Transcript of Interview:
T mobile and Sprint investors getting a busy signal for the moment at least on their $26 billion mega merger deal. The number three and number four largest telecoms are leaning heavily on the 5G argument in order to clear their union with the Department of Justice. But if T mobile and Sprint are hanging there merger hat on this need to link up so that they can build out a super high speed wireless network in the US one legal legal saying they can forget it. Gene Kimmelman is a former antitrust Attorney for the Justice Department and he said to the Wall Street Journal quote, there’s no justification to concentrate or see another merger in the wireless market in order to get 5G and better competition. But as the merger hangs in the balance Chinese telecom and smartphone giant Huawei took to the stage yesterday in China to unveil what it calls its WiFi 6 air engine product which promises to shorten WiFi network latency meaning, the time it takes devices to communicate with each other, shorten it to just 10 milliseconds. But no matter who wins this 5G race, we’ve got the guy who says there is a very sinister side to this next generation of wireless connectivity, Ang Cui is CEO of Red Balloon Security. And this is a cyber sabotage contract for the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. So the big guys all are turning to you. Sinister is a loaded but vague word. What do you mean by sinister?
You know, we have about maybe 5 to 7 billion of these embedded devices connected to the internet today. These things control everything from the gas pump, the ATM you know, things that keep planes in the air, the things that keep our telephones working. So when we do that, and we have to worry about securing 5 billion of these things that our lives depend on, everything’s gonna be fine. There’s nothing to worry about. No, of course, right? You have all of these things that you know, every aspect of our lives depend on and just like your laptop and your desktop from, you know, 15 years ago, these things can be hacked in fairly easily. So what does it mean? If attackers from the other side of the world can all of a sudden, you know, exploit your car engine controller the same way that they hack your Windows laptop? Yeah, from 15 years ago.
I thought the whole point of the Trump administration and US businesses that are building out 5G, the whole point of them saying only use our equipment and everything will be fine, was to calm everybody down and say, oh, then it will be secure. Are you saying even made in the USA equipment provides this massive new, I guess you could call it an attack surface?
Well, actually, unfortunately, we don’t really have a 5G competitor that is entirely based in the US. That’s a sad fact that that’s true. We’re behind is what you’re saying. We don’t have a 5G solution. Yeah, we’re not competing with the rest of the world and the largest you know, the one company that’s getting most traction is from China. So if we allow China to come into the United States, and build out our communication infrastructure. We’re not talking about just making cell phones faster here, we’re talking about connecting every single thing around us talk about doorbells, and baby monitors, wearables correct everything, everything from the thing that automates your house to the thing that you know you have three dozen computers inside your car. And if this technology rolls out, all of those computers will potentially be accessible on this new network. And one we don’t know how safe that network is to use the equipment and the code that goes into that thing. And then all of the devices that connect to it allows anybody to hit those devices …
Verizon and everybody else says it’ll be so wonderful is Oh, all of these cell towers will be talking to each other and he will seamlessly from the hundreds of miles away if you’re on a business trip, be able to look at the camera inside your house and check on your your puppy, or what have you have I just find that this gets disconcerting if you’re saying even if we didn’t use Huawei equipment it’ll keep us sort of vulnerable. And you have something called the Mirai botnet that also was able to illustrate how it would actually happen.
Yeah, absolutely. So let’s start with this, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, my friend gave me this really cool quote, sometimes when you connect to the internet, the internet connects back. And that’s always bad. So you know, when you put something on the internet, maybe you can connect to it, and you can see your little puppy from your house, but who else can do that? So that is the major thing that we have to deal with. We have billions of these insecure devices that are going to pose a problem and yeah, let’s Mirai, you know, we wrote a paper in 2009 that predicted the fact that Mirai was gonna exist and the size and the nature of Mirai – basically it turned everybody’s wearables and everything 2 million devices into bots that then infected everybody else, right? Well, after talking to you, I’m going back to the the dial phone. Yeah. Good. You should. Are you though, going to protect yourself?
What am I doing to protect myself? Well, I, from my perspective, I know that if somebody wanted to reach me and people like me, the offensive capabilities that we have is so far out match than the defensive capabilities that currently exists. So, you know, unless I am building out a very secure Defense Network or something like that, I kind of just do the reasonable thing and give up because if somebody wanted to get to, you know, me or you it doesn’t take very much today.
End of Interview
Further Reading:
The Improbable Rise of Huawei – How did a private Chinese firm come to dominate the world’s most important emerging technology?
CIA reportedly says Huawei funded by Chinese state security – Telecomm giant received funding from China’s military, The Times reports.