I think I'm going to give you a new name, a visionary nation builder. My vision over the next 20 years is to develop one million homes across sub-Saharan Africa. You need to accept it. You don't think about it? You're building a city out of nowhere. And even though I'm not seeing the buildings, but already he's planting his grass, he's planting his trees. And you don't cut down trees too? No, we don't. Actually, if we don't, if we have to cut down any one tree, we have to replace it by five more trees. See, he has not welcomed me yet, but I just want to welcome you all to Taft City. 5,000 units. And how are you going to fund 5,000 units? Well, we'll find the fund. We have finances who are with us. We have shelter Africa as a partner with us. We have EcoBank as a partner. We have the West African Investment Bank with us. We have Africa Exim Bank with us. Trust Bank Gambia is with us. GT Bank is with us. You see, when you deliver, if you have a brand and you deliver and people know that you can do it, finances will run to you and they've been running to us to partner with us. I think we've already built a brand and anyone watching this video knows it from where we've been to. I think in the next five to ten years, for me to come here, I will see more houses springing up like popcorn in here. But that's too far. Come in December, which is in the next eight months, we have our first estate will be ready. The clusters of estates are being built by December this year, inshallah, the whole estate will be ready and people will be leaving here. So which means first phase has already begun? Yeah, we've started. We've started. As you can see, it's all in. The roads are going to be paved with interlocking blocks. All our landscaping has been done. All the water, as you can see, the sprinklers are on. The landscaping, you see this palm trees here? I brought them in from Nigeria. These are the big royal palms. I had to fly them in. I flew in over 2,000 of them. So it will all be lined up along the dual carriage entrance. As you enter the city, you can see it's a dual lane. Going in two lanes, going out two lanes, and you go across the city. What makes it a city? Well, the city is that it's not an estate. You have clusters of estates in the city. So for residents, residential. So you have several estates within the city, which is normal. So that's our model. What you see here is 145 hectares of land, which is just the first phase. First phase? First phase is 145 hectares. What is the total project? The total project is about 500 hectares. So you have 500 hectares, but the first phase is 145 hectares. And then you have a commercial area. So the commercial area, you'll have huge shopping malls. You'll have admin blocks. You'll have petrol stations. And then in the educational area, you have a primary school, a high school, a university, a vocational training college, you know, and also religious sites. Then you have, you have, that's not all. We also have a special economic zone where we're going to now inculcate the agricultural value chain into the city. So people who are going to leave here, when completed, it's about 30,000 residents. So we're not only interested in just putting a roof over people's head, but we're interested in feeding them. So there'll be a poultry here. There'll be a poultry farm. There will be also horticultural and agricultural farms here. But, you know, with intensive agriculture. So every consumable will be cultivated here. So if you want eggs, there'll be a poultry farm to supply fresh eggs. If you want milk, there will be an animal husbandry business here. You want fish? Fish, there'll be a fish farm. Aquaculture will be here because we have a river next to the estate. So that's the way to go. So people will leave, work, and play in the city. Do you have a model or design that we need to look at? Yes, we have a model which we display now and let's walk in and I will show you. So as you, as you can see here, we start, this is where we entered. And then this is, this is where we are. Okay. Now they're all done in clusters. For example, if you see this cluster here, all these here going around like this, coming like this in here. These are all commercial. And it is done not only for the residents, but even for people who are living outside of the city. So when you come in on your right, as you can see here, you have a shopping mall. This in red is all a shopping mall with adequate parking, a lot of parking in here. Then next to the shopping mall, you have the farmers market. You know, with the farmers market, because we're going to work on the agricultural value chain, all the producers are going to be sold here. And you can also have people producing from outside and bringing here for sale. Again, it can be sold to the residents and also people coming from outside. It's a smart city. So you're going to have high speed internet. So you want to attract anybody who's into tech to come and rent out here or buy a space. Then this here is a transit center. A transit center is where, when the public transport comes, that's where they stop. So the public transport will stop in here. That's a transit center. This is a hospital and clinic. Now, on all these here, we partner with experts. Already we are talking to a group of doctors who are Africans based in the diaspora. And we're going to advocate for telemedicine.   Then that's a petrol station in the corner here and this is a mixed use warehouse. So as I said, this cluster all is commercial. Now after this cluster, as you go in, you have the educational cluster. There's all education. All there is all educational. So when you start from here, you have a primary school in this one here. Then after the primary school, you have the high school in there. Then after the high school, you have a vocational training center in there. Then after the vocational training center next to it is the university. It's a primary university and then there you have the student hostel, which is student accommodation. These blocks here. Now next to it, you have a mosque. There's also a church inside. Now this doesn't have too much control, but once you want to enter the security, the residential area, there is total control here, security control. So this is the main gate house. Where if you are living here, you have to have your key card, electronic key card before you enter. So that one in Potapot. Yes, because we need to know what will it be? Potapot, there is actually a lot of beautiful things about Potapot. Okay. And one of those beautiful things is there's so many beautiful estates here and we're standing right in front of one of them right now. Oh, okay. Yeah. Golf estates. Golf estates. Are you the owner? Ah, don't tell me. The owner? I'm the owner spirit. I wish, I wish. Oh, okay. This is really amazing. I have friends that have apartments here, you know. You have friends that live here? Yeah, I have friends that live here. They, you know, go up to the apartment and stuff and it's amazing. It's really nice. Is it owned by an African? It's owned by a Gambian actually, yeah. A Gambian? A Gambian. Owns an estate? Yeah, in Nigeria. In Nigeria? Built by Nigerians, too. A Gambian? Yeah. Owner, built by Nigerians. So African connection. Exactly. Would you love to take me in there? Because I need to... I would love to take you in, but I actually don't have access. You don't have access? You have to live inside the very secure estate. Wow. You have to live inside to have access to the estate. Now, if you want to come and visit, you have to have a code. So if I am leaving here, you will have to call me. I'll give you a code and then security will allow you in. Now, everything beyond here is residential. But as I said, it's different estates in the city. For the first phase, we have seven different estates that are built here. Now, the estates are numerical, but in local languages. In the ethnic group. So the first one is called Benna. Benna in Wolof means one. As you can see now, what is going on? This is Benna. It is Benna estate. Benna is sold out. It's all sold out. But let me tell you what is interesting on this project. Forget about the houses being provided. We are creating 60,000 jobs directly. Because there are 5,000 houses to be built. And every house on every day there are 12 workers on it. So that's 60,000. And then we have indirect jobs being created. Because all the suppliers, all the women who cook the food. Alhamdulillah, I'm Alhamdulillah. First of all, I thank God, I thank MD. Before, I was not doing this kind of business. I find job tired. Then I start to work somewhere, but the thing did not go the way I want it. I leave it. I started my business in Dalawa. First of all, I started in Dalawa. I'm doing this business for two years in Dalawa. Then I come to a tough city here. And they say that the project is very big. So let me come and try. Let me come and see the place first before starting business. I just come and see the place, how the place look like, how here I be. Then I go and plan what to bring. So thank God now I'm making profits. Small, small, now it's better than before. You know, so indirect jobs, there are 25,000 jobs being created. And all of them are from the Gambia? Or it's mixed, I told you, I'm African, I'm a Pan-Africanist. What is important, if you can deliver, we give you job. We don't look at nationality. We are African and I guess that's what our countries are called for. So we demonstrated here. Why do you love working with Africans? Because they need it, it's absolutely needed. So we have a moral obligation to create jobs for African brothers. But people say Africans are not capable to understand that some of their job contractors, project managers, they pick people from different parts of the world, not Africans. You have seen me in Port Harcourt, you've seen what we've done there. And it was all done by Africans. One of them came to me when I was in Port Harcourt, told me that, hey, you have to respect Mr. Taff, man. Because even as a project manager, when I was on side working, people would come and say, pay me money before you continue. But you never talk about all those challenges. No, no, no. Well, they are challenges all the time. I mean, I, in Port Harcourt, I ran into a bank robbery. There was a bank robbery, bullets were flying everywhere. I'm sure this is the first time my family will know. Because they would have asked me, please come back home. You know? So I've had those experiences. The first time I walked into a site, people came with machetes, huh? Said, no, these are farthest land, you couldn't walk here. And my staff, they ran away. But I engaged them. And they ended up walking there. Yeah. So, so me, as I said, I love the challenges and I overcome the challenges. It's Africa, man. Is this a walk part or a bicycle part? This is the bicycle lane. And then this is the, this is the pedestrian lane. Pedestrian lane. Yeah. So one next to each other, you have a bicycle lane and a pedestrian lane. And in between, obviously, you have all these haggis here, all these flowers. So by the time they grow up and they are all trimmed, it will be beautiful and also it will form a boundary. The people that are making sure that this city comes to light, I mean, the workers, the people working in here. Well, I want to really acknowledge the Gambian ladies, the women folk around the community. We have ladies who are doing all this landscaping here and they're also doing all the cleaning. And I am pleasantly happy and surprised that, you know, they're doing so well. You know, apart from them, you know, we are an African based development company. So anywhere we go, anybody who comes in, we give you work.  And that's what really echo us calls for. And that's what also the African continental free trade area calls for.  And we are proud that we are employing Africans to do this. Mr. Aosu. Mr. Maya. It's a pleasure to see you, man. Good to see you too. You say you're from Ghana? Yep. How long have you been working with Taf? Oh, since 2002, 2003. Hey, it's like 10 years this old. Almost, then into 20 years old. Whoa. How does it feel working with Taf, man? Oh, I always feel happy. Because Taf is a hero. For even Africa, not only me alone. A lot of Ghanians are benefitting, a lot of Nigerians, a lot of Togo. Because my team, I have Togo, Benin, Senegalese, Ghanians, Nigerians, all inside, and Benin Republic as well. But let me understand, so who are you then? What do you do in here? I'm a contractor, since I started with Taf. Oh. I think I met you in Nigeria. Oh, Port Hanford. That's true. So you are part of the Port Hanford putte? At Gulf Estate. Gulf Estate? No, you're part of this one. No, we need this all to y'all. This guy's rich. This is Tomaq. He's making so much money. He's doing that so well. Oh my God. Like, how many people work for you now? Oh, right now I have almost about 60 people. Credit them. Credit them. In different nationalities. Whoa, you have people from Ghana? You have Nigeria? You have to go. You have Benin Republic, Senegal, Guinea as well. That's it. So a lot of... That's it. So let me understand. So Mr. Taf get the houses and they assign it to you. And then you guys make sure that... Yeah, we bear it. Show me. Are all these your houses? Yeah, I have almost about 17 houses I'm doing. I'm so impressed. This is just Benin. After Benin, you guys move to... That's impressive. What are you going to tell Africans watching us? Ah, I hope all fellow Africans have to watch what Taf is doing. Because if you go like this man, like maybe 10 in Africa, we are not going to suffer in Africa. I always create jobs for youths and young guys and we benefit a lot. Before I work with Taf, I can go to Europe, but there's no need for me to go to Europe because what I'm getting here is more than for me to be in United States. I'm getting a lot of money in Africa working with Taf. What have you been able to achieve as my worker with Taf?  So I can't... It's etc. My father, my parents, my family, everybody is eating and I'm feeling confident. If I'm not tested, I can't get this. I can't achieve this, I can't. So I always pray to Taf to get more contact so that we can never stop working. Yeah, we'll be working always. Mr Wusu, I want to say thank you so much for talking to me and you are an inspiration man. Thank you.   You're ready to grow up now. You're ready to grow up, yeah. Okay, take a seat. How far now? I'm doing now. I thought I'm going to see only Gambians here. Nigerians are everywhere. Wow, you know Nigeria everywhere in the world. What are you doing here? Actually, I'm building for Taf here. We started all the way in Nigeria as far back as 2013. So you're part of the Potahakot Project? Sure, I was part of the Gulf Estate. And you are here now? Yeah. Back then, how does it feel like working with Taf? It has really boost my understanding in the field of construction. I think at the level I am with Taf and the experience I've gotten, I can be independent. Really, you'll also be a real estate developer in the future? Maybe. It all depends on the future. So what is your role in here? My role here is to make sure that this project goes and Taf achieves his aim. That is my role. So you've got workers that works for you too? Yes, I've brought some Nigerians that are here working with me on the platform of Taf Africa Global. Is there only Nigerians that you're working with? No. Just like I said, I have some Gambians, I have like six Gambians working with me here. Since Gambians, I have like Sererulians, I have like eight of them. Then about 17 Nigerians that are here with me. There are so many Africans watching us. What would be your final message to Africans watching us? Wow, my final message is that whatever you're doing in the field of construction, please endeavor to put in your best and do it well because people are watching and people that are buying and checking quality. I'm sure we'll have close to over 200 contacts. So I am appealing to those Africans, all those young men, to get up and get trained. You don't say, oh, I don't have work. You have to learn how to be a carpenter. You have to learn how to be a steel fixer. You have to learn how to be a mason. And then you will take good money home. I can assure you it's good money. Remember, I started as a carpenter. So if I am here today, any young person just will say, okay, I want to be like him. But don't think that by listening to me to inspire you, will make you be like me. No, no, no, no. You have to do that. You have to work hard. You can see it, man. You can see all this happened when I was young. You see? All this, huh? You saw. You lift blocks. You must sweat for it. I worked for 15 years doing my apprenticeship, working for others, before I set up my own business.  I tell the young ones all the time when they come. My friend, you couldn't be a CEO. You start your business. The first thing you do is you have a card where they admire a CEO. My friend, CEO, it takes time for you to be the chief executive officer. Now, let me speak to one of your workers and I will get back to you. Okay, great. You know, one thing I love about Taf is the fact that he employs more young women. And you are one of them. Yeah, I am. What do you do in here? I'm an engineer. From which country? I'm a gambier. From Gambier? My friend. I guess you are the only female engineer here. I'm the only female engineer. Like, I've been... When I was going to school, I came here for excitement. Around year 2000, and I was trained by Taf himself. Really? Yeah, so as a woman, he got married, stopped, and came back. But he's my inspirator and my motivator. So that's how you came back? That's why I came back. But I've been doing so many things, like engineering. Like, as he said, if you cut my flesh, you'll meet cement, concrete there. So this is me. I was born an engineer, but he also motivates me since I was a young girl. I used to see him going and coming. So when I finished school, I said that I want to be like him. Even at school, I told him I'm going for my internship at Taf. How does it feel working with Taf? Oh my God, it's great. That's the greatest thing that's ever happened to my life. He's so great, he motivates you. And as a woman also, he really loves and adores me and likes the way I work in the office also. Everybody, my staff, sorry, my colleagues, and everybody adores me. And the men around me, you know, they really help me. They're so exposed. You know? They saw me like everything. I've great colleagues. You know what, how does it feel like being a female engineer? That's so great. Only who knows it feels it. You're fine with it. It's great, it's great. I love it. Even though I'm angry, you might come to say I'm okay, I don't have stress. I just love what I'm doing. It's a final message to Africa watching us. Women out there, we have to be like them, you know? When I'm in the field, I don't see myself as a woman. I'm just an engineer, simple engineer. I tried my level best to get it out. Thank you so much for taking it to me. That's you, my favorite YouTuber. Oh wow. Nice to meet you. I have an engineer as a fan. Do you know that your workers adore you? Some of them even can't believe that you're walking in here just like that and being on the field with them. I feel like your humility is everything to them. Well, you know, for me since I was 18, I told you I started working as a carpenter. So I can't change. I enjoy it. And as I advise young people all the time whatever you do, make sure you have passion for it. So being on the side and doing what I do it's like having a cold bottle of water on a hot sunny day. So I just enjoy it. That's all. What we are selling now is the Didi. Didi in fuller means two. And it's about 80 units and we're now selling them. Then the third estate in Mandinka is called Sabah. And it's about 150 units here. So we think that within the next less than two years we will have about 300 units all done. You can see at the corner here that's the church. And then you now come to the fourth estate is called Baki. Baki in Jola means four. Then the fifth estate in Serir is called Batik. Then the sixth estate is in Manjago. In Manjago it's called Paj. And then the seventh estate in English or broken English or Aku is called Seven. Now let me show you something very interesting. The sixth estate which is called Paj is also a retirement estate. We're targeting the elderly to move in here. So we will make provision for the services that they require like health you know clubhouse sporting facilities. That's a pond here at Tunisian Pond. And that's a wellness center. Now next to them you have a golf course. There will be a nine hole golf course next to them. After the golf course we have the entertainment area. Here you will have loads of restaurants night clubs. Anything to do with entertainment is around here. Because this is close to a river. This river here is called the Allahain River. And that is why we are going to now go into aquaculture. So you go around here. The river course flows all the way to here next to the estate. This is all green. And as you can see this dual carriage road here ends up here from the entrance all the way to here. And then we also have next to every road we have a bicycle lane and then we have a pedestrian lane. So nobody should walk where the cars are driving. And obviously you can see the landscaping and that's why we started already. You can see there we are going to create an artificial beach. In this cluster here this is where the special economic zone is. What we want is that anybody who wants to invest in the economic zone in terms of light industries your workers will live in their state. So you are close by. This actually it decongests the current city. By the way the city we are building here is twice bigger than Banjul the city of the Gambia. The capital of the Gambia. This is twice bigger than the capital. So in here in the special economic zone we have light industries, we have greenhouses we have storage in there we have showrooms and other workshops. We also have a sports stadium in there. So as I said this is leave work and play. I don't even know what to say. I mean some of you might be wondering like will he be able to do it. Listen he has done it before. I mean when I went to Port Harcourt I had to talk to people around and all of them were saying that when this man came here most of us were even laughing at him man but he had died. It always seems impossible until it's done. If one person has been able to achieve this what do you think is wrong with our African government then? Because what you've done imagine it's been done by African government. I mean we eradicate poverty because the people in here have jobs to do. I did I think I saw a documentary on how Gambia is known for sex tourism, how Gambians are known for parkway and all of that. You're doing all of that in here. What is that thing that... Yeah let me tell you what the secret is. I didn't do it. The key word is team work. I have a solid team behind me. The team work has somebody who mobilise the team. That's the visionary. It's always good to have a visionary. So does it mean that we don't have a visionary leader to put the team together together? Well we need visionaries. One of the features of a very good leader is to be a figureistically one. You must be figureistic. You must think ahead. You must think ages, decades, centuries ahead of the people that you lead. If you fail to have this as a leader, then you are not a good leader. Remember, a leader can be good or bad. But to be a good leader you must have that futuristic vision. You must see something that none of your followers can see. They must believe in you too. They can see. When I first came here a lot of people thought that I was crazy. This is the bush. Nobody will buy here, even my marketing team. They had no confidence that anybody will buy anything here. But that's what a good leader does. You go there and whatever anybody says no, you say yes. You see everybody going east to tell them no, it's north or it's west and you have to convince them to do it. When I met you in Potalko I asked you about if you had a chance to change one thing in Africa and you said leadership. You know, for me I'm a big fan of actions. That's why I had to carry camera just to travel around to show Africa in my own way, even the African government are not supporting what I do. It's an individual approach. No one is finding me. I find myself and I go it's been a year now. What have you done? You want to change leadership? What are you doing so far to change the leadership that you talked about in Potalko? I don't believe in walking the talk. I don't blame people. That's not my style. I look at my inner self and try to see what I can do no matter how small. So what I've done is set up a leadership academy because if Africa is to change we need to be futuristic. I have a vision. I want to see a city develop in the next 20 years but I'm 65. I cannot guarantee I'll be here in the next 20 years but one thing I can guarantee is that I've built a team that will complete it and leaders must be ready to have others deliver their vision and that's an African problem. What we find is that some of our leaders they have a vision or they have a plan or they call it projects and they want to stay to complete it. Good leaders don't do that. You set your vision set all the plans and exit let somebody else continue. So what I've done in my own case is to look at the youth. I am spending a lot of money on the youth. One percent of my company's revenue not profit goes into funding my foundation and one of the one of the initiatives is to train future leaders between the ages of 18 and 35. So my hope if I live that long that in the next 20 years in a country like the Gambia everywhere I go I should find a fellow of the Taft Africa Leadership Academy. Therefore they will not have anything no they will not have any reason to do anything wrong because they have been taught the 12 core values of leadership we've thought about which is to have integrity to be committed to be empathetic to be a futuristic visionary to be accountable to be take good decisions, decision making you know to be empowered to I said about commitment to be honest to be innovative and be passionate so even if you fail to have those 12 values just like an exam if they have over 50% of that they will make a good leader. You know what I feel right now I feel like the ACOAS and the AFTCA needs to employ you as their ambassador because you're doing what they are supposed to do I mean it's just on paper but in real work I feel like this organization needs to be dissolved I'm sorry I think they are there to do and we are the actors but that's not how it's supposed to be yeah but we are a private sector we take opportunities so that's what the private sector does actually I will tell you the African Exim Bank now wants to use us as a trade ambassador inter-african ambassador because of our success story because they've seen us as Gambians coming from little Gambia Algeria in Port Harcourt making a difference there and then here we are next we are going to Sierra Leone so they want to partner with us and brand us as their ambassador to say that look here we have an African who is successful in going cross-border so therefore we should support him we should not always look for successful people to become brand ambassadors we should support young entrepreneurs who have the dream we say that's what drives us to move beyond our comfort zone let me tell you who is the best brand ambassador for Africa who is the best brand ambassador? Mr. Wode Maia because you are the one who is touring everywhere let me tell you what happens everywhere I step into any country now they tell me oh yeah I saw your interview with Wode Maia so what better ambassador can we have than you but they've not even seen me yet what I'm just trying to tell them is that we deserve that support and I always encourage more Africans to go beyond their own countries and that's why I celebrate to every single day I mean everywhere I go to any African entrepreneur I would just mention TAF I mean there's an award that they're going to be giving to you very soon I don't want to give you the clue but they ask me they called me to ask me what African entrepreneur do you think deserves African entrepreneur of the year wow that would be an honor wait for it I have so many Africans who would love to be like you someday if you have a message for them or that message me my advice is that we should do everything possible to reduce inequality let Africans learn to share let us uplift everybody that's the problem of Africa today gross inequality so the more we share the more we empower especially the youth because unemployment is a major problem in Africa today so we need to empower all these people we need to get them to take up hard skills education we need to change our curriculum the last time when I told you this somebody came to see me looking for a job and I asked him what was his study he said political science I am looking for carpenters messians and electricians and plumbers I don't have them and they earn more than some of these social sciences so I think our governments should look at our curriculums again let us claim for the jobs that we have in demand and stop training for jobs that people will just go unemployed you said the problem of Africa is about not sharing as I mean greed is our biggest problem it's one of the big problems we have many greed is a problem how does greed become a problem because anyway you said you want to take everything something that is not even yours let me tell you about life worry life is a buffet and not an alakat you know what that means you know when you go for an alakat if you don't finish your food you take it away to your home you have all the rest to do so but when you go for a buffet what happens you eat all you can and you have a very small tummy then you leave the rest there then somebody else will come and eat so if you understand this in life then this world will be a better place to stay just take enough that will make you survive if somebody want to buy a property in staff city what procedure does the person have to go through that you know I don't even know how we sell houses I have a parabolic eye I sit on the top but I will lead you to the sales and marketing department and they will tell you how to buy and what the prices are good afternoon sir good afternoon how are you doing I'm fine thank you how are you I'm great I'm here to buy a house you're here to buy a house of course sir you have come to the right place please have a seat first of all what's your name my name is Wada Maya Wada Maya from Ghana you have a very nice name thank you so much would you like some water I'm okay is it possible to own a house even down from Ghana of course it's possible it's all over the world wherever you are you can get a house with us and what is the cheapest house to buy in here the cheapest house that we have is 1.7 million to 2 million dollars no dollars dollars is local currency okay and yes and dollars because I came with dollars well you have to convert it so you get a house with us because it's going to be local currency use the rate and convert the dollars like it depends on the rate it could be 51 it could be 50 what is the most expensive house to buy here the most expensive house is 6 million 6 million yes how many bedrooms it's four bedrooms it's a story building you have one bedroom downstairs and you have three bedrooms upstairs on the downstairs you have a kitchen a dining area and a sitting area and then upstairs you have three bedrooms and one of the bedrooms has its own bathroom and how do we reach out to you guys in case somebody is watching this video and they want to buy a house from you you can reach out to us on our social media platforms or you can reach out to us on our info at tuffafricaglubal.com or you can reach out to us on sales at tuffafricaglubal.com or you can call either of these numbers if you are not in the Gambia you put the country code plus<PHONE_NUMBER> whoa yes you know your job very well but anyway I came with dollars so we will go and change it to dollars I don't want to be back here again is that ok well you don't have to worry about that because if you come with dollars we don't want you to go through the hustle and struggle of changing the money we can accept the dollars and make it easy for you I like the dollars in my car can I go and bring it sure no problem if you are ok with it we are fine with it it's been a pleasure good seeing you here again and this will not be the last time that we are meeting up we will hook up again thank you so much and really I appreciate your time thank you don't forget to like the video subscribe and share this video I feel like a lot of people need to get to know Tuff and definitely someday you see Tuff going around Africa giving speeches to the youth of Africa just to inspire them to go beyond their components my name is Wada Maya and thank you so much for watching see you in the next one peace out


Hi, welcome to SuperUserTV. Can you go ahead and introduce us and what you do at Paddy Power Betfair? Hi, I'm Stephen Armstrong, Principal Automation Engineer, and at Paddy Power Betfair I'm the technical lead on that I2 project, which is our next generation OpenStack infrastructure. Awesome, well congratulations this morning at the OpenStack Summit keynote. You were, you tied for the SuperUser Awards with UK Cloud, but Paddy Power Betfair was a winner. So can you tell me what you do with OpenStack at Paddy Power Betfair? So at Paddy Power Betfair we run two OpenStacks per DC. We run an active-active infrastructure. What we're doing at the moment is we're in the middle of a migration project. We're migrating all of our customer-facing applications onto OpenStack. So we're migrating around 25% of the applications at the moment. And we're going to ramp that to 100% and hopefully migrate it in the next year. And I know one of the stats that was really impressive in your application was talking about how many deployments you do a week or how many do you do a day. So can you kind of talk through that process? So what we've really tried to do with Teams is we bring them in for a sprint where they will onboard their micro-service applications. We try and create a self-service model, and so that we teach them how to use the OpenStack infrastructure. We've created a self-service model with Ansible where they'll fill in self-service inventory files, check it into source control, and then they can basically onboard applications themselves. So the first time they onboard, it takes a bit longer because we're teaching them how to manage the infrastructure themselves. After a while, they just manage to deploy the applications themselves. So that's really the key here is basically training them to be a full self-service model and basically not to be a blocker for the developers to get their new products to market.  So what we've really tried to do is control everything programmatically. So we've made all the processes repeatable. So we were going to run at the scale that we were doing this all manually. It would just be impossible. So what we've got is we've got a main core team of around eight engineers that look after the main OpenStack platform and our software-defined networking with Nuage. They look after the upgrades and basically make sure that the platform is performing. We then have onboarding teams around each location. So we've got one in the UK, one in Dublin, one in Romania and Cluj, and one in Porto that helps all the development teams to onboard onto the platform and migrate their applications. So they're small teams and because everything that we do is automated, it's really just an educational piece to try and get them to use the platform and get used to doing it. If we have any features, then the core team and the onboarding teams will implement that new feature and wrap it in the onboarding process. Awesome, and so we're here at the summit. What are y'all talking about? I know you have, I think, three different sessions that y'all are sharing different experiences that y'all have. Yeah, so some of the new things that we've done is we're onboarding our Inframix databases and MySQL databases. So we've got a storage chat on that, on how we incorporated those features into our deployment pipelines. We also have one for shared file service. So we're using the Manila project for that. So there's a session on that and we've got a few live demos for that as well, which should be good, hopefully they go well. And the other main one is really a lessons learned of running 1,000 deployments a day on OpenStack. So we'll take users through all the problems that we basically had and how we overcame them because you have lessons learned when you create infrastructure at this scale and we just want to kind of share some of those experiences back with other users so that they can learn from them and not repeat the mistakes that we made. Awesome, well thank you again for chatting with us at the Boston Summit and we hope to see you again soon. Okay, thanks very much.


What's up y'all today we are going to be checking out a submission shout out except today's is a little bit of a different submission they didn't glitch or respond directly on Twitter they made a whole blog post. Here's the article centering in CSS you can find it here csstricks.com kind of just goes over my article and calls out my winning solution which was gentle flex right for me this was the one that sort of just did what it was supposed to that solution always works really great for me and I like what he calls out here in the follow-up which is say uh you're not always in these extreme situations maybe vertical centering isn't even the type of centering that you're looking for let's check out some alternatives essentially like just for fun like right let's look at another situation so this is in line elements let's say you want to just center some in line elements he's got a handy one liner here for you text line center and it works great right check it out over here we have a header it's so that's parent owned centering right so there'd be a pink border around this one and it's a one liner text line center and all the text that's inside there will be in the center pretty cool it also works on inline elements like anchors so as long as the children that are inside of here are in line they'll be centered in line that's kind of cool I like this follow-up conversation here about fit content he solves uh well what if this nav needs to just shrink rapid content you only want it to be as wide as its content and it should still be in the center like what do I need to do to that well and he calls out you can use this one really cool a width property called fit content in this demo you see that fit content changes the width of the element while it's still a block level element right if I duplicate this we still get another one underneath and that's because the nav its display mode has not been changed it is still a full width block right but now it's width its painted size is going to be the max fit content and that's going to give you that effect right there where it's essentially in the center still in a block but its painted space is fit to the content it's a very cool solution and way to think about it so anyway I love this response not everyone is centering in sort of scenarios like this and sometimes text line center is all you need I'm waiting for more responses to show me how you center where's the display table example where's um you know vertical align middle where's uh show me there's so many other ways and I want to see the ways that you center share them with everyone else so that y'all can know and I'll talk to you later on the next episode see y'all bye


I swear to y'all, if it is not one daggum thing, it is another at the treehouse. The squirrel has figured out how to chew through the top of my feeder. I already moved the previous feeder. There's been two squirrels that have been coming in. They scrape out all the feed out of my bird feeder. Then that attracts the hogs to come in and it's just been this continuous cycle and I'm not always here to take care of the problem, but I am today. This sucker keeps popping out of the hole. It's on top of the corn feeder, goes in there, dives down, gets a little gold nugget, comes back on top, and then he starts chewing them. Well guess what, I've got the Air Force air gun in here. I'm going to take this other one out and I've got a buttermilk recipe. I'm going to put this sucker in because I am tired of your squirreliness, sir. Ma'am, I'm not really sure what you are, didn't matter. You're about to be delicious nuggets, much better than the last one, super chewy. We have to sneak upstairs, covertly get in position and then take the squirrel out. Put a mince of grease. My shooting lanes directly at the feeder are pretty obstructed at the top level right now. There's a lot of trees in the way, the foliage has come through strong. We've also got this front that's coming in and I'm hoping that's going to get the squirrel back. I already went out there and I had to put a new lid on top of this thing. So let me show you what the squirrel did to the old lid. So that is what a squirrel will do to a plastic lid if it wants to get inside a corn feeder bad enough. They can also do this to your house and they have in some areas of the treehouse. These guys, some may think that they are just cute cuddly little animals. Well, what if they did that to your face? They're not only a nuisance, they could be a home hazard. Also, we have a wasp issue right here. We're about to just take the old wasp shot and get that guy. Actually, you know what it is a risky move, but I found to be pretty effective. You just take that bill I had and you just smoke it. See if I can do this one hand and hopefully not get stung. Man, it's a tight quarter. Oh, man, I missed. Oh, man, I missed again. Shoot, I can't get in there. Oh, yeah, got you, boy. It's the next day right now, you know, we had thunderstorms come in, got super nasty. All the animals went and hid, but right now, guess who's back? Guess who's back? All I got to do is just sit down here in my little cave and old squirrels start to come out. So same kind of conditions overcast might rain this afternoon, but the squirrel is literally on the feeder. It appears to be, oh yeah, striking distance. He's on the corn that I set out away from the feeder. Load up the air force here. There we go. Oh, he's on top of the feeder. He's on top of the other feeder. See if I can sneak out here very carefully. So squirrel was right here, literally just hanging on this feeder. And then as you can see, hog tracks, tracks the hogs because they literally just scrape off all the feed from that and then another perfect shot on that squirrel. That's so sad.  It's a good thing we got this one. It's not going to get into our house now. Me and Steph have definitely had our share of house problems lately. We found a rat in our AC unit, which was pretty bad. I don't even think we put that on the Lake Life family channel, but anyways, the critters are real here, y'all. And we had an inspector out yesterday and he said, do you have squirrels that get up in here? I said, I try to take care of them. And he said, good, you need to. Another perfect shot with the air force, a rifle. That thing is just a squirrel assassinator. The last recipe, I mean, OSG. I don't know if I'll try another squirrel. Yeah, I think we probably backed her off eating squirrels. But I heard about a buttermilk recipe. Actually, one of the guys up at Air Force, Air Rifles, when I went to visit them the other day, they were saying like, man, that recipe you did with that other squirrel. And that was chewy. You need to try buttermilk frying them, which is a lot similar to what my grandma used to do when I used to go visit them on their farm. And I remember it being much better. So that's what we're going to do. Because actually, Steph's about to go to the grocery store anyways. So can you pick up some buttermilk? I will pick you up some buttermilk, but I won't promise I'm going to try this one. OK. I am proud of you, though, for cleaning up. I feel like you're cleaning up the yard. Hey, two shots, two squirrels. I'm not messing around. OK, so while Steph is running to the store to get the buttermilk and a little bit of oil, so we can fry them up. We already have biscuits and deer sausage gravy this morning, which would have been perfect to go with this. But I didn't know that old Mr. Squirrel was going to come out again. The last video where I cleaned one of these squirrels, I tried to cut the squirrel in two and then pull it apart. I didn't do a good job. Hair got everywhere. I'm going to try to do a much better job on this one. And I'm going to try to use the tail method. First step skin is you need a real sharp knife. And this is the one I'm going to be carrying on my hunt while I'm in New Zealand because it's really small, white. And it's daggum sharp and it's just easy to easy to get in there. I'm going to lift the squirrel tail up.   OK, in between the joint. So I'm almost through that tail now. There we go. Made that first part of the cut. Tail is disconnected as far as the bone goes. And now this method you should be able to hold the feet. You need a lot of leverage and pull upward.  Basically what happened there. OK, it is somewhat working here. Not as clean as I'd like it to be, but it's working. So from pulling from the tail up from here, I can still pull it up. I can pull on those back legs. I could just use my fingers to get those little arms out.  And then we'll just grab them right here. We'll pull on the opposite side. Wow, OK, this is much, much easier this way. There we go. So I have hair all over it. Screw it up that part, but the skin's exposed. All I'm going to do is cut the joints right here and then spray off the hair. And we're good. Quite honestly, the last time I did this probably took me like 45 minutes. This method right here is taking like five. So I'm just going to take my knife, cut right here at the joint. Cut right here at the joint here. OK, that's done. Like all the hair, there's a little bit of hair, but not nearly as much mess. And then on the bottom half, same thing with these little arm joints. Oh, chicken's got something. Chicken's got a beetle or something. Pretty excited about it. So there we go. All I've got to do now is just cut the head off and then cut the entrails out and we will be done.  My hen's like hanging out with me all. I'm surrounded by women. I got Steph, I got Emmy, got all the hens here.  Cleaning is done much, much easier than the last time I did it and a lot less hair. I've already quartered the squirrel and as soon as OSG gets back, we're going to get those soaking in some buttermilk and I'll show you all the rest of this recipe. This is going to be a lot better than last time, I hope. But anything fried is usually pretty good. Plus, I think the squirrel is younger. It was smaller. But the meat just felt better. What do you think, y'all? Aren't you glad you're not going in the grease today? She was getting a little concerned there. Y'all are never going in the grease. Unless y'all can't make some eggs, then we've got a problem. Okay, so after cleaning and quartering the squirrel, I put it in some salted ice water inside of a bowl and then I put it inside the refrigerator for a few hours. Now that Steph brought home the buttermilk, I'm going to drain this water out. I'm going to actually pad these dry and then I'm going to replace the salted ice water with buttermilk and let them soak in that till dinner time. This is also one last opportunity to get any and all hairs off the meat. So OSG will freak out. Now that we've got these beauties quartered and there's one little mid-piece in there. I'm just throwing it in there. But basically arms and legs essentially and then a little bit of midsection. We're using some low-fat cultured butter. How come we didn't get the high-fat, mom? Actually it's a little high-fat or whole-fat buttermilk, but you can make your own. You can make your own buttermilk. I make my own. Do you? Well, where is it? Well, you have to make it like on demand, so you can use whole milk and then all you have to do is squeeze lemon. Early it's just like sour milk is what it is. You asked for one question. We got 1% when OSG is explaining how we can make this all natural. Yes, salt. On demand. Again, we don't have that what she's talking about for some reason, but we're going to use this. We're going to cover it. It's still pretty thick. I dare you to chug some of that. You dare me? Yes.  I'll chug that if you eat some of the squirrel. Okay, then. This is going back in the refrigerator, and we're going to let that just coat and get thick. It is evening time. Our buttermilk has been soaking into the squirrel, and now it's time to get to the fun part. Get to the grease, making golden crispies, except these aren't fish, y'all. And yes, I do have a crappie jig in my hat in case y'all were looking at that earlier. That's what I do. Sometimes I get lures in my hat. Emmy, you going to be my helper? Okay, good. First thing we got to do, y'all, we got to put some, we got to make some greets to make our crispies. So I've got some maizola canola. Man, that's some marketing, ain't it? What is in this, honey? It's just straight canola oil. Straight canola. What is canola? I don't even know. It comes from a plant. Like a flower. Okay.  Canadian. Canadian sure do know how to kill stuff and cook it. So here we go. Going into a skillet. Is this warm already? No, it's cut off on the roll. I like to call this the reflective pool of greatness. I'll come up with a better name later. Anyways, we're going to get this deep enough. We're going to get our pool deep enough so our golden crispies can get crispy all over. I've only got one squirrel, so I hate to use a whole bottle. That's pretty much what's happening. At this point, you're going to need yourself a Ziploc bag. You also could use a bowl, but I'm going to use the bag method and I'm going to make a flower spice mixture. That's right, Amy. And it's going to be spicy. So here's what we're going to add. We're going to add just regular flour. We're going to add the CosmoQ SPG, which is basically just salt, pepper, and garlic. And then for a little kick, we're going to go with another guy. This is a CosmoQ. This guy visited us at the Guggen HQ. He's won many awards for his cooking anyway. He sells all sorts of spices.  So if you wanted to make hot wings, you would use this. We're kind of doing the same sort of thing that you would do to make hot wings. So I'm going to add that for a little kick. The last squirrel basically just kind of skillet cooked it.  And Steph, you got anything to add to that description? No, that is pretty much right on point. Pretty good. It's because of that description. Yeah. We topped it with a little glaze, like an orange glaze, but it really didn't help the nastiness. It was real bad. It was real bad.  Like it shot out of my mouth. It shot out of her mouth. She tried to take a bite out of it. It was rubberized and it sprung them up. So yeah, let's get to the final part. I'm doing four scoops. Four scoops of all-purpose AP flour. We're going to crack open this wing dust. This is the Nashville Hot Chicken. One, if y'all are curious. Got some cayenne in there for sure. Quarter bag of that just to give it some kick. Then we're going to pop off with some SPG. A bug just flew out of there. See that? Literally popped the top, a bug flew out of there. Hope you had a good time in there. It probably smells like garlic. The smattering of that includes real Georgia Nats for extra protein. Okay, so our bag looks sort of like that. We'll give it a good mixing. We'll mix this up. Good thing that wasn't open. Then we're going to do the same thing. We'll pull these parts of the squirrel out of the buttermilk. That's what we're doing right now. It doesn't make a new area over here. This is my area, honey. All right, you can have that area. I just want it for tank note. OSG is not involved with this one. No, I'm standing back. She is standing back. I'll watch. Have I ever had one? No, why would I? Before I knew that it was bitter, I thought it sounds delicious. Well, it sounds delicious until you drink it. But the purpose is, for the marination, it's going to get in there. It's going to give it a little meat breakdown, and then it's going to have a nice thick coating that we can put this batter in. This piece right here, I'm going to be honest with you, may not be that edible. I mean, I'm sure it's edible, but it's not like the prize piece. It's the mid-piece. It's got some backbone in there. I cut the ribs and the rib fat off of it, but there's not a lot of meat. And if you look closely, which you're not, because I don't have my other camera guy here with the zoom lens, but that buttermilk is sticking to it. Good. Buttermilk, bam. I wish I had a cooking show. I really enjoy it. All while game. All while game, while I'm catching. Okay, we're going to zip this up. If you stand there and watch, you're going to eat it. It's the rules. Okay, then I'm leaving. Okay, the coating that's on here now, and we're going to drop them in the hottest. There's an age-old question out there. How do you know when the grease is hot? Because it doesn't boil like water. It's not as... I was just going to make up the words bigger all. That's not a word. I don't know where I got that. What you do is you take some flour. Oh, the sizzle. The sizzle is there. Okay, it's ready. It's ready! I'm going to spread it so nicely. Let's just pull out an arm here. The coating is awesome. Thank you, buttermilk. Now let's get some sizzle. Woo! I have a good color to it, too. There's a big metal piece in there. Yeah! We're dropping in the hot stuff. There we go. These are not totally suspended in the grease. It's going to point out. But I'm going to wait until they start to flip them. And as soon as they're floating on their own, they should be totally done. Doing good, y'all. Doing good. It's like a little contentious fried chicken up in here. Except it is a backyard buttermilk squirrel, baby. I like the way that rolls off the tongue. Backyard buttermilk squirrel. Yeah, that might even be the title of this video. It's so good, Amy's coming in. Check it out. She's like, I don't know. I want to know what that buttermilk squirrel is like. It's going! It's time to pull off. This is the moment of truth right here. Backyard buttermilk squirrel. Earlier this morning, this critter was tearing up my bird feeder. Now, it's on a plate. About to go into my mouth. Normally, I would pair this with a frosty adult beverage of my choosing, but I have laid off drinking for about a month and a half now. I'm trying to pure my purification. How do you say that? I'm trying to purify myself in every way possible before I head to New Zealand. So now we will enjoy without the beer. I'm very impressed with the coating. I can see a couple of hairs in there, but with all this great flavor, I don't think it's going to be a problem. Hopefully this isn't still super hot. It's still chewy, but man, that flavor is off the chain. And unlike the last squirrel, I can actually bite through this one and chew it. That just tastes like a tougher hot wing. Like the darker part of the chicken. Okay. Much, much better. This go around, y'all. Much, much better. Two factors I think are going on here. Literally, the squirrel is better. And then the way we cooked it, much, much better.   This needs no dipping sauce. The only thing that might make it better is a good old country gravy, like a spicy country gravy that you could put on it. But I already have biscuits and gravy this morning.  I now know how to cook these. And the cleaning method I used was way better as well. So just better on all fronts, man. Y'all, if you've got squirrel around you and you want to give it a try, do this recipe right here. You're not going to be disappointed. I'll leave links down below for the recipe stuff and things I used. And if you want to check out the air rifle, those are super efficient. I've got that set on the lowest setting. So it's not a BB gun, but it's not like a super high-powered setting. And it's perfect for this right here. If you've got a rodent problem in your backyard, I highly recommend it. Okay, y'all, I'm going to enjoy the rest of these golden crispies right here. And I hope you enjoyed today's video. Make sure to go ahead and give it a double smash on the like button. Don't, don't, don't like double hit it where it goes thumbs down. Just, just hit it one hard time for a good thumbs up. Click all the things, you know, subscribe as well. That usually helps. I think the next time I see y'all, we're not going to be hunting a small game.  So you want to stay tuned for that. I love you guys. Thanks for being here for all these videos. And I will see you right back here on the next one.


Jay Fidel here, it's a given Wednesday morning. And we're on security matters with Andrew Lanning, it's really his show. But he's appearing with me, and we're gonna talk about Russia and how it hacked our government agencies, whatever happened there. And what we can do about it, really important question. It's a revelation. We haven't figured out exactly what happened or what we could do, but we're gonna start that conversation today with Andrew Lanning. Hi Andrew. Hey Jay, how you doing? Thanks for having me on this morning. I think I was on yesterday on my show. It's good to be a guest once in a while. We'll try to treat you nice. Thank you. So Andrew, what happened here? I mean, this is a bad thing. It's in the transition and one has inevitably led to the possibility that somebody was taking advantage of our transition. And I guess the paper said it was all about Russia. And the papers also said something very interesting is that they had done it by way of compromising at Texas an American company that was selling tools to other software companies. So it's hard to track that because you think it's an American company but it was a Trojan horse of some kind. Can you talk about what we know? Sure. So let's talk about SolarWinds. For SolarWinds is a ubiquitous product out there. SolarWinds is used. They have a variety of tools but in point management, in point monitoring. So literally probably all of the Fortune 500 and down. I think a half a million customers globally, right? So you're talking about a product that's used everywhere and trusted for that reason that they've got a great track record. What happened, what we know happened is some of their, one of their updates, right? Companies are constantly updating their software pushing that out. What we know is one or some versions back in, looks like back in March, April, March through June, a few versions. I'm not sure how many they released during that time. The adversaries, some criminals were able to gain access to that code and then inject some malware into that code. And then the real nice is probably not the best word but the interesting thing that they did is that they were able to hide that injection in a way that made it look like valid code from that manufacturer. So that manufacturer's own code-checking mechanisms failed to detect this in their build. So they of course issued that download out there and everyone, or some, I think they said about 18,000 companies applied that. So that tells you there's a whole bunch of companies who aren't keeping their software up to date but the ones that were keeping themselves up to date, unfortunately got this malware and they're called it Sunburst. Sunburst is really a dropper. What that means is it lets the command and control software that it's talking to, it beacons out to that maybe in some period of time, let's say a week or two goes by and let's for example, just say it calls home. So it's gonna go out back out the firewall and let the command and control software that it is communicating with. It's programmed already to communicate with this. Let it know that it's there. It will have done some initial scanning of its environment ahead of time to let the command and control software know what it has found, what it's potentially got. And then the adversaries will just decide, based on the type of information that they get back, what's the best way to start to move laterally, what type of other tools may they need to go in and continue to assess that environment that they're in or to learn more about it. All the while, these guys in particular are trying to be very, very stealthy with this activity. They don't wanna be known. So this is a remote sort of long-term attack, what you call advanced persistent threat. And I did wanna say that although I've seen some media talking about that this is attributed to Cozy Bear, which is APT 29. I've not read of any formal forensic attribution. And I don't think any, I think people are saying it looks like those guys. It looks like those guys, but no one's attributed this to anyone yet. So for right now, it's an unknown entity. Does that mean it's not clear that it's Russia? Not clear. And there's an interesting thing. The techniques are very good and very Russian, but Russia doesn't tend to see our technology. That's China. So China would love this to look like it's Russia. You know what I'm saying? Those guys do that all the time to each other. So, you know that we just have to be attribution is just not something that's been done yet. And everyone's very cautious about attribution because it's very difficult to prove oftentimes. So the, some of the hallmarks in particular why they're saying that is because these guys were able to use the Outlook Web Access tokens, tokens probably from one of the administrators of the software that worked on the software to actually gain access to it. They had to compromise someone inside that organization. And these organizations are, you know, they use multi-factor authentication, something that we recommend everyone do. But this particular group has a way to get around multi-factor authentication related to the Outlook Web Access, OWA, so a token. So, you know, that's one of the reasons why in this group that was studied before was able to do this to a think tank. So there's been some forensic analysis. And so some of this forensic analysis, and it's early on, looks like that analysis. So that's kind of why there's this thinking that, okay, these may be the same guys. But again, it's not been proven yet. It seems clear, this is brilliant. This is not some kid in the basement in Serbia. No, criminals today don't work that way. The kids can't even keep up anymore. Crime, cyber criminals today are definitely nation-state funded. They're nation-state hired. They work with nation-states. Many of the nation-states will let them do their crime as long as they'll be a partner in crime when that particular nation-state wants help with something. So there's a lot of that, that blending has occurred with a lot more frequency in the last, you know, 18 months. So that's a problem for everybody, right? So this attribution problem, is it a criminal? Is it a nation? Is it both? You know, are they in cahoots? So that kind of problem is what all the law enforcement agencies in the country or around the world are facing with cyber crime. I think cyber crime is the third largest gross domestic product today in the world. So that's kind of what- I have many questions for you. So I suppose there's an investigation going on about this American company that had an inside person. And ultimately, you know, it sounds like if the nation's a fair chance they'll find that person. Because, you know, he had to be in a position to receive the instructions, act on the instructions, insinuate the code necessary to give the nation-state a hook inside that particular software module. But I guess what I don't understand is why? Why this? And why the government, the newspapers are talking about, you know, a half a dozen government agencies or more in the United States that all got hit and had their data ripped off. And the question is why wouldn't anybody go to this kind of trouble? And was it limited to government? From what you say, it sounds like it was way beyond government. So what was the purpose and scope here? Yeah, for sure. So government's just a victim in this case as anyone else. So, again, SolarWinds is used by so many different organizations, right? Just if I said Microsoft Word, right? Every company probably uses Microsoft Word, right? So it's that ubiquitous as far as endpoint management goes. So they are out there, they have different types of products. So not everyone uses all of their products. This particular Orion suite is very popular, obviously. So, you know, it was brilliant to target them. This is another thing when we talk about the amount of resources that it takes.  So that takes a lot of resources, a lot of money, a lot of patience. You're going to have to work to get someone's credentials to compromise them. That takes a lot of research on social media and it just takes a lot of work, right? So- Yeah, but the work you're talking about is compromising somebody. It's almost like finding an agent for espionage rather than pure technology. Well, it's not finding a person. So a person's credentials were compromised. So they were able to take a person's credentials and then emulate them. So it's like, I became you to the system. Just for example, if you were the administrator, now I can act upon that system with your authorities. And of course when they get in, they work to escalate that privilege till they got to the level that they needed to where they could actually work on the code base itself. And again, this type of supply chain problem, right? So there's a lot of concern. You hear the term supply chain risk management today. You're starting to see that in bid proposals in fact, where we have to explain the supply chain risk management infrastructure that we have behind our offerings when we sell things to the government, for example. So for software supply chain risk, this type of product and our product for that matter really isn't regulated. There's a lot of protections that go in. No one wants to make bad products, right? However, we would love to see a product like this built in a, let's just call it a white room where it can never be touched by the internet. Therefore, no system compromise can ever occur from outside that could allow something like this to get introduced. It would have to be code that somehow walked in the door like on a USB drive, for example, right? Which would also not be allowed in the white room. So there's ways to sort of prevent this type of thing from happening. And they're known, they just aren't regulated. So industry doesn't, isn't forced to operate oftentimes at these higher levels of assurance that we would like it to because there's no one really, you know, there's a risk, solar winds may surely run a risk of being sued or something like that as an outcome of this. But, you know, the doing the building of the code, building a white room, having a lab, having it audited by third parties to make sure you're doing everything proper is very expensive. And so companies don't go to that expense because they're not forced to. And that's a real, go ahead. Do we understand exactly what the mechanics are here? Do we understand what, you know, what this code does? I mean, you've described how it got into the system and how it got into the software supply chain, I guess is what it is. Sure. But do we understand what it does? I'm assuming in a gross sense, I'm assuming it allows a foreign actor to come in and find things and take them out again, take out data. Does it also allow them to screw up the system and bring it down? Does it allow them to modify the code or modify the functionality as to get a wrong result, for example, in calculation? Do we understand it? Well, there will definitely be more research as we find out what these actors have done. Again, most of those systems, so the right now they're Microsoft, SolarWinds, FireEye, several of these companies have put out what are called indicators of compromise. So you need to go look either at your firewall logs or your system logs, your identity management logs. And if you find any of these indicators of compromise, the first one would be that initial dropper, right, got reached out. You know, the first one would be if you have any of these versions of the bad SolarWinds software, did you install that? If you did install it, there's no doubt that that dropper was installed on your system. Now, the next things to check is see, they already know which command and control, or they know some of the IP addresses that the command and control called out to, the dropper software called out to that certain IP. So you can look on your firewall log, for example, and see, wow, was there something inside my system that reached out, okay? If so, then, you know, you've got, you probably need to offline that system. You need to at that point presume that it's inspected, right? You've got to presume that they've come back in and done something else. And then you've got to go look, and it just depends on what type of system you have and how, you know, how in depth and how connected it is with other systems. Is it a cluster of servers? Is it an isolated system? So, you know, all that forensic work is ongoing in a variety of systems. So we'll start to learn more about, you know, potential exfiltrations of data. Obviously, if anyone has command and control capability inside your system, they can use that system for whatever they want. You hear DDoS attacks, right? So you'll hear like a botnet. A botnet is nothing more than, let's just say 100,000 computers that someone has command and control software installed on. And they take those and it's one moment in time. They call them up and use all of them to go to a website, for example, to start to ping a website with a bunch of packets. And that dynamic denial of service DDoS attack could happen. Because the IP address that they're pinging on cannot handle that much traffic at one time. So yeah, for sure. So your system can be used to do other crime. Obviously, if you have the keys to the castle in there, those can be stolen from you and sold on the black market, you know, on the dark web. Or, you know, they could be used against you perhaps in a media campaign. Very embarrassing to have your tools stolen. I commend FireEye for coming out and letting everyone know that's how this got found. They had some of their tools stolen. They are one of the preeminent red team companies in the United States. And they use, they have tools, they built a hack into your system. Tools that are proprietary to themselves. So they've now had to go release indicators of compromise that would show that their tools are also being used against you, right? So that you could detect them. Those types of companies don't like to have their tools known because that's basically the keys to their castle. That's how they're so good at doing what they do. Well, it's just looking at this as an outsider. So an outsider. So you say, okay, we know that these certain products in the supply chain were kidnapped. And we're just gonna change them. We're gonna say, okay, the suspect module is gonna get switched out now. And we're gonna have another one we developed from scratch and we're sure that this one doesn't get through the firewall and allow bad actors to get into our systems. Okay, so would that solve the problem to switch it out? What are the challenges about doing that? Because you have all these downline companies already using the software that's been compromised. You have to reach them, of course. You have to reach everybody in the supply chain. But how hard would that be? Well, so that's a normal thing. Anyone running that software ride is going to get an update. Typically those are automated. Some companies may not automated, but it is out. The HF2 was supposed to be released today. Hotfix number two for that SolarWinds Orion. And so that is available for everyone. And you must go do that. But if you're running Orion, you need to go do that, right? Now, that doesn't solve the problem because you've already had the dropper installed. The dropper's already potentially called out to the command and control software and installed something else, right? So that it's sitting there waiting to be used or waiting for the command and control to access it. So that's the problem that you have is that you've got to go get rid of that dropper that's there. You've got to go find- Can you block it? For example, go to the firewall and say if this suspicious activity happens and port this or port that or in a certain way, just don't recognize it. Sort of neutralize the dropper, as you say. Can you do that? For sure you could. And that's a good idea, but there may already be other stuff installed that's calling somewhere else. So while that's a good practice, yes. Then that's one thing you need to go look at because it's been there more than a few weeks, which it probably has, it has called out. And if it called out, then you have to presume that other tools have already been installed and they may be calling to other places. So again, some of this forensics that we're learning, there are some things we do know. I believe Microsoft is gonna block that entire domain today so that no one can call the known ones anymore, right? So that even if you've got software and you haven't had the time to clean up your system or do it, it can't call that particular command and control, the one that we know. But if I'm a criminal, as soon as I started getting penetration and I got my command and control software contacted, I would have started to prioritize the places I was in. And immediately gone back in, I wanna go hide this dropper, I wanna go hide those firewall logs if I can, and I wanna install something else that no one is looking for. Some other type of advanced persistent threat that's going to do something else for me at some point in time, maybe tomorrow, maybe a month from now. Most of their time is spent gathering, they've gotta gather a lot of information. And then it's not a trifling thing to exfiltrate terabits of data from someone, it's a lot of time. And so that needs, because your firewall will see that. Everyone watches for that type of activity, right? And so, they've gotta take it out a little bit at a time which takes a long time. So their remaining in stealth mode is critical. And now, of course, if the fire I found them, the world's looking for them and now they'll be, in particular, they'll get rooted out, but a lot of people probably aren't capable of doing this forensic work. They'll just hatch their solar winds and the APT will be sitting there and it'll sit there for a long time. There's no way to necessarily stop that if you don't go find it and find out what's been infected within your system, right? Even to that end, and nobody should think this is hopeless. This is work that we have to go do. When we know what we need to do, we go do it, right? It's part of- Why didn't we do it before Andrew? We have a huge industry of cyber security and security software all over the country, the world. The world. I mean, every country that has the internet has this and the software everywhere, every country in the world. So couldn't anybody see this coming? Couldn't anybody figure this out? Why is it such a surprise? Why is it a newspaper headline? Well, because it sells papers. I mean, the people don't know. I mean, for IT people in general and security people for sure, everyone's well aware of this, right? This isn't new or anything like that. Droppers aren't new, malware isn't new. Infecting a supply chain has happened before. This is not, you know, a new event. It is, I think, sensitive because it's solar winds. This is one of our security vendors that we trust and they've been compromised. And the depth of the compromise, the size of the compromise is just a testament to how vulnerable we are because of our supply chain dependencies, right? Again, if I said, if Microsoft were, you know, we've had sequel worms, right? Because SQL, Microsoft SQL is everywhere. Those are very, very effective. Is that the injection attack? Yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly. And there's ways to prevent that. For example, there's the part of the UL program I talked about, they do fuzz testing where they intensely take your software and inject it with gibberish or inject it with super long strings or inject it with certain types of packets. And it can cause it to act erratically. When it acts erratically, sometimes you can take advantage of that and then inject code or cause it to run, go into an error operating mode, which allows you to then use it to do something else with. So, you know, when a system has anomalies, right? Those anomalous behaviors can create outcomes that no one had thought of before. And this is when we talk, you hear the term like zero days and things like that. So there are people that are constantly researching this type of stuff. When they find them, hopefully they're the good guys, the white hat guys and they sell those compromises back to like Microsoft and Microsoft will fix them. Had someone found this one in SolarWinds before it got obviously, you know, found by FireEye, you know, they would have hopefully offered that too. And these companies offer what are called bug bounties. So they'll offer white hat hackers a lot of money to report to them these vulnerabilities so that they can fix them. And that's a good system. We find a lot of things that way, but you have to just go to MITRE, keeps the common vulnerability enumeration, our critical vulnerability enumeration CVEs. You can go online and look there right now, just Google CVEs and go look at those. Those are all the critical vulnerabilities that haven't been resolved, right?  I can go look and there's half a dozen of them there. I can take those, there are already attacks built to detect those particular products like you've heard of Shodan. So there's tools available where I can just go and go find where these routers are in the world and then start to run those attacks against them. So the vulnerabilities are known, the attacks are built. There's no cost to any of this, there's just time. So getting into someone is really just a matter of effort. There's not a, isn't that difficult, but this software hacks a little different because they were able to get, compromise an administrator and then use that administrator's credentials to get into the code. This is by a developer who writes code and then they were able to insert this through his credentials, right? So that- I thought the US was ahead of the game. I thought we kind of- We are. That's where it started with us. And we have not only Silicon Valley, but if you look at the country now, there are experts in software all over, including in Honolulu like you. And so, did you see Halt and Catchfire? A fantastic series about the development of some of these things back in the 80s. I didn't see it, no. There is a series on Netflix. Anyway, my point though is that with all of the expertise that we have, query how did these guys in nation states that are ostensibly behind us, get so far advanced that we can't stop them and that they relentlessly keep on going and we're in this kind of tennis game with them with they always seem to get a leg up on us. Why is that? And what are we missing here? What is the government missing? What is industry missing that we're not ahead of them? Well, I would just venture this for your thinking. I would say we're well ahead of them. We just don't advertise it, nor do they, when we break into their stuff, they don't talk about it. We have freedom of speech here. So the newspaper says, oh, the Russians are attacking the government. Yeah, maybe. The Russians attack solar wind, right? Everyone uses solar wind. So the government's a victim also. Along with all the other victims. But the stuff that we attacked, you have to remember, we took NSA put our defensive and our offensive capabilities together now under Paul Nakasone, right? So I would just venture to guess, you really, really, really don't want to be in our radar because we bring an absolute nightmare when we want to. And where we want to, I believe that we do. That's for top secret conference rooms that I'm not allowed in and none of us will know about, right? But our defenses are very good. Now, that's government defenses. So a commercial defense, right? We see the vulnerability here in the supply chain where a commercial vendor who's been compromised hurt us all. And so that's a difficult issue. And again, you have to understand, when we say government, it's very unlikely. And I don't have visibility on this, but I'm going to say it's very unlikely that any of this breach would have gotten anything into any of our classified or above systems, right? Those are maintained differently. They're monitored differently. There's a lot of other work that goes on there. So, I think that one of the bigger breaches that government had was the OPM. If you remember the OPM breach when all of our, I'm a former veteran. So my details were lost in that event as well. So, that was a massive breach of PII, personally identifiable information. But by and large, I can't imagine that they got very far. Well, you saw the list of government agencies. Forget the private sector for a moment, just the United States. Half a dozen major departments in Washington and our government were compromised. A, how much, and let's assume also they never got into classified information, military secrets would happen. But how much damage?  We need to talk to each other. Those agencies have to function. And these were, it's all about software. How much damage have they done either now or so in the future using these same, what do you call them bots that are inside government computers? How much damage have they done to the government? Is this just a step one of a multi-step process where later we're going to hurt, not necessarily in secrecy, but on data and functionality? Potentially, I mean, now that we know the IOCs, fortunately the government does have resources. It's called our taxpayer dollars and they're going to spend them cleaning this up. There's a cost for sure. But that's this particular attack, right? Which is a good thing. We need to go clean this one up. Again, it doesn't mean that there aren't other APPs already resident across our telecommunications infrastructure, our energy infrastructure. We know they are, as a matter of fact. So many of these systems have been penetrated what we call critical infrastructure. And we're all working to protect them, to find them, to lift them out. Forensic auditing is brutally hard work. Not very many people on the planet are that good at it. We talk about cyber experts, but there's a few groups in the United States that specifically will work, will fund your education. If you happen to have the skill sets to be able to do forensic auditing, they need you. Alan Power came out to Hawaii, worked with our governor. He's worked with many of the governors to try to, they built a game that actually high schoolers can take. And it's not STEM related. This is your ability to be persistent and to have certain tenacity and just certain things you've got to have in you to be able to stay after it and really go find these things in our system. Well, let's assume for a moment, that private industry spends the money and there isn't a lot of money in some sectors these days. Private industry spends the money, brings experts in and they close down the holes. And the federal government brings the resources and they close down the holes and do damage control as necessary. But of course, there's this whole industry out there. I guess it's mostly in government that's supposed to give us security. So you would talk before the show about how, what they do is not necessarily known to the public. A lot of it is, classified may not be the right word but it's not available to the public. And my question to you is, so let's assume all of this gets somehow and it will fixed, it'll get fixed and the holes will be plugged for now. What is the, it's a hard question, what is the next one? What is gonna happen? It's like I asked about COVID, what's the next virus, what's the next hole in the boat? And are we prepared for that? Are we working on that? Do we know what it is? Do you know what it is and can you talk about it? Well, sure. I mean, we know it is this one we know was from March. So there was probably one in January and probably one from last year. And there's probably a lot of undetected advanced persistent threat tools installed in a variety of subsystems in critical infrastructure. Will they wait, when I say they, will the adversaries wait to use those to take down the electrical grid in the Northeast, for example, will they use them to take down the banking system to cause financial disruption to an economy of some country, our country or another country, who knows. You know, we have to presume that we are already compromised. And that's the way we function, the way I function anyway. So if you know that, you must take your really valuable assets and make sure that they're not connected to those things that are probably already compromised. Does that make sense? And so if they are, and if they are, you've gotta keep them encrypted, right? You gotta use strong encryption. So that if they're taken, then it takes an extra, you know, a really big effort to get them decrypted, right? You've got to change your tokenization of your credentialing, right?  You gotta rotate that stuff out. You can't ever use administrators of any type to do anything else. This is a, this compromise of Outlook web access tells us that probably this administrator had an email account associated with that same account that he worked on the system with. That's a bad idea, right? Because it can be compromised. You don't wanna, an administrator, someone who's working on the code, for example, that is all he should do.  It doesn't do anything else. He can't Google, he can't do anything while he's sitting there working on that, nor can he communicate from it. He's gotta go use a different system. But you've gotta have, yeah, you've gotta have that segregation to keep your assets protected. I mean, it's a standard practice classified and above. It's just that below classified and out in the commercial spaces, it's expensive to do. And so, it doesn't get done properly all the time. Well, business is collaboration these days and the bigger the collaboration, the more effective the business is. You can't grow without growing in software. But let me just, as a final thought here, let me talk about the ordinary Schmo. The ordinary Schmo is loading all these utilities on the internet, he's getting this and that.  There's stuff, people can crack his system and they can take his data and all that. We know that, identity theft all over town. But here's one, and I won't mention names because I'm not sure that the name I have in my mind is the one that could do this. But there are various utility software manufacturers that feed the private computer, personal computer market. And you can download them in a minute and you have them on your system and they do all kinds of things. And they're very helpful and they're very good. They're very good. But when you look a little further, you find out that these companies are owned by and programmed in Russia, for example. Sure, okay. And I say to myself in a paranoid way, I say, because I think you have to be paranoid about these things.  I say to myself, you know, if this is leaving some kind of tracks on my computer and it's meshing up with millions of other computers, because it's good software, it works well, can't complain. But if there was some kind of Trojan horse in there that connected by the internet to other people, millions and millions of other people and somebody pulled the trigger on the far end, say in Russia, they could bring down the entire personal computer industry and beyond in the country, maybe the world.  It's a full-blown business already. So when you want to do something like that, you just go on the dark web and purchase it. I can buy two terabits per second of DDoS attack right now. I just buy it. It's already built. There are already millions of, not only PCs, but devices, IoT devices that are compromised. And so the people who own them lease them out to other criminals. Does that make sense? So this is business. So if I want to DDoS a company, I just, I wouldn't, I'm not going to go inspect 100,000 computers.  That's been around for a long time. Well, suppose I want to bring the country down. Suppose I want to stop all commerce, I stop all productivity, I really wreck the economy and I have a handle on every single personal computer, Mac or PC, what have you in the country? Cause I have very good software living on there and they like it and they use it and it's open to the internet. That would be a business of another kind, yeah? Nation-state. Yeah, well, yeah. So there's still going to be command to control infrastructure, right? That the major providers are going to see that start to happen. They already start to hair down DDoS as a matter of fact. So they built out nodes to push all those packets off so that they're not all hitting one gateway and closing it down. So there's the major providers that built out infrastructure across the US already to help us mitigate some of these types of things when people try to do them, they still try to do them and they're still quite effective. I think the biggest DDoS to date is about 8.1 terabits. That is phenomenally huge. I can't imagine how many devices that was working on that particular network, but that's what's been recorded. And I think Verizon just released their report, these companies put out on these reports, CrowdStrike and FireEye and all them every year about all the stuff that they've seen. And so the smart guy like, gosh, you're sitting at home, they're doing that with your computer. You just think your computer's running slow. You don't really know. It's not like they took the whole thing because they don't really want you to kick them out.  They don't want you to take it off, right? So they just want to use 30% of your processing power, not a hundred, you know what I mean? Well, we're just about out of time, Andrew. I really enjoy this conversation. I hope other people do too. I think the word has to get out about this. And that's my last question. What message would you leave from your end of the security industry? What message would you leave with people? How should they approach this, handle it, think about it? Should they be worried? Should they be confident? What mindset should we all have about it? What comes out of this newspaper headline? So for sure, if you use the SolarWinds product, you need to get a hold of the IOCs, right? Which SolarWinds has published them, Microsoft has published them. You can go get a look at those now, run scans on your systems, look for these IOCs to see what you've got. Obviously you need to update your SolarWinds to the new hot fix version, which is supposed to be out today. That'll take care, so you won't have that, but you've got to go look around forensically. And then you definitely need to be monitoring your firewall for outbound calls, right? And look for outbound exfiltration of data. Again, there could be something else installed that these indicators of compromise don't see, right? There could already be another tool that's been installed that they're using. And there are a lot of IOCs. Most of these tools are looking for all these things that we know about. It's the stuff that's unknown that we don't know about. If it's there, there's nothing you can do, but except watch for, you know, why is all of a sudden, you know, five megabits of data flowing out some port that never happened before on my firewall, right? So there's things like that that people need to look for. And that's your intrusion detection, intrusion prevention systems, right? But the small guys oftentimes don't have that. So they can at least do the Windows updates, the Windows defenders looking for these IOCs that's gonna quarantine them on your system. As of today, I believe they were gonna load the binaries in there. So, you know, there's, you gotta do the normal good computing. You also, you need to be aware of what's going on. And then, and also try not to spread like fear, like we know what to do to fix it. So you just do what you gotta do. Do good computing habits, use multi-factor authentication. You know, do those things that are smart, separate your valuable assets, don't have them on your network. You know, if your network's on the internet and you're playing games or whatever you're doing, you know, if it's not safe or not secure, you don't wanna have assets on there. You know, that's just good computing, good cyber hygiene, we call it. Yeah, Andrew Lening integrates security technologies. The host of security matters and a principle of the Security Industry Association as well. Thank you very much, Andrew. Really enjoyed talking with you. Thanks for having me, Jay. I hope the audience likes it. Stay safe, everybody. Aloha. Aloha.


Don't do that.


All right, here's a story that I'm sure is going to make you a date. So in Montana, young environmentalist activists, these are young people, sued the state of Montana, sued them because the young people argued that the state agencies were violating the young people's constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment by allowing fossil fuel development. A judge yesterday ruled in their favor. He ruled that the state has an obligation, an obligation to consider, or has a constitutional obligation to consider a clean and healthy environment for young people. And as a consequence, right, to reevaluate all fossil fuel permits, all fossil fuel permits. It's the first time a U.S. court has ever ruled against a government for violating a constitutional right based on climate change. And now this is a state court, not a federal court. It's based on a state constitution, not the U.S. Constitution. And you know, this is going to be appealed and we will see what happens on appeal. And of course, you know, Montana is a major producer of coal, coal-burned electricity, has large oil and gas reserves that are being exploited.  But it is a big deal. This is a big deal. These young people are convinced that they will be convinced by Greta and her pals and her intellectual supporters that they are going to die, their lives are going to be shortened by the use of fossil fuels, and they are demanding that the states protect them. You know, the dean of the Lucid Clark Law School in Portland says, the ruling really provides nothing beyond emotional support for the many cases seeking to establish a public trust right, human right or federal constitutional right to a healthy environment. There is no such right, not in the U.S. Constitution, not that this even our Supreme Court will accept. It's just unbelievable that a judge would rule this way undermining the entire nature of our Constitution, that we have some kind of right to these kind of outcomes. Where would these kids be? Would they even exist? How would their lives, what would their lives be like if we didn't have fossil fuels? They have no conception of that. No conception of that. I was encouraged today, though, to read, oh, I think I just closed that window, to read out of the U.K. like a sub-stack, this is, yeah, here it is, it's a sub-stack. It's the Cliff Fox sub-stack, it's an Academy of Ideas out of the U.K. The title is Extreme Weather, Can We Adapt to a Changing Climate? And his conclusion at the end is, should we spend trillions on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions? Given that economic losses from such events can be enormous, isn't prevention better than cure? Or would that money be better spent on making society more resilient to extreme weather? Does the narrative of climate change catastrophe get in the way of less dramatic measures that can protect people and property? And he's talking about the fires in, among other things, the fires in Hawaii. And the focus of the article is climate deaths are down.  And it's actually, and the cost of reducing fossil fuels is just astronomical when we can spend a fraction of that protecting ourselves from, you know, nature, from maybe catastrophic event or bad consequences of climate change. And it's straight out of Alex Epstein, right? I mean, the whole line of reasoning is straight out of Alex Epstein. So here you have an Academy of Ideas, which is kind of a left of center organization in London, in the U.K., hard to identify a left of center. They're very good on free speech, but Cliff Fox, I mean, basically it's a Marxist organization that is good on free speech and anti-woke, but they're Marxist in a sense of class redistribution, state ownership of resources, things like that. So it's really, it's interesting kind of the combination. But here they're taking on climate change. They're taking at least this one right out there is Rob Lawyans, a Alex Epstein approach to climate change.