The Passwords Are the Problem with Thierry Gagnon and Philippe Desmarais
Release Date: 10/18/2023
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Investment losses can be confusing because they do not always tell the whole story. Sometimes money is lost because the market has changed. Other times, an investor was sold something they did not understand, pushed into a product that was never appropriate, or denied the information they needed to make a real decision. Courtney Werning has built her career in that space, helping investors sort through what happened and whether someone can be held responsible. Courtney is a named partner at Meyer, Wilson, and Werning, a national investor protection firm that has recovered more than $350...
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Aging parents often rely on the people closest to them for help, but what happens when that help becomes a way to take control? For Charles Wallace, the warning signs started small. His mother’s fridge was suddenly overfilled. A caregiver refused to provide receipts. Spending patterns began to shift in ways that did not make sense. At the time, each concern could be explained away. Looking back, they were part of something much larger. Charles spent 15 years in banking and finance, and after his mother’s death, he used that experience to reconstruct more than 3,000 transactions. What he...
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The Power of Prediction
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We make predictions all the time including about the weather, about traffic, about what someone is going to say next. It feels natural, even rational. But when algorithms start making predictions about us, whether we'll repay a loan, reoffend after prison, or respond to a medical treatment, something fundamental shifts. The forecast stops being a guess and starts becoming a verdict. My guest today is Carissa Veliz, a philosopher and associate professor at the University of Oxford, where she also researches at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her work focuses on the ethics of technology, privacy,...
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Privacy vs Reality
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Online security advice often sounds simple until you actually try to follow it. Between password managers, privacy settings, and data brokers, protecting yourself can start to feel like a full-time job. That gap between what sounds easy and what’s actually realistic is where a lot of people get stuck. My guest today is Yael Grauer, a freelance investigative technology reporter who covers privacy, security, digital freedom, hacking, and mass surveillance. She also works as a program manager of cybersecurity research at Consumer Reports, where she manages Security Planner, a free resource that...
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Wired to Trust
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It’s easy to think scams only work when someone misses something obvious. In reality, most of them don’t look obvious at the start. They show up as normal situations with just enough friction to notice, but not enough to stop. That small gap is where people tend to move forward instead of stepping back. My guest today is Tali Sharot, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how we form beliefs and make decisions. She’s known for her research on the neural basis of human optimism, and her work has been published in leading journals. In her books, The Optimism Bias and The Science of...
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Every day, employees at hotels, restaurants, and resorts across the country are doing exactly what they were hired to do: being warm, responsive, and eager to help. It's what makes hospitality work. It's also what makes hospitality one of the most targeted industries in cybersecurity. When your entire workforce is trained to say yes, teaching them to be suspicious is an uphill battle. The smarter solution might be to take the target off their backs entirely. Jasson Casey is the co-founder and CEO of Beyond Identity, a company built around one idea: making identity-based attacks impossible....
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Phone scams get dismissed as background noise or just annoying interruptions and unknown numbers with robotic voices we learn to ignore. But behind that noise is an industry built on psychology, automation, and staggering profitability. My guest today is Alex Quilici. He’s an engineer, entrepreneur, and the CEO of YouMail, a company focused on protecting consumers and businesses from unwanted and fraudulent calls. Alex has spent years analyzing how robocalls and scam campaigns are designed, how they evolve, and why they continue to work despite better technology and increased awareness. What...
info_outlineWith the use of passwords, we’re hoping to ensure privacy and security, but sometimes it is at the expense of convenience. As technology changes and biometric databases become more utilized, we need to remember that they may also be hacked.
Today’s guests are Philippe Desmarais and Thierry Gagnon. Philippe is a tech entrepreneur who co-founded Kelvin Zero and currently serves as its CEO, overseeing the company’s strategic direction. He is also a member of the Next Generation Advisory Council at Rockefeller Capital Management. Before creating Kelvin Zero, Philippe played a significant role in various start-ups, focusing on data analytics for political campaigns, remote hardware device management, and cybersecurity.
Thierry Gagnon is co-founder and Chief Technology at Kelvin Zero. He is an expert in software development, malware analysis, cryptography, and reverse engineering. He has been actively involved in the cybersecurity community, participating in renowned competitions and projects such as Malware Information Sharing Platform.
Show Notes:
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[1:18] - Philippe and Thierry share their backgrounds and their roles in the company they co-founded together, Kelvin Zero.
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[2:34] - Thierry’s expertise is in cybersecurity but Philippe’s interest was more in crime. They combined their strengths and passions to create Kelvin Zero.
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[6:18] - Passwords have been around for millennia.
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[7:24] - We often confuse being smarter with being faster.
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[9:45] - Passwords are not often attached to an individual. We have so many passwords and can’t actually know them all.
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[11:53] - We can compromise passwords at scale.
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[13:20] - The attackers only need to be right once. The defenders need to be right 100% of the time. How can we flip this?
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[15:47] - The average person is tasked with trying to keep up with cybersecurity and, in most cases, they are not qualified to do this.
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[17:11] - What does it look like to take a password-less approach?
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[19:20] - If cybersecurity is done successfully, the opportunities are massive. But regulation holds us back.
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[21:51] - Once a tech company can serve protection, then companies can focus on their services and products.
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[24:46] - There are differences between the physical world and the logical world.
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[28:41] - How do you convince people to share medical data for research when there are constant breaches?
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[31:33] - Is privacy the same as anonymity?
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[33:52] - Technology should be able to do what we want it to do, but that’s not the case.
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[36:36] - In a password-less environment, how can we validate a user?
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[39:40] - Thierry believes we should get away from the server authenticating because then it is the responsibility of the organization.
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[43:18] - Sci-fi movies sound far-fetched, but a lot of them predict technology.
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[46:35] - Thierry and Philippe share their thoughts on what we should be putting our focus on now.
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[49:40] - Stay away from single-factor authorization.
Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.