Kim Zetter

Investigative Reporter, Wired Bio: Kim Zetter is a veteran cybersecurity investigative journalist and author of Countdown to Zero Day. She covers cyberwarfare, state-sponsored espionage, and the mechanics of major security incidents and digital threats. · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

13statements → 11claims → 7claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.92/5average certainty → 2.08/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 2said about them ↓

7 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 9 assertions · 1 insight · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Kim argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Zetter: Hackers behind 2014 Sony breach never mentioned 'The Interview'
“But it was only after media reports started surfacing, quoting anonymous government officials about the Sony movie, that everyone then jumped on this bandwagon and said this was about the movie. But the hackers themselves never mentioned the movie.”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:25 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.4 / 5 directness 4.9 · coherence 4.7 · precision 4.2 · compression 3.9

answered every one of 13 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

271 words/min while actually speaking · 59.9 um and uh per 1k words · 13.6 false starts per 1k · 27.9% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,321 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Kim Zetter said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zetter: US government evidence attributing the Sony hack to North Korea is flimsy
“So the idea that the government would say definitively this is North Korea already is a little shaky. And what they've provided as evidence is an IP address that they say is, which they haven't even disclosed the IP address. All they've said is that an IP addr…”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 14:37 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Assertion Supported
Zetter: Hackers behind 2014 Sony breach never mentioned 'The Interview'
“But it was only after media reports started surfacing, quoting anonymous government officials about the Sony movie, that everyone then jumped on this bandwagon and said this was about the movie. But the hackers themselves never mentioned the movie.”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:25 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Disclosure
Cybersecurity expert Kim Zetter avoids online banking and digital health records
“I don't do my, I don't do online banking. Okay. So I don't have a lot of trust in in those kinds of systems. I don't have a lot of I do very little. I don't put my health records online, that kind of thing. So I keep it as much to the minimum as I can.”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 27:00 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zetter: Chinese Hackers Do Not Conceal Tactics Due to State Support
“The Chinese don't necessarily try to hide their tactics because they are supported by their government, so they don't really have anything to worry about there.”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:02 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zetter: Obama administration's cybersecurity focus drove private sector investment
“The government's focus on cybersecurity, and by government I mean the Obama administration specifically has made cybersecurity one of its primary focuses. And that has then trickled down and caused everyone else to focus on this more, because that means money …”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 0:43 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Prediction Held up
Zetter: Third-party vendors will increasingly become conduits for cyberattacks
“And that's something that I think we will see more of. We sort of see you know, victims get hacked, obviously, and their systems are insecure, but a growing problem are the issues with third-party vendors, contractors, other people that you work with that are …”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:59 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Assertion Supported
Verizon Report: Phishing Emails Are Opened Within 90 Seconds On Average
“A report came out this week from, ah, Verizon, ah, examining how long it takes, ah, someone to open a phishing email after it's landed in a company's network, and it takes on average about a minute and a half because someone in that company is going to open th…”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:30 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Assertion Supported
RSA was breached after an employee opened an email in spam
“This was a security company, one of the top security companies, RSA, that's having its conference next week. They got hit in a phishing attack in, ah, Around the same time that Google got hit. And in that case, they sent only a handful of emails to some specif…”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:51 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Assertion Supported
Zetter: US Authorities Must Wait for Russian Hackers to Travel Abroad
“It's hard to go after Russians. Little cooperation with the government, and so U.S. Authorities have to wait for someone to leave Russia and go, you know, on vacation to Thailand or someplace, and not been there.”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:49 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Prediction Held up
Zetter: Extortion through public data releases will become a major cyberattack trend
“The threat was, if you don't comply with our demands, We'll release the data, and I think that's what we're going to see more more of. I think that's a new trend that we're going to get.”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:20 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zetter: Companies increasingly self-disclose hacks on blog posts before customer notification
“Now we're actually seeing blog posts, things like that, where they are coming out and formally announcing the hack, and sometimes even before they notify the customers. So that's a growing trend, and I think that companies are realizing that they have to get o…”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:07 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Insight
Zetter: Security improvements force hackers to retool rather than stopping them
“What changes is in some of these hacks is that we get a little smarter with security, and so the hackers have to go back and retool their techniques. But they do come back again. They come back with new techniques and new methods and new tools just to achieve …”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:30 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)
Assertion Supported
Zetter: Microsoft uses civil lawsuits to dismantle botnets and malicious IP infrastructure
“We've seen this a couple of times with Microsoft, where they've gone to, ah, they filed a civil action court in order to get certain IP addresses or hosting companies taken down in order to control botnets and other malicious activities that's sort of, ah, con…”
Kim Zetter Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:59 a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)

The other half of the tape: Kim Zetter's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 2

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011222019episodesmentions
0122019episodes it came up in
000.51122019episodesmentions per episode
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made) Jan 2, 2019 20m
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