Cult of the Dead Cow and the Roots of Modern Cyber Ethics with Joe Menn
Season 3 Episode 16 •Show Notes
Cybersecurity’s history is often told through breaches, crime, and disruption. Joe Menn argues that the story of early hacker culture also offers something constructive: a model for how technical curiosity, ethical reflection, and independent thinking can shape the public good.
Drawing from his work on Cult of the Dead Cow, Menn traces how figures once associated with pranks, underground tools, and legal gray zones helped influence vulnerability disclosure, hacktivism, privacy debates, and even the way government and major companies think about security today. But the episode does not stay in the past. Menn connects those earlier lessons to much more current concerns: digital surveillance, the tightening relationship between big tech and government, and the security risks emerging from the rush into AI. The result is a conversation about far more than hacker lore. It is about who gets to shape technology, what values guide that work, and why critical thinking itself may now be part of the infrastructure worth defending.
Main Topics Covered
- The legacy of Cult of the Dead Cow
- The evolution of hacktivism
- Ethics and critical thinking in cyber
- Surveillance, privacy, and state power
- AI security and concentrated tech influence
Key Quotes
“I think it’s very interesting to me that… any Fortune 100 CISO who’s in his mid-50s or older broke the law as a teenager.” — Joe Menn
“Hackers are by definition, if they’re any good, are critical thinkers, because they’re taking stuff and saying, well, okay, this is the intended purpose. What else can it do? What else can I make it do?” — Joe Menn
“Hackers should be big players in legislation and in protecting critical infrastructure, and all these other things because they are critical thinkers and won’t just repeat what the conventional wisdom is. You get value from people who are thinking differently. — Joe Menn
“[A]t the most recent inauguration, you had Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, and I believe Elon Musk standing closer to Trump than his cabinet members. The allegiance of big tech is actually more important than some of the entire branches of government. And their interests are now, by and large, very closely joined.” — Joe Menn
“[W]henever there’s a new exciting technology; people rush into it and then sometime later they figure out about security … And right now, there’s this land rush where all the vulnerabilities are now visible through the wonder of AI. And so, tech debt that was swept under the rug is now become a forest fire.” — Joe Menn
Relevant Links and Resources
About the Guest
Joe Menn is a longtime technology reporter and author who has covered cybersecurity, privacy, and related policy issues for decades. In the episode, Frank Cilluffo notes that Menn has written for The Washington Post, Financial Times, Reuters, and the Los Angeles Times, and is the author of two bestselling cybersecurity books, including Cult of the Dead Cow.
Transcript
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Joe Menn [00:00:00]: There’s been a resurgence in hacktivism. When these guys were starting out, there weren’t a lot of ways to do good with tech and they sort of had to make it up as they went along. But now, you know, like the Red Cross has a technologist and Lord knows how many are at the FTC. So there are all these different things that one can do.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:00:21]: Welcome to Cyber Focus from the McCrary Institute, where we explore the people and ideas shaping and defending our digital world. I’m your host, Frank Cilluffo, and this week I have the privilege to sit down with a longtime technology reporter, Joe Menn. He’s been covering the issues for many years. He is the author of two best selling books in the cyberspace, including Cult of the Dead Cow. He was a writer for Washington Post, Financial Times, Reuters, L.A. Times, and has been at the front lines of covering technology, some of the many ethical questions we’re all grappling with today, and really excited to sit down with Joe this afternoon.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:01:12]: Joe, thanks so much for joining us.
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Joe Menn [00:01:14]: I appreciate the opportunity.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:01:16]: So, Joe, I thought we’d start with your book Cult of the Dead Cow, which has a cult following, a number of friends and colleagues, and pretty much everyone I know in the cyber field is aware of the work. What I thought we’d start with is what led you to writing this book. And if I can also take a, not just going for hard news, but bringing the people behind the clickety clack of the keyboard to life and why that’s important. So let’s start with the book, if that’s okay, what led you to jump into this and then we can get into all the colorful characters.
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Joe Menn [00:01:56]: Okay, great. So as you, you know, as you mentioned, I’ve covered cyber things for a long time. It’s, I can see 30 years coming at me pretty soon. And you know, I think I was one of the first mainstream reporters to see that this was, that cybersecurity is going to be a very important big deal. And it wasn’t going to get, it wasn’t going to get any less important over the years. So I invested a lot of, a lot of time and effort in understanding it from all perspectives. It was also just inherently interesting to me because it’s, it crosses all these traditional beat lines. It’s a kind of a tech story, it’s a business story, it’s a criminal justice story.
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Joe Menn [00:02:36]: And for many years now it’s been a geopolitical story. And it really affects, it affects everybody if you take into account privacy issues, which I do. So when I started covering this seriously, more seriously, at the L.A. Times, in the 00s, there was a very big thing that happened that wasn’t really announced in 03, 04 05, when it shifted, if something went wrong with your computer and you got a virus, before that point, it was some kid or some experiment that got out of the lab, something like that, and afterwards it was more likely than not the result of organized crime, because the spammers had their IPs getting blocklisted by sysadmins, and so they needed clean IPs, and so they got folks to write viruses and round up random computers and botnets, and then they’d have a bunch of clean IPs. And then once they had that, they could do other things, including denial of service attacks or extortion. So I decided that this was too important and too complicated to do in just newspaper articles. And so I wrote a previous book called Fatal System Error. And it was about organized cybercrime, particularly in Russia, its alliance with the government folks there.
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Joe Menn [00:04:08]: And it was sort of the first book that sold any copies that said, we’re in deep, deep doo doo here, and this is what we should try to do about it. This is what Congress should try and do. This is what the White House should do, sort of public policy stuff at the end. But it was like a crime caper with good guys and bad guys and stuff like that. Since that book, there are lots of other books that said we’re in big trouble in this way, we’re in big trouble in that way. And I didn’t want to write another book like that that said that everybody else was now doing, that said that cybersecurity is a huge, massive problem. So I thought it’d be much more useful to try and do something that was positive, like more solutiony, that showed a way forward, which is much harder to do as a journalist than to point out that something is terrible.
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Joe Menn [00:05:02]: But I thought it was worth the extra effort. And once I decided that, if you look around, there’s not a lot of positive things to write about cyber. So I thought there have been some really good calls over the years. Coordinated disclosure of vulnerabilities where you’re not pulling a big surprise on the company that allowed it through is one. The circumvention technology to help get around, say, the Great Firewall of China, that’s a good thing. So these other things that have happened that are positive and that deserve some attention, but whenever I write a book, I look for people, particularly if it’s complicated to bring folks along, bring the reader along, to actually make the education be fun, where you’re actually caring about the people and you see them grapple with with issues and learn a little bit about them as people. So once I figured all that out, Cult of the Dead Cow seemed kind of obvious because they go all the way back to the 80s. It is known for many things, including the release of Back Orifice and Back Orifice 2K, which were hacking tools, coining the term hacktivism and sort of leading the hacker culture for around the year 2000, but they’re still active and relevant today.
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Joe Menn [00:06:36]: There was substantial overlap with the Loft, which many people know, and they were involved one way or another in all of these important inflection points, including coordinated disclosure, including Tor, including other circumvention technologies, and the invention of hacktivism, and they had some overlap with WikiLeaks. I mean, you know, it’s not that they’re all fabulous people that never screwed up, but they’re this great through line that you can follow with colorful characters that will teach you a little bit about, you know, what, what the old gen, the prior generations did right, where they screwed up and hopefully learn from that so that, you know, newer people to the field can have an advantage because of the cool stuff that’s already happened.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:07:28]: And you know, Joe, I think having a sense of history is actually really important here. And I mean, I know there’s this image that everyone has of a kid with a Jolt Cola. Maybe my generation was Jolt Cola. I don’t know, maybe it’s a Diet Coke or something now, Red Bull, but in a hoodie, and bottom line is some of that does in fact exist. But hackers, as a collective agnostic, it could be good or bad. So at the end of the day, to be able to defend a system, you genuinely have to know how to break into a system. So tell us a little bit about that story arc.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:08:12]: And which threads, if you were to go back to Loft and Mudge and back to the old days, what stories are most relevant today that are still with us? And I want to make sure we save time for a discussion around ethics and technology. And you’ve done some incredible reporting around privacy, which so many tough questions there and even tougher answers. But first, with Cult of the Dead Cow, where do you see that trajectory going today?
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Joe Menn [00:08:41]: Well, let’s see. So just to hit some of the highlights here, I think one of the reasons this is a great story is that in the beginning they were like teenagers with modems that were powered by hamsters and they were just trying to connect to other people and learn stuff and experiment. It began in Lubbock, Texas, and a favorite hangout of the teens who started it was an abandoned slaughterhouse because it was creepy and weird and they’re, you know, teenage boys and they thought Cult of the Dead Cow sounded sinister and they’re, you know. And there was something very unique about that generation of early hackers. And in the book I talk about a number of things that contributed to it. But there was this sort of golden era of a few years after War Games came out and everybody learned about war dialing, including some of these kids. And before the Computer Fraud and Abuse act made all that fun stuff illegal. And it was all like, you know, taken away or could have been taken away.
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Joe Menn [00:09:47]: And I think one of the things that’s why these people are important today is that it was not easy to get online. It was technologically frustrating and it was very expensive unless you happened across somebody else’s credit card or you were at a university or something like that. And so it’s sort of self selected for people who were, who really cared about this stuff. And you know, either because they were desperate to find like minded people or to learn or something, they really cared about the technology. There was something special about it. And then the other thing is they wound up with all these moral issues because in the olden days they were pretty much stealing phone time to get, there were these things called area codes, and to get to a bulletin board with a dial up, you were going to have outrageous long distance bills or more likely your parents going to have-
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Frank Cilluffo [00:10:48]: Freakers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Joe Menn [00:10:49]: Outrageous long distance bills. And so I think it’s, it’s very interesting to me that you know, any, any like top, any Fortune 100 CISO who’s, you know, in his mid-50s or older broke the law as a teenager, if he’s any good or she is any good. And that brings a different perspective, I think, than most people have. I think you’re a little more skeptical of law enforcement. You tend to think through the morality on your own. And that’s kind of one of the overarching lessons of it is that now that cyber is this nice clean profession where you can go to a good college and major in cyber-y things and get a nice slot in a big corporation doing cyber-y things without thinking about the ethics of what you’re doing, what is good for people, and you can get sleepwalked into doing some bad stuff, putting in back doors or whatnot. So it’s not like I’m trying to prescribe any morality.
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Joe Menn [00:11:46]: I just want people to think about it for themselves because I think that is something that the old guard did that some of the new kids don’t.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:11:53]: Were you a regular reader of 2600? I haven’t thought about it in a while, but just curious if, if that was part of your staple reading.
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Joe Menn [00:12:01]: So I was not, you know, I’m not like a tech person first. I’m just like an English major who thinks this stuff is interesting. So I came to this after, you know, kind of after the explosion and was not like, you know, I mean, the truth is I wanted to live in San Francisco, and once I got here, you know, tech was the thing to cover. And when I started in 99, it was just like all this dumb Internet hype and people were buying crazy things because they thought there’d be somebody dumber down the line they could flip it to. And it was very frustrating as a guy in the reality business to listen to all the hype. And so hackers had this really different, valuable perspective. I mean, they made stuff up too, but they were the ones that had an incentive to tell you that Windows wasn’t safe or that Symantec wasn’t going to protect you from everything, that kind of thing.
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Joe Menn [00:12:58]: And I just sort of naturally gravitated to it for that reason.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:13:00]: And disagree with me, but in the news business, if it bleeds, it leads. So that automatically kind of leads to negative stories. And there are plenty of those when it comes to the hacker culture as well. And I don’t remember if you covered the Russian business network, but when you look at some of the organized crime figures, they were some really bad actors. And I think part of what I find compelling is you also had early stages of these white hat hackers who, yes, may have been technically potentially breaking laws, but the flip side is their intent was not necessarily pure, but it was not to steal and rob alone. Right? Am I fair with that?
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Joe Menn [00:13:55]: Yeah, absolutely. And yes, the Russian business network is a huge deal and a key part of my previous book, Fatal System Error.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:14:03]: RBN. That’s where I think I remember that. Yeah, exactly.
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Joe Menn [00:14:07]: I had the, I had a fraught week plus in Moscow working on that book and was followed around by very large people.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:14:16]: You actually traveled during that? Wow.
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Joe Menn [00:14:18]: I did. And I’ve been since banned from entering Russia. I’ve been sanctioned by the Russian government.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:14:26]: You wear that as a badge of honor, I assume.
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Joe Menn [00:14:29]: It is to me. Like I said, the CDC guys, the early Cult of the Dead Cow guys leveled up. And they were, in the beginning, they were about pranking and writing text files and linking together these bulletin boards. But once AOL and Microsoft put everybody online in the mid-90s, they kind of looked around and said, well, actually, this stuff, we know about how some of this stuff works, and we have a responsibility to tell people what’s going on. And so they, along, there was, they kept doing that.
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Joe Menn [00:15:04]: So they found, they experimented with different ways to get public attention on stuff, to put pressure on big companies to get their software better. You know, they went, many of them went in house at companies and taught them how to do security better from the perspective of a real hacker. And then, you know, some of them went into government service. You mentioned Mudge was one of the people that was both in the Loft and Cult of the Dead Cow and most recently was running, had a very high position in the executives part of DARPA. So that was one of the things that was so interesting to me that went in all these different directions.
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Joe Menn [00:15:49]: Nonprofits, the Veracode, which is a security unicorn, was very important, was founded by members of CDC and the Loft. And then the whole hacktivism thing, which was a word that they coined.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:16:02]: So it’s sort of, and not to close this chapter just yet, but in addition to, I would like for you to add a little bit of color on one or two characters. I’m a father of four daughters. I love them all equally. So I’m not asking you to pick favorites, but if you want to pick one or two, that would be great. And then what do you think we can learn today, not just from the hackers and the capabilities, because that’s obviously changing. You blink and it changes.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:16:33]: But what other traits, whether they’re cultural, whether they’re ethical, what should we be learning from them, if anything?
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Joe Menn [00:16:42]: Sure. So, I think Mudge is easily one of the most interesting ones. You know, just your basic prodigy genius type. And he’s sort of, the CDC called him their hacker laureate because, you know, in the beginning there were these, like, funny wise guys. And then, you know, then they had responsibility.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:17:12]: Then they had responsibility, right?
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Joe Menn [00:17:13]: Right. And then, you know, the, the guys that were like, deep, deeper technical minds like Mudge and Chris Rioux, who went on to found Veracode, they kind of wanted to be with the cool kids, so the geeks joined the cool kids, I guess is one way to think about it. And both of them were in the Loft and, they wrote Back Orifice, which was a, you know, ubiquitous Microsoft hacking tool, and so on. And so Mudge went on to do, as I said, DARPA.
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Joe Menn [00:17:55]: He, at DARPA, he created the cyber fast track, which was, you know, instead of giving, you know, multiple millions of dollars to IBM or somebody to work on a futuristic cyber project, he’d give as little as 50k to somebody in a garage. Like, oh, well, one hacker, two hackers who just had this idea to work on. And out of that came this amazing stuff. Charlie Miller was one of the early recipients. He famously hacked a moving Jeep and started the whole cybersecurity for cars thing. There are all these really cool, Dan Guido, Dave Eitel, all these amazing people got their breaks, and it sort of broke down the walls between government and individual contributors in the hacking community. And that was super important.
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Joe Menn [00:18:40]: So Mudge is one. I’d say Oxblood Ruffin is another. He was kind of like the father of hacktivism. And we talked about not agreeing with all the ethical calls that members of the CDC made. As a journalist, what Oxblood did is horrifying. But as an activist, it’s objectively interesting. He made up this tale of the Hong Kong Blondes, which was supposedly this underground group of hackers in China that were pro democracy, and the CDC was helping them with their own security and various tech. And people wanted it to be true.
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Joe Menn [00:19:20]: And Wired wrote about it, and the LA Times wrote about it on their front page, and it was all completely made up. But one of the, one of the, but it inspired people to actually try to do things to help the Chinese. And there’s one guy in particular who was inspired by that who wound up, like, you know, going, going to Dharamsala in, in India and actually helping, you know, the, the, the Dalai Lama and his folks who are constantly being hacked by the Chinese government. And so it eventually became true.
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Joe Menn [00:19:57]: They were pretending that they were helping protect people from China. And then indirectly later, it was true. And then there’s also very interesting stuff about their alliance with the government there because they wound up helping get the Citizen Lab in Toronto, like the best outfit at tracking how governments use tech against their own people. They worked with the folks in Dharamsala because, you know, the Chinese malware that first headed to the Tibetans was next going to go to Lockheed Martin and folks like that. So it was a really useful alliance. So what people should take away now, besides thinking through the ethical things and learning about why your forefathers and foremothers made the calls they did, there’s still hacktivism today. There’s been a resurgence in hacktivism, and you don’t have to participate. There are lots of other ways to give back to the community besides doing stuff that’s borderline criminally, but it’s had some very interesting effects and I think it’s worth looking into.
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Joe Menn [00:21:13]: They include somebody who hacked, somebody in Europe, who hacked the government of Myanmar and found a bunch of documents showing that American companies were, were violating sanctions by helping the very unpleasant government there oppress its folks. And that was then published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, which is kind of like a WikiLeaks done better. And that led to those companies pulling out of Myanmar. So there’s, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of good activist stuff going on. And I think, you know, there’s also, you know, the world sort of turned. The world opinion is turned against the tech giants now, but there’s a lot of good you can do by contributing to open source, by helping on policy debates, if you actually understand the tech. When these guys were starting out, there weren’t a lot of ways to do good with tech, and they sort of had to make it up as they went along.
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Joe Menn [00:22:14]: But now the Red Cross has a technologist and Lord knows how many are at the FTC and, you know, members of Congress have staff that are technically pretty sharp. So there are all these different things that one can do.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:22:29]: You know, those are all great points. One thing, and disagree with me, if I were asking myself, the curiosity, though, is another big, I mean, at the end of the day, these were, this was tinkering, it was experimenting, it was going to Radio Shack and buying the MacGyver equivalent of bits and pieces. That can change the world, can it? And disagree with me on that.
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Joe Menn [00:22:56]: So one of the sort of, aha moments I had when putting this together, and this was in, you know, this was during Trump’s first administration, so that, just to give you a time frame, is that hackers are by definition, if they’re any good, are critical thinkers, because they’re taking stuff and saying, well, okay, this is the intended purpose. What else can it do? What else can I make it do? They’re thinking outside of the box, literally the computer box, server box. And that’s an incredibly important skill and one that is kind of under threat.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:23:35]: And lost.
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Joe Menn [00:23:36]: With people sort of choosing their own reality and trusting stuff because some YouTuber spouts it. So I was trying to preserve that, to promote that, that critical thinking is critical infrastructure and we can benefit hugely from listening to folks and following that model from not just, I argue that hackers should be big players in legislation and in protecting critical infrastructure, and all these other things because they are critical thinkers and won’t just repeat what the conventional wisdom is. You get value from people who are thinking differently.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:24:16]: I love that. And I do think, I mean you’ve seen scans of brains of those that are actually writing and thinking and doing their own. And then you see those that are dependent upon technology. One brain lights up all four quadrants, the other you’re seeing maybe a tidbit of a, of a, so I’m with you on that. And I think curiosity, again willing to learn through experience is worth its weight in gold. And sometimes you hopefully learn from your mistakes too. And hopefully not illegal ones.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:24:52]: But all things said and done, I think that is important. I want to pull two other threads that you, you talked about the Citizen Lab and should we worry that autocratic regimes can over, technology again is agnostic, it’s a double edged sword, but in one way the individual is empowered like never before. In other ways autocratic regimes can use technology like never before. I’d just be curious what your thoughts are on that.
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Joe Menn [00:25:31]: So I think this is incredibly important. I briefly touch on John Perry Barlow and the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow, among other things, was a co founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And the Declaration of Independence was this sort of florid but inspirational exaggeration about how cyberspace is independent of governments and is all about freedom. And that is not actually the way it’s turning out in a lot of the world. It is, as somebody said, turn, turnkey oppression or authoritarianism. The Internet is a fantastic tracking system and it is, and the more we’re dependent on technology, the more interested governments are in using that to shape society.
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Joe Menn [00:26:32]: And frequently out of view of the public. And the Citizen Lab in particular has shown time and time again that this, these nifty zero day exploits are used, are bought for millions and deployed against not just human rights activists, but you know, the leaders of the minority political party and journalists and, and attorneys and anybody else that is threatened. So you know, middle, name a Middle Eastern government, you know. They’ve all used it to scare and police their people for their freedom of speech, for exercising freedom of speech. So it’s, it’s incredibly critical. And the surveillance issues are not just for China anymore. There is, and this is actually something I’m looking into for my, what I believe will be my next book.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:27:28]: Excellent. You’re going to give us a preview of that?
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Joe Menn [00:27:31]: Let’s put it this way. I’m very interested in the economic system, incentives and technology and the human decision making that has gone into the widespread use of surveillance against US citizens, to the extent that we have somebody from ICE holding up an iPhone, taking a picture of a peaceful protester and using facial recognition to find out who they are and then show up at their house. We’ve come a long way very quickly in this, and I think it deserves more attention.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:28:11]: Well said, and in parallel, big tech, in some ways, they have more power than government. Or actually we’re seeing a great case play out right now vis a vis Anthropic, Department of War. I’d be curious if you have any thoughts on that, but maybe more in a strategic sense, what are the big ethical questions we need to be thinking about from big technology? And then what policy questions should those on Capitol Hill and elsewhere be thinking about and Executive branch thinking about as well?
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Joe Menn [00:28:49]: So this is one of the reasons why I did a revised edition of the Cult of the Dead Cow, which came out just a couple months ago. This stuff has gotten more important since the book first came out. And in particular, the coming together of big tech and big government really changes how things work, because the stories in the book, a lot of them from back in the day, have to do with these cool hacker thinker types going inside Microsoft and Apple and making them better, those sorts of companies. And now I think that is not the, and there were, there was clashes. There was Apple refusing to hack the phone in San Bernardino. And there are all these things where government and technology companies, their interests diverged and they both argued their cases. In the new afterward of the book, I talk about what has happened more recently, and that is at the most recent inauguration, you had Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and I believe Elon Musk standing closer to Trump than his cabinet members. The allegiance of big tech is actually more important than some of the entire branches of government.
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Joe Menn [00:30:18]: And their interests are now, by and large, very closely joined. And that that should be scary to people because, you know, the US has worked as a system of checks and balances and diverging power centers. And if they all are on the same page, then a lot of things are at risk. And so that’s something to think about. In the case of Anthropic and OpenAI, I think that’s very interesting. I mean, the red line is, seems pretty defensible there. No use in dragnet mass surveillance and no use in automated killing. That sounds kind of American to me. But that was so offensive to the Pentagon that they declared Anthropic a supply chain security risk, which it is obviously not.
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Joe Menn [00:31:21]: I think people need to be paying attention to what’s going on more closely.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:31:26]: And asking questions and thinking it through. I think we’re so early on some of these matters, but in other ways, we’re kind of late. So we, we can’t have afterthoughts. Joe, we’ve gone through, I can’t imagine, I can’t believe we’re already at 30 plus minutes. I want to ask, I always close with what questions didn’t I ask that I should have?
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Joe Menn [00:31:51]: That’s actually one of my favorite questions as a journalist.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:31:53]: Boom, I stole it from you, maybe.
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Joe Menn [00:31:58]: And at this stage of my career, I’m like, happily passing on as many trade secrets as I possibly can. What didn’t you ask? I don’t know. You know, people sometimes ask about the media landscape or disinformation. I think those are, I think disinformation is a big deal, and I think the union of AI and disinformation is a very big deal. And AI security is, you know, as you know, having been following technology for a long time, whenever there’s a new exciting technology, people rush into it and then sometime later they figure out about security. And in that delta there, a whole lot of damage can be done. And right now there’s this land rush where all the vulnerabilities are now visible through the wonder of AI.
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Joe Menn [00:32:49]: And so tech debt that was swept under the rug is now become a forest fire. And so the good guys and the bad guys are racing to find these volumes and either patch them or exploit them. And, you know, I wish we were hearing more from CISA about this because I think it’s a huge freaking issue. And the next year is going to determine a lot of what, you know, the next generation is going to be facing.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:33:18]: Joe, thank you for spending so much time with us today. Thank you for your sharp pen and your curiosity to be able to zero in on these issues and, and your ability to put it into book form where these aren’t just zeros and ones, these are people. They’re making a difference for good, for bad, and everything in between. And just really appreciate you taking the time with us and look forward to reading your next book. Thank you, Joe.
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Joe Menn [00:33:45]: Thank you so much.
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Frank Cilluffo [00:33:47]: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Cyber Focus. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing. Your ratings and reviews help us reach more listeners. Drop us a line if you have any ideas in terms of topics, themes, or individuals you’d like for us to host. Until next time, stay safe, stay informed, and stay curious.
