Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: One, two, three. Come on.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: In the grand stadium of the digital landscape, where teams of innovators and hackers face off daily, there stands a commentary box like no other picture the buz of a pregame show, the strategy analysis of the halftime break, and the deep dives of a postgame discussion all rolled into one.
Welcome to off the Wire, a play by play on cyber issues, your sports desk for the big league of cybersecurity. Just like in sports, in the cyber world, understanding the play is key to staying ahead of the game. And that's exactly what we offer, a podcast that brings the strategy room to you, helping you to understand the moves, the players, and the landscape like a true analyst.
Off the Wire, a play by play on cyber issues.
Welcome back to off the Wire, a play by play on cyber issues. John Watkins here with my co host Anthony Kent. Good to have you back on the show, Mr. Kent. And we've got some pretty interesting stuff here today, don't we?
[00:01:08] Speaker C: Yes, we do.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: I think it's been kind of neat how things have been evolving. Our last episode just kind of talk about that a little bit.
Wow, that one did fantastic, didn't it?
[00:01:18] Speaker C: Yeah, Bob really knocked it out of the park with that one.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Yeah. If you haven't had a chance to listen to that one, that's episode six. Bob Farmer from out at Delta Montrose Electric association talked about an attack that they went through in 2021, how they recovered their team's resilience. Just a fantastic talk. Hey, I think one thing that you talked about one time recently that you were going to start doing was the news portion, right? Do you have any news for us, Anthony?
[00:01:50] Speaker C: Not right at this moment.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Well, I got a couple news items that we can talk about, like ransomware is just going crazy. I know of two local firms, local to me here, that are dealing with, and I won't mention their names just out of respect, but one of them is a global firm, and they've got some presence here locally, and they have got a major, and they're a manufacturing company, and they've got a major ransomware situation going on, and all of their production line is shut down. The other one is a pretty big realty company with about 500 employees. And the last I heard, they were negotiating the ransom to try to take it down by $400,000. But that was by the play group. And I don't know about the other one. I don't know who perpetrated the manufacturing one. But, yeah, ransomware season, right? With Christmas and I think the holidays that everybody knows that some attackers know that here in the United States we're not going to be around. And I think this is kind of peak season for them. Right?
[00:02:53] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I do have one piece of news. I think it's Comcast or Xfinity, I think it was. 32 million people have their information stolen.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: I got to add that to that big text file with everybody's usernames and passwords in it. Yeah, fun times. Always something going on in the cyber world.
Yeah. Also the podcast is doing quite well. This is an interesting episode though, because finally we've got a sponsor and this is kind of new. So we've always had good old John Watkins consulting as a sponsor, which they've been a great sponsor. We love that company.
We do.
But this is a new company, so we're going to talk about their products and stuff today. I did a nice interview with them and before we get into that, let's just go ahead and roll their ad. In the digital world, cybersecurity is king. Welcome to Kicker, the premier marketplace for cybersecurity software demos. Buyers envision a world where choosing the right cybersecurity solution is effortless. With Kicker, explore demos of elite security solutions tailored just for you. Say goodbye to endless research. Witness the power of top notch software in action. And for sellers, this is your stage. Kicker offers a unique platform to showcase your groundbreaking product to a global audience.
Automated demos let potential buyers experience your software's impact in real time, boosting trust and speeding up sales. But there's more. The world hacker Kane. Imagine your product battling it out in custom built capture the flag arenas. It's more than a competition. It's a spectacle of cybersecurity mastery. Kicker, that's where buyers meet innovation and sellers showcase their excellence. Don't wait, visit Kicker. That's k I kr co. Today, kicker, bridging gaps, building trust in cybersecurity.
Okay, so yeah, that's kicker and that's what we'll be talking about today. Kicker and the hacker verse. But before we get into that, let's introduce our co host, Mr. Anthony Kent. Go ahead and introduce yourself, sir.
[00:05:17] Speaker C: Hey, everyone, Anthony Kent here. I work at Fort County Electric. As a vp of it, I've got about ten years of co op experience, probably more like twelve if I added up correctly. And I have about ten years of cybersecurity experience. And recently this year, well, this year is almost over, but I attained my cissp this year.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Fantastic.
[00:05:38] Speaker C: Over to you, John.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: Thank you, sir. And yeah, I got my cissp about four years ago now going on. Yeah, I guess four and a half years ago and been in cyber for the last 14 years. Done a variety of roles from security analyst to red team to policy creation and those kind of things. And my favorite thing to do is incident response tabletops and things like that to kind of do some preparation to make sure your incident response plan is in tip top shape. That's what I should say. But yeah. So I own John Watkins consulting and I worked at a co op for about ten years myself. So good to have you on the show, Mr. Kent.
[00:06:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm really excited about this. When you told me about this vendor, I went and looked at their site and got super excited because I saw their list of demos and they have a little bit of everything.
They have wazoo, they've got alien vault, they got no before they got cyber, Wireshark. I mean, you name it, they have it metasploit, Nessus, lastpass, and then I think some of their edRs, they've got crowdstrike as one.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Let's back up just a little bit. And it's awesome that they have all those, but let's tell the people what that is, what they do.
So, Kicker is the brainchild of Mariana Padilla and her co founder, Mr. Craig Elrod, and they have come up with this platform that allows us as users, let's say, anthony, we're going to go buy an EDR. And so we don't know the one Sentinel one and Wazoo and all these different ones, and we want to figure out which one we want to, you know, nothing against salespeople, but.
[00:07:33] Speaker C: You mean sales weasels.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I used to be a sales weasel. I mean salesperson. So careful disrespect. Yeah, no disrespect. No disrespect. But we all know that when the salesman comes in the room, I mean, everybody knows that the conversation is not the same. Right? So this is meant to be like a peer reviewed or a community reviewed platform that allows you to check out these products in real time and really check and see if they do what they say they're going to do. So then, as Anthony was saying, they have all these different products already on their site. And you can do a demo, a live demo. Right?
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:20] Speaker C: Being able to do a dry run before you have the product, that would be pretty awesome.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Especially without the stupid vendor getting in the way and telling you this and that and the other. And I mean, I think the benefit here to co ops is we really can't afford to make a bad decision in the co op. I mean, nowhere you can, especially with today's economy. But by the same token, the software, you buy it, you never use it, you spend all that money on. It's kind of a waste.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: Yeah, there's nothing worse. I'm not going to name vendors, but in 2022, we bought a product basically for vendor access, and then we had nothing but issues. I mean, the system would go down, we had to downgrade it for it to do the functionality we wanted. And then the people trying to support us were having a hard time getting on, which is very frustrating, and end up the year after we had to change gears and basically kick them out and get a new third party vendor access tool, which is going great. But that's a lot of time and resources. And just having a bad product puts a sour taste in a lot of people's mouth, too.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: No, it's a great point, and that's a great story. And I think the other part of this, it's like the salesperson probably didn't tell you all those problems, right?
[00:09:38] Speaker C: No, not at all.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: No, they're like talking this thing up. And no offense, no offense to salespeople, I know there's going to be salespeople probably listening, but you're financially motivated as a job. You got to do your job. And that job is like convincing people to do stuff that maybe is not always in their best interest, but it's more like in your best interest as a salesperson. So without further ado, that's what kicker is. They've got, like Anthony said, a ton of vendors up there. I think they're adding more all the time, and they do almost like a capture the flag type.
Yeah, so they do all that stuff and it's pretty cool stuff. So with that, we'll go ahead and roll the interview that I did with Craig and Mariana, and we'll just see what they have to say about their awesome product. Take it away. Thanks for joining us here today, guys. I appreciate you getting on the call so we can do this on our podcast. And thank you for sponsoring off the wire. It's a real big honor for us, but it's an honor to have Mariana Padilla and Craig Elrod on here, who are the co founders of Kickerthehackerverse. And we'll talk more about that in a little bit. Let me tell you a little bit about each one of these, and then we'll dive into some topics. So Craig has over 30 years of tech industry experience. He's got all kind of certifications, is known as the king of technical marketing. I don't know if anybody else has that title. And he's a published author, a podcaster, a daydreamer, an inventor, and a walking incubator of cool ideas. Now that's kind of a play on words there, right, with the incubator of cool ideas. But he brings fun, he brings excitement to the business. Craig got tired of his brain playing tricks on him, so he went into marketing and sales and then marketing again. And with his latest venture, kicker, Craig understands all levels of the business and also codes. By that, I mean he coded the first kicker arena. Craig also enjoys writing rap music and going to the gym with his two sons. And by the way, they like to hack also. Welcome to the show, Craig Elrod.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: Thank you, sir. Thank you.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Thank you, thank you. And then we also have with us Ms. Mariana Padilla, who is the other co founder and CEO of Kicker. And she is a self described smasher of status quo's. And there's nothing that she hates more than being told, this is the way we've always done it, with quotes. This mentality is what led her to sign on as co founder of Kicker. So, Kicker, we're going to talk more about this in the show, but it's the disruptive software sales platform of the future.
They have a very unique model, and this allows buyers to access immersive demos so that they can try before they buy with cybersecurity software. So Mariana's strength includes storytelling, team building operations.
Mariana previously founded Red Lab Marketing, which was a social media marketing agency committed to elevating the stories of brands, making the world a better place. Mariana is passionate about social justice and keeping it real about business. And in her spare time, you can find Mariana exploring Chicago, walking her dogs, or eating croissants at her favorite sari. I had to brush up on my french just for that last part. Welcome to the show, Mariana.
[00:13:01] Speaker D: Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. And this is what happens when you let the founders write their own bios.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: Hey, it's better than Chad GPT. So why not?
So why don't you guys tell me first a little bit about Kicker, and then we'll kind of talk about some other things. What in the world is that? What is kicker?
[00:13:21] Speaker D: Yeah. Well, I will kick it off, K-I-K it, and I'll tap Craig in here, who had the original brainchild. This was his, really. You know, we want to be able to give buyers more autonomy in the purchasing process. And allow them to kick the tires on software they're considering on their own time. So I really live the pain of attempting to purchase enterprise software, not cybersecurity specifically, but lots of marketing tools that I've used in my time at my agency. And all I wanted to be able to do was to be able to touch, feel, use it without having to click on the talk to sales button. And that isn't out there. That doesn't exist. And so I met Craig, understood what he was doing, and came along for the ride. So, yeah, Craig, you're.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Well, what we're putting into this little platform here and this little circus we're building is sort of a culmination of doing technical marketing for 23 years and just identifying all the things that gave me stomach pain over the years.
And we're finally at a place where we can solve this problem.
Everything is in the cloud.
Software solutions are in repos. And so all of this can be automated. We can take the technical marketing talent, the ability to sell, the sizzle, we could package all that and we can offer it to customers. And where it's leading is actually sort of nobody's had the epiphany, but when you see it, you'll just go, oh my God, that makes sense. And that's what we're doing.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: It's interesting that you bring up this concept of technical marketing. A few years ago, I worked at a startup, and they were a software as a service platform and that kind of thing. And it was a very new concept to them to have somebody like me on the team as a technical writer who was also helping with all the marketing efforts, I was helping with all the emails and all that. It was really, I guess, a real general direction of adding that technical piece to the marketing side that really wasn't there prior to, let's say, 2011. Right.
[00:15:35] Speaker D: One of the challenges that I think the cybersecurity industry faces is the communication piece of things. And you mentioned the technical writing. I think cybersecurity specifically has a really hard time of communicating to people what it is that they do. If you go to black hat, if you go to RSA, you'll see that a lot of these companies are saying the exact same thing, which makes it very difficult to help their products stand out from the crowd or to help buyers really understand the product that they need to be purchasing. So I think we are coming at this from the perspective of helping buyers really understand by giving them hands on access to evaluate these tools on their own time. But I completely agree. I think that particularly when you're super in the weeds of building and selling these products, you forget sometimes that people outside of your small little bubble company that you're building may not know what the heck it is that you're saying. And so I think that that's a challenge that the industry really faces and that we're trying to solve. But, yes, I completely agree. Being able to communicate succinctly and make that communication sound more accessible is a challenge for a lot of technology, but particularly cybersecurity.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think another challenge here that especially maybe a smaller enterprise would deal with is there's a lot of pressures from some of these vendors, and it's a big deal for a smaller business to buy something that ends up being shelfware, right?
[00:17:04] Speaker D: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's been a big problem.
So there's a couple of different problems. One is that sometimes products get recommended by mssps, and it's not because it's the best product, it's because they have a relationship with that vendor.
So that's one of the things. Or you have a long standing relationship with them, or they're friends or something. So they're pushing these products.
Or the other thing, too. Is, is sales actually pushing something that the product actually does? Is the other question, because I've heard from a lot of buyers who said, hey, we bought this product and sales promised us that the product did this. And then it turns out we installed this product, and the product doesn't actually do that. And the piece of things that they're looking for it to do isn't in the pipeline to be released for another eight months or something. Right. It was especially challenging if you have this log contract, so you're stuck with this product.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, that's my point.
You get this end up having this shelfware that costs a lot of money, and it's like these smaller companies. Well, everybody's really budget conscious right now. And I think with that kind of pressure that companies deal with, I think it's very important that I know I sat in that seat for ten years when I was making a buying decision. I did anything and everything I could to try to figure out, am I really doing the right thing here? And I think this really allows folks to get their hands on something so they can see if it makes sense for them before they commit themselves to that kind of a decision. Right.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: So I'll actually pipe in as mean. Mariana nailed it. That's why she's a CEO you just mentioned. Very key term there, hands on. And I've been building hands on things my entire career and recently had a chance to build and show off products in a hands on environment. And I discovered that some of the threats that were going to that product weren't being stopped. And then light went on and I started thinking, oh my God, how many more products are like this? And it turns out there's a lot that we just go on the salesperson's word, right? And oops, we're in a contract. It doesn't work, we're screwed. What next?
[00:19:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
And not to put salespeople down, because I was one for quite some time, but obviously they're financially motivated, right? So when there was that financial motivation involved in the picture, maybe you're not always getting the best product. Just because the salesperson says it's the best product doesn't always mean that it is, right? So how long has kicker been going around and how long have you been working on this?
[00:19:35] Speaker D: Craig's been noodling on this for a long time. Right. So this is, like I said, his brainchild. I joined the team last July, initially just was kind of thinking about doing contract work with the team. We had a different name back then. It was called Red Locust. I immediately told him we need a rebrand. Immediately. Absolutely not.
And then came on as an advisor, became CEO in November.
So currently Kicker, which I guess that's a good transition. I can kind of talk about our upcoming rebrand to hackerverse if you want.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that'd be great.
[00:20:11] Speaker D: Yeah. So I love the name kicker, kick the tires, all that stuff, kik, it makes for great copywriting. But really I think that our moat, if you will, our differentiating factor. There are a lot of presale demo tools that have been coming out onto the market to help companies scale their presales process, which I consider to really just be a band aid on the problem. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, it's still a vendor led sales motion, if not a buyer led sales motion. So marketplace gives people the ability to access those demos on their own time and access different vendors. But really, so I think our differentiating factors and what makes us really unique are a couple of different things. So one, we do a lot of live events called World Hacker Games, which we can touch on that too, which essentially live CTF arenas where we can showcase how vendor products perform in real time, which is incredible, I think a pretty revolutionary idea. And then the other piece of things is our community, which is also called the hackerverse and kind of prompted the name change, because really, at the end of the day, we're a community led driven organization. We want to be providing value to the cybersecurity community, and that is by giving them unbiased access to these demos and unbiased product reviews and all those kinds of things. So to us, the hackerverse is kind of more encompassing of everything that we are doing. It is the cybersecurity universe that we're building. And so we've kind of made the shift to rebranding to hackerverse in 2024. So it will be the marketplace, the community, and the events all falling under the hackerverse banner.
[00:21:51] Speaker B: Yeah, and I like that. I really do. And I think there's a benefit, and I love win win situations. Right. Like, I think this is a win win for both the vendor and for the buyer, because from a vendor standpoint, if you've got a good product, if you really can stand behind your product, then you shouldn't have any problem with a buyer getting on there and having some kind of unbiased interactions with it.
So I think this is a good thing. I especially think this is a good thing for those kind of folks that maybe don't always know or have the, a lot of teams that are smaller, don't have the depth, the depth or the bench strength to be able to fully qualify a product. And a lot of times they're relying on the salesperson's expertise. But it's the fox in the hen house, right? So you've got somebody who's, like I said before, financially motivated to help you make this decision. They're consulting you, but who's it benefiting here? So I think it's great that they can make that unbiased. And I love the fact that there's a community. I think that's pretty cool, too, because there's probably some additional interactions that you could get, maybe some help to say, is this really a good thing? Have you used this before? I'm sure those kind of things go on. Am I right on that?
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Yeah. In fact, I can talk to that. So what's interesting is, as we've been plugging this thing along and pushing this boulder up a hill, is we've been probing different areas and noticing things, and it became glaringly obvious ever since COVID hit, things have just, they've changed, right. Especially in the marketplace.
And I worked at a couple of startups where we'd pull in like 300 leads from a show, and then after the sort of demo phase, it would drop to four. I mean, it was a cliff. I'm like, oh, my God, buyers, everything's changed. The old tricks don't work anymore. White papers, nobody reads them. Webinars, people don't go. And it's like, oh, my God. We're at a point where we really have to change. And millennials are coming into the market, and nothing against salespeople, but they don't want to talk to salespeople. They want to do their research. We found also, cecils don't buy software just on a salesperson's word. They go into their community and say, hey, dude, we're doing this. Yeah, this product is working for us. So there's this community aspect of qualifying software that nobody's really focused on. We're sort of the first ones there. And we're like, okay, well, I'm a competitive person. Let's create an MMA ring for cybersecurity software. And we'll put the community people, anybody can participate, and we'll put the vendor in. And this goes back to a meeting we were having earlier today when I mentioned a book called Radical Candor, which I think is absolute genius. It's being able to call the baby ugly, right?
[00:24:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Being able to speak your voice and say, that is a piece of poop, and it needs fixing. And if we do that, we're going to get better accuracy with these tools, and we're going to get products that people want to use. And some vendors may not make the bar, but you know what? The threats that are escalating around the world, we have to. We really don't have a choice.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: Right. That's a fantastic point.
[00:24:55] Speaker D: Yeah. And I think from the vendor perspective, the ability to have consistent product feedback is really important.
I think the other piece of things know. So Craig mentioned the community is really important for software sourcing. I think one of the areas where I think we're really going to make a big difference is that there are a lot of communities for practitioners, ethical hackers, there are a lot of communities for Cisas, and never the twain shall meet.
Which doesn't make any sense to me, particularly, as Craig mentioned, with a growing number of threats, we need to be having more conversations at all levels of the organization, bringing people in to have these truly important connections, having emergency simulations where we bring people in, and you have to collaborate and figure this out, like all these kinds of things, because the threats are real and they're mounting. So if we can be the ones that solve the problem of being able to have practitioners and ctos communicate and also give them a venue to source for and evaluate new tools. I think that's a win win for everyone and for the vendors. If we have 5000, 10,000, 15,000 people in our community, it's an obvious, it's like a no brainer. It's like, okay, they're all on the kicker. Well now, hackervers, it's going to take me a second, I'm getting there. Yeah, marketplace, it's a no brainer really.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: But it makes perfect sense because you're exactly right. You're doing a couple of things here in my opinion. One, you're helping, coercively helping, I guess, the vendor to get on board with the product that actually does what it says it's going to do, right, which is what it should have done to begin with. But this gives some, I guess it's not an audit or whatever in that sense, but it just brings some accountability to the process, which I think has been missing for some time. And to your point, Craig, these threats are know they're not going away, they're not getting fewer threats as we go forward, are they? And they're not getting less serious as we go forward either. So if the software is supposed to pick up on this stuff, then it ought to be able to see that. You ought to be able to test that in real time. And if you can't, what's the purpose? And then you've already invested all this money, now you've got a tool that's.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: Just sitting there doing nothing, right, it might turn into a spectator sport, but it's going to be step in the ring, you're ready to compete. And if you've been in the ring and you've won or gotten 50% or 60%, well, no. Right.
As a vendor you could say, okay, I'm winning today, but I can win more if I really dial in my feature set, right? And this group of communities said what you thought you were going to build is not what we want. We want this thing over here and we want it to do this feedback, it's more accurate and you step back and the big epiphany for all of us is like, why hasn't this existed before?
[00:27:50] Speaker B: Right?
[00:27:53] Speaker A: Who missed it?
[00:27:55] Speaker B: I'm so glad you guys are doing this. And I was curious to know, are the communities, are they kind of segmented into different types of verticals or are they just kind of like everybody's in the same kind of community?
[00:28:05] Speaker D: No, they're all in the same community. We kind of know different industries that they're representing, which I think will come into play as we so currently everyone's housed on discord once we have a more advanced version of our website, because we are a startup that will be migrated over to the website, to the marketplace itself. So the community will live within the marketplace. We kind of think about that as twitch for hackers. So there'll be video streaming capabilities, slack type communication, all that kind of stuff. So blending the line between education, entertainment, edutainment, if you will, I think makes sense.
We need to bring more people into cybersecurity. And one of the things that I'm really excited about is where we stand in the market in terms of being able to, for lack of a better word, make cybersecurity sexy and make it fun and make it a place that people, a desirable place for them to be because we have such a shortage of, there's massive numbers of job openings. We need more people in this industry. We need people raising their hands and saying, I want to be part of this, but to go back to your initial question, no verticals as yet. I'm sure that will be something that will just, I think the community will kind of dictate a lot of the ways that the community itself is built in the future that it has. I definitely see that being something that will come in the future, for sure.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: That's great. Let's transition a little bit. I know we wanted to talk about, and Craig kind of brought it up, but some of the threats and maybe some of the things that your team has found through this on the dark web, or maybe just general cybersecurity trends, either one.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: What we're going to do is we're going to say, okay, let's take these people that know how to build exploits that haven't been developed before, and we'll throw those at a product and let's figure if it doesn't stop it now, the team knows, okay, we need to figure out how to stop this particular category of threats. And I think that's going to elevate the need for that software. It's going to elevate the accuracy. And why not do that? We need to.
[00:30:09] Speaker D: Yeah, Craig, why don't you touch on, can you talk about the silent Bob honey pot arena situation?
[00:30:17] Speaker A: You're a perfect example.
We love our arena builders, and we're never going to tell you who they are, these talented hackers.
We're always sourcing for good talent, and these guys just kind of were given to us by the hackerverse.
We're grateful to have them, but they're geniuses.
We had our first customer, Spiderbat. They knew what we were doing instantly because they had tried to do this before and understood the reaction, and the response was amazing. And so they immediately bought in. So we agreed to three arena events. On the first one, we said, here's our differentiator. Right? There are a lot of known threats out there, but what we did is we took one that was discovered just like two weeks before, and the Spiderback guy said, can you build an arena for that? We want to see if we can stop it. And it's like, in a couple of days, our geniuses in the arena. They built it. They built an arena. Well, what was funny is it turned into a honeypot. And we actually captured in our lab the exact threat that we were trying to block. And that was Silent Bob.
And so then we realized, oh, my God, we can do this for any new threat that comes out, we can build. And so we did. The second one was, I can't remember the name. What was the second one? And then we had Jeremiah. We just gave it a name. And that one is actually coming up on December 29, and it's super interesting. So what we realized is, shoot, if something is released on the dark web or in the news tomorrow, we can build it and we can have it in front of a product right away. And that's something that hasn't existed ever.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: Yeah, you're talking about some real time threat intelligence there that probably doesn't exist anywhere else, right. That's pretty amazing. I would definitely recommend that you go out to their website, check it out until they change the name. For now, anyways. It's Kikrr Co. Check it out, see what they're about. I think that I can wholeheartedly make a recommendation that this is something that you want to get involved.
And I think there's opportunities, Craig, for other vendors to get involved with this as well, right?
[00:32:18] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the whole goal is to get as many vendors on there, obviously, not only to help the monetization model, but let's get the entire community in there, and we want to move the needle. Right. We want to say this is where we were back in 2023. And in terms of accuracy and reducing the threat, the possibility of these threats, we've really dialed in on that, and that's really the goal.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: Fantastic. Well, I will now open the floor up for any final things. You guys have been super gracious with your time to explain what kicker and going forward, hackerverse is all about. And I think I've got a good understanding, and hopefully other folks do. How do we get in touch with you other than the website?
[00:33:01] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. So Craig and I are both very active on LinkedIn, so that's a great way. Obviously, check out the website. You can contact us there. If you are a vendor listening, happy to have you on board. You want to be one of the early adopters on this platform. Trust me, I am making a prediction. Maybe not this year, because it's happening in a couple of months, but next year we're going to roll into RSA and all these vendors are going to be chasing after us, begging to be on our marketplace. So there we go. May 2020. What are we going? 2025? That is my prediction. If anyone wants to put some money on that and meet me at RSA.
That's what I'm guessing, but, yeah, get involved. And also, we would love to have more representation from folks in this space in our community talking about the challenges that you're facing. So we can definitely, in the show notes, link out our discord community eventually, like I said, that'll be on the marketplace itself. But the more people we have from a broad cross spectrum of industries, the more robust the conversation will be in terms of the threats that we are facing. So please join our community, come talk to us. Talk about the challenges you're facing. Make some connections, get some product recommendations, and make the world a safer place.
[00:34:14] Speaker B: Fantastic.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: Perfect. That's the business point of view. And which is why I'm not a CEO.
The point that we missed is there's this huge creator economy thing that's about ready to explode. And you know what? We're doing that and we're going to make this fun and it's going to be visually appealing. We're going to have fun. We're going to joke around, no more stuff. You can't wear ties, no more suits.
We're doing fun stuff. And I'll go on a limb and know. Look, for us at RSA, there's going to be some really weird stuff coming from us. Well, from me, I don't know. Marianne will probably say, no, craig, you can't do that one.
We're going to do some weird, cool things.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Very good. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your time, both of you, and we look forward to the success of the hackerverse in 24 and beyond.
[00:35:03] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So there you go. Nice interview. I think that went really well.
[00:35:10] Speaker C: I think that's awesome.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And what's interesting, too, I think, and I think Craig made this point, is like why didn't somebody think of this before?
I think it'll catch on. I think it's a fantastic idea. And like Craig said, I'm surprised no one thought of it before, but I think they've got the right idea. I think they got the right backing.
They are set in 2024 to really kind of push this out there. I think with the rebrand, I think that'll help, too. I think that's a good idea, don't you?
[00:35:38] Speaker C: Yeah. The hackerverse is a little easier to remember or spell than kicker. No offense.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think they saw that too.
I just think it's a novel idea. As a startup. I can see where after them going to. I mean, because here's the thing. I was thinking about this the other day was, if you've got a vendor that really uses this in the right way, it's only going to be a win win. Right. Because not only does the buyer get to really use your product in a real world setting, but as you. As a vendor, you get to really improve your product in a real tangible way.
[00:36:20] Speaker C: Yeah. And we've had a lot of vendors. It seems like back in the day you could get a demo, like on your network pretty frequently, but now that's rare. And this kind of solves that.
Hackerverse or kicker, they're doing all the hard work. They've got this lab environment with all these scenarios, and you can test it and actually you can kick the tires on it and see how it is, whether they support doing a demo on your network or not. I think that's just a good way to answer that gap.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And with that, I think everybody should go check out their website, right? Like it's Kikr Co. And check out the website, see what they have to offer. I think you'll see that it's a very cool thing. Again, it's an automated demo marketplace. It's got built in events arena, and so you can really showcase that true functionality of cybersecurity software. And that hackerverse is that community side of it where you can really touch, you can really see, feel cybersecurity products in that real world, kind of gloves off environment. So I think it's a great thing. And thank you to Mariana and to Craig for coming on. We greatly appreciate that and for sponsoring this episode. So with that, I guess we should talk about our closing remarks and make sure you like and subscribe and share. We're getting more and more and more followers every single episode, the last one. So I don't know if anybody knows these stats or whatever, but let's talk about this a little bit. Anthony, the last episode that we had, we basically came this close to being in the top 25% of all podcasts in the world with that episode.
[00:37:59] Speaker C: Yeah, we were so close.
[00:38:00] Speaker B: So close. Within 15. Within 15 more downloads than we would have been there. But I still think it put us in the top, like 30% for that episode. So that's really good. And that's all because of you guys. That's not because of us. That's because you guys are liking it and sharing it and talking about it. And we appreciate that. And we would love to hear your feedback, love to hear your thoughts on episodes or even vendors that you would want us to kind of check out like we did with this one. We want to hear what you guys have to say on that.
[00:38:30] Speaker C: There are any topics or anything, just let John or me know, and we'll be glad to cover it.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: Absolutely. At least we'll consider it, if nothing, then, because we'd love to get back into our debate stuff, too. We've done like three interviews in a row now, but that's okay. This podcast is kind know it's a work in progress. Right. We kind of started this podcast with the thought of, will this even work? And we just kind of said, let's just give it a shot. And we've been super pleased with the success of it. I know I have. Yeah.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: And we appreciate everyone's feedback. We really do.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: For sure. You can donate to the podcast. You can be a sponsor as well. So we're still signing up sponsors. We've got several different packages. We'd love to talk to you about those.
Again, if you want to donate to the podcast, that's no problem either. We have a link for that. I will try my best to get that in the show notes.
Next one I think we got coming up.
I think we're going to talk about OT security, right?
[00:39:32] Speaker C: Yeah, we're going to talk about Ot security.
There's a big debate out there whether to have an EDR in your OT environment or not. Everyone's got either a logical or physically separated network, and there's a big debate on whether you should be doing that or not.
[00:39:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So we'll flip a coin, the proverbial off the wire coin. We'll flip that bad boy, and we'll see if we can't kind of figure out which is best to do for that. So that's coming up on an episode in the near future, and then the next one is after the new year, right?
[00:40:08] Speaker C: Yeah, it'll be after new year.
[00:40:10] Speaker B: Okay, so we're not going to release another episode for the rest of the year. We're just done for the whole year. And we'll see you next year. That's what we're going to say for today.
[00:40:18] Speaker C: 2023 is over.
[00:40:19] Speaker B: 2023 is over. That's so 2023. So anyway, thank you everybody for tuning in to so many of the podcasts. We greatly appreciate it. We look forward to keep bringing some more good content to you in 2024. And we do appreciate it so much. This has been off the wire. I'm John Watkins with my co hosts, Anthony Kent, and we'll see you next time.
[00:40:43] Speaker C: Merry Christmas, everyone.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: One, two, three. Come on.
[00:40:46] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to off the Wire, a play by play on cyber issues featuring Anthony Kent and John Watkins. Make sure to, like, subscribe, follow, and hey, share this podcast if you liked it. We appreciate it. Appreciate your time.
See you next time.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of John Watkins consulting or its affiliates. Always consult with a qualified cybersecurity professional for tailored advice.
