I’m a recovering intelligence officer. I’m always a recovering intelligence officer for one trauma or another. And I’ve had the benefit, the pleasure, the honor to apply a lot of those skills I use in defense of our nation in the commercial section and in the commercial world as well, rising all the way to chief operating officer of a company that I thought was pretty obscure.

Whether I’m a nation state targeting data, whether I’m a criminal enterprise targeting data, or a transnational organization targeting that, that data is valuable. And while it’s valuable to me, there is a negative externality to the people that I’m taking it from as well. It’s not a victimless crime, right?

Anybody ever watch storage wars?
You can go on the dark web and buy drives like you were buying a storage unit. “I’ll give you a thousand dollars for that storage unit”. I know there’s got to be a couple thousand bucks worth of stuff in it. Your data out there is the same way.

When I think about being on a red team, I take a systems thinking approach. And if I want access to your CEO’s computer, if I want access to your engineer’s plans, I look at it from a systems perspective. And when I do that again, this is the kind of dastardly side of things, right?

Think of shredding tools. You dump all your paper in a big bin, and when the bin fills up, it goes off, it gets shredded. Good to go. There’s a lot of services like that for media as well. But again, You’re now sending media off and… is it really being shredded? Or is someone going 8 to 5 o ‘clock? I’m just gonna say it was all shredded — then stuff ends up being sold or worse.

How do you certify it and make sure you can prove it? And ready to say, No, this is certified. “I know this was disposed in the appropriate way.”