Pablo Escobar, Startups and Cyber Security
*let me start by saying that this post is not intended by any means to admire Pablo Escobar’s actions, he was a criminal, a drug dealer and worst he was a murderer; it’s supposed to be a cynical point of view and share some of my insights as an entrepreneur and founder.
Shall we begin?
When it comes to creating companies and especially startups, your biggest asset is people and this is also the biggest challenge as an entrepreneur.
You start with small team, usually 2–4 founders who create the initial prototype and vision and then start “begging” for seed money; Assuming you have moved beyond this phase you then start recruiting people.
After 3 years co-founding my own startup I must admit that this is the biggest challenge, bring to the company high quality people, make them believe in the vision, believe in you as a leader and make them work for/with you 24x7 to achieve together the ultimate goals.
Pablo Escobar was a people person, this was probably the biggest difference between him and other drug dealers and this is why he was so successful in his “domain”.
He wanted a scalable business from the very beginning and in order to achieve that he needed a lot of people, people he can trust, people who would risk their lives for him, making them believe that his business is the most important thing on this planet, very similar to startups.
Money is not the key
In the last few years I have interviewed dozens of people and I can tell you that money is not the main incentive for people to work for you, they want to feel they are part of a bigger mission, they want to feel an important player and meaningful to the company, so only paying high salaries would not make them run sprint together with you.
Leadership is about Everyday Actions
From my experience people are always on observing mode and as a leader and manager you must act accordingly, you need to be very professional, speak confidently and have solutions, it would be better of course if you have technical low level expertise to make better judgement calls and you would also get the “respect” needed in ego environment, you need to assume you get judged by your employees every single day.
When it comes to Cyber Security, intelligence is a key factor to a success both from a defender and adversary point of view.
In the real world if you have bad intelligence people die, in the virtual cyber world important data is stolen, people’s lives can be totally ruined and even die as well.
The common advantage of criminals and cyber adversaries is the fact they are always one step ahead, they are more creative, they are constantly evolving, they have zero bureaucracy and therefore much faster.
On season 2 episode 4 Pablo used a deception to deal with the search bloc and even kill the head of it, Horacio Carrillo. He sent a false information to one of Peña’s CI so he can ambush and kill them all; Deception is a very effective way for defenders and offensive hackers to achieve their goals without the other side knows about it.
HUNT or BE HUNTED
Season 2 is all about capturing Escobar, Pablo knew it and he turns the table by moving into the hunter role.
There is a small percentage of organizations who have the hunter mindset, organizations who are really paranoid to assume malware and hackers are already in their network and must be found constantly, this naive “feature” makes them really vulnerable and easy target.
We should be worried
I deal everyday with cyber criminals attacks and the technological gap between them and defenders is still too big, defenders think mainly about their job security and driven by compliance.
Adversaries are doing hard complex research everyday to bypass any vendor solution and their financial incentive is growing, Ransomware is just the current trend to monetize malware but be certain we’ll have many more.
