter seasons on the tour? Of course, ending in Wimbledon at the end of June or the start of July. Let's go have a look at the biggest names and what they're going to be playing over the next couple of weeks in preparation for Wimbledon. So let's start with week one for the WTA and I picked four of the biggest names on the tour with Shveontek, Sabalenka, Rabakana and Jabur. None of them are actually playing this week, which is officially the first week of the grass season. So they're all absent this week. Going into next week, which is week two, Shveontek is not playing. But the other three are actually playing the Berlin Open, which is a 500 event. So a big event on the WTA in preparation for Wimbledon. Shveontek won't be there, but a lot of big names will be including Sabalenka, Rabakana and Jabur. In the third week of preparations for Wimbledon, Shveontek is actually playing a 250 event in Badenburg. Sabalenka won't be playing at all, so she'll get a rest before Wimbledon. And then both Jabur and Rabakana are playing in Eastbourne as a final preparation. Of course, week four is when Wimbledon is. So Shveontek only playing one grass court event, which is actually one more than last year, because last year she went straight from the French over to Wimbledon. Sabalenka only playing one event as well, whereas the other two big names are actually playing a couple of events before Wimbledon. Jumping over the men's side now, and we've got Djokovic, Elkeres, Mehvedev and Rude. The only player playing this week is actually Mehvedev. In the Netherlands at the La Bima Open. So Djokovic having a week off, Rude having a week off after making the final of the French. And of course Elkeres also taking a week off after making the semis. Week two, Djokovic missing that one as well. But at Queen's Club at the Sinch Championships, Elkeres will be playing on the grass, which he didn't get preparation last year in terms of grass season. So that'll be interesting to see him play an official grass court tournament before Wimbledon this year. And then both Rude and Mehvedev are playing in Halla for week two. And then in week three, Djokovic not playing either. So he's not playing any matches officially between the French and Wimbledon. Mehvedev also not playing in the final week before Wimbledon. But Elkeres and Rude are both playing an exhibition event, the Giorgio Armani Tennis Classic, which is something they both played last year. So no official preparation there. It's just kind of a little bit of fun before Wimbledon. Of course week four is Wimbledon. But very interesting to see that Djokovic not playing any preparation before Wimbledon did the same thing last year, won the whole thing. So maybe he doesn't need to have a preparation. Whereas all the other guys, especially going from the clay to the grass, need those extra matches. So there you have it, some of the big names that are playing over the grass season. And some of them that are not playing until Wimbledon, Djokovic not playing again at all before Wimbledon. And he seems to win anyway. So it doesn't really matter. There's plenty of other names that are playing this week, next week, and the week after. Guys like Sidney Passer playing this week. Rubelev's got matches coming up in the next couple of weeks. Hashinov as well, who played well at the French Open. And then you've got other players like Hedadzmaier, Mukova, all playing as well over the next couple of weeks to get prepared for Wimbledon. But let me know down in the comments below. Do you think Djokovic's not playing Wimbledon preparation tournaments will affect him? I mean, it's never affected him before. But what about someone like an Elkeres? He didn't play great at Wimbledon last year. He did have a bit of a struggle in the first round. He didn't play any preparation. He actually is having some preparation.


Okay, maybe a little lower. Maybe not a little lower. Okay, I think we're good. So good morning, everyone. My name is Joe, Joe Sloak. I currently run CTI and a few other things for a company called Huntress. They might not really like some of the stuff I'm talking about today, so we'll just kind of leave it at that. I've been lots of other places too or whatever, but this is the first time I ever spoke in a main stage DEF CONS. I was really excited about this because I never thought I would. Because I am not the hacker type, I am more of the defender type or whatever, but I think this talk on burrowing through the network and really contextualizing something called the Vulcan leaks or Vulcan papers is something that's not just really valuable for my community, talking like blue teamers and so forth, but also provides a really good insight into how high level advanced stage cyber operations work for our real high end state sponsored entities or adversaries, depending upon your perspective.  So we'll level set on that and then get into how Vulcan relates to the ecosystem of Russian cyber operations and then orient what Vulcan looks like within the context of greater cyber history, because I think as a relatively young discipline, we still do a real shit job in understanding what has come before and how it all links together and comes evolves over time. With that in mind, we'll then talk about what the future looks like for cyber operations, offensive espionage and other and close out with some conclusions and hopefully I'm not over time at that point because they will throw me off the stage if I am. So the Vulcan files, what are the Vulcan files? So the Vulcan files are a cache of documents that were disclosed to primarily two German journalists, Hakan Tanravarty and Hannes Munzinger, who were both former at Sudo-H's Oitang. They're now working for the German state broadcaster and for this effort they worked with Dr. Spiegel. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of project documentation, contracting documents and similar for a bunch of cyber operation tools and effects payloads sponsored by various Russian agencies. Really cool stuff. It was a pleasure to help out Hakan and Hannes or whatever on this work, but there was also coverage in English in the Washington Post. Eleanakashima and others published on this as well for American audiences. And you had cyber firms or whatever like Mandiant now, part of Google Cloud, part of something or other, Alphabet, whatever that chain looks like, who did a deep dive on this as well. Some really good contextualization from like, you know, the so what cyber defense perspective on these things. So that was all pretty cool. We'll get back to like, well, why am I not hearing about this until today or whatever for, I'm guessing a non-trivial number of folks in the room. But in looking at what the Vulcan leaks are, they involve a company called NTC Vulcan, just look at it in Russia. The leaks themselves, I've already said like hundreds and hundreds of pages of materials or whatever, like primary source documents that I think for historians will be quite interesting or whatever as we write the story of what cyber looked like in the 2020s and 2010s. And then the significance of these things. So in looking at NTC Vulcan, this is a computer technology firm that is owned and operated by Russian military veterans with the approval or authorization to perform classified or sensitive work for Russian state organizations. Not all that different from how many veteran owned businesses you'll see scattered up and down, you know, the highway or whatever between say Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland and whatnot. So, you know, other folks have contractors or whatever that are coming out of dot gobspace dot mill space and starting up their own dot coms or whatever for twice the salaries and so forth. The leaks themselves came from an unknown entity. There is some discussion that this was an entity who was upset and disgusted with his country's policies towards Ukraine and that this was an active protest for some of the capabilities that they were responsible for or linked to in development.  Lord knows where they are right now or whatever, hopefully somewhere far away from Russia at this point in time. But provided this documentation to the journalists I mentioned earlier who then went through a consortium of paper cut media in order to disseminate this to a variety of other news organizations. The Guardian, I can't remember if it was LeMond or LeFigaro, but anyway, French publications, Washington Post, et cetera, to try to get this far and wide.  We see it a lot when it comes to, say, the US space, and I'll get to that a little later on, and some leaks that have come about from Western sources or whatever. But like other than things, like if you are familiar with the Intrusion Truth Twitter account and some of the work that they've done in publicizing Chinese nexus operations, seeing this sort of leak or disclosure or whatever from an insider doesn't happen terribly often and we haven't seen a whole lot of this coming from the Russian space. And so really getting this view into the nuts and bolts of cyber network or computer network operations is pretty cool and pretty interesting shit. So here's Vulcan. I don't know if they're still in this building or not, but that's the Google Street view from the address that was up to date as of like 2021. So hi guys.  Don't answer that question, I suppose. Again, Vulcan files covering lots of stuff, but three primary programs of interest, one of which we'll focus on today. So the one that will focus and spend the most amount of time on is scan or scan V, which is a scanning suite, but it's a lot more than that. We'll get into the significance of that shortly. A information operations platform called Amazon, which while we're not going to spend too much time on that, very interesting from a forward deployed information operations sort of capability space. And then there was another tool called Crystal 2V, which we're not going to talk about that much at all, because I frankly don't find it all that interesting other than that it exists. That looks to be a sort of like a testing or penetration testing platform for industrial control environments and similar, but doesn't appear to be as concerning or whatever as some of the malware we've seen coming out of Russia like Triton, Indistroyer and similar. But to get back to scan V, what we're talking about here is a really interesting program combining multiple networks to set up a scanning enumeration, exploitation and data collection platform that goes across several different information domains. So I don't have a pointer or anything here, but if you look at this, we go from the external internet where systems that are set up with a bunch of publicly available and non-publicly available exploits and or knowledge of vulnerabilities and exploit payloads for those vulnerabilities, being able to deploy those to victim nodes as well as extract information in task exploited nodes to then move into a processing environment that if you can make it out, it's a little small. You see on the right with that red network and the green network in the corner, CD and CD. So talking true sneaker net operations and moving data into classified processing platforms for further analysis and evaluation.  Like this is like how the sausage gets made when it comes to state sponsored cyber operations. You'll notice I'm not saying nation state because if you say nation state, it hits you in the head with a sock with a bar of soap in it. But anyway, the idea here being is that scan V by design is a distributed multi component system with various information boundaries, public internet, private, you know, internal network that has internet connectivity, and then having out of band networks, not air gaps because we are sneaker netting shit over there to classified processing mechanisms. It's designed for the automated tasking and action within preprogrammed capabilities. So we're talking about basically standing up a platform to do exploitation and subversion at scale. The purpose of this, we can't really there's not like a explicit purpose document that I was able to find at least in the Vulcan documents, which by the way, you can download if you want to look at them and read Russian, it's linked at the end of this presentation. But really looks to combine external scanning functionality with a catalog of vulnerable software and exploits. So like go after all of the Ford OS like everyone else in the world or here's your six Citrix devices or whatever and pop those and we'll talk to how this links to other Russian operations here in a little bit. But the main idea here is automating or increasing the efficiency of cyber operations as well as infrastructure harvesting, not just identifying endpoints that are valuable in themselves as sources of information or targets of disruption, but setting up the sort of network intermediaries that could be used to tunnel and launder network traffic so it doesn't look as malicious. It's coming from Susie's home router or whatever from their ISP and not directly from GRU headquarters located on the outskirts of Moscow. Amazit is another program that I won't again, we're not going to spend too much time on that here because again, we only have 45 minutes. And so, you know, we have many miles to go before we sleep and such. But it is interesting in that it provides a platform that by physically connecting to mobile and information networks, so installing hardware in the switching center or at the BSC or BTS if we're talking cellular networks and so forth, that it provides the ability of not just reading traffic and you can see the panel on the left that we have Twitter, the contact of live journal I think is up here, I guess that's still popular in Russia, who the hell knows. But various posting and social media platforms, not just for a collection perspective, but also providing the capabilities of injecting into and modifying those communication streams. That's pretty interesting because it moves beyond espionage to being able to do things like modify or send tweets impersonating individuals to influence conversations and do other sort of info ops activities. So in looking at this, we have Amazit as an information operations and collections platform.  Drago's did a deep dive into that if you're curious, we're not going to get too much into that here today. It's interesting because it's capable of capturing and processing communication streams, not just for collection, but for that manipulation piece as well. And that has potential applications because this is a mobile sort of system. So it's not just about deploying this in Dagestan or Chechnya or something like that for internal communication monitoring, but you could imagine although there's not been evidence of this to date that we are aware of, of taking this into occupied areas of Ukraine or similar in order to establish some degree of population influence or control through capturing and manipulating social media streams.  So that's all cool and scary and cyber even whatnot.  But after like the week that all this came out seemed like no one really cared and I don't really know why that is. You know, certainly there's a lot going on in the world right now. You've seen the meme or whatever of like aliens land on earth and like dude or whatever is in the corner smoking is like dude, I got a lot of going on right now. I can't do this. So like, you know, what else has been going on?  So, you know, stuff like that. We've got, you know, Taylor Swift taking over the world, you know, so other things to attract our attention. And yeah, we got UFOs out there. So maybe people were just busy. I don't know. But that's one of the reasons why I thought this would be a useful presentation to a wider audience because not just what was reported in the news, but also connecting Vulcan to the history of cyber operations, which we'll get into here momentarily. So in diving into the Vulcan leaks, they represent a significant event in the history of cyber operations. Now we just need to review what the hell is inside these things after that short overview. So in looking at the Vulcan leaks, we have NTC Vulcan as an entity. And then these programs, ScanV, Amazit, Crystal2V, also MiniDuke, which Google's tag associated with Russian operations and linked it based upon the Vulcan leaks to NTC Vulcan as well. So for software programs, one not explicitly documented in the leaks themselves that link to this one organization. But more importantly, these items also directly linked to various elements of Russian cyber operations. ScanV is associated quite directly with the Russian military intelligence GRU unit 74455, also known as Sandworm, which is a pretty gnarly actor that does lots of asshole-ish shit or whatever all across the world, and especially in Ukraine these days. Amazit, as an information operations platform, was linked to the Radio Research Institute in Russia, which is also associated with the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB. So internal intelligence and security services, but certainly with an external mission as well.  But we're seeing NTC Vulcan working with each leg of the Russian CNO tripod, which is kind of interesting. Because for various reasons, especially between the civilian intelligence agencies like SVR and FSB, and then the GRU, if you've looked at something like Mark Galliotti's Russian Putin's cyber hydra or whatever, a lot of these organizations don't get along very well and are actually quite competitive with each other. Yet FTC, or NTC Vulcan, is doing work for all three roughly simultaneously, which is kind of interesting. It's not completely unique, but it is sort of rare to see that sort of spread across multiple facets of cyber operations, instead of having just one or two dedicated customers as part of this. So with that, we see that Russian cyber operations has a variety of links to the private sector. So one example that I actually presented at Virus Bulletin last year is Schnickham, TSN, IIHM, a research institute associated with Russia's Ministry of Defense, and an entity referred to as Xenotime, which we're not quite sure where it aligns with Russian cyber operations. It seems GRU-ish, but not necessarily so, and there's some nuanced reasons for that that we can't get into today for timing reasons, but we've also seen organizations like the SVA Institute, another research organization in ties to the SVR, or ODT, yet another public-private research organization tied to the FSB's front-on botnet that was used in disruptive operations. A Kovant Institute, another public-private research organization linked to the FSB in supporting and enabling operations and sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. And also in-controller and pipe dream. Wait a minute, no one linked in-controller and pipe dream to Russia, right? We talked about that here, I think in track 4 last year, a former colleague of mine, Jimmy Wiley, did a deep dive into pipe dream and in-controller, which was quite fascinating. But if you look around enough or whatever, you'll see that there are folks that have tied in-controller or pipe dream, depending on which vendor you're going with a naming schema, to a organization called Advanced System Technologies, a contracting entity in Russia. So again, seeing this nexus of private sector organizations developing and deploying tooling, such as Droverub, also associated with AST, and that was the subject of a fairly lengthy malware analysis report released by the United States during COVID, which again kind of floated off the radar a little bit. But the idea of this privatization of cyber warfare, I said it, I'm sorry, but the idea being is that we're maximizing on capabilities by extending beyond the silos of government organizations to take advantage of public-private relationships and research institutions, as well as outright commercial entities to support state-directed efforts. So in looking at this, NTC Vulcan is both an example and a pioneer in a way of increasingly outsourced cyber development and engineering for state-directed operations. However, it's important to note, this is not just Russia, this is not just happening there by any stretch of the imagination, and there are probably some people at that other event or whatever up the strip earlier today that had booths that are just as involved in this space as well. So let's go into ScanVee and Sandworm, because that's kind of the most interesting item from my perspective, especially because I'm kind of an infrastructure analyst at heart when it comes to what I do in the security space. So Sandworm historically leverages compromise legitimate infrastructure. They don't spin up their own like Hetsner or HostSailer or AWS Node. They'll go out and compromise someone else's server or whatever and tunnel traffic through there as an OPSEC mechanism and to try to break the trail going back to them in their organization. And there's multiple examples of this, going all the way back to like Indistroyer from the 2016 Ukraine event where they used what appeared to be compromise TorExit nodes as the last step command and control infrastructure before accessing the Ukranian infrastructure where Indistroyer was deployed. But also more recent items like VPN filter and Cyclops Blink. We'll get back to those in here in a minute. But the important thing is that what ScanVee represents is a way of getting this sort of burnable, deniable infrastructure and doing it and tasking it at scale in a semi automated fashion. So being able to hack the planet in a way that allows an operator to enter in some criteria and then step off keyboard. So when looking at this we can operationalize this sort of idea by stockpiling vulnerabilities and as anyone here who does any sort of red teaming knows it doesn't have to be a damn zero day.  But you know coming up with a list of publicly known plus one day vulnerabilities and then sparkle in a couple of zero days if you really have to I suppose and you have a quiver of arrows to launch at a variety of targets in order to get points of presence in a variety of networks. Then I just need to identify vulnerable nodes and what's interesting is that ScanVee does have a showdown plugin. So yay a little unfortunate but you know you can't avoid these sorts of things I imagine but also it does its own scanning and evaluation and so forth and looking for these vulnerabilities and then through exploitation marshal victims into proxy chains for operations so that I can go from GRU HQ where my operators are doing operations to some so-ho micro-teaker whatever that's out there in the wild to my ultimate victim and probably having multiple steps in the middle there so that all my net flow analysis or whatever that scare the shit out of Ron Wyden and other folks really kind of goes down the toilet because I'm doing chained communication or whatever across multiple items along the way and so what I get is this not like just some creepy old man staring into the Palantir or whatever the hell this orb is or whatever but really check out my orb operational relay boxes people who say command and control nodes and to call them orbs you can probably guess either they worked somewhere previously or their larping is someone that works someone somewhere previously the idea being is that you get burnable reusable infrastructure that's not directly linked to yourself in order to execute operations to avoid tracing back and to also allow for you to burn that infrastructure without losing something more valuable in the process so what's the so what behind these sorts of items like okay it's cool hacking programs they got leaked or whatever big fucking deal dude like well there's this focus on scalability and control of widespread operations if you want to be an intelligence agency in the 21st century at this point there's a lot of shit out there in order to go after and doing this on a very human scale basis just doesn't scale all that effectively unless you can throw thousands of bodies at it which is what some people assume China is doing which seems almost borderline racist in a certain sort of way but the idea being is that you either need lots and lots of operators or you need to figure out a way to do this in an automated fashion so getting that greater efficiency and extent of cyber activity as enabled by a platform such as scan v gets you to that point where i can do more with less you know this is the whole impetus behind you know detection is code and dev sec ops and whatnot is that just like we are in the defender's face trying to do more with less because i don't know like we do have the people many of them have unfortunately been laid off over the last like eight months or whatever which really fucking sucks but even still anyone who worked their salt within this space knows that we can't just continually throw bodies at security problems and expect good things well it kind of works on the offensive side too is you have more and more stuff floating into information space and so we're really talking about moving beyond one operator one op campaigns to massive distributed operations enabled by this platform of gathering information collecting infrastructure for use and then doing a combination of unclassified and classified network processing and tasking of what has been compromised all right that's cool but is this unique what's Vulcan look like in cyber history well is Vulcan activity unique I've already given you this answer like fuck no it's not unique this sort of shit's been around for a bit so what's it look like though previously so have we seen similar examples yes we have we've seen similar examples in Russia we've seen similar examples in China maybe we've seen similar examples in the US I don't know we'll we'll get to that here in a minute but really we can just choose our hacker and by the way if anyone in the audience knows or is responsible for creating this image please let me know because I wanted to make stickers or shirts of this for years and I can't find the original source for it so yeah hit me up or whatever because I want to make sure that you get recognition and whatever else or whatever out of that because I think that that picture is freaking awesome anyway so as we're choosing our hackers here and figuring out like who's been doing this sort of rationalization of cyber operations we have to look at Russia in cyber manipulation and where is the lines with Russian cyber operations history so from we have two facets here looking at sconvy and amazit we have building compromise networks and monitoring and manipulating information from those overall mission profiles we've seen previous examples of this so we've seen vpn filter and cyclops blink from a infrastructure perspective and swarm the system for domestic monitoring within the Russian Federation when it comes to information collection and operations so we're looking at this vpn filter and cyclops blink are two capabilities somewhat related that were network device targeting capabilities like find a bunch of vulnerable micro ticks knock them over and rope these into network collections of nodes that can be tasked for various purposes in the case of vpn filter it looked like this was being built into a large distributed denial of service network likely to target Ukrainian entities although it was disrupted by US authorities in conjunction with private sector and some others before it could be used but these could also be used to proxy traffic and that appears to be the case for cyclops blink when it was deployed as a similar capability of again targeting network devices in order to take advantage of unpatched or vulnerable systems to proxy traffic for following operations but there's also evidence that there were further capabilities at least in review if not in outright use such as a mod bus protocol capability associated with vpn filter was only able to collect mod bus a OT based traffic protocol for those unfamiliar but if you're gathering that information presumably you're doing so for a reason that could lead to following exploitation manipulation man in the middle that stuff or similar so as a result scan v represents a mechanism to automate control and manage these sorts of capabilities that Russian organizations principally sandworm have already deployed but gaining that scalability and efficiency to make these operations more realistic and essentially more efficient and cheaper to run at scale but from an information operations perspective we've also seen this with respect to swarm which is related to a Russian law that allows for well requires that the Russian security services bolt in some hardware into telco providers and similar in order to gather up traffic and perform surveillance at scale so this has been around for over 10 years at this point and has been documented by variety of organizations whether we're talking about commercial press or things like the European Council of Human Rights and so forth but the thing is that swarm requires putting hardware into the telco providers network and then stepping away where swarm gives way to something like opposite is the ability to forward deploy that and allow for information influence operations to move beyond just the network backbone that's already under direct physical and legal control by the authorities in question but they begin deploying that in say the occupied areas of Ukraine or similar regions to sort of extend that sort of visibility and capability into areas where it would otherwise take significantly more effort in order to try to rebuild and re-architect the backbone behind the communication networks and such organizations I can instead take a suitcase plug it into the base station controller of a given area and boom I start collecting and man in the middleing information especially across social media platforms so okay we picked on Russia a lot all right poor Russia right actually no fuck them but okay but what about China like you know what about China China's out there too right you know aren't they really you know active in this space well he certainly are and one of the ways I think a lot of folks are familiar with is the Great Firewall of China one of several reasons why I will you know as much as I would love to go to China someday I know it's not going to happen anytime soon but you know why VPN services are such a hot commodity for people in the Chinese ecosystem to try to evade Great Firewall traffic control and traffic interception less heralded but honestly more interesting in my opinion there was a capability that was disclosed by the folks at Citizen Lab at the Munk School in Toronto about China's Great Cannon so this was a capability that almost took the same infrastructure behind the firewall of deep packet inspection and traffic moderation and added on the ability to inject into traffic streams to deliver exploitation payloads to targets of interest based upon the traffic recorded certainly things like SSL or your friend in these sorts of cases unless that is also being proxied as part of the firewall operations but the idea here is providing an effective means to exploit individual users at scale based upon selectors identified in traffic to get endpoints on or you know compromised endpoints for dissidents political opposition commercial organizations or whatever that might be opposed to the regime or present a risk of some sort and there's a desired need to monitor so we're looking at this the Great Cannon that came out in 2015 that's almost 10 freaking years ago where was technology 10 years ago this is a lot different or whatever now or whatever if nothing else we're on generation what for iPhones right but you know the idea being is that shits change and as a result presumably and we've seen this that the PRC is continuing to invest and invest quite heavily in CNO capabilities and other cyber operations and we've seen this reflected in widespread intrusion operations like the proxy shell proxy logon exploitation campaigns going back to last year to something that Orange Psy eventually presented at Black Cat I believe as well as Def Con but that was weaponized by Chinese threat actors for quite some time due to mysterious items around the disclosure of those vulnerabilities to Microsoft but also more recent campaigns targeting Barracuda email security gateways and other infrastructure that China is going just like wild on popping infrastructure right now and we can see hints of the automation aspect when it comes to something like the gray cannon so looking at the combination of great firewall and cannon functionality starts giving us glimpses of similar ambitions and similar programs that we see in the Russian space with the main question being the scalability and management of these capabilities and how they would link to more widespread intrusion campaigns could China build their own scan v essentially my answer is like yeah they're pretty fucking smart of course they could build it if they want to and now that this information is out there probably incentivized to do so at some point in the future but wait there's more hey remember the Snowden leaks like that that wasn't too long ago right that was only like 15 years 10 years ago yeah 10 years ago like a month ago so note and obligatory cover my ass or whatever statement here that the following slides are based on public commentary and posting and neither confirmed or denied the accuracy or veracity of the items discussed these are all theoretical things that people have posted about that have analyzed the Snowden files or Snowden leaks directly anyway that out of the way the leaks of their implications is that we had a popular conception that mostly revolved around the prison program that was a questionable program for domestic surveillance and so forth targeting a variety of communication platforms and social media and so forth that was certainly important and arguably very very bad but that wasn't the only thing leaked which is why there's questions about Mr. Snowden's motivations and so forth based upon the other things that were cast out into the world as well because there were additional programs disclosed including Snowden and potentially others because we've seen things like shadow brokers and other sorts of entities come along over time disclosing significant information on computer network operation capabilities such as widespread automated exploitation and control frameworks that were being used by NSA and 5i partners according to reporting prior to those leaks coming wild or coming into the wild so we can talk about a quantum of exploitation so looking at Fox IT and other organizations there was an item in the Snowden leaks concerning a program called Quantum that essentially provided a man on the side capability of monitoring traffic through various observation points and then when traffic of interest is identified injecting into that traffic stream and trying to then achieve exploitation based upon selectors sounding a little different because there's that man in the middle portion of events but from the automated exploitation and control perspective like this is looking a little bit like Scandi in certain aspects and there were fun diagrams or whatever noting how the internet or whatever was basically targeted or whatever in such a way to allow for identification of traffic of interest that would then result in not just exploitation but then marshaling those exploited end nodes into intelligence agency controlled apparatus so fun stuff there the main thing with this sort of automated exploitation at scale is that they represent automated exploit systems similar to what we're seeing with Scandi disclosed publicly and certainly you started seeing articles and wired and the Fox IT article and some hacker forum posts and like how you can do this on your own you know started popping up about 2012 2013 or whatever not that long after or 2013 2014 not that long after the leaks but what's interesting is that what was five-eye alleged state of the art almost 15 years ago at this point given the likely origin of when the documents actually were emerged that Mr. Snowden then decided to yeet out to the world we see artifacts of this now reflected in Russian and Chinese operations so the point is is that if true these Snowden leaks were arguably a disaster for the United States related to CNO and SIGG capabilities by deploying disclosing methodology like as an intelligence agency that's very very fucking bad however it also appears that multiple other parties were paying attention and taking notes on how to build similar or potentially even more ambitious programs based on these disclosures disclosures whether we're talking Snowden Vulcan or anything in between like Vault 7 or Shadowbrokers and we've seen this with Shadowbrokers eventually leading to WannaCry this shit doesn't happen in a void just because some researcher or journalist or whatever pushes us out there doesn't mean like oh capabilities are burned move on like nope folks are taking notes and learning from each other and making sure that they're trying to adapt to the state of the art of adversaries or even allies as they may see fit or necessary to do so so what's the future of offensive cyber then in light of all this sort of activity well well well there's a popular conception of cyber of computer network operations if you got one asshole on a keyboard or whatever doing bad stuff or like if you're a red teamer doing bad stuff for good reasons and that's cool at all and maybe it encapsulates some of what still counts for red teaming and pentesting or whatever operations and maybe for some state-sponsored programs but a more realistic depiction of CNO these days well you're sitting in a freaking cube farm man this is a discipline now that has evolved beyond like one individual executing a single operation to trying to develop frameworks to do these sorts of operations at scale and we've seen this in multiple aspects at this point so just looking at this slide we have scan v we have the Snowden leaks items and we have the great cannon all representing attempts some successful some still maybe notional it's debatable if scan v actually went live or not I've been looking for a scan v node if you find one let me know I'd be curious to take a look at it but the idea being is that we're looking for a road to scalable cyber and that applies across personnel targeting and operational security so from a personal standpoint cyber talent while it is available right now because vcs are laying people off and they suck the talent is still expensive especially if you're working in the dot govern dot mill space they have to compete with private industry and so forth so the ability to codify skills and capabilities in programs and in applications becomes quite useful in extending and expanding programs so you're not doing a you know arithmetic expansion like one operator one up but rather a geometric expansion that I get a couple of devs and I can get a you know exponential increase in the number of potential operations and endpoints that I can exploit that gets us to targeting where if you are a significant authority or state sponsored intelligence agency with any sort of ambition whatsoever global actions or global ambitions require global actions being able to successfully target and manipulate networks at a vast scale and just throwing thousands of you know a million monkeys on a million terminals or whatever can maybe exploit the internet or whatever in a million years and so forth but that's not realistic so to really come up with a way to hack the planet so to speak we need to figure out ways of automating and making that efficient but also top tier threat actors know that they don't just buy AWS nodes or something like that these days some still do and there are reasons to do so but if you're really trying to do things like conduct offensive cyber operations or disruptive operations it behooves you to start making the final hop to the victim network and where you're originally starting operations from as far apart as technically feasible both to maintain your own sources methods and command and control frameworks as well as to potentially muddy the waters around think thorny questions like attribution but also more importantly retaliation and response based upon that but importantly the Vulcan leaks are now lagging indicators this activity has already taken place we're looking at this now in the past tense thus we need to anticipate even greater degrees of automation queuing and reactive targeting emerging over time again five eyes were doing these over 10 years ago China was doing a version of this about six or seven years ago Russia was doing something kind of like this or whatever would VPN filter and Cyclops blink and then with scan v decided to like go to 11 on the volume and really make this into a much more wide spread sort of capability so this shit's going on and it's been going on and it's only going to get better or worse depending on your perspective for things so what should we expect I would argue that we should expect greater automation and improve scalability just you know accountants and so forth or whatever they want to try to make you do more with less and that applies in dot gov dot mill space as well so it's it's going to happen that's not a very sexy point but more interesting is this marshaling of the neutral web for offensive actions where your unpatched soho router or whatever becomes a frontline article or whatever in targeting excuse me critical infrastructure in Ukraine so how do we start defending that and do we start doing things like automated remediation of vulnerable nodes or whatever that are in neutral space can we do that is that legal will that piss people off yes it will piss people off but it really becomes a thorny issue for how we start responding reacting and doing things like takedowns against these sorts of capabilities there's also and this is actually kind of cool I think less reliance on rock stars and more commoditization of capabilities so we want to talk about lowering the baler the barriers to entry when it comes to cyber this is one way that I don't need to rely on like two or three top tier hacksores or whatever in order to execute all my operations rather I just need to identify ways of getting that knowledge that is employed by those individuals putting it into code and then deploying it in some way that scales effectively and also you know I'll give all the AI vendors or whatever a lot of shit because there's so much bullshit out there right now but there are non-bullshit applications for artificial intelligence when it comes to this sort of activity so imagine if you will that in addition to building say an automated fuzzing platform for vulnerability identification you extend that even a little bit further to a system that can do system scanning and classification that say could identify based upon the system type and vulnerability what is a reasonable vulnerability that I could exploit that minimizes my risk of detection and then what follow on payload is most suitable for this device to ensure either it's a lasting note in my network or I can use it as an immediately burnable item for say deploying a wiper against a system of interest that I want to take out of the internet I apologize it's like day three of DEF CON my voice is going yeah so where does that put us it's like conclusions like yeah average series innovate man like that's cool but where are we now capability inspiration and proliferation basically so average series learn from operations and open source research every action comes with some sort of response or reaction in some great newtonian reflection within the cyber ecosystem and thus today's leak or disclosure becomes the inspiration for or the hey where the fuck are we doing that for some other party or whatever that happens to be involved in this space with that computer network operations is not a static field but a constantly evolving one with multiple factors and you want to talk about three body problems we're talking about like a five or six body problem here in terms of adversary and defender reactions and relationships as well as other sort of factors that come into play so what's our guidance for defenders and decision makers my community well adversaries are constantly evolving and learning like no shit Sherlock of course they fucking are otherwise a loser jobs well legacy techniques and tradecraft for defense and identification will fail if we're relying on things like block listing or the IP addresses associated with C2 frameworks or whatever it's a losing game why because of a thing like scan v it's like oh you block this note well I have 15 more or whatever over here for just this one up and I can get a hundred more if I want later on it's playing whack-a-mole and it's a game that defenders are going to lose so instead we need to start building an emphasis on things like behavioral analysis of traffic patterns and anomaly enrichment are necessary items which kind of gets us into that creepy AI space a little bit but again have done well and done accurately without the marketing bullshit around it can actually be a valuable way of trying to resolve some of these problems so the idea here is that defenders can't rely on just sort of statically addressing individual threats but trying to understand categories of threat action in order to then take some sort of defensive response okay that's my community what about your community for all the red teamers and hackers and such out there whatever well in addition to thank you for letting me speak to you for a while and I hope this was interesting really what we're looking for is that human-driven operations are rapidly being replaced by high-end threat actors we're not talking about like the elite hacker or whatever in the hoodie or whatever or Mr. Robot tapping away or whatever in the dark it's like that shit just doesn't happen anymore we're talking about bureaucracies of dedicated developers infrastructure teams exploit development teams working in concert in order to develop and deploy capabilities for whatever reason as a result actually emulating adversaries while it's really you know depending on the organization that you're working with some of this goes out the window because it's like you have single factor off on your VPN like please you know try harder you know for those organizations they're already screwed but if we're talking about trying to emulate adversaries for more mature organizations as hackers, red teamers pen testers etc we need to think at a higher level of like okay how does this sort of operation scale how can I start mimicking this sort of activity in a meaningful way that I'm not just testing defenses but providing opportunities for defenders to look at traffic and actions that are similar to what my adversaries are doing less testing and probing will become more challenging it's not just about spinning up an AWS node and then brute forcing traffic on the single factor VPN anymore and then migrating to the domain controller point creds and game over but really thinking about like okay how do I start really emulating what we've seen over the last 10 years in terms of infrastructure deployment and then action on the part of high end threat actors so where do we go from here networks of various types that will continue to be weaponized by threat actors either as end targets so I'm going direct to my victim less likely for my high end threat actors but more likely as means to reaching them I'm going after and doing these exploited scale campaigns not because these targets are immediately of interest but because they provide me with a way of tunneling my traffic to my ultimate victims and that neutral or third party web space in between starts to become a very interesting battleground where there's not a whole lot of agreement on authorities to operate and what defenders let alone law enforcement can do to respond to them like if you hack back or whatever on the C2 server and it's a application server for a university somewhere what have you done have you committed a crime arguably yes is that a reasonable response or whatever for that node being used to send like some L-DOS based wiper or whatever on your network probably not but how do we figure this out these are questions that policy people should be addressing but instead they're talking about commercial threat attribution and naming scheme is another bullshit like that and not really helping out that's my world I'm sorry the idea though is that the increasing scale and velocity of campaigns will make defense and response challenging but not impossible we just need to recognize the state of where things are and begin moving and adapting defensive controls and countermeasures and tandem with that to come up with reasonable solutions I have no freaking idea where I am on time right now I had two minutes that's not enough time for questions really I'm happy to meet out in the hallway afterwards if anyone wants to discuss I'll hang out like over there somewhere like by the windows or something but this is available on the media server bunch of references and resources related to these topics if you're interested in going deeper into these since we really just cover things at a high level but thank you so much this was a lot of fun I hope this was interesting for you


As part of efforts to improve the lives of residents, Governor Babaji Desong Walu has stressed the need for healthy living as he encouraged them by availing themselves of the state health insurance scheme. So Walu was represented by the Permanent Secretary of Ministry of Health, Olu Shagun Oboye, encouraged residents to change service providers if they are found wanting. The governor said these during the first Lakers Health Insurance Summit with the team are celebrating Lakers Health Insurance. I have health insurance. Everybody should get health insurance. Nobody knows when illness will come and it is expensive to treat yourself out of pocket. There will be complaints, there will be challenges. But there's a methodology, there's a channel to address those complaints as well. So if you pay and you use it and you have a complaint, please come forward and complain to LASHMA. There is also the opportunity to change your service provider. If the service provider you chose is not meeting up your expectations, you can change. In the same vein, the Permanent Secretary of Lakers State Health scheme, LASHMA, Dr Emmanuel Azamba, spoke on the integrates and the private sector into the scheme. Things that we are going to talk about here. How do we integrate the private sector into the Lakers State Health scheme? As I said during my welcome remarks, we are allies. We are working in partnership. We are not here to stifle or in any way repress the private health insurance space. Rather, we are supposed to complement each other because they provide health insurance for a different segment of the population. Our responsibility and our target as an agency that is providing social health insurance is the informal sector, the vulnerable and the MSME, just as Mr Gomno said in his speech as well. So we are about to roll out a massive public awareness campaign, which will be multimedia of course. And it will be continuous because we also have grassroots presence. The informal sector is in the grassroots. Not all of them watch TV. They do radio more of that. And then you have to go to them to pass this message. So those are the kind of strategies that we are going to use to deploy. And they are continuous and sustained manner to ensure that it gets to everybody. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel. And don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Welcome all. Personally, it's great that art and culture are more part of the technology community. And this panel is a great example. And we'll jump right in. The last decade in terms of music has seen great influence of technology in how music is enjoyed and distributed as well as influence of platforms on discovering music. How do you see what are the skills, and particularly soft skills that we need to empower creators with at this point? And if you could talk a little bit about what you see as the biggest changes that have happened. When I look at you, I see myself because I'm on this screen behind you. But how's everybody doing? Everybody's feeling good? It's been a long two days. I had a roundtable. This young lady was in the roundtable with me earlier today, and we were talking about soft skills. And what I was saying is that one of the things that we all have in common in this room is that we are enthusiastic about being here. We're excited about being here. And it is important for us as leaders in the culture industry to communicate that to other culture workers, to young people who might want to enter into contemporary art, dance, filmmaking, music, performance art, whatever it is. The ability and the reality of being excited about what it is you're doing and being inspired by what it is around you. Because we talk a lot about technology and artificial intelligence and blockchain and all of these tools. But at the end of the day, these technologies are just that, they're tools. They are going to allow us to make better business decisions as business people. They're going to allow us to make better personal and creative decisions as creatives. And they're going to help to minimize repetitive tasks in our process. But at the end of the day, they're just tools. And what is going to be most important for us is to continue to be excited about what we do regardless of the medium, regardless of the tools we use, regardless of the equipment we use, whether it is that you're using a piano or image and is using her gloves or whatever it is. It's important that we can communicate that human emotion through whatever tools it is that we use. Yeah, I echo that. It's a painful year when you spend so much of your time, as we all do, with admin. We've just chasing numbers, chasing acknowledgments, making sure that everything is the way it should be so that the song or the product or whatever it is can have a life of its own. And what I'm really interested is, how do we empower the song to do a lot of that work by itself, empower it with data about who's written that, what are the monetary splits about that, what is the inspiration about that, what is the emotional tagging around that song, where was it written, what gear was used, all these other ways that people could build services to find songs that could essentially find the artists, so that they don't have to worry when they finish a song and they're happy with the song, they can just put it somewhere, in a place, and they can walk away knowing that it's going to be doing its best for you, that you don't have to become like an amazing entrepreneur or some hilarious video blogger to be able to have a career in music that the song should speak for themselves. And we need to encourage development in that space so that AI, curation, discovery can help connect the people that would like to hear the music, would like to discover the music in whatever ways, through a health app or a jogging or a sex app or however they're going to hear your music to empower all these different uses for music, because it's very hard for innovation to happen in the current music space. And so you've not only spoken about but worked towards a world where this kind of missing layer would exist of an open song database and easier tagged. That data, two years ago you were at Slush and how has the world developed? So we have streaming services for delivery, but you argue very strongly that there should be another independent layer and possibilities for smaller services, can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, so ultimately every individual in this room has multiple skills, passions, ideals, collaborations that they've done, projects that they've worked with, and all of these things help empower you to get better jobs, to go and work towards more things that you're interested in. But how do people find you? They might find you on LinkedIn or they might find you through friends or...  We are, you know, our songs are over here and we're over here with our website collection society number over there and a Spotify identity over here. But we're very fragmented, we don't have a place where people can find us through a trail or a breadcrumve trail of our works. So what we're proposing that we do over the next year, we've been talking about it for four years and now we're gonna do it, is we're going to build, we're gonna bring to life a music maker data layer so that individuals can own their data and in time kind of turn the music industry onto its feet so that we can be that base layer and we can generate, help author to come to life, a truly comprehensive open songs data layer as well. So you've got your data of your songs over here and your music makers. And from that base layer, there's all of these commercial opportunities for services to innovate on that space. And that's what we hope to, we'll materialize over the next year. So the reason why we're in Finland is we're doing a week here, we've just done 15 weeks in 15 countries connecting with 15 conferences and doing shows and whatever we can to reach music makers and to invite them into this imagination of the future by putting their foot forward and essentially just putting their name on the map and saying we believe in this future and that as we have a thousand or 10,000 over time, we can start to show how many we are, how organized we are becoming and how we want this future to create a flow of innovation in the music industry and beyond because our songs need to, they deserve a better home at the end of the day like music deserves a better home. I think a related theme, both of you have mixed many different influences also sort of geographically. How do you see the opportunities in new technologies to serve underserved musical communities or markets that haven't really had access before? Well, I think one of the biggest advantages of the technological evolution in the creative space is the tools that have allowed us to communicate and collaborate. So we live in a whole new world of communication and collaboration now where you can work on music with someone across the world who you've never met before. You know, just using email and Dropbox and WeTransfer and all of these tools that we have available to us. You even have tools now where you can share a session so we can work on the same session even if we're in different countries. So those tools have really allowed people to collaborate in ways that they were not able to collaborate before. It's no longer a case of, you know, well, we have to schedule a time so that we can be in the same country so that we can be in the same studio so that we can share the same ideas. We can now share our ideas regardless of where we are in the world or what time it is or what we're doing. So that's one part of it. And then the second most important thing is the democratization in technology in that the same technology that I use or you use or you use is now available to somebody who is in the Africa's or in South America or in Asia or in North America or wherever it is. So we all have access to the same tools. We all have access to the same garage band on your Mac or the same Ableton or the same fruity loops or whatever it is. So people have new opportunities now to create in ways that they never really had before. It's no longer a case of, well, I can't afford a piano. I can't afford a drum set. You know, the tools are available and the tools are there and it's just up to the creators to, again, take advantage of those tools and use that to inform their work. And the third thing is that it's important for people like us who are in this position to also inspire the younger ones, inspire the newer ones to be able to shine a light on what people are doing where they may not necessarily have had that opportunity before. So this is no longer a case of saying, well, I'm going to go to South Africa and discover some kind of music and then come back to America and use it in my own way and not have to give credit to the person who created that music. The whole thing has kind of been tuned on its head now and now it's more about celebrating here. Here's this very interesting artist that I met when I was in the Caribbean or when I was in South America or wherever it was and we did some work together and you shouldn't check out what they're doing and that's kind of the ethos that we've taken in a lot of the music that we've done over the years whether it is collaborating with artists from the Caribbean or from South America or mostly recently from across Africa and not just incorporating their production aesthetic or their music or their lyrics or their musicians or whatever it is, but also being able to shine a light on what they're doing and saying, hey, you know what? You might like what I'm doing and I work with them so now you should go check out what they're doing. So it's important for us to be able to kind of open that gate and show people something that they may have been missing previously. I mean, it is incredible. Globally, what we can do, how we can co-create across different platforms, different cultures. That bit of it is really amazing what we can do now. The difficulty is there isn't the industry to support what next. We output tons of music, amazing stuff but in order to sustain us to do that we often have to do other jobs in order to create the music which maybe other people enjoy and pay for in some way but it doesn't come back to sustain the livelihoods of those music makers and in many parts of the world there literally isn't any music industry. There's no, to speak of, royalty situation where musicians in Sudan get paid on the radio don't get any money. It's, there's just so much room there for music makers to be invited into the actual industry side where they currently can't. So whereby you might go and do a collaboration and that might invite them into our commercial music industry but otherwise how would they get their foot in the door? You have to have worked with somebody who knows how to get you into the system, da-da-da. And so what we really need is, you know, a true global music maker community handshaking across the world, verifying each other to bring us the same opportunities to every music service out there who's not just able to focus on the people who already have records signed by record labels to, you know, independent or whatever. There's so many other parts of the world that don't have any way to make, to play in that game, to get music on Spotify or to... You both touched on it a little bit. Do you see the world today, given dominance of streaming and other social platforms for new musicians? You're both established musicians. How is it, how are the new platforms for starting artists? Are they in their favor? I think independent artists still face a big challenge when it comes to these larger streaming platforms because I think the biggest challenge that the independent artists face is that they don't necessarily have access to the same metrics that Spotify does or Apple Music does or Warner Music or Universal Music Group or any one of the majors, you know. So you're starting off and you're putting music out there but you don't have access to any of the metrics associated with your music because you don't have any ownership of the platform. You don't have any stake in the platform. So I appreciate what Imogen is talking about in terms of being able to add an additional layer so then maybe that will allow the artists to now have some access to their own data, to their own information so that they can make better decisions as opposed to targeting marketing, as opposed to going to perform in Finland because you might be able to look at the metrics and see, oh, yeah, people like my music in Finland or targeting super fans, you know. And the two big players, Spotify and Apple Music, they have backends that are tailored towards artists. They have Apple Music Connect and Spotify for artists but at the same time, those are still very rudimentary tools and they don't really offer the type of engagement data that Spotify uses to build their playlisting engines which playlisting engines aren't necessarily built right now to benefit the listener or to expose new music. They build so that people can keep hearing songs that they like so that they can keep paying $5 a month for Spotify. So it's more about customer retention as opposed to creating tools that can empower, not just the listener but empower the creator and from that standpoint, it can be a bit challenging for new people that are coming into the market. Yeah, I mean, ultimately I would love to see a feature where the song interfaces with all of the services and the song kind of has a history of events and partners and people who've collaborated with it and that is kind of wrapped around itself and are able to move further. So if people discover that via Spotify or via some health app or whatever it might be that this particular piece of work is actually really good for running, then that data can go feedback into the song that it's been discovered that it's really good for running so then other running apps might start to use that music. It's, at the moment, these kind of, the services are, it's a good step like into helping people, you know, having an option of a library of music to play but it's by no means comprehensive and the data is all fragmented and sitting in their own silos and really we would love the songs and the kind of postcards from the songs to come back to the artist or anyone involved in that song and so that even maybe a fan, you know, it must be, well it is really annoying that we have like Apple Music accounts, Spotify account, YouTube account, wouldn't it be nice just to have one identity that kind of floats through these different accounts and that me as a creative could have somebody that wants to follow maybe what I'm doing but they want to know when I'm doing a Q&A on Twitter or Reddit or I might be doing a Facebooker thing over there, I might be doing some other thing over there and they get notified of that by way of a kind of image and heap bot letting them, letting their kind of fan passport know that so that individually, it's called a fan passport or whatever but individually people having a digital version of themselves or a digital representative of themselves that shares what they do, what they love, who they're interested in, you could want to sell that or not to people who are interested in that because other people are buying it off services anyway, you should be able to, so this is kind of the creative passport which is for the music makers it's like a step towards that ultimate goal that as humans we can just interface with multiple services and our skill sets can reach out to find better future of work and collaborations on a much bigger level because many artists are not just music makers, we also, I don't know about you, but I'm interested in developing technology or you might be interested in certain subjects or might be interested in photography or filmmaking or you know and so yes we make music but we're also just generally humanly creative like we all are so it seems like we have an opportunity in the music industry to kind of pilot that identity space into how we navigate around the various different services and help to create more of a flow in our business and creative life and that we hope, I hope services will come as the music makers come to start thinking in terms of if we had that layer what could we change? Yeah, I don't know where I was going with that. No, I think what I would ask is you've both spoken about that such a layer would be good for artists and creators. What's holding it back? Well, what do you think? So what is holding back that there isn't an independent layer? The way it looks for me, I was struck when you talked about the tools, I took a 15 year break from making music, you come back to it and you said, now this is all possible, everything here and you kind of see the delta in a very big way. From a distribution point of view, we can each put a song, get it on Spotify and through a distributor and it'll be there in a week. Whether any people will find it is another thing like you were talking about the algorithms. But, and you're specifically I think proposing that this new layer and songs having more information about them feeding back into it would be a way for songs to travel, be discovered more beyond the algorithms only of Apple and Spotify music. For me, it's just a matter of time. Blockchain has inspired a lot of people into the ideals of what could happen in terms of structure and business and sharing and open data and authoring into that space. For me, it changed my life four years ago when I was like, so wait a minute, there could be a song database where all of the collection societies and all the radio station, all the labels would feed into and respond back from one point of a song like an identity of a song and that I as a musician, instead of waiting two years for a payment from a radio station or from a live performance or something even though I played it, I have to wait two years for that. And so even though you might get a penny in your pocket if some Finnish radio station played your music, it would take probably two years for me to receive that as the composer back in England and it would have cost the system at least a hundred times that to make that payment into my pocket. So there's not just up to 50% of royalties every year that doesn't reach the right people, that's a major issue, but it's also the time that it takes to get there, costs a hundred times as much so we could be getting a hundred times as much back. It's crazy. So I think that's the exciting point in time now is that lots of people are thinking about these issues across all different industries and for the first time ever in my life, I think first time ever, people are interested in the musicians' woes because there's innovation possibilities, there's commercial potential for people outside the music industry to innovate in this space because there's such a market for it, which is why things are starting to shift. The music industry itself is slow because they're quite happy in some respects, but I think that the time has come where musicians are just fed up and they're just fed up with being fed up and now it's time to just get on with it and you know... What are you, from a technology point of view, what are you most excited about in terms of opportunity for creators at the moment and new technology? Well, I think that, you know, the whole idea of big data in the creative space, in the music space is brand new and to your last question, one of the biggest challenges we face is there's a lot of fragmentation.  So you have all of these fragmented players that are kind of operating in isolation and the only communication they have is really kind of like what information they choose to exchange with each other and then on the other side of it you have this whole idea of big data and how do we manage it and that's so brand new to us, you know? So I think that probably one of the most exciting things is us being able to kind of scale down enterprise solutions that have been in existence for the last 10, 15 years and actually be able to apply those same enterprise level tools to the creative industry in terms of like song management, rights management, payment processing and all of these things. So that's definitely a big change that I think we're going to start seeing over the next three to five years. It's going to take some time again because you have so many players in the field, you know? And a lot of it will need to be structured and regulated, but I think that that's going to make a significant difference to how people put their music out there and how it's consumed. I'm excited about so many things. I just don't know where to start. I'm excited about the idea that big data and the curation of that data could emerge into something like a data sets for artists where scientists do kind of, you know, work and analysis and research and that they curate that into a place where musicians can interface with that data and create music out of, you know, fact kind of, you know, analysis and research that then could then potentially pay the scientist for their research as part of the song and that could all be distributed via smart contract. Or I'm also very excited about how the social aspect of VR could impact the music touring space or the music performance space, how our own identities are going to be visible in the VR space, how we can co-create in the VR space. I'm also excited about the idea that in the future there's been just no need for advertising ever again, that especially in terms of music, that the idea of the song by kind of going through some kind of filtration analysis sponge goes onto this kind of song database thing or network of and that it gives the same opportunity for some 15-year-old kid in outer Mongolia who's creating some music in his bedroom, reaching some CEO executive at the head of IBM who maybe is having a bad day and by way of their personal assistant computer metrics knowing that you're feeling particularly down in that day, the system might actually connect these two people together from outer Mongolia and the head of IBM. So I just, yeah, I think there's so much potential with AI and blockchain. This may have answered one of the questions that came from the room. The artist Laurie Anderson once popped the big one. She said, are things getting better or are they getting worse? That was her question. The question reached from the audience. In your experience, is technology making the music business better or worse for the artists, especially in terms of distributing the content? Both of you are optimistic. Yeah, totally. I mean, again, the tools are there. It's really up to the artists themselves to choose how they use to manipulate them. I think we're in a curve. It's not, it kind of is okay for a few artists in the past did very well and it kind of worked out physical sales touring that kind of made sense. And then the digital area came and then it went, doesn't make any sense at all. There's no connection between anything anymore. Who is everyone anyway? And now we have this potential with, you know, thinking is around identity and privacy and data sharing and all these things, which are going to lead us into an age of abundance for creativity in terms of flow of creativity, in terms of tools, but also in terms of discovery and support and partnerships and collaborations. So I feel like now, if you're like now in the music industry, it's not good. It's really hard. And it's not hard to be creative. That's easy. It's like easier than it's ever been. But in order to actually do something with that and go to the next stage, it's so, so hard. You just can't shout above the noise loud enough. So, but I'm excited about, you know, with the support of developments in AI, and curation discovery and, you know, a shared systems of protocols that we will reach and an incredible, you know, future in five, ten years from now where you can say that my daughter, if she ever decides to go into the arts, I have confidence that it's going to be an incredibly abundant space as it should be. Very good. One last question from the audience is, tech has democratized access to music making and publishing and soon Western music in quotes or Western music makers will be a minority. What will mainstream sound like in 2030? Ooh. I don't think we have any idea what it's going to sound like. I think it's just important for us to keep persevering, keep innovating and keep shining a light on people who are doing fun and exciting things, you know. We share, we like something because the reason that we got into creating any first places because we were passionate about it, we were passionate about what others were doing. So we continue to share that passion, we continue to highlight what other people are doing and we just try to leave our mark. But I don't know that I can really say what music is going to sound like, you know, because it's continually evolving. So it's just for us to kind of leave our mark on it. Yeah, I don't know, but I would love to see, I would love to experiment with kind of an AI version of myself, like my creative self, so that if there was specifically an Imogenheak fan out there and they were having a bad day or they needed a bit of extra courage to go into school that day or whatever it might be, that I might have developed an AI kind of generative reactive version of myself to be able to do what I would do if I was there in person, but I'm not. So I would like to see, like, yeah, how we can extend ourselves. Extended creativity. Yes, and kind of situational, spontaneous response, kind of, yeah, connecting in real time to the fan, a piece of us, a very personal piece of us. Yeah. With those words, it is great to have art and culture in the middle of technology. We hope that there'll be more of that together with Slush and Helsinki Festival in the future. And for all of those of you that may be back last two weeks of August in 2019, welcome to the festival and YouTube. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.


A search and rescue operation intensified at the explosion site that occurred in Ibadun last night. The state government has announced the premises of housing corporation Ibadun as the emergency hub for the victims of the explosion. Retired commissioner of police and special advisor to the state government on security matters Fatah al-Washini, while addressing the press this afternoon, noted that more information is needed from the residents who identify affected individuals, adding that the hub will help in processing and sharing relevant information about the explosion. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


If you've been watching Risk Bides over the past six weeks, you'll have a pretty good idea what advanced materials are, and what might make them potentially risky. But there's one question that hasn't been addressed so far. Are we smart enough to create advanced materials that are safe by design? In principle, if we know what makes something harmful, we can design it to be less harmful. You're already seeing this with synthetic chemicals, where scientists are designing substances that do what they're supposed to do, but are gentler on the environment and our bodies. And there's nothing to stop us doing the same thing with other materials. Because advanced materials depend on designing and engineering substances to behave in a certain way, it's a relatively small step to including safety parameters in the design process. As long as we know what makes something harmful and how to reduce it. This safety by design approach is already being used in areas like green nanotechnology, an innovative approach to developing high performance materials that pose minimal risk to people and the environment. One example of safety by design and green nanotechnology is the use of advanced titanium dioxide nanoparticles in sunscreens. Many sunscreens use organic chemicals to protect the skin against the sun's ultraviolet rays. But to work, these chemicals have to be absorbed into the skin. And over time, the UV radiation breaks them down and makes them ineffective. This is why sunscreens need to be reapplied every few hours. Even organic sunscreens, on the other hand, work differently. Particles of an insoluble substance like titanium dioxide are applied to the surface of the skin where they reflect the UV light. But they can also reflect visible light and look kind of messy. However, making the particles small, around 20 nanometers in diameter, hits a sweet spot where they reflect the harmful UV light but are transparent to visible light. In other words, you have a highly effective yet invisible sunscreen. Apart from one small problem. Nanosized titanium dioxide particles are photoactive. Mix them with water and ultraviolet light and they produce free radicals, highly reactive chemicals that you really don't want to be exposed to. This isn't great news for the skin, but it also isn't great news for the product as the free radicals also kill long-term performance. To overcome this problem, one company engineered their sunscreen nanoparticles to be safe by designed by adding small amounts of the metal manganese. The result was highly effective UV protection without the production of harmful free radicals. Something that was only possible because of a combination of materials designed know-how and health risk smarts. As we learn more about how to make materials safe as well as useful, safety by design is likely to become an increasingly important way of ensuring products are acceptably safe and commercially viable. Of course, sometimes a fair dollop of creativity is needed to ensure both safety and functionality. Knives that don't cut, for instance, are still tough to make. But by combining science, design and engineering in innovative ways, risk and usefulness are no longer either or options when it comes to the next generation of materials. To the contrary, an intelligent understanding of risk is becoming an asset rather than a liability in making and using materials that support sustainable and profitable products. And this, from a risk perspective, is what makes advanced materials so exciting.


Hey there, Foundation staff! This is Level 2 researcher Theron Sherman, and today's broadcast is on SCP-1268, Object Class Safe Exeki. Special Containment Procedures SCP-1268 is to be kept in a standard humanoid containment cell and fed regularly. The room is to be monitored by one guard at all times. In the event of a containment breach, security personnel are required to detain SCP-1268 alive if at all possible. However, if personnel deem SCP-1268 an imminent risk, they are permitted to dispose of it by any means necessary.  While SCP-1268 is capable of basic motor functions and self-maintenance, it does not appear to be capable of communication, nor does it show signs of emotion or higher intelligence. It is currently believed to be non-sapient, however, it has demonstrated the ability to use stairs, door handles, and elevators. When left to its own devices, SCP-1268 will wander aimlessly until it is in proximity to a large group of people. In these situations, SCP-1268 will go into the crowd and slowly move through it. During this process, the behavior of those in the group will be altered in a predictable manner. Zero to two minutes, no effects are visible. Two to seven minutes, persons in the crowd are visibly nervous, turning their heads frequently and moving more quickly than before SCP-1268 enter the crowd. Seven to fourteen minutes, persons other than SCP-1268 begin to experience disorientation and confusion. Some will actively attempt to exit the crowd, although most will continue with whatever activities they were participating in. Fourteen minutes forward, almost all persons in the crowd panic and attempt to leave the area by any means necessary. Subjects affected this way show a distinct lack of concern for the safety of themselves and others. Anomalous effects will cease after SCP-1268 is no longer in the crowd. The danger of SCP-1268 varies with group size, group density, accessibility of exits, and size of exits. On average, thirty percent of all persons in a group that has been affected by SCP-1268 will be killed from being trampled or from interpersonal violence. A further thirty-five percent will suffer injuries of various severity. SCP-1268 will remain unharmed and show no apparent reaction to the event. Addendum A review of available footage has found that, when in a crowd for fourteen minutes or more, SCP-1268 will exhibit a behavior that may or may not be... laughter. Ugh. Okay, this concludes today's broadcast. Please like, comment, subscribe, and hit the bell using your encrypted YouTube account and support the broadcast at patreon.com slash site forty-two.


Going on everyone Sam here with late sports cards for been 23 for any prism football hobby six box half case break number 30 Pick your team style names and teams and tonus end with the Eagles Armando B. Chargers Ashley W. Bangles Calum F. Giants Chad are with the Panthers Charlie P lines Chris s jets Chris H. Cowboys Dave S. Packers Greg E. Patriots Harper B. Colts JVP with the Seahawks Jeffrey H. Texan's chiefs and Steelers Jeremy H with the Vikings Jim J. Titans John M. Jags Justin L. Broncos Justin R. Niners Ken S. Browns Kevin C. Bears Costa K. Cardinals Kyle K. Vills Matthew B. Saints Matthew W. Commanders Robert H. Dolphins Roger F. Ravens Ronald I. Falcons Stephen P. Rams Valerie P. Raiders and Bucks Let's do it West with a bunch of spots today as well and I'm asked to including a masterwork spot What are your thoughts on masterwork as a Star Wars guy? Um, I mean it's fine It's not a product I would personally buy but like there are some good stuff that comes out of it. Yeah I know you're more of a chrome guy though. Well, it's not only that but it's just kind of like Silver John L. If I don't to me like When it comes to that I like the more like the illustrated stuff. True Zach Harrison is 75. I know what you mean Nice one there Hadn't been hoker and joey Porter like just a picture of the actor doesn't get me excited. Yeah, okay. That's fair You know I mean that's fair The sketches that come out of it. Yeah sketches are awesome back to 125 Evan Hull and waiting to Sylva to Sean Gibson at 225 is to Sean Gibson Foskey and Jack Campbell. I think honestly like my favorite Star Wars products probably galaxy just for that reason Yeah, no, that's fair. Plus. There's a lot like there's more scenes and stuff in it too. Joe burrow. Yeah, red wave bobby Wagner Aden O'Connell and darno washing like if I was going to collect a star wars product, I think I'd do a new galaxy too. Yeah Hello mark Mark chili Edwardsville, Illinois today Devonta Smith, Cedric Chilman to 25 for the browns It was chilly this morning. It was really freaking cold this morning. I was freezing when I woke up jot downs Wow over that part I don't know Donny. I was pretty much freezing. Okay. I mean everyone's different That's cool Silver portals Jamar shakes got Randall Cunningham to 75 green scope. Nice color match for the Eagles. That's sweet Sweet How about some sweet action? They probably probably will Michael Meyer. Let's hope it does mark Uh, James T with a couple of spots. Jim g with the spots to bias with the spots and Chaz with the spot two spots We can't pack it as we need to get a PSA subs back. I need to listen to some of that stuff now Yeah, I know I listened to some of my golden stuff last night finally Silver Jalen Phillips, Orange Waves, Zach Evans to 60 on the rookie Will Anderson Need to make up for my 12 dollar loss on that Oh, no bought it for 120 and then I sold it for Bijan and I lost about 12 dollars in fees. Yeah, Bijan. I'll do it That that is Parrish Johnson to 175 Tank Dell and Chris Rodriguez here. Honestly, it's not the same person buying the Colton every single breakmatch They're just the team they go quick when they're available. They'll go really really quickly Silver John Randall to 225 Bobby O'Karake Manual Forbes and Pukinakua Some of our tank things be Tariq Stevenson to 149 Eric Gray and KJ Henry Brett and Ralph both taking spots up as well. Thank you at both. Thurman time is to 199. Come on mark That's in Bennett and base that is orange tomorrow at over shown two one 249 base base Tony with some more spots and bone draft Steven with a flux spot Anton or Tony picking up a super jumbo Ralph with a red sock spot Brett asked for the cardinals and definitive I would say probably more of the randoms. It's more on the random side. I'm not the one who personally does it It's either rich or forest or lane will do it Um, usually rich a list of and then either forest or lane will schedule and sometimes forest lists them too I don't think lane list lane will schedule Silver Bijan Jacobi Myers to 199, but yeah, it's more random like Jameer Gibbs and Derek Hall We've list stuff out multiple days in advance So usually like today for instance Maybe like Thursday breaks or Friday breaks will get listed. But yeah, I mean honestly refreshing it's the way to do it burrow a blue wave and league willis Kendra Miller and sam look for time mojo Mojo Luke schoonmaker on the variation Congrats on that. Um cowboys to 25 uh orange Calvin Ridley to 249 juju Branson Paris Johnson Silver hype drake london idonokano Silverado. There we go. Congrats Raiders very nice Take that all day some qb love Kittle or uh, not kittle uh cmc prismatic to 125 Kyle Duggar It's fine. Yeah, it's actually funny enough. We actually looked it up on saturday I was I was like, I wonder but yeah, it's okay. It's close-ish, but yeah, it's all right drake london to 225 on the track Bijan and Tyree wilson silver jsn to 149 that is Aiden hudsonson Okay, we're posted us a picture on his instagram story. I say if a check out orange avid kamara 249 And he goes it was like he was like I need a it was like a poll It was like I need an answer on this he posted He has spencer strider gold sapphire ps8 10 and he posted like one with like a background And then one of him holding the card Yeah, and he's like normally I don't put my hand in the pictures, but the lighting is much better Like what do you guys think it was like it was like are you guys kind of bothered by the hands and he goes it was like Uh, no fine like no find a new uh angle or like no, it's fine So I just I didn't even I didn't even vote. I just swiped up and said your hands are bothering me really bothering me So that's where that came from Silver is jessen herbert blue waves peter skironski to 199 Lucas van ness Now never forget he got me back once really good the 125 is jonathan mingo Um, I think I I'm sure I told you this at some point But he posted like A picture of a card of a like card of a set that he's looking to put together He's like if anybody has any of these cards, let me know and I told him I was like, I don't have any It's just so you know and then there's one night silver chris olave the 249 sam laporta on the orange Pelagic antsy chase brown there was a one it was a tough night too, man. We were just like grinding ourselves up and um Candler comes in there's one spot left in the break and he goes I don't want the last spot you so everybody knows It's like damn. Yeah, you got me on that one silver is josh allen and demarvion over shone rookie auto for it in the cabers Really mods biz mac get lost Biz mac come on first biz mac jumbo is a mod too. Yeah It looks like this looks like such a doofus right now. He always does If you look doofus in the dictionary, it'd be Screenshot of paid manning right now. Oh, we got a true gold True gold everybody bills Jordan poyer it's a 10 Congrats on that Jordan madison.  I just want to know if he thinks he how powerful he really thinks he is silver jay kater orange 249 kyle trask mckay dylan horton orange wave coming up silver is harrison smith 260 george carl aftis CJ stroud and ty jay spears silver zay throwback nice one there purple or blue ice tuba hovered for 99 Levison firing young purple cave on timido to the pelotu in java mingo five points and six boards Silver is demar hamlin warren sap to 75 green scope bottle for tampa one of last teams taken If you uh base and base kyle and andrew with some more spots. Thank you guys five five point six boards for game power there silver erin rogers Two at 149 trevor lorence go to bad biz mac silver lockdown trevon digs davis mills to 175 There's rishi rice and dalton concave rice young prismatic orange javon holland 2249 mims and dairies davis silver lamar purple ice diante johnson a 225 hey stuce vone silver travis etienne catty macintosh to 149 red wave auto Congrats on that one rookie for the good ol c-hooks Lauren williams journal. Thank you. Dave picking up a 10 box football spot Kyle c with a couple of bowman chrome use and andrew r with a couple of spots including a master workspaw burrow purple power harrison smith color match to 49 jaylon carter shan clipper silver chris godwin purple josh gibbs to 125 base and base silver legerious sneed byron young to 175 silver rookie jamir gibbs purple jay jettus the 125 color match again johnson price young rookie All right, red wave trevon williams to 149 rice young rookie and jaden reed whoa I'm gonna throw them all over again now Pretty good. You just called that 225 is leighton vander ash purple ice That's heavy on wicks jsn rookie silver clewell herbert andre reed to 25 that is navy camo Congrats on that one bills Thank you guys a bunch of spots coming in and a bunch of breaks It's being harrison silver no afant purple ice damien pierce to 225 The week day was zoma Vaughn miller to 175 on a hyper cam smith dtr Hype drake london to 199 that is going to be a Laramie tonsil. I know I saw that I saw that pethora Uh, it looks like lebron and uh fanatics have a deal official deal really because he posted something with fanat like a fanatics thing on uh Intag fanatics and tops. Wow. That's chris olave orange cedric tillman. That's pretty big two 249 zay and a chan That is kind of huge man.  It feels like at this point, right? silver emergent ps2 Tyler scott silver rookie auto This one there for the bears overshown and will mcdonald All right, we got jacob with a couple of breakaways christy with colorado Mike d with ohio state and tyler w with three flux spots two boxes left on the day everybody Two to go. Then we got a forest way another gold guys It's been a good case overall man hendon hooker Uh, that's upside down It is a lion and it is glee fraymond. It's a 10 congrats on that detroit It's kind of hope i'd be a little four to Or branch honestly any of them, but that's cool. Golds are always fun. I always like golds They're ain't gonna play about a gold. No silver rookie. They're called orange. It's 249 broadney thongs chase brown kendre miller That is a uh lorenzo carter to 149 So you talk about for the drive home and the papa johns for later. Oh, there you go See how my mind works silver hawk 2175 for shot penny painter and jamir gives rookie Silver jay jettus blue wave to 199 david and joku sam lapporta and debon witherspoon So you want to do that? I think it's talk about you figure out when we 199 will Anderson air called juju brints silver, chasem hill orange chase claypool to 49 Bejohn, wow, they already have it Forest camo coming up Resolve, it's george pickens to 15 nice and a 15 nice one there for the uh stealers second-year pickens wilson, cedric tillman Silver doesman ridder christ johnson to 99 blue ice nice Um, I think they're happened tonight son. I think they happen tonight if I'm not mistaken I believe that's a force out of the drawings happened tonight. I'll ask I'll ask him again But I'm pretty sure it's tonight if not if it was last night It's there should be a video on youtube and I'm like 99 percent sure it's tonight Uh buda baker tank del to uh 249 Murphy eric dray power jesson herbert height to 49. Thanks Very cool green scope ty jay spears to 75 as well rookie for the uh Said this afternoon. Yeah, my guess it'll be it might be the first thing he does when he goes live is do the drawing silver jamar chase Uh, trill davis. That's cool, man franchise legends to 25 Very nice. I am a yanks fan card shark. Yes. I am Jalen hyatt and manuel wilson. I am a pretty big Yankees fan All right, let me thank everybody again here jonathan with a good win spot maxime with a mixer brandon w with a delight greg m with a prism Christopher m with a super jumbo and john k with a super jumbo as well O and b with a 10 box spot. That's right. Justin. It was you at last spot mojo on the tv. That's awesome, man Battle land snel. I would feel okay. I just don't want to overpay for snel. That's my only issue I'm a little weary that we're gonna pay too much for snel. I wouldn't hate it I would I would be okay with it. We need pitching. So He's the best pitcher out there right now silver zay at his a dare call to 249 miller and la porta That's not my money, but I don't want to like I don't know If he stinks then we pay him a lot. That's not good. Byron young silver rookie purple ice nausea hairs to at 225 chasen silver rachon gary to 125 miles garret With a spoon and it's on Harrison Justin shorter to 25 Nice one there for the bills. Thanks be zack harrison Brandon, what's up, buddy? silver alvin kamara Yes, yes, there will be personals after uh breaks day. Hey, how about a puke in a coup on a 60? Orange wave congrats on that just broke the record. Nice Congrats on that Dtr and base uh I would bag it. Yeah I I do I do know that flakes null on the scion. That's pretty Pretty obvious as the garret coal to 149 is deke Are you sure? According to this guy though according to this guy. I don't know ball. So it sounds like that sucks Guess I don't know ball if the guy in chat says it that's uh, drake london emergent trevor lorence 225 The jags abaconda and lucas van ness silver givante williams and clueless jakir silverado Nice one there. Oh, it's this guy. It's the troll again. Let's go. Welcome back, buddy Damn, I thought you got I thought you had uh something better to do, man Oh, man. Oh, welcome back buddy, dude. Well, I thought you got I thought you had uh something better to do, man See that you go Oh, welcome back. Love. Dude Well, but I thought you got The guy it's the guy Welcome back It's the guy Oh The guy it's the guy Oh him, but Drake London, 199, Elijah Dotson, Deontay Banks. All right, it's good. Silver Amonra to 225 is Nick Chubb, Zach Evans, and Jake Caner. All right, quick recap, everybody. Ryan is Chubba Hubbard to 75, Ty J Spears to 60, Carl Laftis and Zach Evans to 49, Harrison Smith. Justin Herbert to 25 is Luke Schoonmaker, Cedric Tillman, Justin Shorter to 15, George Pickens, two golds, Jordan Poyer and Cleef Raymond. Autos and then Magg Cards. We've got Devon Aachen, Khalil Shakir, Tyler Scott, Tamara Onovershown, Aiden O'Connell, Kenny McIntosh, Chris Johnson, Warren Sapp, Randall Cunningham, Zach Harrison, Terrell Davis, Andre Reed, and then Pukinakua to 60. That will do it for the break, everybody. Thanks again for the fill. Next up is nothing.