Redefining CyberSecurity

Ransomware - Time to Decide - Will You or Won't You Pay? | An Infosecurity Europe 2024 Conversation with Jon Davies | On Location Coverage with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli

Episode Summary

Join hosts Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli as they discuss the complexities of ransomware and their related payments with Jon Davies, Senior Director at NewsCorp, ahead of Infosecurity Europe. Explore riveting discussions on the ethical dilemmas, regulatory challenges, and strategic responses businesses must navigate to combat this ever-evolving threat.

Episode Notes

Guest: Jon Davies, Senior Director - Cyber Defence, News Corp

On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjondavies/

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Hosts: 

Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast [@RedefiningCyber]

On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/sean-martin

Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast

On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli

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Episode Notes

In this engaging episode of the On Location with Sean and Marco Podcast, hosts Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli dive into the imminent Infosecurity Europe event with special guest Jon Davies, a Senior Director at NewsCorp. The conversation opens with Sean and Marco expressing their excitement about the event, especially focusing on Jon Davies' upcoming panel discussion on the controversial topic of ransomware payments.

Jon highlights the diverse perspectives that will be represented on his panel, including law enforcement, insurance sectors, and end consumers. This diversity aims to illuminate the complex landscape of ransomware and the regulations surrounding it. Jon explains how recent guidance from UK government bodies is prompting debate about whether ransomware payments should be made illegal, and the implications this could have on businesses and society at large.

The dialogue shifts towards the impact of ransomware on different sectors, particularly critical infrastructure and healthcare. Sean raises the ethical dilemma of whether companies responsible for essential services should pay ransoms to ensure continuity and safety, also touching on the broader societal implications and fiduciary responsibilities of publicly traded companies.

Jon shares an interesting anecdote about a unique ransomware tabletop activity where he collaborated with hostage negotiators to better understand how to navigate ransomware demands. This leads to an intriguing discussion about the human element in cyber negotiations and the potential benefits of leveraging negotiation tactics traditionally used in hostage situations.

Marco and Sean further explore the necessity of having a strategic response plan in place for ransomware attacks, emphasizing the stark contrast between the resources available to large corporations versus small businesses. Jon underscores the importance of having a playbook and a coordinated effort to report and manage cyber incidents effectively.

The conversation also touches on the role of insurance policies in cyber warfare, potential regulatory changes, and the need for a collective effort to combat ransomware. Jon argues for a balanced approach that includes technological investment, regulatory measures, and smart strategic planning.

As the episode wraps up, Sean and Marco express their eagerness to attend the panel and encourage listeners to stay tuned for further coverage of Infosecurity Europe. This episode offers a comprehensive look at the multifaceted issue of ransomware, providing valuable insights for businesses of all sizes.

Be sure to follow our Coverage Journey and subscribe to our podcasts!

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Episode Transcription

Ransomware - Time to Decide - Will You or Won't You Pay? | An Infosecurity Europe 2024 Conversation with Jon Davies | On Location Coverage with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli

Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.

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Sean Martin: [00:00:00] Marco.  
 

Marco Ciappelli: Sean.  
 

Sean Martin: Can you feel the excitement?  
 

Marco Ciappelli: I am. As a matter of fact, you see this for people watching. I already have the little lapel mic. I'm going to keep it until next week. I'm not going to remove it. I'm going to sleep  
 

Sean Martin: on it.  
 

Marco Ciappelli: I'm excited to actually use this every day in London for security. So the excitement is getting really  
 

Sean Martin: stationary and mobile all at the Excel conference center and uh, In London, they're just outside London, of course. 
 

And, uh, Anyway, um, We're gonna be a big sell. I'll just leave it at that. And, yeah, Seeing a lot of friends making new ones. John is a new friend. John Davies, thanks for, uh, uh, Thanks for joining us. Congratulations on getting a, getting a speaking session, part of a panel there at Infosecurity Europe.  
 

Jon Davies: Sounds good guys. 
 

Great, great, great to meet you. Um, look, looking forward to the session. I'm [00:01:00] sure with the other panelists, we've got a kind of a great diverse, uh, options and without kind of using the pun, good cop, bad cop, it's really good to have, uh, someone from, from law reinforcement there to kind of give their perspective. 
 

Someone from the insurance sector. And I guess me as a, as an end customer and then consumer of potentially, uh, you know, targets of kind of these these Ransomware gangs ransomware as a service these individuals. Um, so it's gonna it's a good mix of folk gonna gonna be there Hopefully we're gonna cover some Interesting, interesting areas. 
 

Um, some new, newer sessions that kind of on regulations that have been pushed out very recently. So it's kind of pertinent timing. Um, the certain guidance that has come out from UK government bodies, um, areas that are now starting to be lobbied, whether we should make ransomware payments, uh, illegal and fraudulent, um, making them to report. 
 

So some really Interesting, interesting areas and, and all without saying the word AI in, in the topic as [00:02:00] well, which is quite cool. Come on, you just, you just did that.  
 

Sean Martin: Well, it's not in, it's not in the title. It's not  
 

Jon Davies: in  
 

Sean Martin: the title. But, uh, yeah, go ahead.  
 

Jon Davies: Yeah, I, I think in all serious nature though, I think AI does come into this conversation with, with ransomware. 
 

So, you know, a number of years ago, the complexity of kind of getting into, into this world, you know, it's highly skilled people, you know, In terms of ransomware as a service, you kind of got the business development, the software engineers, the folk looking for vulnerabilities, creating those exploits and crafting them. 
 

With AI now, kind of that skills barrier has dropped, right? Really, really, really on the floor, getting kind of these tools to, to go away and, and write that, whether it's the phishing email, it's kind of that initial access, the initial, all, all the way through to, to writing the exploit. Some interesting times and, you know, hopefully we can put pressure on, you know, tech vendors and, and software vendors to help them, Better protect us. 
 

But I think ransomware, it's one of these areas where it's not just the technology, it's kind of the process, the people, the culture of the organization, you know, are you [00:03:00] likely to click the bit, the link, the button, whatever that is, um, you know, do you have plans in play as an organization? Have you practiced those plans? 
 

You know, we've all been there in school, college, workplaces where we test the fire drills. We're all marched outside with the fire marshals. We don't really do that. With a lot of kind of these procedures that we have, um, you know, in corporate enterprises, we don't test them fully. Um, one of the things personally for me is kind of understanding the stakeholders involved. 
 

Um, you know, To this day, it's massive, kind of from your PR folk, your legal, your privacy, your tech teams, your MSSPs, your third parties, your vendors. There's a magnitude of people involved in incidents and incident management and it's understanding how all these operate together. You don't normally get the opportunity to kind of test those, those out. 
 

So I'm hoping that we kind of get into that conversation, get some of the audience, uh, interacting, asking the questions, putting us on the spot, challenging us, right. Getting us to think [00:04:00] outside the box. Um, and I think that's, that's what it's all about. Personally, for me, I kind of enjoy these sessions. 
 

It's like cyber, cyber therapy. Uh, it's kind of like minded people challenging you in areas maybe you've not thought of but it's a great session to kind of learn and kind of take those, those lessons from people in different industries or sectors.  
 

Sean Martin: Yeah, I'm super excited for this conversation because if you think about Nobody's immune to this and everybody's a target. 
 

Nobody's a target, everybody's a target, nobody's a target. When you think about some of the smaller organizations that outsource IT or don't have security in house and business, business folks and functional teams set up services, right? And then those services get compromised. It's often them making the decision of what to do in the case of a ransomware incident. 
 

There's no, to your point, there's no There's no team to do [00:05:00] the, the test, to do the firing drill there.  
 

Jon Davies: And I think that's a really pertinent point. And I think Paul will, will have something to say from, from the police. So he's the national, um, from the Welsh Cyber Resilience Centers, represented the National Cyber Resilience Centers. 
 

But the purpose of those out in region for SMBs and kind of small row fits is going to be key. And it's going to be some good lessons learned, uh, and how you get in and interact with, with those individuals and groups, uh, and bring in that law enforcement. Element into it. You know, it's key. Um, I think we're in the UK. 
 

We can have use the term action fraud It doesn't sound like the place you go and report cyber crime, right? And it'll be good to see how that that's going to evolve going forward and what support there are for these small medium businesses So yeah Big multinationals, corporates. We have teams of people, um, you know, skill to the teeth, vendors to the teeth of capability, but you're smaller outfits. 
 

Typically they don't just spot on that. And what, what advice is out there for free? Who can you [00:06:00] call on in, in such incidents? And pretty much how do you not get your pants pulled down by, by a vendor and MSP at that point to charge you a fortune? Cause you know, it's the worst day of your life when, when he's happened. 
 

And some, uh, some vendors, um, some service providers are going to try and cash in on that opportunity when. You know, rightly so, there's some free advice out there, some free toolkits that you can refer back to and guidance. And yeah, I'm sure Paul and myself can touch on those in the session and where to turn to, where to ask for the help and advice. 
 

Sean Martin: Yeah, the exorbitant service provider fee might be way less than the ransom payment. So, we, we, we've, we, we have some, Great excitement here already. We're, I don't know how over six minutes into the conversation. We don't even know who we're, who we're hearing from here. I mean, Marco and I do, of course, but, uh, for our audience, they don't know who John Davey is and why we're chatting with you, so I want to give you a moment, John, to kind of let us know who you are, what you're up to. 
 

Some of the experiences [00:07:00] you've had, um, talking about infrasecurity, uh, Europe here and the panel you're doing on ransomware with some folks. So let everybody know who John Davies is.  
 

Jon Davies: Yeah, certainly. So yeah, I've gone, gone a hundred miles per hour straight into it without, without doing the intro. Um, but yeah, so yeah, John Davis, I'm currently a senior director at News Corp. 
 

So, um, the, the big old beast, so Mr. Murdoch, Murdoch Jr. Now it's, uh, Empire. Um, I look after cyber defense in the, in the EMEA time zone. So that's everything from incident response to some of the engineering side from our detection response, um, engineering. We have some of the forensics capability here in the, in the EMEA region. 
 

Um, that's the role today. I also sit on the board of directors for CSEC, which is the Chartered Institute of Information Security. Again, really great profession and anyone in cyber security, it's the body where you typically go to get your professional training. recognition, um, and right now, yeah, we've kind of got the new badge in the UK. 
 

Um, I'm not really a fan of badge collecting, but this, this [00:08:00] is a really important one. Um, so it's the charter security professional. So, you know, cyber security information assurance has been around for donkey's years. It's, it's nothing new. We've kind of changed the terms, um, but we're going down maybe the engineering route where in the U S you're going to have got professional engineer status UK. 
 

We've got chartered engineer status. It's maturing The profession and having a place for security people to kind of go register Um prior to this i was microsoft chief security advisor for the partner ecosystem within the uk So pretty much know all the uk mssps That there are have some great relationships with those guys and girls Um, and prior to that significant experience across, uh, UK, uh, government, civil service departments, uh, and M. 
 

O. D. Um, so that's kind of where I crafted, uh, crafted my skill set that, you know, great opportunity to get exposed, uh, across the piece of, of different cyber security pillars. Um, but yeah, for me, systems engineering is where I kind of cut my teeth into it. That's kind [00:09:00] of where the road started for me. Um, yeah. 
 

And yeah, interesting background. So started, I guess, all through the academic path, even became a qualified welding inspector, believe it or not, along, along the way before jump, jumping back to more electrical electronic engineering.  
 

Marco Ciappelli: All right. I'm going to bring it into into the big question because you mentioned you're going to play probably good cop bad cop on the panel. 
 

And I'm thinking like, and then you say things like, um, there's never been a better time to talk about ransomware, which sounds a little weird. It's just like, do we really need to talk about it? But we do. Right. And, uh, my question is, from a societal perspective, It's something that ransomware or something similar existed before the Internet. 
 

Right. So we know it's not something that you can just patch with some technology, which I think we figure out the entire cyber security industry is [00:10:00] not something you patch with some technology anyway. So I'm curious to know from your perspective that the regulation, um, that is happening maybe in the European community nowadays, but also the option what you said when he's a corporate environment where you have a multinational There may be a lot of loops to go over. 
 

So the question here is, do you pay or you won't pay? So I want to know, where do we stand, really?  
 

Jon Davies: Yeah, no, certainly. So I guess it kind of comes down to it's a business decision right now. So there's no, in the UK, certainly there's no kind of rules and regulations and laws against it. You know, a side pillar of that is if someone's on the financial sanctions list. 
 

within the UK or the groups on the sanctions list, then if different ballgame, you'd certainly need to bring your, your legal people into that. But yeah, from corporate individuals, from kind of your tech providers, cloud providers, hyperscalers, where you look at that shared service model, the data is your own, it's your data as a company, it's your [00:11:00] responsibility. 
 

So it's business decision to kind of, kind of do that. Um, there's an ethical stance to it. Should, should we be kind of aiding and abetting, uh, organized criminal gang nation states, um, whether that's, you know, true, true or not depends on which side of the side of the fence you sit on. And, and certainly a great discussion point. 
 

Um, you know, if it's a crown jewel, so some organizations, if they've kind of gone through that maturity, you understand what a minimal viable company is, what makes Money for your organizations, and all of a sudden you're being extorted, you know, a dip, a double dip, a triple dip. So you know, where before the data was just being sold, now data's being sold, it's encrypted. 
 

Then you may kind of have your public perception, your customers being targeted as well, or you kind of, your external footprint being targeted. There's, there's a lot at stake for, for organized organizations, um, you know, especially the, the multinationals where PR is, is huge and how you deal with that. Um, so in terms of. 
 

Regulation. Yeah. So, you know, NTSC has recently put out some, some [00:12:00] stuff that we're going to cover. UK government is starting to lobby and kind of go out to kind of the general public to say, you know, if you go and undergo ransomware, you know, is it a kind of, uh, regulatory or mandatory regulatory, uh, response? 
 

You have to report that to, to a body right now, which body that is, it is unknown who's going to be capable of dealing with that on the sheer scale of it. Um, you kind of have to have. look at the victim side of it. So behind all of this, you know, for, especially for the smaller organizations, there are victims, right? 
 

And, and unfortunately, you know, individuals and companies have gone bust and then there's a human element to it. Some people have committed suicide, right? When, you know, things have gone to that serious nature of it. So how do we kind of Protect individuals. Um, how do you protect, uh, companies? Uh, and then it kind of goes back to, you know, even if you pay that ransomware, there's no guarantee you're going to get, kind of get your data back that no one's going to be, you know, it's not going to be released out into the wild per se. 
 

Um, and it doesn't alleviate your responsibility to [00:13:00] report that to the ICO if it's kind of PPI and GDPR type, type information there. So a little. Paying maybe kind of the low hanging fruit, kind of the easy option. Sometimes it's not the best option. Uh, and I'm sure Paul will, will kind of cover, cover that, uh, being not the best option. 
 

Um, but then, you know, on the, on the flip side of all of that, you know, you could get your company back up and running. Um, you could get access to your data, uh, but you are, you know, facilitating if you want and funding, you know, the ongoing nature of ransomware, ransomware as a service, organized criminal gangs, nation state. 
 

I think we're up to a billion dollars so far for ransomware payments. So it's, you know, it's huge, absolutely huge money. Um, and I think this. This year alone, you know, where we're already tracking significant spend and significant uptick in ransomware, you know, the top 10 Ransomware gangs if you want they're still the same ones They you know, yes, you know nca the national crime agency has taken down [00:14:00] Uh certain threat areas, but they'll pivot right they'll rebrand They'll rechange their tools or the tdps the tactics techniques procedures and they'll come again because they're financially incentive You know incentivized to do this. 
 

There's so much money in there. It's like a small business. You know, it's not even a small business, right? One billion dollars is huge money. Um, so how, how do we globally combat this? Um, we've touched on technology, not being kind of the, the golden bullet, if you want to the sporting gun. And the reason is there's so many Bloody vulnerabilities, right? 
 

There's so much vulnerabilities out there that, you know, your external attack footprint, um, is huge for, for an organization. That initial point. And it goes back to the unfortunate, uh, you know, saying that an attacker only has to be successful. Once defender has to be successful, you know, 24, 7, 365 days of the year. 
 

You're only giving them that one initial footprint, you know, that leverage to get into an organization. And you just don't know. What, what, what's going to happen?  
 

Sean Martin: So I want to ask you about this cause it's [00:15:00] coming to mind here. The, the idea that, well, especially for publicly traded companies where they have fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders and then critical infrastructure, and then, I mean, we talk about victims. 
 

Somebody loses a bank account. Maybe there's a way to kind of get the money back. But when you start looking at healthcare and critical infrastructure, people view it, our power be without health services, what have you. And if, if I'm responsible for critical infrastructure, staying up and running for people's health to be maintained. 
 

Um, I, I have a responsibility to those, to folks to keep things up and running. And if that means paying the ransom , maybe.  
 

Jon Davies: Yeah.  
 

Sean Martin: So, I don't know. Is that something you think have to think about? I mean, yeah. No, I, I would say kind of include you in critical [00:16:00] infrastructure, bringing information to, uh. So yeah,  
 

Jon Davies: it's an interesting area and whenever I get into CNI, it's kind of the, the other side of this is the safety element. 
 

So if you're going to get a really malicious threat actor, you know, these things can part connect to the kinetic world. They can, Make, you know, decisions if you want your PLCs, your SCADA systems, or you could kill someone, right? So there is a, you know, a further risk, you know, inside this extortion net, but with CNI, so the, the kind of the new lobbying, is that for CNI, you shall not make any ransomware payment. 
 

That kind of, that's where we're gonna go done this and it's going to be up for public discussion. Um, it's an interesting one because I'm sure, you know, if, if a CNI service goes off for a long enough period of time and no one's paying the ransom, uh, and something's happened, you know, what, what's going to happen then, you know, are MPs heads going to start, uh, uh, turning and people being, being pushed out of Parliament based on, you know, certain, you know, Uh decisions that are being [00:17:00] made now today that we're we're discussing Uh, and we're getting right into election period, right? 
 

So it's going to be interesting time, um, you know Not that we're going to be talking on disinformation here, but it's kind of that all all of that extortion side It's kind of from from an attacker's Perspective they've got a tool set right they're going to start pulling those levers to see which makes you know Those individuals tweak with inside that organization to see what they're going to get a response from Um, you know, not not so long ago me and paul ran a ransomware tabletop activity We brought in a hostage kidnap negotiator To, to that with, with a bunch of seasons in the UK, that was super cool. 
 

It's the first time I've ever seen that being done before. Um, and it's that human element. How would you negotiate with, uh, with someone on the other side of the phone, on the email, you know, is there anything we can learn from, you know, negotiation tactics that we maybe lower the price down? Get into the head of the individuals 'cause they're who runs at the end of the day. 
 

And the, the one thing that we, we, we need to understand is [00:18:00] they're business people. They're businessmen or women, uh, at the end of the phone or, or the email, they're looking for the best deal that, that they can get. Um, so, you know, bringing in someone with negotiation skills to, to kind of this area, I think is, is pertinent and, and it brings a different skillset, um, that typically, you know, cybersecurity for. 
 

Don't have, we're not used to negotiating, uh, you know, with organized criminal gangs on Asian states. And one thing I took away from that session is you want to be the dumbest person in the room. You don't want to say you've kind of got all your cyber security team, you know, they're there with you and it's an interesting uh mindset because all of a sudden If the attacker knows, uh, you've got, I've got technical people working it, they, they may not want to leverage, uh, any opportunity to, to lower, lower that price. 
 

Um, so I thought that was, that was pretty cool. Um, but going back to kind of the CNI element, you know, that I'm not sure where I sit on one side of the argument. Um, I see it from not paying, but you know, if I'm not getting paid or if my pension is not coming in or kind of your, your social services, your social [00:19:00] security payments are not making it. 
 

in or your NHS services are not working because we've decided as a country we're not going to pay ransomware for CNI. So it's an interesting stance to take. Um, will it force individuals and organized criminal gangs and ransomware gangs not to target you? I'm not too sure. I'm not too sure. It's certainly something i'd love to participate in in that kind of conversation to see both sides of the argument And unfortunately, there's no safe area. 
 

We can we can test this in right if we say we're not paying we're not paying for cni Um, so some some insurance companies in some of the policies for the fallout from war They won't cover that. So what's happening in ukraine and russia right now if a ransomware or an offshoot of that targets, uh, you know, your sector where your insurance is. 
 

Some of the policies won't cover you for that, uh, because, you know, hybrid warfare now is using, uh, cyber, you know, as part of that with, with kinetic, the fallout, um, the unintended [00:20:00] targets of that could, could reach back, uh, or be weaponized by, uh, These, uh, organized criminal gangs and ransomware gangs, uh, to target, target further into organizations. 
 

Um, so I'm not sure what, what do you guys think from, from CNI? What, what would you do if your services were down? Cause at the end of the day, we're the end consumer of the CNI services. If your, your bills weren't being paid or your electricity went off, what, what would your thoughts be? What do you want one? 
 

I want to  
 

Marco Ciappelli: take as we go over this. I'm thinking like you can't just have one bullet for everything because we mentioned many exception where it will make sense to protect the user. But also I can think about small business as you mentioned versus big corporation where it could be the cost of doing business versus the small business is out of the the question. 
 

You know, it's out of the game and maybe, you know, even thinking about losing their life because there is no more future. So, I mean, I cannot see this being one piece of legislation that says, nope, we're not going to do it. It's, [00:21:00] it's not feasible. That's that's my thought.  
 

Sean Martin: I also think you can't, you can't force a direction without an answer to the problem being solved in another way. 
 

And I think if the regulation or the laws say this is this, this is the position. Then they, there should be some investment and maybe some timeline to say, these types of organizations have to become this level, have this level of posture with this plan for, for, uh, for response and resilience and recovery. 
 

And as you move different across different sectors and what have you, maybe there's different levels and different investments and some time to reach that. And then, yeah. And some that, that, to me, that's a requirement, the requirement is to reach a level of security and recovery acceptable so that we can avoid,  
 

Jon Davies: I think that's, that's a kind of a great call [00:22:00] out because, you know, ransomware, you know, we're talking about a specific area, but we're not touching on vulnerabilities and vulnerability management of organizations. 
 

So, you know, without investment to kind of patch what's already broken. Then you're already leaving the you know, the door half a jar for an attacker to come in Yes, they may not target you a ransomware straight away But all of a sudden an access broker may sell kind of, you know access into your organization to someone who will target you So it's uh, yeah, it's a slippery slope. 
 

We're not in a great place Uh, you know, even over the last five ten years You know, things haven't improved. You know, if you look at the graphs from the ICO in terms of, you know, ransomware, you know, it's going up. It's going up and up and up in terms of the payments, the number of ransomware. So we need a step change, whether you know that is technology, whether it's investment, whether it's it's regulation. 
 

But, you know, I think it's a combined effort. We need to kind of bring this this together to try and head it off. How do we do that? I'm not I'm not sure. I think that it needs a lot of smart people. I think it needs a lot of smart people. [00:23:00] To think, think together in a room and kind of come up with a solution and test it. 
 

Um, but, but right now in terms of what we can do in terms of organizations, small, small organizations is have a plan in play to understand not, you know, if this is going to happen, but when it's going to happen and have a playbook to know who to call, you know, who in your organization is, is the right person. 
 

You know, if you've got suppliers and third parties, please, you know, which, which number do you call? How do you report this? Again, today, I don't think there's any. Easy place for individuals or organizations, you know, small, medium, big to, to go and go and report, you know, cyber crime, ransomware. You know, there's, there's a bunch of different government pages. 
 

You could have got the, uh, action fraud. Uh, you've got the ICO. It, it takes a bloody massive coordinated effort just to go and find out who you reported to time. You report it to your own legal people to understand, you know, is this a reportable incident, a data breach that we need to report? Um, once they decide that. 
 

You're so far down the journey that [00:24:00] you can have, you know, we need a simple one stop page for people to go to, to kind of get all that information and not be bombarded by 101 vendors saying they're going to protect you from ransomware by buying their product because unfortunately there is no smoking gun right now for that. 
 

Marco Ciappelli: And unfortunately, you'll go back to the big company will have the people that they can call and the small company would not. And. And as we were talking and we're wrapping here, Sean, it come to mind the conversation with our friend Miko Hipponen, where I, I made the joke about randomware instead of ransomware, because it was talking on how, especially now with AI, everybody can just have massive probability to get hit anyway. 
 

So, um, it's, it's just a matter of when, and it's not, it's not the same. It's not the same for everyone. Well, I think it's going to be a great, uh, I'm going to do my best to to be part of it. At least, uh, you know, watching not not on the panel. Be part in term of watching [00:25:00] and see what you guys come up with, uh, John  
 

Sean Martin: John mentioned need need to bring a few smart people together in a room to have this conversation. 
 

That's exactly that's not me. But that's not me. I'll pretend to be stupid. I'll be the dumb guy. I'll be the dumb one asking stupid questions that hopefully maybe something happens from it, but 
 

You're joined by Paul Peters, Gareth Bateman, and then James Coker from the security magazines moderating the conversation It's called ransomware time to decide will you or won't you pay? And, uh, perhaps with an added bonus of can you pay, uh, coming soon. And, uh, so that, that chat is on Thursday the 6th at, uh, 1055 local time there on the, on the keynote stage, you got yourself a nice spot on the keynote there, John. 
 

And, uh, yeah, I'm looking forward to it and the whole week at InfoSecurity Europe in London at the Excel. So, uh, thanks, John, for, uh, for joining us. Mark, I'll [00:26:00] see you there in a few days. Thanks. And everybody listening and watching. Thanks for staying tuned to ITSB magazine for all of our coverage, InfoSecurity Europe, and, uh, there's more coming to you. 
 

A few more beforehand and, uh, a lot. And then outside, maybe, maybe Big Ben on a, we're going to see the Eiffel Tower there in London.  
 

Marco Ciappelli: Yeah. That might be the pizza tower too. That might be misinformation. Hey, it's easy to put it in a picture. There we go. That's right. All right, John, we'll, we'll see you. We'll see you soon. 
 

On the floor. Guys. Looking forward to it. See everybody. Bye. Bye. Cheers.  
 

Cheers.