Tag: hacking

Why No One Cares About Data Hacks

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

No one cares about getting hacked for 1 simple reason: Data is one of the few things that can be stolen and yet remain in its original location.

You’ve been hacked, your data is stolen, and yet you still have it. It’s very unusual. So when it happens we don’t feel violated. When something physical is stolen from us, or broken, the problem is obvious – there’s a void, we get emotional and we take action. One type of hack we care far more about is ransomware attacks. In this instance we are forced to pay a ransom to regain access to our files. And you guessed it, the reason we care is because the data is gone. But in the case of 99% of data hacks the victim is totally unaware it has even happened.

Hacking isn’t really hacking, it’s stealing. The incorrect naming is part of the problem and while segments of our society care deeply about hacking (me included) we generally care far less than we should. So let’s conduct a couple of quick thought experiments.

Senario 1

You get on line one morning only to discover you’ve been hacked. All the pictures of your family for the past 10 years are gone from every device, forever. All of a sudden you care.

Senario 2

You get to work only to find that every email you’ve ever sent, received, saved and filed is gone. All your projects, all that corporate ass covering, everything gone. All of a sudden you care.

Senario 3

It’s Friday night you go to watch a movie, put on some of your music, the digital versions you bought, but the files are all gone. Stolen. All of a sudden you care.

Scenario 4

Imagine you go to buy something with PayWave. Yet, all your money in digital form (read here all of it)  has gone to zero overnight. All of a sudden you care.

Scenario 5

Your autonomous car starts driving somewhere you didn’t ask it to. It’s gathering speed heading towards a bunch of pedestrians. All of a sudden you care.

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This last scenario is the is the best example of why we need to start caring much more than we do. It’s a glimpse into the future of hacking. Hacking with real physical and immediate consequences. Digital stuff is about to control our electricity grid, drive our cars, run our houses and maybe one day regulate our heart beats and augment our brains.  We have to fix this stuff now, while it’s relatively easy and long before we finish building the computational cage we’ll be living in.

 

A Privacy Tipping Point?

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

This week I did media interviews from Sydney to New York to Washington to San Diego about the sudden popularity of FaceApp. I’m guessing you’ve already tried it. If not – you upload your photo to the app and choose a filter to either make you younger, older, a different gender or sprout some facial hair. Powered by AI, the app magically spits out a photo of you that can be plain frightening.

FaceApp improved its software this week and celebrities have been posting photos of their future elderly selves. 150 million downloads later, security experts have sounded the alarm about the consequences of uploading your data to an app based in Russia. But here’s the rub: its terms and conditions aren’t really any different to most social media platforms. Why is this concern over cybersecurity very much now in the zeitgeist when we hand over much more personal data to tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google every day? Yep, you got it, it’s because The Ruskis are involved. Personally, I’m more worried about Mr Zuckerberg and so is Wired magazine. In any case, it’s clear every big tech database has already been hacked by foreign entities, including the Russians.

While it is kinda weird it took a foreign social app to generate such a media storm, I’m thankful it has. We might just finally be starting to get woke to the compounding effect of copious amounts of personal information being vacuumed up. What is clear is that we always turn a blind eye to the downside of anything when the short-term benefits outweigh the long-term consequence – which is what Big Tech does so well. They know we can’t live without their services on a daily basis.  But when it comes to FaceApp…a few funny photos is all they provided and all of a sudden, we get worried about what we are giving away. Maybe they should also have promised to make the world a more open and connected place?

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The greatest pricing hack of all time

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Before I tell you this story, you need to understand a couple surprising facts about airlines.

Fact 1: The airline industry is a ‘net loss’ industry. If you add up all the profits and all the losses of airlines since commercial aviation began it’s around $60 billion in the red.

Fact 2: The profit margin on a 1 hour flight is around $2 per passenger. (around 1 GBP)

Now for the greatest pricing hack of all time.

When a low cost carrier like Ryan Air sells 10 pound fares, or 1 pound fares for that matter – they make more money then we’d imagine. The reason is simple: around half of the travellers who bought these ultra cheap tickets don’t turn up.

They buy the tickets as a kind of ‘future travel insurance’ – a ticket in case they want to go to Prague… I mean they intend on going, but the tickets are often bought very long in advance, and so cheap, life gets in the way and they decide to not go. It’s only a small amount of money, the cost of a coffee….

Ryan Air CEO

Crazy Michael (The Ryan Air CEO) keeps the money. The ‘no show’ money is 100% pure profit, and often more than what they’d make with an actual passenger. But here’s the kicker, there is no refund or changing of dates, so he gets to sell those ‘no show’ tickets again. After a period of time Ryan Air have worked out an algorithm of how many forgo their cheap tickets. They then over sell the flights by that amount of passengers. They know the percentages, and they’re nailing it.

This hack will keep on working, so long as they don’t get greedy. If the special is on too often, it will reframe price expectations, and change the ‘no show’ ratios. If they can resist temptation, they have a winning formula.

It’s another great example as to why price should never be an afterthought. The price is something every startup should be hacking daily.

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The ultimate innovators – kids

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I’m starting to believe that the ultimate requirement for innovation is ignoring barriers. Not inventing rules that are not there. The second part of this thought is that we are trained over time to ‘assume the rule’ – when in actuality there is no rule.

I’ve been watching my daughter recently do little the things that I’m sure all kids do.

I play a game with my daughter where I show her how to stand on one leg. I don’t tell her what to do, I just stand on one leg…. and of course she wants to do it too because it looks like fun. And she copies me immediately. But because she has only recently learned to walk, she can’t quite manage it the way I do. So she without hesitation runs to the nearest wall, puts one hand against it to gain balance, and successfully stands on one leg. At this point she is very pleased with herself that she has managed to do it. Big smile ensues as she looks to me for approval…

And here’s the kicker… I am pleased with her too. But not in a kid like condescending way. I am seriously happy with her approach. And here’s why:

At no point was any rule given that you can’t lean against the wall. She hacked the system and got it done. I clap her and encourage her. In this instance it’s all about the objective, not the method. And the one thing I will never do is start to reduce her mind with rules that just aren’t there.

What we should do with our startup is innovate like kids do. Ignore how the bigger, more resource laden and older incumbents do things, and just hack for a result.

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