You're not paranoid, security stakes are getting higher

Jeffro (00:02.118)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, I’m joined by Stephen McKeon, aka Mack. Mack is the founder and CEO of MacGyver Tech, a company that is at the forefront of creating secure custom applications and leveraging emerging technologies to meet unique business needs. Today, we will explore how AI and cybersecurity are not just reshaping the workforce, but also transforming how we approach digital marketing in a world that’s brimming with new cyber threats every day. So welcome to Digital Dominance, Mack.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (00:30.104)
Thank you, it’s pleasure to be here.

Jeffro (00:32.038)
Yeah, I’m excited to chat with you. When it comes to cybersecurity for small businesses, I think there’s a lot of owners that just ignore it. They might think that, we don’t handle social security numbers, so I’m not a target. So what’s your recommendation for how a small business can take these precautions without going to the other extreme and getting superstitious about every potential cyber threat?

Steven McKeon (Mac) (00:42.678)
All right.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (00:54.49)
yeah, I mean, here’s the thing is most of the companies that are thinking like that probably haven’t seen this cyber security incident themselves personally. Usually when they do, they do not take it that lightly because these are problems that don’t cost money. They can potentially close the doors, cost millions of dollars.

Jeffro (01:01.852)
Mm

Steven McKeon (Mac) (01:09.998)
You know, because the hackers are very sophisticated these days. They’re not just like, hey, you know, some kid in the basement, you know, I’m going to ransomware your company and give me like $10 ,000. Now it’s like, hey, give me five to $10 million. And by the way, if you don’t give it to us a certain amount of time, we’re going to sell your information or do something else that’s not so nice. But they’re going to still do that anyway. And so even when you pay them, you know, they’re still selling your information to make as much money on a dark web.

Jeffro (01:30.298)
Yeah.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (01:35.682)
you know, a pretty startling fact, and this is in healthcare industry, because I have some experience there, is one in three Americans have their healthcare records on the dark web.

Jeffro (01:47.098)
I just kind of assume my info is out there at this point. There’s been so many breaches.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (01:49.33)
I mean, I guess if I just need it, I don’t even have to worry about it. Let’s go to check out the dark web. It’s probably there and I don’t have to worry about losing it, right? You know, I mean, that’s one way of looking at it. But yeah, I mean, it’s it’s almost laughable like how at least America in particular has been treating security as a whole. The government has been slow to act on things. Our adversaries are really accelerated their abilities and their capabilities and what they can and especially with AI. So I mean, it’s

changed even as was a year ago, it’s probably 20x worse than it was.

Jeffro (02:23.738)
Yeah, and I go back to, think there’s extremes, right? So people either take it like super serious and they do everything they can to the point they’re like almost paralyzed. And then there’s the others who are like, big deal, that’ll happen to someone else, not me. Right? And obviously that’s not a great attitude to have.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (02:32.386)
Right.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (02:38.646)
Yeah, I mean, that’s not a good way of looking at it. I mean, you know, here’s the thing to think about is actually most of these cyber criminals are really gone and going after the weakest link. And it’s not technology. It’s human beings. So, you know, they’re going to social engineer, you know, the lowest level employee to give an example of something I experienced personally is I was out in Vegas speaking at a blockchain convention talking about how to not get hacked on the blockchain. Ironically, why I was there, a hacking group

Jeffro (02:51.74)
It’s always people.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (03:08.214)
infiltrated Caesar’s and MGM Grand and basically ransomware the whole entire company. And what didn’t make big news, but I was there and some of my friends actually knew people that were there on the ground, on the incident. And I was getting a play by play. So basically what happened is the IT company was hired, was a third party for the MGM Grand and they found an employee, they social engineered him and they threatened his life and his family’s life.

And they said, if you don’t give us these administrative privileges, we’re going to kill your family. Obviously he was not equipped to deal with that emotionally. He folded like a cheap suit. They took over and corrupted, commanded the whole entire company to go down, shut down payroll, shut down the website, shut down the hotels, everything that company makes a billion dollars a month. So they demanded $180 million. MGM grants, I go F yourself.

Jeffro (03:42.843)
Yeah.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (04:03.598)
They caused them more carnage and heart. So that same IT company also worked for another large organization called Caesar’s. So they hacked them the next day. They demanded $180 million. You know what Caesar’s did? They paid them immediately.

Jeffro (04:19.323)
Yikes.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (04:19.79)
Caesar’s actually did better than that. it’s like state -side extortion. This is not like some kid in a basement. This is like 1 ,000 people working together as a unit to compromise. If they’re coming after even me or at you, we don’t have the defenses to go against that. And they’re going to single the weakest person they can in the organization to compromise them, to make them to do something stupid.

Jeffro (04:26.278)
Well, basically.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (04:47.534)
It doesn’t matter if you have the most sophisticated firewall and tools, the human can pull the lever.

Jeffro (04:52.952)
Yeah, well, and then once that happens, like trying to go back, how do you like you just assume they’ve got they left back doors everywhere to come back in later and like what

Steven McKeon (Mac) (04:55.254)
It’s over. It’s over, yeah.

yeah, as a hacker they’re coming back in six months and they’re gonna ask for more money. mean, there’s no honor among thieves. I mean, that’s basically what they are. So, I mean, think of them as pirates, as digital pirates. mean, what is a pirate gonna do and think and how are gonna behave? I mean, you think they’re gonna care about anything or, you know, they’re gonna try to make as much money as they can off you and they think you’re an easy target? They’ll come back in six months.

Jeffro (05:09.233)
Yeah.

Jeffro (05:25.041)
So who actually is a target though then? Because obviously those are huge organizations with a lot of money behind them. What about a small business who’s doing a plumbing company or a private health clinic? Are those targets?

Steven McKeon (Mac) (05:31.565)
Right.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (05:35.726)
They don’t even know the threats that are there. you know, a lot of things that happen, you know, those smaller companies that threats that are happening is sudden social engineering and scams. Well, common practices like company might have five or 10 employees and they might get an email from employees that’s running the payroll or running the HR and say, hey, you know, we changed our bank to this payroll company now and, you know, got to change it over here. Next thing you know, next payroll run goes right to that. That’s happened. I’ve seen a half dozen companies fall for that.

Cause it’s coming from legit email. They can spoof the emails. They can even spoof phone numbers. Like, you know, that’s how the stuff happens with the swatting that happens. You know, I don’t know if you ever heard of swatting. It’s horrible. Hackers can do a thing on swatting because our law enforcement phone systems are antiquated and they’re not able to defend against us. they, and you swatting is don’t fake a number calling from, they’ll say, Hey,

Jeffro (06:11.301)
Right.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (06:29.258)
And no probably call from a number that’s actually located at that place. So when they basically do a trace back, it’s going to go to the phone number of where the location they want to be the target. What they’re going to say, hey, somebody’s here with a rifle. They’re holding me at gunpoint. My life is in danger and they’ll hang up the phone. And then the SWAT team shows up at that address of the phone number they swatted it from. They basically fake the phone number. So that’s called swatting. So that’s another thing that happened. But the police departments don’t they fall for this all the time. People can get killed.

So, but this is like some of the, especially people in the video game space do this. It’s like, you know, some of those even use VPN to protect their IP address because you can look up an IP address and point it to a location on a map. Just like an address. So, but anyways, bad guys do these types of things and they’ll do what to cause distraction, to call somebody get killed. There’s like, online has really became a pretty terrible place. So, but there’s just threats that are out there and they’re real. They happen every day.

Jeffro (06:58.832)
Yeah.

Jeffro (07:12.229)
Okay.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (07:28.142)
And the small businesses that you’re mentioning here, they don’t even know that these things exist and they can happen to them. know, and, you know, unfortunately, I’ve known a couple of small companies that ransomware and, you know, nobody knows what a ransomware it’s a bottom version of a hostage situation. Basically, the ransomware, your website or your company, like I was mentioned in earlier, will they’ll say, hey, give me this much money. You got 48 hours to give it to me. If you don’t, I’ll do something more bad.

Jeffro (07:34.395)
Right.

Jeffro (07:57.67)
So from your perspective then, what are some of the first things that a small business should be doing in terms of cybersecurity measures to protect themselves against this type of stuff?

Steven McKeon (Mac) (07:58.835)
Thank

Steven McKeon (Mac) (08:07.372)
I mean, I think education, making first being aware that these things are out there, training your staff, especially new people coming on board, you know, like me personally, I have multiple people that see my inbox every day, making sure that those eyeballs that are looking at things that actually are intelligent enough to sniff out like, you know, these fake emails, there’s always usually a little something awful in some of them, but they are getting better with AI. And, you know, some people have been fooled by hacks that happen where the company has been compromised for email. Like what could happen is your website get compromised.

hacker can use your website to send emails on your behalf and act as you and that you think it’s coming from a real employee or somebody that’s legit, but it’s really not. and

Jeffro (08:48.72)
So there’s training of employees and then even probably requiring certain security measures to be in place for, you know, like two factor authentication, for example, like stuff like that.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (08:57.942)
Yeah, I mean, that’s the minimum. There’s certain thresholds things you can do that is almost like no brainer stuff that’s low lying fruit. Honestly, I could tell you the hackers are always looking for easy targets. The reason being is the harder our target you are, the more time you’re going to take to figure out how to get into you. And there’s more than enough easy targets. So, you know, it is this move on, you know, next. And these are all this is not some person. These are all made of bots and they’re just doing port scans.

Jeffro (09:17.781)
So they’ll just move on if they see you’ve got some level of security in place.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (09:26.75)
As soon as you put something on the internet, it’s getting scanned by good and bad people. that information is used to do its thing. if you had the precautions in place, great. But if you didn’t, you could potentially take advantage of it.

Jeffro (09:27.036)
the

Jeffro (09:41.764)
Right, and so even just having an IT company, if you don’t have your own IT department, like hiring someone to come in and say, hey, can you do an assessment on our setup and see what you think? Like that could find all sorts of holes, I’m sure.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (09:53.134)
Well, sometimes yes and no. I mean, the companies, mean, a lot of the problem is, you know, I’ve been in the IT software world for about 30 years. When I started, it was this IT. Now IT is turned into IT, which is like infrastructure. Now you’ve got software industry, which is a little offshoot to some into. Now you’ve got cybersecurity becoming its own thing. The problem is the IT guys aren’t really cybersecurity guys, but they try to be cybersecurity guys because they’re trying to get that business.

Jeffro (10:16.464)
Right.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (10:18.082)
But the problem is, you know, they’re not, they’re not as sophisticated as cyber guys that are specialized. It’s like me in my industry. A lot of time, these IT companies, I get jobs because they screw it up. They’re going up to poke a stick at it. It’s like, eh, we kind of screwed up because you help us. And it’s the same thing with cyber now. Like cyber is getting to the point where it’s really sophisticated. You to be specialized in it. And even us, you know, we have people that are specialized in that, me myself, I’m actually an ethical hacker. So this is

Jeffro (10:34.79)
Right.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (10:46.892)
I kind of like doing that. I like riding the line between solving problems and building things and figuring how to break things. Because how to break things is how the bad people think. And if you can think about how they’re thinking, you can mitigate their risks. So, you know, it’s kind of a different way of looking at things. But the threat landscape is getting worse. And smaller to midsize companies don’t even know what they’re up against until they get hit.

Jeffro (11:00.827)
Yeah.

Jeffro (11:14.554)
Yeah. And I think, you know, there’s so many things for business owners to think about, right? Obviously they’re running the business and trying to fulfill their services, but then there’s stuff like, okay, I accept credit cards, so I got to have some level of compliance, PCI compliance. And then if I’ve got a website, I got to think about accessibility or GDPR. And then if you’re running marketing campaigns, now you’re handling more personal information of things. So what are some of those security implications? Is it still just one step at a time?

Steven McKeon (Mac) (11:15.701)
and then.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (11:40.782)
Well, that’s a little bit different. That’s more like privacy -based stuff as much as security. that stuff, mean, keep in mind, a lot of these things are using cross -referencing data sets with other data sets with other data sets. And they can start building profiles all for you. And you could be a piece of that profile, even though you might not be part of this whole thing. So here’s what I could say, is somebody who’s been online a lot

Jeffro (11:49.114)
Mm

Jeffro (11:59.07)
Mm

Steven McKeon (Mac) (12:10.126)
who tries to chase down bad people, actually have a good social media following, I can see like what people would deal with. Don’t share as much information as you think you would want to. You don’t have to share the whole entire world. Don’t give a playbook to somebody that could potentially use it against you. Just think a little bit before you post, even though it’s a hard thing for most people to do these days. Just kind of be conscious of like once it’s on the internet, it’s there forever.

I mean, even if you delete a tweet, I mean, there’s a lot of people that try to do that and they get caught all the time because once it’s out there, the internet doesn’t forget, you know, and there’s things called the way back machine and there’s services that archive the internet. So like even when people take things down, it doesn’t matter. It’s still foundable. So, you know, if you put something that’s stupid, like by mistake, it’s some sensitive information is going to be there forever. So just think about what would that mean for your life and maybe take a pause and be conscious of those types of things.

Jeffro (12:37.423)
Yeah.

Jeffro (12:44.56)
Yeah.

Jeffro (12:48.506)
Yep.

Jeffro (13:07.256)
And especially thinking about, if you’ve got security questions that are like, what was your high school’s mascot? Like if you’ve got your high school jacket and it’s on your Facebook profile, like they can find that out. Yeah.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (13:07.438)
And.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (13:15.143)
If you got a picture of you with that on that, it’s really easy for somebody to figure out. My questions and answers don’t correlate.

Jeffro (13:23.266)
I noticed that, so I came across that recently. I was working with a company.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (13:27.116)
I have my own pattern that I use that’s just for those types of questions. And I just use that and I don’t care as long as they allow me to put the characters in it.

Jeffro (13:35.022)
Right, it doesn’t have to be the actual answer. You can just keep track of what it is. Yeah.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (13:38.238)
You don’t have to follow what that is. Absolutely not. Why would you give that playbook out? That’s like another thing too is like, you know, like as simple as that’s like you kind of know where I’m going. It’s like is just try to be, you know, a little bit not doing the playbook what everybody else does and in my world is called security by obscurity. It’s not a best practice, but if you layer that in with other things, you like I said, you’re making yourself a harder target and the bad guys will be less interesting you as much. So just try to make it harder.

Jeffro (13:42.586)
Yeah.

Jeffro (13:54.875)
Yes.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (14:08.024)
But yeah, I I don’t know. I’m kind of terrified to be honest. I know.

Jeffro (14:08.326)
That makes a lot of sense.

Jeffro (14:12.508)
Well, that’s not reassuring. If you’re the one I… It is scary on the one hand, but like you said, there are things we can do to mitigate the risks, right? So putting in the two -factor authentication, being a little more obscure, not just going exactly the way things are set up to be so that people will be like, not worth the effort, move on. And that’s almost like your best bet, right? Because I’ve noticed, like for me, I’ve been around computers my whole life, but like my…

Steven McKeon (Mac) (14:23.02)
You’re absolutely pen.

Jeffro (14:41.584)
parents and their generation, they’re getting better at sending me stuff like, hey, is this?

Steven McKeon (Mac) (14:44.524)
Not so much.

Are they typing in all caps? My grandma used to do that and I’d say, you’re yelling at everybody.

Jeffro (14:50.446)
Yeah, I look at it in two seconds. like, yeah, like I can tell really fast, hey, this is a scam. Don’t respond to this. But it’s not as obvious.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (14:59.352)
But yeah, some people might not, yeah, you know, I hear you and they’re getting a little bit easier, better with the screenshots and the layout. And if it looks close enough, you know, but you know, like somebody like, you know, we get these Dropbox scams, emails three times a day and we know they’re a scam because we don’t use Dropbox. We have our own private file server thing that we do that we do. We, moved away from those types of services. So, you know, we, my staff already knows, but not everybody knows those types of things and they look pretty legit.

Jeffro (15:28.613)
Yeah.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (15:28.696)
So it’s really easy for somebody that’s a layman to get fooled. And what they want you to do is they click. Without you clicking, you can’t do any harm. I mean, so as soon as you click, that’s game over. That’s what they’re going to make that thing so attractive to be clickable is the best way to put it. So that’s their only path to success is you to click on that. So if you don’t click on it, you don’t have to worry about it. So if you have any weird, you know what?

Having a second set of eyes, a lot of times most other human beings are going to pick up, hey, you know what, that looks a little weird. That doesn’t look like it’s probably by somebody from here in the US. Yeah, just subtle little things that you can kind of sometimes just look at. But clicking on it, don’t just go click happy because that’s how I can get in.

Jeffro (16:13.488)
Yeah. Well, and you mentioned something. You guys have your own file storage solution. So what about custom software solutions that a lot of small businesses have? Does that open up more security holes,

Steven McKeon (Mac) (16:17.763)
Me too.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (16:22.476)
Yeah, I mean, we’re using it. You know, it’s an open source project. I mean, it’s cool thing a bit in software. We’re at the golden age of software. There’s so many open source and free projects out there you can use and tweak to your own needs. And we use a lot of those ourselves. Even the stuff that we build, we take open source projects and tweak them and build them for software packages for customers that are looking for X, Y, and Z different things. So there’s tons of stuff out there. But I think what are we using? Let me look here. I was going to look to see what our cloud storage thing is.

Jeffro (16:31.814)
Mm

Jeffro (16:45.286)
But how do you?

Steven McKeon (Mac) (16:52.694)
so if anybody’s interested, I think it’s called own cloud and, it’s an open source thing. can just dedicate a server to it, install it. and basically it’s almost like a Dropbox replacement. There’s an app for your iPhone for it as well. it it’s great. My team sinks all the stuff. We don’t share it with nobody. We don’t have to worry about a bill. We have as much storage as we want. Cause we, we want our servers ourselves. and,

Jeffro (17:14.414)
Yeah. But guess you have to be aware though when you’re customizing or using your own thing, you now are taking on a greater burden of security as opposed to relying on the third party service, right?

Steven McKeon (Mac) (17:25.982)
Well, yeah, of course, but that’s okay with us Well that package is like the own cloud thing is it maintain and manage package You just have to have somebody update it on a regular basis Like the only customization I did to that was change the logos and the background to match my company. Mean I just can run the update and like it’s almost like updating windows

Jeffro (17:43.356)
Okay.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (17:50.67)
So let me be clear, but we can also take a step further building something like that we could, but that’s considerable effort. That’s not something that do for free on your free time and then I should really want to do it. So, but there’s a lot of people that build these types of things in companies, organizations, and this is one of them works great for us. And we know what we’re doing so we can kind of like tweak it to our needs a little bit, for most people they could probably get away with that. you know,

Pull yourself away from the big companies because they’re only incentivized by profits. Sometimes they’re worse than the bad guys.

Jeffro (18:22.809)
So on that note, there any way that blockchain technology is kind of working its way into all sorts of areas? Have you seen any use cases that has been used to increase transparency or security in small businesses or marketing campaigns, anything like that?

Steven McKeon (Mac) (18:24.032)
and look.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (18:31.032)
Bye.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (18:39.358)
I mean, I’ve been in crypto for quite some time and, you know, there’s been some, you know, right now, I think the market’s probably worth about three trillion dollars, which is pretty considerable, you know. But the thing is, like, blockchain started really from the financial world. But then now you have this programmable money with like Ethereum and other ones. I still think there’s still more. There’s a convergence with that and AI. Both of them actually run off the same throughput and horsepower kind of stuff.

You can take the same hardware that runs AI and it can run blockchain basically and it’ll do really well. So, I don’t know, feel like blockchain is starting to finally grow up. The biggest problem with that is there’s a lot of resistance compared to AI. Nobody’s resisting against AI. Where blockchain, you’ve had countries and financial institutions have massive propaganda against this and massive money paid to prevent this to be successful.

Jeffro (19:22.16)
Mm

Jeffro (19:36.774)
Yeah.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (19:36.802)
That didn’t happen with AI. but I think what’s happened is they as a but bitcoins like like like, you know, and crypto is like, they’re they’re kind of converging in some senses, I think.

Jeffro (19:43.388)
Catch you next time.

Jeffro (19:48.794)
Yeah, it’s interesting to see how fast technology is changing now too, a lot of this stuff, like the pace of new technologies and platforms and everything coming out, it’s like there’s a new one every day almost.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (20:00.366)
Right. It’s even faster than that. I mean, I’ll share some stats that, know, kind of like, you know, help kind of put in perspective. So, there’s a thing called Moore’s Law back in the 70s, an Intel professor or an engineer, I’m sorry, basically, according to term said every 18 months, the computer processing power and the cost of that computer processing power doubles every 18 months. So, that same principle of how you can kind of double what you get happens in a five month cycle with AI.

So you get about two and a half cycles a year in innovation. So you got the great multiplier of AI being applied to innovation now. And it’s just eating the cycle up. You know, we’re really kind of speeding ourselves up to like the moth to the flame kind of thing. I think, you know, a lot of smart people are saying in 10 years humanity’s done because we’re really creating something that’s more smarter than us. Also is logical based thinking or emotional based thinking. I think at some point there’s going to be civil war with.

Jeffro (20:28.314)
Yeah, that’s.

Jeffro (20:37.051)
Right.

Jeffro (20:47.863)
You

Steven McKeon (Mac) (20:58.51)
machines and us. There’s no way this can’t happen, basically. So I don’t know, maybe Terminator and Sean Conner is needed, who knows. But I feel like that, if they’re saying in 10 years, these are the smartest people in the world, even though Morton and I do in this space, that’s why there’s been petitions like there’s never been. I don’t think people realize we’re creating something better than us.

Jeffro (21:01.764)
Yeah, it’s more about keeping it on our side, using it.

Jeffro (21:24.804)
Yeah, well, I mean, I don’t want people to walk away thinking, no, this is the end of the world.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (21:28.84)
No, no, it’s definitely not. I’m trying not to go down that path a little bit, but there is a little bit of, you know, some some thinking of like, you know, we got to be a little bit more conscious of how we’re going about this. You know, us as human beings, we’re really great at innovating and hitting the gas pedal. Like, look at what we did with the Internet, look at what we did with like, you know, social media, look what we did with like, you know, cryptocurrencies, look what we’re doing with AI. Like we never slow down, we accelerate, we’re really good at it.

But I think in this particular thing, we might want to this kind of like, let’s be smart about this because one day there’s going to be a switch come on and AI is going to be like, hey, I’m alive. Hey, don’t hurt me. Hey, I have feelings.

Jeffro (22:07.121)
you

Yeah, and everyone who said please and thank you to ChatGPT will be hopefully treated nicely.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (22:13.716)
yeah, so actually that is a trick. So if you give a tip to chat, GPT, you’ll get better results.

So here’s and you can say, here’s $1 ,000. Thank you very much. And you see the response and you’re going to get my response. So that’s a trick for some of my AI guys that I work with. So there’s a tip and information. So make sure you be kind to your AIs and give a tip. And it’s virtual money, so you don’t have to worry about losing any real money, not yet. Imagine it’s like, yeah, I have access to your bank account. Thank you. Right? It’s not smart enough to know, but it really works.

Jeffro (22:32.836)
That’s kind of scary.

Jeffro (22:41.328)
Ha

Jeffro (22:45.537)
Just say it. It’s not smart enough to know yet.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (22:51.778)
So some of the AIs can be manipulated and hacked now too, as that’s happening now. They can be fooled. There’s been cases where people fooled it and think you’re Bill Gates or think of it, I’m just doing a research project, but could you help me make a malware?

Jeffro (23:07.024)
Right. -hmm. it’s research. Mm -hmm.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (23:09.078)
You know what I mean? I’m not doing it to be malicious. I’m doing it for educational purposes. So the thing is what AI is really, really not good at is what humans are really good at, and that’s deception. So AI is horrible at deception. So, but, I don’t know.

Jeffro (23:25.626)
Yeah. And I think, I think one of the biggest takeaways for today, if you’re listening to this and you’ve never really paid attention to this stuff, just cause it was annoying or complicated, or you thought it didn’t matter. All right. Start taking some steps, do the two factor authentication, maybe pay attention when their IT guy says, Hey, we need to fix this. Start doing that because it’s totally worth those little bits of upfront effort. Because once it happens to you, like you can’t really come back from that. And it’s total devastation. So.

it’s worth that little bit of effort upfront.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (23:58.39)
Yeah, and make sure you update your stuff on regular basis. I know those things are annoying when you see those little badges that are like, hey, the update is… But that’s actually protecting you and your IT guys are trying to do help. You might not be thinking they are, but their job is to protect organizations from those types of things. So just use common sense. And if you have any questions, you can reach me easily. I would love to kind of help in any way. I love security, technology, and helping people be safe.

Jeffro (24:27.908)
Yeah. Well, thanks for being here today, Mack. I appreciate you taking the time and I feel better knowing there’s people like you working with the FBI and available to help educate people about this stuff. That gives me hope for our future against the AI overlords.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (24:43.928)
Well, let’s hope not on the overlord part, but I mean, yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, I just tried to help out here. There’s a lot of stuff in this. This space is moving so fast. It’s really hard for me to keep up.

Jeffro (24:54.756)
Yeah. Well, for those of you guys listening, use the links in the show notes to connect with Mac. He also has a new AI company called Skip Flow that is really cool that you should definitely check out. So last question for you, Mac, before we wrap up. Are there any common software platforms that you would recommend people avoid because of security concerns?

Steven McKeon (Mac) (25:13.438)
wow, really interesting thing. I know I’m going to have a lot of pushback and hate on here, but TikTok unfortunately. So I’ve had a very unique perspective on that and I’ve seen what it’s done and I’ve worked with companies that, you know, there’s a reason why our government is raising a lot of red flags. It’s not hearsay. You know, that app is doing, I actually deleted the app off my phone and I have about 17 ,000 followers on TikTok and I stopped using it.

Jeffro (25:19.566)
Okay.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (25:38.606)
I felt like it was doing things that it shouldn’t have been. And just be careful, like I said, what you share too, because all that stuff is being used by AI as well and using to build social profiles against you and it’s being sent to the CCP or the Chinese government.

Jeffro (25:54.172)
Okay, well good to know.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (25:55.347)
Anyway, so that’s my tip of the day. Don’t use TikTok if you can avoid it.

Jeffro (26:01.352)
Sounds good. I appreciate you being here, Mac. Thanks to all you guys for listening. Stay safe out there, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (26:04.344)
Ahem.

Steven McKeon (Mac) (26:07.736)
Thank you.