Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast I'm Hannah. This conversation is all about the

business of cybercrime and is a rerun of one of our popular episodes on

security from last year. The episode with Joel de la Garza, operating partner of

information security at A16 Z, and former Ciso at Box, myself, and Jonathan Lusthouse

director of the Human Cyber Criminal Project at the University of Oxford is all about how these

cybercrime organizations function, who is behind them, and what changes when we begin to

understand cybercrime as an industry. For the latest on what's happening in security as well as tips for securing yourself, please

visit A16Z.com slash security trends.

So the idea of the lone troublemaker hacker, the kind of hobby hacker, political activist is sort of what we for a long time have culturally thought of as the cyber criminal, right?

But that's no longer the case.

It's now really a much larger highly organized and profit driven

organization. So can you walk us through how that actually happened? The shift

from the loan hacker to the highly organized industry is really one that's

taken place over quite a long period of time. I mean this is something that

actually wasn't criminal to begin with really. When it started to become a

little bit more of a criminal activity, that's when we started to see people operating in this kind of lone wolf capacity and causing trouble, you know, sometimes in small groups, but largely just as individuals, when we start to see something that's far more structured, organized

and profit driven, really begins to occur mostly in the 90s because this is a period that

we're starting to put things of value online.

So until we have the actual targets there

that make it worth people's time to go after them.

Right, it was a hobby because there wasn't any actual value to it.

Exactly.

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