There is no denying what food can do to our health. However, sometimes, there is a great misconception about how eating healthy is about limiting yourself to bland and tasteless foods. Proving it wrong, Dr. Diane Hamilton sits down with Jean-Marc Fullsack, the Executive Chef instructor at the University of San Francisco. Jean-Marc takes us into the world of healthy and delicious cuisines and how he trains others to do the same and serves people—which includes the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy and Steve Jobs—food that makes them healthy and happy. He then shares how he has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and how he is overcoming it.
While the internet has provided us more means to reach others, it also has paved the way for many loopholes that make us vulnerable to attacks. Learn how to protect yourself as Dr. Diane Hamilton talks to David Barnes, Global CEO and Co-founder of Zulu Labs, where he published the first algorithm to programmatically check if a domain is secured from being used in a spoof attack. Here, David helps us understand domain (DMARC) when it comes to email, spam, cybersecurity, and more. Listen in to know how you can keep yourself secured and protected.
I’m glad you joined us because we have Jean-Marc Fullsack and David Barnes here. Jean-Marc is an Executive Chef Instructor at the University of San Francisco. He’s been a guest chef at the White House. He’s done a lot of amazing work in that industry. David Barnes is the Global CEO and Cofounder of Zulu Labs. He’s going to teach us something about security and who’s sending you that email? It’s going to be an interesting show.
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Cooking Healthy Cuisine With Jean-Marc Fullsack
I am here with Jean-Marc Fullsack, who was born in France, where he trained in classical French cuisine. He is an Executive Chef Instructor at the University of San Francisco. You’ve probably seen his work with Dr. Ornish. He’s been a celebrity chef at the White House. I’m trying to think of all the things I’ve seen him do. I’m excited to have Chef Jean-Marc here. Welcome. Â
Thank you very much, Diane. Thank you for having me on your show.
I was looking forward to it. You’ve done some interesting things. You’ve had quite exciting life experiences. I was looking at your list of all the people you’ve cooked for. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to cook for Jacqueline Kennedy or Steve Jobs. I want to get a little bit of a background on you if I could so that people know a little bit more about what led to your success. Â
I was classically trained in France. I did an apprenticeship and going to the Hotel and Restaurant School. I started working at the farm and a hotel. It was also a hunting lodge. It’s close to nature and it was an interesting experience. I moved to New York at a young age and I was fortunate to work at Lutèce, which at the time was one of the best restaurants in the world. I met my Master Chef where you learn the most. I worked with Andre Soltner there. It was fascinating and I learned a lot. I lived in New York for three years. In the ’70s, New York was very much an urban jungle. After New York, I moved to New Mexico.
In New Mexico, did you still work as a chef? What did you do then?
I’d worked as a chef. I worked in a little restaurant. In New Mexico at the time, there were not too many restaurants in the ’70s. We did love this restaurant. We had relations with farmers and people raise our deal and we used to fly fish from the East Coast. They never had fresh fish at that time in New Mexico. We used to make our own bread. It was very much connected with farm to table restaurant. It was fascinating. It was great to work there, but I felt like I needed to learn more. I reached a plateau there and then I moved to California.
That’s when you eventually worked with Dean Ornish. I’m curious how that developed.
When I moved to California, I was cooking classical French cuisine, which is the food to die for with lots of calories and butter, as Julia Child would say. I worked at the Metropolitan Club. It’s the largest woman club on the West Coast. Working in a woman club, there was some dietary issue. I worked as a nutritionist and creating healthy dishes. I realized then, you could apply the classical technique and make your food taste good. I learned how to cook healthy cuisine. One of the members had created one of the first cooking schools in California, which was the California Culinary Academy. Her name was Danielle Carlisle. She asked me to go and teach at the school which I did. When I came to this school, they had no real nutrition classes. In France, it takes two years to become a chef and they do include nutrition. I said, “You need to have nutrition.” She said, “We don’t know how to do it.” I said, “I know how.” We then created a class there and we had a restaurant there that serves healthy foods. Dr. Ornish heard about that. He contacted me and wanted me to work for him, which was funny. I did not want to work for him first because his diet was strict.
He was vegetarian with no added fats and he asked me if I could cook lunch for him. I said, “Yeah, sure. I can cook lunch for you.” He said, “I want you to work for me.” I told him, “I’m not a vegetarian. I eat steak and I smoke cigarettes.” I was the typical French, which I stopped, thank God. He kept on insisting. He said, “If you don’t come, my patients are going to die. I need you to come.” I said, “Fine. I’ll come in and help set you up in your program.” When I started to cook for him, I realized the impact food had on people. He was doing his early research and you could see patients who their health would improve and they will get so much better. It’s fascinating what foods can do to your health.
Eventually, I became a vegetarian for eight years. I realized that if I became a vegetarian, I would have to learn how to cook vegetarian better because I can understand the craving. Interestingly, I worked for twelve years for Dean. Cooking without fat is difficult. He trains you on how to bring flavor in foods. When his research got published, we traveled all over the world to train chefs and we ended up working at the White House. We trained all the chefs at The White House from Air Force One to Camp David, where I made mochi to the White House and the Navy Mess. It was fascinating.
Not only have you worked there, but you’ve cooked for the House of Representatives, the US Senate, and the US Navy. You received the Walter Reed Medal for Outstanding Performance for your work with the Walter Reed Medical Center. You train private and corporate chefs and celebrities around the world. You’ve had quite a background.
It was fascinating and interestingly when I went to the White House, the kitchen in the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy made it a historical monument. It’s still like Jacqueline Kennedy’s time.
What is it like?
Most things have moved but it’s the same table, the same counter the kitchen looks like when Jacqueline Kennedy left. It was interesting. Each president has their own China. It was a pleasure and it was wonderful.
Which presidents have you cooked for?
It's fascinating what foods can do to your health. Click To TweetIt was under Clinton. At first, he had some health issues and President Clinton is now a vegetarian. He improves his health too.
As you’re talking about being a vegetarian, I’m not a vegetarian, I’m a picky eater. I hate to tell you that. For me, there are certain foods I can’t eat like garlic and onions. I found out I can’t eat later in life and it kills me because I’m Italian and everything I cook has garlic and onions. You were talking about cooking without fats to make things taste good. How do you cook without spices like garlic and onions? I was thinking of some of the best mussels I ever had in my life were in New Mexico, by the way, which was weird. How can you make mussels without garlic and onions though?
Your garlic and onions are essential in Western cooking. You should cook Japanese food then. The Japanese barely eat any garlic and onion in their classical cuisine.
That might be my way except I’m picky. I don’t like vegetables much. I imagine you get a lot of people who are picky when you’re dealing with different restaurants. It has got to kill a chef when you go to the restaurant and you say, “I just want this and want that.” You take out all their stuff. Does that drive you crazy?
Sometimes, but we’re here to serve the people and the chef is all about making people healthy and happy. Once you learn the technique, you learn how to adapt the food to their needs and you make it well.
You were talking about Julia Child. I haven’t seen a whole lot of Oprah shows, but I did see her on Oprah one time. She did an episode where she looked inside the refrigerators of famous people and she had Julia Child and Dom DeLuise on. Dom DeLuise’s refrigerator was great. It had all kinds of food and crazy stuff, but Julia Child had almost nothing in her refrigerator. Did you happen to catch that episode?
No, I have not. She came to one of my classes and she was great. She did complain because I was cooking healthy foods. She was like, “You should put more butter on there.” She was much like her movie, Julia & Julia. She’s an interesting person.
I think of Dan Aykroyd every time I think of Julia Child. He did a great skit. I’m sure you’ve seen the Saturday Night Live skit where he imitates her.
You have to give her credit. She did bring food to America. She changed the food culture in America amazingly indeed.
It’s interesting because my husband is a physician and I worked in pharmaceutical sales for a long time. We talked about what’s healthy. It used to be you don’t want fat. Fat was bad, then fat is good. Is it good or is it bad in your mind?
It says the bad thing now is the sugar. When we cook with Dr. Ornish, his diet was good. It got hijacked by the fast-food industry where they start to make all such fat-free products that are loaded in sugar. That was unhealthy and it backfired completely.
They found the sugar ties into so much heart disease. It’s interesting to follow what’s happening in the healthcare field, but you’ve got such a great background with combining health and great cooking together. We’re talking about the White House. You’ve worked with Martin Mongiello, who was on my show. You did something about introducing a new brand Boca Burger. What is that?
That was a fun event. We did an event with three chefs and we had a 30-course dinner in the period of one hour. It get too many to bring a new dish. Chef Hubert Keller from Fleur de Lys and Chef Michael Lomonaco was the chef of Windows on the World. He was there from New York and he has a very New York personality. I was talking to them to introduce them to the diet. I cannot compete with the chefs. They have big crews. They are doing fancy food. I remember President Clinton jogging to McDonald’s and then I thought he might enjoy a burger. This burger called Boca Burger, which was the first soy burger that came out of Boca Raton, Florida.
We made this burger. We made it with organic bones and some ketchup with low sugar into the dish and some big fries instead of frying them. I never forget it. Michael Lomonaco got upset. He was like, “What is this? You make me come to the White House to cook dinner and you’re going to sell a burger. Are you kidding me?” I said, “Michael, it’s not a regular burger. It’s a soy burger. It’s good for you.” It turned out to be his favorite. The New York Times got ahold of this. They talk about Boca Burger being served at the White House and then this Boca Burger exploded. The new trend food are the vegetable burgers that are coming out and I’m laughing at this like, “I’ve done this many years ago.” They had come a long way and they are getting better and better.
I mentioned that you’ve cooked for Jacqueline Kennedy and Steve Jobs. What was it like to cook for them? What did they like and what did they ask for? How was it?
Jacqueline Kennedy was interesting because she used to come to Lutèce. Richard Nixon used to love to come to Lutèce as well. There was a time when the Republican and the Democrats used to dine together, but Jacqueline Kennedy was fascinating. She had an open kitchen, so you could interact with the guests. She spoke fluently in French. She loved food and she loved to hear how the food was prepared. That’s why she brought a French chef at the White House first because she loved cooking. She’s an amazing lady.
How did she eat the food? She was super thin. Was she eating healthy things or do you remember?
She used to eat everything. Her favorite dessert is frozen raspberries smoothie, and then veal with morel mushrooms was her favorite dish.
How about Steve Jobs? What did he like to eat? He was a vegetarian, wasn’t he?
Steve Jobs was vegan because when he was studying at university, he didn’t have much money. He used to eat with the Hare Krishnas and then he became a vegan. I cooked a vegan brunch for him with Swami Satchidananda. It was the Swami that blessed Woodstock. He was looking at Swami for spiritual guidance when he was coming back to Apple. It was a fascinating lunch. He was an interesting person. He was nice to me. I was lucky he liked me. It was funny because they are playing vegan music in the background and having brunch. It was great.
Any other big names that we would recognize that you’ve cooked for?
I have some but they want to keep it confidential especially at Lutèce. It was the best restaurant in the world so we had all the presidents and even Japanese Emperors used to come.
That must be an amazing experience to do that. I’m curious, what is your favorite recipe to make? It does change, I’m sure. Is there one thing that if you’re stuck on a desert island, you’d want to make all the time?
People ask me this all the time. It’s hard to answer this. It’s like saying, “If you’re a mother with many children, who is your favorite child?” I’m like, “I love them all.” It depends on my mood. I like to eat things that are in season. The cherries are coming out. In summer, young vegetables and asparagus are coming out.
I’m a big dessert fan. I’m curious what your favorite dessert is?
I’m a chocoholic.
It’s hard to beat chocolate. I’ll give you that one. I’m a big banana cream pie fan. I imagine you’ve made a lot of interesting desserts. Do you make traditional things or you try to make them more interesting wild things?
I love fruits in dessert too. I love fruit tarts and fruit pies. Those are my favorite, fruits and chocolates. I specialize in healthy cooking. Desserts are not exactly the best thing because it has sugar.
The sugar part is the hardest part for me to give up, but it’s interesting to look at the fads of what comes and goes. There’s a lot going on right now. Martin and I had worked together on a board for a restaurant hospitality industry company. I know this has been a tough time. You and I were talking about some of the things we might talk about for this show. I was thinking about how has the Coronavirus affected the hospitality industry? Has it affected what you’re teaching and what you’re doing?
The teaching part has been affected because we had to finish the last semester online with Zoom. It was a different experience. We adjusted to it, but it was a shock. It’s tough when you have a certain connection with your students in the classroom and then suddenly you’re separated from them. You see them on the screen like fifteen new faces. It’s also tough to get their attention. You have to change the way you teach to get their attention. For the restaurants, it has been a disaster. For the restaurants and hotels, it’s been tough. It’s problematic because if you removed too many seats in a restaurant, it’s hard to be financially successful. The restaurant will have to change and adapt. We will have to do food-to-go to get some volume. Maybe change the experience of dinning.
The chef is all about making people healthy and happy. Click To TweetWhen you take food-to-go, you bring the experience back to your own house, the experience in the restaurant. It’s in the surviving mode and it’s going to change the way we eat and the way we dine until we find the cure or vaccine, which is heartbreaking for me because hospitality and gastronomy are like art. It reaches and brings people together on the table. You have this connection lost. Technology is also dividing us. I’ve seen this in the classroom with my students with Facebook and the social media.
The obsession is being on their phone constantly. It’s hard to get their attention and multitasking doesn’t work as far as information is retained. I’ve seen this because I’ve been teaching the same class for twenty years. Suddenly I realized like, “What is going on? Those students’ scores are coming down, and yet they are as intelligent as the other students. Why is that?” I had to sometimes ban phones in my class and you have to be strict. Technology is also dividing us. We come to a point where you have a technology that’s dividing us and then we get together to go after gastronomy or eating. These are troubling times.
It’s interesting to see the impact. I interviewed Jenn Nicken, who’s the Founder and CEO of The Chef & The Dish where she’s using technology to bring people from other countries to your table. You work with a chef in Italy and they help you cook a meal and you learn about the culture. It was a cool thing. I did it with my daughters and we did an Italian meal. We made veal. I’m not sure but it was great as I recall. I could see that we could use technology to find out more, but sometimes it can be distracting. I still teach quite a bit for different universities and I do them all through technology. We don’t have to have a burner going on and cooking things together. How do you do that now when you’re on Zoom?
Especially this new generation, they love cooking because they’re living in this digital world where everything is abstract, and then cooking is an organic process and you have to be present because anything can go haywire. They enjoyed this and they love to hear the results. When I stopped and we had to cancel my classes, I asked them to cook at home. They cooked at home and then we cook through Zoom. I asked them to buy the ingredients and then we cooked together through Zoom. Some of them were not prepared. Some of them could not cook at home, which made it interesting.
The first part of the class is the science behind the cooking in right orders, the technique and the science behind cooking. You then apply all this when you cook. You put in the science into practice. Whoever could cook learned much more than the people who could not cook, which is interesting. I’m going to try to require in my next semester, we need to find a way to have access to the kitchen so we can cook together. Surprisingly, they were surprised and you could cook at their own home and come up with these results. The best part was the parents who loved it as well. I’m teaching the students and parents.
Speaking of being a parent, my daughter lives not too far from San Francisco. Her husband works at Apple so they live in Sunnyvale, which isn’t too far from you. I’m sure she’s reading this. She’s going to want to know your favorite restaurants in the San Francisco area. Any favorite Italian, Brazilian, or Lebanese, she likes those foods. Anything you can recommend?
There are many of them. I love Indian food. There is A16 in San Francisco. There is Amber. They’ve run in Palo Alto and San Jose. That was good. I love Chinese food. I love dim sum. It’s hard to recommend one restaurant.
How about Italian? What do you think is the best Italian restaurant in San Francisco? I know it’s hard to pick one.
There is one. I like to go to Napa Valley and I love to go to Bottega in Yountville. It’s far, casual, and great. I love this.
I know there are many restaurants to choose from and it’s always fun to go to that area. I get up there when I worked on the board with DocuSign. I get up to San Francisco quite often. Hopefully, sometime we’ll get a chance to meet. A lot of people are going to be interested in finding out more about you after reading this. Is there some site or some way to follow you if somebody is reading and wants to watch what you’re up to?
It’s through the University of San Francisco. You have to log in. It has all the information and you can start there. I’m starting a little channel. I’m doing some cooking videos on YouTube so that people can have access to this. The University of San Francisco is where you can get ahold of me and find me there. I’ve been teaching there for many years and I love teaching there. I also teach a class with the School of Nursing at the University of San Francisco where we teach healthy cooking. The Hospitality Management Program is where we do events and we train managers. Mostly is not to train cooking, it’s to train the manager of the hotel, but some of the students ended up being a chef. We do some high-end events, and we do fundraising for a homeless shelter that is on St. Ignatius. We take the students from the School of Nursing and then we cook healthy food in the homeless shelter with their budget to show that you can eat healthy at a low budget.
I had Chef Andre on not too long ago. Do you know Chef Andre Rush by chance? He was one that I’ve met through Martin and he cooked at the White House too. When I’ve talked to you, Martin, and Andre, it’s inspiring to see the things that you guys have done in this. All your works are especially inspiring for healthy cooking, for people who don’t have the money to do a lot of this fancy stuff. It’s great what you’re doing. I’m glad you were able to share it on the show. Jean-Marc, it was nice meeting you. Thank you for being on the show.
Thank you, Diane. Thanks for having me.
It was so much fun and you are welcome.
Keeping Yourself Secure From Online Attacks With David Barnes
I am here with David Barnes, who is the Global CEO and Cofounder of Zulu Labs in Melbourne Australia. I’m excited to have you on the show, David.
I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you.
I’m interested in what you’re doing. I know Justin Breen had introduced us and I know that you have created a trusted email center program and you do certain things that you do to keep people from doing email spoofing. You sent me an email that I was like, “What is this?” I want to talk about what you do, but before we get into what you do and what that email was, which I’m still interested in knowing how you did that. Tell me a little background on you and how you got interested in doing this.
After my university days, I was a little bit entrepreneurial. It was in the late ’90s and around the dot-com boom and bust if you recall that. People used to send emails to each other with attachments and jokes. I started filing those email addresses because it seemed like at the time, the more email addresses you had in the carbon copy field, the more friends you had, or it seemed like a popular thing to do. I would take those email addresses and put them into a spreadsheet or write a little application so I could send that emails. Google had come out with their AdSense where they had advertising. I would put links in the mouse when they went out.
I would be sending out hundreds of thousands of emails a week and making quite a decent amount of money off what was probably now called a click fraud and they shut that down quickly. It’s also well-known as spam. I started off as a spammer as I entered my corporate IT career and worked through and that got shut down. I’ve had an interest in an email ever since I suppose. What has come about in many years is an opportunity to not just prevent unauthorized attacks or unauthorized use of one’s email domain.
My prediction is that if every domain was a trusted domain, we would have spam levels probably below 10% down from the 85% levels or about 395 billion messages per day, which is spam or criminal related emails. It’s been a labor of love since school, but it was designed because my parents wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a legitimate email, a spoof, a phishing email, or an attack. I wanted to make it simple enough on a score of 1 to 10 that everybody using the internet can understand. That’s how it all started.
My mom calls me all the time saying her bank said that something’s happening. I’m like, “No, it’s spam. It’s phishing.” Parents believe everything they see. I didn’t realize that 85% was spam. That’s interesting. It’s almost impossible to unsubscribe from a lot of these things?
It’s been such a free for all and what people don’t realize, and it’s a good chance to simplify why it’s been such a problem is if you’re finishing college in the States and you decided to go for a sabbatical in Australia, for example, and you run out of money when you’re on your trip, and this is back in pre-internet. You would write a letter home to mom and dad. You’d put their address on the front so they’re the recipient or the to in this case. It’s from you and asking for some money because you’ve run out of cash to get home and finish off your trip. You put that in the letterbox. Whether or not you’ve put your address on the back or inside it doesn’t matter. Australia Post picks it up, delivers it to US mail. We call that a mail relay. US mail picks it up and then takes it or delivers it to your folks.
When they get that letter, they can’t tell or be absolutely certain unless it’s registered post or unless there’s a card or unless they recognize your handwriting. They go down to Western Union, send across $10,000, and that goes into the funds or beers and champagne. They’ve lost their $10,000. You’re not the sender of the email or you’re not the sender of that letter. You’re the person that created it and it’s from you. The sender is the mail system between the two countries. The recipient is your parents.
Email is built in the same way to replicate what happened in the postal service. What you don’t realize is there are two email addresses that send an email. There’s the from, which is from you in this case, and then there’s the delivery mechanism, which is the return path. If the return path is sending emails on behalf of tens of millions of businesses around the world, what’s to stop other email senders to use your domain? There hasn’t been until now. There was a protocol that was invented in the US with some of your biggest and famous companies including Bank of America and Google that has been designed to stop this. The implementation of it was slow, even though your federal government has rolled it out to around 95% secure, which is amazing.
The nearest government that’s come close would probably be Canada or Australia with up there and the implementation and that language are around 15%. The US government federally is at 95%. State Governments in the US are around 5% implementation. There was no global coordination of this. In fact, I don’t think the guys that invented the protocol quite saw what would happen or what was coming. At the end of the day, there’s no reason for anyone to suffer from any email attack ever again. People need to stand up and get it done. It all seemed inevitable.
What’s interesting to me is the email you sent me was from my site. It was an email and I’m like, “What is this?” I hadn’t been introduced to you yet. Our friend Justin Breen had introduced us and I knew you were going to be on the show, but that’s all I knew. I get thousands of people that I’ve interviewed. All of a sudden, I get this email from you, but I didn’t know it was from you and it’s from me. It’s from an email from my website, but it’s not an email account I’d ever set up. The name itself was not one I would use, but it’s a good guess that I might have used one like that. I’m looking at this going, “What?” I’m not even sure what I’m looking at. How are you able to send something from somebody else’s account? Can everybody do that? Is that a simple thing to do?
The protocol that I tried was called the DMARC, which stands for Domain Messaging and Reporting Conformance. That protocol was implemented by default by service providers after they had gone through this project in 2014 and 2015 to prevent Yahoo addresses from sending Gmail and related emails. If you login to your Hotmail, you used to be able to send any other emails. They shut that down first. It used to be prevalent and fairly easy. You could even do it from Gmail or Hotmail. They shut that down, but it’s not difficult. If I had a little bit more informational background as when I did the same thing to Justin.
Justin’s school has got all of its teacher email addresses on their website. It didn’t take me long to figure out who Justin’s child’s teacher was. I am pretending to be the teacher telling Justin that his son is getting held back in detention for an hour and he’s coming later to pick up little Johnny. That could have been it, you can see it exactly. The sinister side of that is bad. I didn’t have enough or much information on you but the interesting thing is that Justin doesn’t know anything about your email. He’s none the wiser. I’m picking on him, not on you. I’m using your domain as the tool to attack Justin and he doesn’t know any of your policies or anything like that, which is standard for everyone. This is where I suppose we went out there advocating some firsts.
One of the first is that now that they have a wide bar, which the domain can protect their email domain from this place and they used to attack. Are they liable when it is being used to attack if they haven’t done the free and necessary steps to prevent that from occurring? It won’t be too long I would imagine before lawyers pick up on this and understand the ramifications. It’s not so much what’s happened to you or that’s not great for your brand and doesn’t look good, but it’s the recipients are none the wiser as to what your policies are or that in fact it’s not from you. You wouldn’t do that and send that content.
For anybody reading, it sounds like Diane is questioning my validity, I suppose. I had to use a crack at myself. That’s some of the business providers’ outcomes from this. If you can’t trust the email and we’re doing email transactions between automated systems for purchasing electronics, gadgets, or whatever. It becomes interesting when one party is protecting themselves and the other party hasn’t. One party suffers a loss because that domain has been used as an attack against him. There are a lot of ramifications when the lawyers get their minds and their brains around it. There will be some interesting lawsuits coming in.
At the end of the day, there's no reason for anyone to suffer from any mental attack ever again. Click To TweetDo you say that it is free to do this?
Yes.
How is it free to protect yourself?
When finding things on the internet, we use a domain name service or DNS server. It’s the traffic director. There’s a record that you put into that system, which is called a DMARC record. Depending on what the configuration of that record is, and you can use it as a system for free. We want to get businesses compliant and get that momentum going, which we were getting sign-ups from all corners of the globe, which has been interesting. In Sweden, Brazil, Hungary in all places that have internet. We want to first put a mark on the responsible domain. I knew that this is the right thing to do. There’s a whole raft of material that goes around that. There’s everything you need to get a job done for free if you choose to do so, otherwise your admin guys should be able to do that easily for you as well.
This is what you do at Zulu you’re saying? This is the product that you offer.
IÂ started software development in my shop in 2005. I started looking at it in 2016 and I personally took on this project four and a half years later. We’ve released the final iteration for four years, although I’ve heard of larger organizations. This has been a labor of love. We don’t charge for people to go and use the system. That’s why I give back first to the community in some way. How would we make some money out of it? We also have a default email, cybersecurity metric for cybersecurity insurance policies. If you want a cyber insurance policy or cyber indemnity policy, you need to be paying us to get your score around, which tells the insurance that you’ve done all the necessary steps to prevent your organization from suffering from the phishing attack, which can lead to things like ransomware attacks and all the rest of it that come off the back of email. I’m recording what the insurance guys have told me that 92% of cyber-attacks start with an email. There’s no need for that.
Are big companies like Google doing this thing?
Google would probably put this together to make it a standard for the internet. We were not able to talk to them anymore, being an email service provider, which is their core business. We had DMARC. There were some interesting discussions when we were doing 100 million emails a week. All of a sudden our open rates dropped and we went out to talk to the big four. I tend to have what I consider for you project. It started off as a risky project to make sure that we will be ahead of the game and not be able to send an email and send it to this labor of love. I can’t say with all the sign-ups. One of the largest pharmaceutical companies that signed up, which is quite a number of reasonable costs there. The government and I sell it back to some of our standing members of that syndicate. I don’t think they realized what they created and I will say break the protocols for the protocol can be broken up and dispersed. It’s your DMARC.
If you conform to DMARC, it doesn’t mean that I can’t speak to you. I expressed that quickly. The typical email gateway will be able to, especially the mail about 4 or 5 minutes or less. Where the challenge comes to them is making sure that they’ve got reasonable details to make the email look that it’s from you or that they’ve done their homework. They did a dangerous thing coming out that make you feel like it’s in the flow. I know an Australian home builder suffered a reasonable scam where the staff had the emails pretending to come from the general manager. In home building, that’s quite a large invoice payment per unit. They pretend to be the general manager approving invoices to be paid into the attacker’s account. The number was over $2 million worth of invoices that would cost about 15 to 40 invoices. That’s how easy it is. They send an email to an account saying, “Please pay this. It’s approved,” and then off it goes.
I always think about how much time and energy these people spend to do things the bad way, if they took that same energy to do a real company the right way. You talked about at the beginning that you did a lot of spamming and all that. Did you feel uncomfortable doing that or that was like what everybody was doing? What’s your motivation?
I can remember in those days where people are carbon copying everyone into emails. I didn’t think twice about it because it was what people were doing. I just found a little bit more creative.
It’s the marketing at that time.
You’re talking about 90% open rates. The 10% open rates that you didn’t get where because you mistyped or miscopied it. It was effective. Even what I suppose was the sign of things to come, but not even feeling bad. The abuse that I got, like the dark painful type email and more so even their cell phone is old back then. Especially that’s private to them. That’s their email address, how did you get it the day you contact me? I would get abused and get some interesting responses. It was obvious to me that I wasn’t in a staff position. I brought it back to them and get into change. Thank you for having me did that, discuss the email that came out the time, but not at the time. Certainly years later when I created the SPAM Act and the CAN-SPAM Act that was in a portrait and I couldn’t be seen to be doing that. I swung the other way and then tried to make sure that we can get rid of the spam epidemic.
How often are spammers even caught or are there penalties for what they’re doing? Are they penalized, is what I’m trying to say?
In 2011, my platform, ZULU eDM which is an e-blasting platform. It’s more of a target marketing communications system. We were getting compromised by what they call the Adobe Gang. I got a knock on the door, and this group of service providers and authorities, including the FBI and the police. It was rough. These guys are sending out what looked like an Adobe download, a PDF download. That was containing the phishing or the virus that was attacking people. It already compromised the use of our good email delivery reputation to get as much email there. They were arrested somewhere around 2013.
If you google Adobe Gang arrest in Montreal, you’ll get somebody says, “I was arrested in Montreal.” That was a coordinated group around the world that was designed to illicit gains. From my understanding, it’s called cyber gang. They’re running pretty much everything. I would have assumed that they know the writings on the wall with email. We get attacked regularly. I’ve seen attacks discussed for the worse because it will get closed down. There’s no doubt about it if implemented properly, if we keep doing what we’re doing. We deserve to get what we get.
I’m not an expert on blockchain at all, but I’m curious. Does your system use any of those same types of technologies they’re starting to use with blockchain?
We’ve got a fairly sophisticated algorithm that comes up with the score and it takes into consideration what the industry thinks to the email sending best practices. We are looking at not just the DMARC protocols. I am publishing on GitHub, the first DMARC algorithm to assess what compliance is, and then Microsoft with GitHub will run faster. It had nothing to do with me, but I keep telling my mum that it did. We use DMARC protocol and that algorithm that I wrote a couple of years ago and published in free again on GitHub. We use a number of other key metrics. It has lots to do with DMARC configuration. We can get a lot of information from the DNS or before we then look at certificates, we then looked and maybe what you’re talking about, I’m not going through it in great detail which is used in IP that we’ve got. It also helps others figure out what they’re going to do the second game, what we’re doing in connection. Yes and no is the answer to your question.
It’s frustrating to deal with all these spammers and all of the things when you people are trying to hack and phish and do all this. Â
Diane, when you’re compromised like we were, you would be coming to work not knowing if they need or not. It’s like somebody is in your house or have been through your house. It’s horrible. It’s not a good feeling. It has to stop.
I’ve had friends that have had their companies held hostage in a way from the dark web and different things. I’m stunned by some of the stuff that goes on out there. It’s important that people know about their options to be secure. I thought this was an interesting thing, and I was glad that Justin introduced us. A lot of people would like to know more about what you’re doing at Zulu Labs and how they can contact you to find out more about DMARC and all that.
Justin Breen, thank you for this. Justin is a legend. It’s TrustedSenderScore.com. You can get the app. You can pretty much find me at the back of that somewhere.
Thank you so much, David. This was fascinating. It’s great what you’re trying to do and I appreciate having you on the show.
Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
You’re welcome.
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I’d like to thank both Jean-Marc and David for being my guest. We get many great guests on the show. If you’ve missed any episodes, you can catch them at DrDianeHamilton.com. You could also listen to iTunes, iHeart, and all the other podcast stations where we air. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you join us for the next episode.
Important Links:
- Zulu Labs
- Jean-Marc Fullsack
- Dean Ornish
- Martin Mongiello – past episode
- Jenn Nicken – past episode
- Justin Breen – past episode
- TrustedSenderScore.com
- iTunes – Take The Lead Radio
- iHeart – Take The Lead Radio
About Jean-Marc Fullsack
Jean-Marc Fullsack was born in France where he was trained in classical French cuisine. He graduated from the Hotel and Restaurant School in Strasbourg. His cooking experience includes first class restaurants, Hotels, Private Clubs and Food service management in the Health Care industry. Jean-Marc was Instructor at the California Culinary Academy where he taught classes and operated a restaurant specializing in Healthy Cuisine. This expertise brought him to the Preventive Medicine Research Institute (PMRI) with Dr. Dean Ornish. Jean-Marc contributed to Dr. Ornish’s bestselling books “Eat More Weigh Less” and “Everyday Cooking with “Dr. Dean Ornish”. As the executive chef for Lifestyle Advantage and the Dr. Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Jean-Marc developed wide variety of exemplary dishes for those committed to a low-fat whole foods nutrition plan.
About David Barnes
David Barnes is the Global CEO and Co-Founder of Zulu Labs in Melbourne, Australia. After researching the effect that various DMARC entries have on a domain and what the outcomes mean to organizations and their business units I defined DMARC Compliance Vs DMARC Conformance after developing and publishing the first algorithm (freely available on GitHub) to programmatically check if a domain is secured from being used in a spoof attack.
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