YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Holland

lines on the record: 116
first: 2020-09-29
most recent: 2020-09-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so I miss the people. I miss having firsthand exposure to the mission. I think back to some of the things I got to see and be a part of that no one will ever know about and that is really cool. It was really neat being a part of that. It creates memories that I'm pretty sure if I were to run into somebody 30 years from now on the other side of the world in a bar, immediately there's that connection of like, hey, we did that. That was really cool. So yeah, I mean, I miss aspects, but I don't miss the handcuffs that were ultimately a part of my departure from there.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was well, it was stupid to say that we were violating the DMCA, and two, the response was just so much unbelievably worse. And it was a very weird first few months of the company.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was so much worse because, and I don't know if it actually resulted in the revoking of ATI and NVIDIA's signing certificate, but it was something that to us.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back at that time was a really contentious thing because it was changing what people could or could not do with computers and it was a really big deal. So when we released that, some people are like, oh, that's kind of neat. And other people are one person in particular was like, this is a violation of the DMCA. You should be arrested. PS, it's not really that cool. I'm going to go and release a tool that actually exploits ATI drivers and NVIDIA drivers and then basically does the same thing. But I've done it a lot cooler. So take that linchpin. Ha ha. And in reality, that was.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's not going to be the silver bullet that everybody thinks. So we said, all right, well, why don't we just do something kind of funny and, you know, show them. So what we did was we wrote a tool called Denwapatziv. The name of the company was Den Whipatziv, which is Vista Pund in reverse, got a signing certificate under this fake company legitimately registered fake in reality and released a tool that would load it was a signed component that would load an unsigned driver. not to do anything other than show how easy it is with the most simplest, goofiest approach to get around this problem. And so at the time I was in Australia with my business partner starting things up. We were working out of a closet, really kind of a ragtag set up to start. And at the time, there were people being arrested for violations of the DMCA digital Millenniums Copyright Act, which”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that was a funny period. At the time, my business partner and I, we thought, how can we make a splash? Because when we left, you know, our attention was to, you know, augment the world that we left with, I guess, a privatized twist on things. So we thought about okay, how can we really stir things up a bit? And at the time, Microsoft was releasing mandatory driver signing as part of Windows Vista, which is showing our age right there. And there's so much hype around it. And the way it was being advertised, it was going to be the silver bullet. To stop all malware, to stop anything bad that could be happening. And anybody who has spent any time, I guess on the offensive side of the house, you know, was looking at that and saying, no, bullshit. Yeah, it'll make things better.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was very frustrating. And I remember that colleague saying, this is just part of business, man. Once you're part of a group that does something really good and people take notice and they want to turn that into a larger part of the organization. And with that, What you're seeing now, you know, formalized, you can't work more than this. You have different reporting responsibilities. And, you know, at that time, I just wanted to innovate. I just wanted to come up with new solutions to the problems that operations were running into not being able to do that in its raw form was extremely frustrating.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember having a conversation with one of our mutual colleagues at the time, and I remember being very irritated about the arbitrary handcuffs that were being put on our ability to innovate research. I remember a contentious time that you and I actually stood up at a town hall and got in a giant argument with a director.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was just I answered the question. And I think that was the first time it really dawned on me that I probably don't fit into the mold that they were looking for. So I think that's when I started to, I guess the ball started rolling on my departure.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To hear what I gave them, where the technical responses to the questions they were asking. So, how would you solve this problem?”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could grow into and what the vision of the group I was in achieving. Like there was a ceiling arbitrarily put on top of that. And I'm the type of person that I don't work well when somebody says this is as far as you can go or this is what we're going to do regardless of what the evidence or ideas or good ideas, bad ideas, whatever that stopped and was not an environment that I said, I can grow here anymore. One of the big indicators of that, which you'll probably laugh at this, but there's a management competition. I screwed up the entire interview, but it was the same problem where somebody would ask, you know, the interviewer would ask me a question. And rather than give the answer of I would build a team to do this, I would request funding to do this. I would reach out to universities to bring them into the fold. So, you know, that's the answers they want.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I reflect on that quite a bit just because I get that question often and I don't think I've ever really had a good answer that wasn't necessarily immature. The ultimate reason I left was because I saw a limit to what”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got dealt with, and you could really jump into that environment. It just catapults one's growth. And I still look back to those times and consider myself extremely lucky. And I guess always acknowledge that that time in my life largely defined who I am today.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's kind of you to say, there's probably a factor of blown away at how much of a jerk I was in the process of that, which I'd like to say has changed, but probably not so much. Yeah, it was a really, it was cool. I think the environment that we got to work in was learning from people. For me, that time in my life really defined what a good team was, when you learn something, you share it with other people in the office. I remember there was five or six of us in particular at one point where it was a very large research focused group. And anytime you learn something or I learned something or one of our colleagues learned something, it was a really neat discovery, but we took the time to educate each other. And I think what that fostered was a team that a level of trust that I had never experienced in my life. I remember entering that team being massively humbled. And once the ego.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, firstly, I think vacation is probably largely overrated just because I'm a workaholic. But yeah, no, it was a really neat way to start. I mean, our career was just a year or two apart, but it was definitely a very interesting experience being thrust into an environment where everything you do contributes much more than you would ever think. Because coming out of university, you want to get a job with a good salary. All of a sudden you're, in our case, we're doing things that actually matter to the country that have a very significant outcome. And it's like going from zero to mature very, very quickly.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's that going to the doctor scenario when you have a pain, you don't want to necessarily find out what it is because people are naturally averse to bad news. You can't be like that with cybersecurity. If you don't have a cybersecurity vendor, if you don't have a company helping you out with that problem, get on it. Everybody is a target at this point. Your company is not small enough to be off an attacker's radar. I have seen five person companies, actually I've seen two person companies attacked and hit. So, you know, my advice is don't be afraid to ask for help.”
2020-09-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT