Hacker TikTok: Community, Creativity, and Controversy

we're ready to rock here on hacker tick-tock community creativity and controversy so with that we have a moderator over there on the table and um i'll let y'all take it away thanks welcome hi everyone thank you for getting us started my name is kylie robison i'm a reporter at business insider i'll be the moderator too today um today our panelists are going to be kyle tobner uh serena aka she networks she's on zoom and um make it hackin andrew um today we're gonna be talking about tik tok and um our security professionals and their content that they make on there tik tok is best known for being a dancing app as you know uh animal videos all that

but they have decided to make security content on there and quite successfully so we're gonna get into that um without further ado some introductions we'll start with kyle different ways that hackers start with serena network let's talk about dhcp dhcp is a protocol that allows your computer to dynamically receive an iep address without you having to manually enter any information it does this by broadcasting requests out to a dhcp server and the dhcp server will grab an iep address out of its pool and assign it to you an attire can continuously ask for iep addresses until there's no more addresses left in the pool to give out and this is going to cause a problem

because now real people who need addresses aren't able to get any and this is going to cause a denial of service this specific attack is called dhcp starvation the next attack is dhcp spoofing and when your computer is broadcasting out and asking for an ip address everybody on the network can see it so this means anybody can respond to it the attacker can sit there and say hey i'm the dhcp server here's an ip address and you should send all of your traffic through me i'm the gateway and this is a type of man-in-the-middle attack

[Applause] serena introductions hi um should i talk now can you hear me yes please okay cool um hi so my name is serena um i am currently a tester at black hills information security but previously to that i was a network engineer at cisco i worked in tac for uh cisco ucs and i was on a i was a data center uh technical lead for customer success and yeah i make videos on tick tock about networking and cyber security thank you serena yeah right who do we have next right make a hacker it's a piece of information that you learned that feels illegal to know i studied physics in college and one day we learned about faraday cages which are

metal structures that block radio frequency signals and i thought don't stores put rfid tags on things that are expensive and if you walk through the door the alarm goes off well all you got to do is use a faraday cage like a piece of aluminum foil wrap the foil around the tag and now the alarm doesn't go off that's uh educational purposes only folks okay um i'm andrew make it hack in i was a theater major and i also studied physics too uh army veteran i'm a nerd i drive a star wars car and i love electronics reverse engineering and i have a cat thank you andrew what's a piece of information that you like

last but not least

tell me you're a hacker without telling me you're a hacker i want to read this new york times article but i don't want to pay for an account so i go to the url bar at a period after dot com and i'm in educational purposes only hi i'm i'm kyle tobiner i am a head of security at a software startup i spent a long time at salesforce on their security team and i try to make educational security content on tick tock thank you kyle tell me your serena okay so next we're gonna get into creativity so i don't think i would have ever expected security informational videos to be going viral on tick tock especially

kyle's i remember watching that or um at the show me you're a hacker without telling me you're a hacker would have never expected that but it they blew up they're quite viral they've been quite creative and i wanted to know precisely why tick-tock uh where there's dancing videos and not necessarily the great the best place for enterprise security content uh why tic talk um so the reason i got started on tik tok was during the pandemic and one of my friends got me into it he was on it back then i think it was more of a dancing app or at least starting to change a little bit and he convinced me to start creating some videos

and it didn't start off as security content i was just kind of posting random stuff had a chick-fil-a video go go viral but after that you i kind of saw the growth and then eventually made a new account to do the security content so i like it just because it's very easy to grow get your name out there get your content out there so this is slightly dramatic i apologize but last time i was at b-sides about two years ago presenting i just found out two days prior i had cancer it was kind of a very tough time for me and during chemo tick tock actually was one of the things that made me really happy it's

very easy to use there's silly videos and so coming out of that whole cancer experience i'm all better now but coming out of that i was like i'm going to make some videos on tick tock i'm going to give back a little bit to the thing that i enjoyed so much and i didn't start with security content i just started with stupid nerd stuff but i slowly gravitated to security content and i saw that there was a really big appetite especially from like college and high school students to learn how to get into this field and so that i found that really fun to do and a really interesting way to give back thank you serena i'd love to hear from

you yeah so very similar um well not quite as similar to kyle but um downloading tick tock over the pandemic and at the time there really wasn't a lot of tech creators in general and definitely not a lot of cyber security or networking so you had a lot of like developers i think at the time but anything else was kind of lacking um and so some people you know when we started posting a lot of us started posting around the same time and we're very baby and you know had some videos go um pretty viral and that was great because it kind of was like oh like there's an interest for this here and it

kind of pushes you to think a little bit more creatively and see what you can really do in 60 seconds but overall my favorite part of it has been like the community and that's why i continue to do it is because i've just met so many great people along the way and have made great friendships and connections and i i think it was a great opportunity thank you serena so as many don't know it's kind of a grind to make content on tick tock all the time has to be pretty consistent um and i can't imagine how hard it is to make consistent security content all the time um i would love to hear you guys

thoughts on being security professionals and having this tick tock gig going how does that go for you guys how do you keep up with the content grind uh andrew we'd love to hear from you i definitely post less now than i did before um but yeah i think you know for me uh i i am a big uh fan of creating things i do a lot of circuit board projects and other kind of like nerdy projects so i think just for me i like creating and whether that's a video or a project i get a thrill out of that so making a video showing off my projects is just kind of rewarding because i get

to document it i get to share it but yeah i think i definitely put probably way too much effort into creating my videos um then maybe i should because i don't think it's necessarily required on tick tock to you know put a lot of effort into things you can just kind of record in the app and and upload it but i usually edit it off off the app first but yeah it's just i like creating things so i keep doing it i think i'm very different from you andrew and that i try to create my content as quickly as humanly possible like the least amount of effort i can put into it the better which works for my really busy schedule

and i think early on i was like one a day or two a day i had to do it had to do it and then at some point i just was like you have to give yourself a break it can be really stressful to to set these artificial limits yourself so i just now i just do it when i want to and when it makes me happy and i'm a lot happier making the content now than i was before when i had that schedule yeah i would say um the same as kyle i i try and do it as quickly as i can um but i think for a lot of creators in the beginning

there is a ton of incentive and it's very exciting and you come up with all your ideas and then your ideas become like more and more sparse uh i mean this has been at least my experience has become more and more sparse as you put everything out because you're pushing out stuff so quickly and so you know for youtube if you think of youtube a creator might have maybe one two videos a week that they put a good amount of effort in but that's really only two ideas for tick tock they want you posting very consistently daily or multiple times a day so i've had to completely revamp the way that i have approached creating content

and um it's worked out for me really well just coming up with ideas and kind of planning things out a little bit better um but yeah it's it's it's a grind for sure thank you um on top of keeping it creative keeping it consistent uh you have to keep it engaging so with security awareness it can be hard to keep it engaging especially for a younger audience 33 of tick tock i believe is under 19 if that's correct so how do you keep it engaging for such a young audience well i think if you make an entertaining video it's going to appeal to anyone well maybe not anyone but i think i think you'll find

uh depending on your content you'll find people of all demographics tick tock doesn't provide um analytics on age so i don't know how many of my followers or her viewers are in the young category but yeah i think you just make it entertaining maybe stuff relatable i don't know how close security can get that to the to them but early on in my uh tiktok career if you want to call it that um i was doing a lot of security tag videos like the one that you saw at the beginning that was actually just my first one that so a stitch in tick tock is where you take someone's video and you add your sort of response to it

so that was a stitch to that girl asking what's something that feels legal to know and i was like oh i know a lot of things that feel illegal to know after watching a lot of defcon talks and uh so i did that and then uh just the response was overwhelming uh so many comments talking about uh i think the top comment on that was walmart ain't ready for me tomorrow and uh so i was like oh yeah i like security tags i like the physics behind it so let me just kind of dive into it more and um yeah we'll talk about later why i stopped posting that kind of content but um yeah i think you just make it engaging

you want people to comment you want people to share so yeah this is actually where tick tock has influenced my professional life the most um so the video i shared was like really quick where i talked about the new york times and that video went mega viral like 26 million views is probably the thing i've done that'll be seen the most in my entire life but there were some weird side effects of going that that viral and one of them was my mom saw that video and didn't know it was me until later when my sister shared it with her and was like wait that's my son but so then we had a conversation she

called me about it and we had the most lucid conversation about what i do as a professional that i've ever had with her she was like so your job is making things in the browser do things they're not supposed to i was like yes oh my god you get it and so now when i do things on tiktok or when i do things for security education at work i'm trying to make them as simple as possible because the fact that my mom who knows very little about the internet very little about hackers was able to connect that dot to me was like revolutionary and that changed my thinking about content especially security content going forward after

that yeah um sorry what was the question again i haven't answered the correct one no worries um it's how to keep your content engaging especially since it's surrounding security awareness for your uh for your audience yeah i think um i think a lot of people are more interested in cyber security than you think i think that the way that corporate does cyber security is ineffective and boring and if you think of like a lot of content that younger people watch it's or you would assume younger people watch which is true but it also appeals to a much broader age range like how youtube videos are set up and things like that um you know just keeping it interesting and

teaching them something and letting them them know like the how behind something so if you think of like a corporate phishing email it's like okay this is boring like don't click a link but if you talk about like what's happening on the back end that's way more interesting because they're like oh okay cool like you're learning something aside from like don't click a sketchy looking link you know so and another thing that i do is i just experiment a lot so i try and create a bunch of different type of content to see kind of what does really well what responds what doesn't and then you know navigate and adjust my videos from there but you'd always be surprised

a lot of times um highly produced videos might not do well but a video that i say something really dumb in in 15 seconds does really well so it's it's hard to tell honestly thank you so uh on top of keeping it engaging creative uh you're you're posting for a community a community um and i wanted to know uh what about having that audience on tick tock versus youtube twitter instagram what drew all of you to that platform when there were so many choices out there to build a community which you all three have quite i think tick tock so tick tock's competitors right now are instagram reels which came after tick tock and youtube shorts which just came after

tick tock tick tock came from musically um i think vine was probably like the first short form video platform but um i think just having like a short form video platform is appealing to a lot of people especially to the younger generation just because you don't have to sit there for 10 minutes even though i'll sit there for an hour and scroll through tick tocks but you don't have to if you just want to watch one or two videos you can you have that choice so i think that was tick-tock success they were kind of like the first ones although like vine was like six seconds so a little longer i think you need to engage

people and their algorithm in terms of like recommending videos to you is so good uh you know after you have to like once you sign up you just have to like feed it a little bit and then it'll just like start pushing you videos that you never knew you wanted to watch and i think that's partly um how we're able to get to our audience is because um tick tock has so much data on what you interact with you know i follow kyle so like sometimes a video will be recommended to me and i'll see i'll see that he commented on it so yeah i think their algorithm is just really good and they're also really good

at just finding your audience for you i think the social aspect of the video creation is really fun too where like andrew makes a prompt i respond to it and then people ask questions and he can answer questions i can answer questions and you can just from like one moment in time you can make create kind of hundreds of videos around a bunch of different creators and it kind of draws people in where they're like oh you can you can go down a rabbit hole and tick-tock very quickly you're like i like this thing let's watch more more more more more and suddenly you realize oh i want to go into cyber security i didn't know that but this is amazing and

so i like i hear that feedback a lot from people who found not just my videos but sort of the communities videos on the topic and they're like suddenly very invested in pursuing that as a career path which i think is really cool yeah mine's i mean i just started using tik tok like i used other platforms so i mean i had used instagram i had used twitter um i had used facebook right and so i just started using tiktok like the way that i would have used those platforms but in that medium if that makes sense so obviously being like in your mid-20s um you're very online very social media and so i mean at the time i only had 50

followers on twitter and i had you know a couple thousand on instagram and then i started making tick tocks and and i didn't really expect um the response that i received um but you know sometimes you just find something that you're good at or that resonates with a lot of people and you just keep pursuing it because it's like oh this is you know i'm doing something right this is working and it's great and i'm having a lot of fun doing it and so i kind of more just like stumbled upon it i didn't really i didn't start take talk as a creator i started as more of just like an average user and then became a creator if that

makes sense i just want to add something real quick um tiktok definitely has like a culture so when i was talking about those other platforms i don't know how much of a culture there is on those platforms but as kyle was talking about there's like trends so like you know there might be a they call them sounds but it's really like the song that's on a video might be like going viral for some weird reason but you can go down the rabbit hole and seeing everyone do the trends so there's definitely a culture on tiktok that i love thank you guys for your answers so you guys have all built up a community on tiktok and as you mentioned

before you're often showing vulnerabilities that they can exploit um to hundreds of thousands of followers how do you guys go about showing those vulnerabilities and handling showing that to so many people it's hard um so i think we're gonna get to the some of the moderation stuff later but i i i did probably months maybe six months or so of like showing different security tags and how to exploit them and that sort of thing tick tock doesn't really want you to do that they don't really want you to show how to exploit something even though i would have like a disclaimer on my videos saying you know educational purposes only um those only worked so far

um but some videos were removed again it's i kind of thought about it as like lock picking like lock picking isn't illegal it's only illegal if you're picking someone else's lock so if i show you how to open a security tag like don't use that for like malicious purposes but like if you're interested like me i know i like to know how things work i like to reverse engineer i like to find exploits that sort of thing that's all good don't do it you don't take money out of someone else's hand and you know don't harm a business but you know i think just because tick tock has billions of users or whatever it's like they just

are trying to play it on the safe side and uh they don't want you to do that kind of thing um so it's been hard uh i think you can talk about vulnerabilities without showing how to do it but i i like to show how to do it so like i said i got a lot of videos removed i think i learned like i've been having a real struggle with this i mean i'm sure if you follow me on tick tock or twitter um you know that i've had a struggle with tech talk and removing my videos like most recently they removed a video and it's not even just when it comes to vulnerabilities like they removed a

video that i created on nmap um which is you know it's just nmap it's a ip scanning and and cert you know anyway so i did a video on nmap and then that was removed and then there was another video that i did on password spring where i just talked about what password spraying was and like a little fact or a little tip that you could do to help detect if there's password spraying in your environment and that one got removed and so it's really frustrating because my idea is like i would like to get to people who are interested in these things and i'd like to get into them early before they seek out

um this type of advice from you know more of a negative area on the internet um and get them into a like a path that can provide them a great job with great money and um just by following their interests but in a positive community right and so it's definitely very frustrating i don't show any active exploits i mean to be completely honest and i'm sure a lot of people would understand that showing an exploit fully in 60 seconds would be almost impossible depending if you're just instead of you're just like i'm going to get this thing off github and then download it and exploit it that way um so there's a lot of stuff that goes

on before making the video that i make that um you don't see so the full picture really isn't there but you'll walk away with an understanding of how it works if that makes sense that does thank you serena and you were talking about those positive outcomes of having such a large community and interacting with them i imagine almost daily weekly um do you guys have any stories of positive outcomes of having that community success stories people getting into security stuff like that i kind of stumbled my way into content about job descriptions because people have been asking me about how to find entry-level jobs and i went to look for entry-level jobs and couldn't really

find good ones and sort of it was an education for me so i started doing a series breaking down really bad entry-level jobs and giving people the signals of like this is not entry level ignore this kind of job and i got a lot of really great positive feedback from people that it helped refine their search and so i get really happy when i get linkedin messages as like hey i found the job i got my first cyber security job that's like a little victory moment for me and they always make me happy and i've had enough of them that like that's what keeps me going making the tick tock content obviously i got to know kyle through

tick tock it was really awesome seeing his video go viral and then removed how long was it down for six days it was down for six days i think that during that time it was probably new york times like scrambling to fix their vulnerability i don't know if it's it would be a vulnerability but yeah how do you remember how long it took him to fix that it was like two weeks actually yeah so you could you used to be able to use that trick uh to read an article but not anymore thanks to kyle so yeah it was awesome he had so many shares on that video the like the pay well paywall technology got so much

better after that video went viral like they used to be so full of holes and now i it kind of pisses me off because i'm on my ipad and i can't i can't do everything i used to do but it actually did cause a lot of these platforms to improve their paywall technology which was interesting yeah i think part of my favorite thing about tiktok is like just seeing like uh that tell me your hacker video uh got a lot of like people like kyle like stitching it and kind of giving their response so i've i've become like internet friends with a bunch of people through that yeah definitely i mean i i've i've done

giveaways and things um i've partnered with other creators to give away classes on wireshark and ccna i we i partnered with the duck bill group to give away 10 ccna vouchers for people who are interested in taking the exam and then partnered with david bumble to provide them with all of the courses that they would need to help pass that exam so truly like i really just keep trying to funnel people in as much as i can depending and it doesn't really matter where they are um in their journey into tech but yeah it's been great i mean i definitely get a lot of dms especially from women which is fantastic um just saying that hey like i wasn't sure if i

wanted to go into tech because you hear so many negative things but you know watching your content has helped me and i that is obviously my favorite too because i'm just like yeah like welcome please come i love that thank you serena um as you mentioned you get a lot of messages from women trying to get into the field uh something we know about tick tock it is not without controversy especially for women and we've talked about the moderation it's an uphill battle for you guys so i was wondering um as content creators how can we uh discuss the the struggles you guys have faced individually with the platform and being content creators and getting stuff take down taken down

because you're showing vulnerabilities or whatever it may be so i think there's a couple thoughts here one i think you know a lot of the stuff that i used to post i think is in the gray area of stuff that used of things that tick tock wants or doesn't want on the platform so i've kind of moved on from showing those things and i'm okay with that i think my biggest wish is for them to improve their moderation i think they've got a good set of community guidelines and i think all their intentions are good but i think you know anything at scale is a problem in trying to moderate millions of videos uploaded i read the transparency report this

morning i think in the last quarter there was something like 90 million videos that got taken down and uh i think half of them were by automated means so and i remember a transparency report last year that said i think it was five percent of those taken down were false positives and i'm just like oh my god that's that's how many videos that are like being taken down that that shouldn't have been and as a creator uh you know you might put a lot of time and effort into your content and when it gets taken down it kind of just like hurts a little bit especially if it's like something that is innocent so i think there's some

room to grow for the moderation to i don't know if it'd be involving more humans one of the other thought i had is you know some of it's automated some of it's being reported by users and i think there's a lot of content being taken off the platform that should not be on there whatsoever but then you have people that just kind of get targeted uh for whatever reason and you know you can just report anyone's video so i don't know what they have in place to fight mass reporting or anything like that but i'm hoping that they get better at you know trolls uh from reporting yeah there's definitely uh people who have alluded to potentially my videos getting

mass reported and taken down and that is a possibility for sure and i can't really say that if that if that's true or not i don't know um but i do see this problem with other content creators in the cyber security space who are not me so obviously hopefully they would have some type of system in place that mass reporting um you know wouldn't cause so much uh disturbance in my videos i don't know um but it seems to me like a lot of things that to get taken down are things that show terminal or command line in my videos which is super interesting so i'm going to be experimenting with that for the next few weeks

um because it just seems that's like some videos when i'm just explaining something's fine but the second i bring up like a terminal it becomes an issue and it gets taken down so that's just something interesting that i have kind of found myself but you know a lot of my videos i don't think they're in a gray area i think that they should be out there i'm not showing things that um people shouldn't know i think it helps people to know those things to better their cyber security practices even as just an individual a non-tech person just to understand some of these concepts and how these things were their moderation is very frustrating and the human component can be interesting

because when you talk about hacking or hackers it obviously comes with a very negative connotation for a lot of people and it doesn't need to be negative right because there's a lot of pen testers um or white hat or whatever people that are doing hacking for a positive way to earn money legally and things like that so you could get a moderator who just is like hacking spat no and they they're not really digesting the video per se or understanding the implications so that can be kind of an interesting thing to deal with even with a human moderator is just the idea of hacking and maybe their bias or a preconceived idea of hacking i think i get frustrated with kind of a

different thing which is there i spend a non-zero amount of time self-moderating the comments of my videos because there is a huge part of our community that is just gatekeeping and that i i get really frustrated with that because i make a video try to make it really simple entry level for people who might be interested in the field and in the comments people start talking down to other people who are interested in this kind of simple content and i hate that because we have such a pipeline problem in cyber security of getting people into the field you know there's so many unfilled jobs and if we have people at the front lines kind of gatekeeping and turning

people off of the field i find that really problematic so it you know it doesn't violate tick tocks guidelines but it kind of violates my personal guidelines so i have to do a lot of comment deletion and blocking to kind of try and maintain the positivity and you know help people not get discouraged yeah and one note on top of that kyle um i think compared to youtube like for whatever reason take talk you just get a ton of comments like base base if you look at a similar view on youtube to tick talk um tic toc just has so many comments and before the last maybe six months or a year there was pretty much like no moderation

for comments on tick tock and now they've gotten like slightly better but um the comment section could probably have its own talk on its own because it's so chaotic sometimes thank you guys so uh you guys are all security professionals um it's not without its challenges and you have to turn out content all the time keep it engaging why do you continue to do this what's the upside especially as you guys are all established professionals in this field um like i said before earlier i just like creating things and my day job has nothing to do with what i post on tick tock so i um i always have another project kind of going on so i'm always

i always have something to post about i think i enjoy kind of the ancillary opportunities that it opens up um like i met you because of my tic toc posting uh nist reached out to me which i thought was really fun to say you know we really enjoy your content we can't say publicly we enjoy your content because you use tik-tok and that's a problem for us but keep going and here's some resources we might want you to talk about maybe and so like stuff like that is really interesting to me where it's like tiktok is really good at building a big audience that a lot of the platforms other platforms struggle to reach like

really young people and so i think tick tock is really unique and so that's why i kind of just focus on like i have no real interest in youtube or other platforms i just enjoy tick tock it's really fun yeah and i really enjoy the interactions that i have with people for the most part i mean obviously there are some negative but overall the people that i meet through doing it and i get to learn a lot while doing it myself overall i think there's just so much more benefit for me to do it and i enjoy it so luckily it's it works out well when you love doing the thing that brings you a lot of other benefits

thank you serena so uh for people who might be in the audience looking to do the same uh make videos on security content what is your guys's advice for getting started and navigating all of the things you guys have discussed today who is on tick tock raise your hand watches your videos oh cool yeah i wish there were more hands up um but yeah i i think you know there's there's people who are just on the platform to to watch and that's perfectly fine um but uh my advice is if you think you have something interesting to say or show go ahead and like make a video i totally understand with this crowd if you don't

want to put something else on the internet i totally get that but um if you have a fun hobby i watched a video the other day it was someone scraping beeswax off of i don't know what you call that but honeycomb just scraping the wax off of it and it was like i was like i can't believe i'm watching this and i watched the whole thing and then like it was just it was a viral video like for understandable reasons it was just like looked really awesome so i think tick tock is uh also a good platform because there's just so much exposure to the things that you never get to see in your life uh there's

a guy i don't know i think he's from some south american country but he was like weaving blankets on a live and it was just thousands of people in this live like watching this guy weave blankets and there's so much out there so if you think you have anything interesting um to show post it and and even if you don't think it's interesting someone else might so maybe it's something like routine that you do but if i would also say if you're very passionate about what you're doing i think that helps kind of like deliver your message like hey i really find this interesting um yeah i think also tick-tock makes you a better communicator because the out the way the

algorithm works with the platform it's very honest about like did people watch your video or not how long did they stay interested did they comment did they share it with a friend and so you start to realize like the way you might be speaking and the way you might be communicating may not hold people's attention and as you get better you start to realize oh there's ways that i can be more interesting more captivating tell a better story and so that translates directly into my day job and there's a bunch of accounts i follow on tick tock that have nothing to do with what i'm interested in they're like 22 year olds who are in college but i

think their presentation style is so much better than mine that i watch everything they do because i'm learning a ton from how they communicate to the world and i i just love that yeah i agree both those are great points um there's two there's people that follow me there's one person who is a pilot for a major airline and he follows my content i follow his content and i've never flown a plane but you know it's just interesting to learn about some of the aviation stuff and the way that he presents it i'm like wow this is cool so definitely love to see other people's style in presenting really interesting things i mean there are accounts on tick

tock that'll have like i think i came across an account a cleaning account and all this account does is does like house cleaning and they have like 5 million followers because some people are just like oh learning cleaning tips for your home or just it's satisfying watching something that's like super messy be really clean and see the potential in a space so like whatever you're passionate about in your hobby just post it there um there's another cyber security creator his name's crypto the llama and he got i think almost like 400 000 followers and he never showed his face in a video so that's another way too if you're not interested being you know front and

center in front of a camera i get that there's been times where i've stopped posting for a while just because i just didn't want to be on camera um there's a ways around that too so it's really up to you and you know just keep posting if you're interested in it and whatever you decide really krypto does have his picture when his profile picture which is funny though because yeah he never shows his face except his profile picture yeah i would also just say it's really really easy to get started with tick tock content like i've never used anything else except my phone i use the editor in the app i use my phone to take

all the videos i don't invest a lot of energy into it and i've been very successful and it's like you can get started for no money at all yeah agreed thank you guys so we're about to wrap up um i just wanted to open up to q a discussing everything we've talked to our creators about today the controversy the community the creativity uh if anyone has any questions

and uh we sent a link on twitter with that slide do thing do do you know if we have anyone moderating that because i hope so hi i'm jackie uh so i've been tracking advanced like nation state actors for the past 10 years and so it just really makes me wonder what you're thinking about when you use a platform that is in part owned by the chinese government as security professionals sorry it's the elephant in the room i mean um the americans should make a better platform the platform's awesome right it's great so i did a um final paper for my master's program on tick tock and kind of the controversy around the chinese government and it owning

tick tock as a platform and honestly a lot of it was a political campaign um there was a lot of money spent on anti-tick tock uh rhetoric and campaigns and ads and content i mean we're talking like hundreds and thousands of dollars spent from political campaigns on anti-tick talk ads i think this is this started happening coincidentally around when tick-tock took uber's place as the number one startup and i think you know if you look at tick tock itself they have done so much and i am so critical of them like if you follow me on twitter you know i'm very critical of them but i do want to you know correct information or misconceptions because they're so

transparent now i mean tick tock is not available as an application in china none of tick tock servers are in china all of them are based in the us um or singapore and there's a headquarters in the u.s they show they have their source code available for you to check out yourself if you're interested they publish your transparency reports um i personally as a cyber security person and if we're talking about risk i'm less concerned with tick-tock and more concerned with like our power plants if we're really gonna get into the conversation of security and um nation-state actors but that's just me i i've done a decent amount of research on it mainly because i had the same question and kind

of came up with like all right this seems like there's some other motivations happening here um with just people disliking china and the government of china and not being very happy that they had a successful startup in america basically

got a question over here yeah it sounds like you have some understanding of who watches your videos through kind of anecdotal experiences comments stuff like that people say hey it helped me out but i'm wondering um does tic toc like twitter or youtube have any kind of analytical tools that help you understand who's watching your videos who the audience is even you know like maybe you post a video and people drop out in the first four seconds that that kind of thing like how deep into the weeds can you get with like demographics and how people watch your content and consume it they're definitely getting better uh there's a new release i don't have it

yet but it's it's kind of got like the youtube analytics where you can see drop off like when that happens so they just started pushing that out do you know if you have that yet i can see uh male versus female like percentage-wise mine's about 70 30 70 male 30 female which is interesting because when you sign up for tick tock you never put your gender in there so how are they how are they assigning your gender that's very interesting to know we don't know age although if you do have a tick doc business account or you sign up for ads or something you can see that information because you're trying to target certain ages

you get to see your country or where your people are from i'm only about 60 u.s which is very weird but some videos kind of get pushed out to to other countries that's kind of like the basic information you can see average watch time the percentage of people who watch the full video but they are getting better at their analytics

great other questions from the group here okay well um closing house back to you question for you you write a lot about tick tock i've noticed that what got you interested in tick tock because you're not a you're not a content creator but you you tend to write about it well i didn't expect a question for myself um yeah i don't know i'm interested in technology i majored in information systems and i became a journalist after college because i liked writing more about technology than uh creating technology um tick-tock is a formidable platform i used to not take it seriously and i was in college not that long ago it was you know a platform for people my age i did not

take it seriously i thought uh it's for people who are even younger than me but once i got into it um my mentor actually she was like you need to start making tick tocks now and i was like i'm never gonna do that um but she was right people were blowing up as you guys all did um not really expecting to it's it's a very formidable platform and i don't think it's gonna go away any time soon i think it's only gonna get stronger and not only that the people i've written about on tiktok and why i met kyle was because my editor tick tocks was like wow look at this look at what they're creating and look

at everyone's responses so i thought that was interesting these people who are blowing up on tick tock and then the comments of people who are my age and younger like wow i learned a lot from this can you tell me more and um people engaging with it uh i think it's only gonna get bigger from here and i think we're gonna see more creators who are you know security uh professionals uh maybe ceos that would be funny i think it's just gonna get bigger so that's why i chose to write about tik tok and people like kyle thank you guys oh we see another question in the crowd

thank you uh so with tick tock content you have the inherent limit of like 10 10 minute videos right now and you miss some of the context around like a blog where you can technically detail something for security or a screen share from your pc where you can show kind of hacker tools or infosec tools what are strategies you guys use to build the content but still be very technical i think the limitations are actually a strength and i've never created a video over a minute and i never will like i like the one minute limitation uh and so some of my more technical videos i'll take a a bug bounty report from like you know a transparent hacker

one report and i'll break that down for people like here's how the attacks work here's how they found the bug here's what it means and you can actually you know with with crisp editing you can explain a lot of technical details in a minute i think it's actually a really good exercise to see how you can be more simple i just want to add that uh one thing to remember about tick tock is usually people aren't searching for content on tick tock you're not you know you might go to youtube and you're like how to use nmap right but you're not doing that on tick tock so you also kind of have to like come up from a point of

view where this the people aren't really searching for this content they're just getting it delivered to them so i think depending on the content you maybe there's some content that doesn't belong on tiktok like if it's a tutorial um it might not have the biggest reach where it would like on youtube where people are searching for that sort of thing and then i also just kind of think that you know there's i think there's a time limit for just on what type of video you want to make like um one of the recent projects i did was hacking harry potter wands and someone wanted to get a tutorial on how i did uh one of them and i was like oh man i

don't think i was gonna do very well but it's like a four minute video and it's it's doing pretty good so i think if you kind of structure it right um and if it's appropriate for tick tock you don't have to like worry about is this what something's searching for then it'll be okay cool thank you all right oh we got a question i really love this active audience here this is good stuff

hi um i have a question around being a security kind of informer educator versus an influencer it sounds like the three of you create a lot of educational content which is amazing we need more people in the security space do you foresee yourself trying to [Music] become like more of an influencer trying to influence security trends trying to influence better security posture using kind of your platform in that direction is that something you've considered or see anyone trying to go in that

direction i get contacted occasionally for sponsored content and i tend to just ignore it all like i have a job that i really enjoy and that's where i make my money so i don't do tick-tock to to make money or to be an influencer and i kind of don't intend to and i'm happy with that because i think it lets me keep my content really clean like i decide what i talk about and don't have to take edits from anybody else yeah i i do take sponsorship so i'm a little bit different but i'm very very picky on the sponsorships that i take so i've worked with um like esa and nvidia aws um all companies that i am familiar with

and have used and can attest to just as a person because again we are all professionals too so i don't want to put my name on something that would discredit me um or make me look bad i'm not using take talk to make money um but it definitely is somebody who also had recently graduated college and has some student loan debt i'm like all right cool i'll take definitely a few sponsorships um to help with that and also kind of i don't know i don't want to say it motivates me to make content but it's like okay you know like if anything goes wrong if i lose my job it is another way that i could potentially at least pay

some bills if needed luckily it hasn't come to that but um has helped me pay down my student loans so i'm very grateful for that as far as being an influencer um i'm not entirely sure like ultimately i think that word just means different things for different people like what i do sign contracts uh sponsorship contracts there are influence or contracts a lot of the time um it'll say that or something like similar to that um i'm here to make like educational videos and talk about security stuff um my idea of influencing is just influencing people into the field so that's hopefully what i'm doing excellent all right well we are out of time um

thank you very much uh audience y'all been tremendous as well tremendous amount of talent yeah please give me a hand thank you right