Matthew Holland
Founder & CEO, Field Effect · 1 appearance on the record.
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Before launching Field Effect, Holland spent seven years as a security researcher at Canada's Communications Security Establishment and co-founded Linchpin Labs. At Field Effect, he leads the development of managed detection and response cybersecurity software for small and mid-sized businesses.
29statements → 5claims → 4claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 3.93/5average certainty → 2.93/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 1said about them ↓
3 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 assertions · 14 opinions · 9 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 1 names 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 Matthew 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
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Matthew Holland on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Matthew Holland said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Holland: Ransomware is the easiest malware to detect and stop
“Ransomware in general, I don't get how it even exists. It is the easiest malware to detect and stop. How there's even an industry around that blows my mind.”
Holland: Modern security machine learning is just 2005 antivirus analytics
“The existing machine learning implementations and a lot of solutions out there is the exact same thing that, you know, I've seen in antiviruses back in 2005. They just didn't call it machine learning. It was just training analytics to look for anomalies and.”
Holland: Countries cannot trust Huawei for 5G wireless infrastructure
“If a nation is going to re-kit their entire country with a new type of wireless gear, especially with the complexities of five G, you need to trust that vendor. You need to be sure that the interests of that vendor are at the very least not opposed to the inte…”
Holland: Snowden leaked legitimate programs just to insult the intelligence community
“Why did he, you know, expose completely legitimate legal intelligence gathering programs that have a ton of people's names associated with that? Why did he go out the door with that? And that, I think, is what I have a much larger problem with in that, you kno…”
Holland: The cybersecurity industry is an unethical shit show
“The current state of the cybersecurity industry, to say it's a hard problem is an understatement. It is a, an unethical shit show, I would say, and it really bothers me where it's at.”
Holland: Bypassing Apple's core mitigations allows attackers to compromise any device globally
“All you need to do is get around these set of mitigations, and you now can own any Apple device in the world.”
Holland: Samsung Android 11 builds may lack upstream security fixes
“You could have, you know, the latest Samsung phone running Android 11 that doesn't actually have all of the security fixes that the main Android branch has.”
Holland: Targeted attacks are more likely to succeed on Android than iOS
“The odds of being hit in a mass attack are potentially lower, but if somebody is targeting you, I would say that the odds of, you know, you, them being successful against you are higher on Android for sure.”
Holland: NSO Group cannot be trusted to make ethical decisions
“They have a whole group now or whole internal group within the company that I've read dedicated to making sure they make ethical decisions. I don't, Personally trust that they're making ethical decisions.”
Holland vehemently opposes any pardon for Edward Snowden
“A little part of me will die if he is pardoned.”
Holland: Google's Project Zero was largely built with ex-intelligence talent
“I mean, Google's Project Zero is largely built from people who have exited the intelligence industry with a chip on their shoulder.”
Holland: Offensive hacking only exists because humans write bad software
“The first bit only exists because humans
Are generally horrible at writing software. So that wouldn't exist if people were actually good at security models and implementing software.”
Holland: Commercial security vendors falsely claim businesses need every tool
“And the way that vendors will try to push it forward is they say, you actually need all of that, which is total crap. You do not need all of those things. They do not work well together.”
Holland: Social media influence campaigns are not actual cybersecurity
“What are the organized influence, influential campaigns on, on social media to get people to vote in particular directions? I do not think that's cybersecurity, but that also gets lumped in.”
Holland: Gartner's Magic Quadrant is continually outdated and behind the curve
“The Gardner Quadrant system is often outdated. We were For example, Field Effect was marketing a managed detect and response service well before it was defined in Gartner. And ironically, at the time, we had a hard time, you know, gaining traction.”
Holland: Most cybersecurity vendors prioritize flashy interfaces over solving problems
“And that is largely a component that I don't think most vendors in the cybersecurity industry get. They are more interested in showing you, check out this really cool interface, which, you know, no one in your company is probably going to know how to use.”
Holland: Android fragmentation prevents mass attacks better than Apple iOS
“The nature of Android also creates a scenario where there's so many different flavors of Android, it makes it much more difficult to create a mass attack. Whereas on iOS, because it's the same version of the operating system across the board on every device, i…”
Holland: Running a one-year-old Android OS makes users significant targets
“Pretty confident that if you're rocking a version of Android that's a year old, you're probably a pretty big target, and that, You know, again, I don't mean to pick on Android, but that is just a reality of how that ecosystem has evolved.”
Holland: Network monitoring solutions cannot stop ransomware
“A network monitoring solution will not stop ransomware. There's nothing you can do about that. Yeah, you have to be on host, and you have to have a measure of sophistication and tradecraft to identify and block it.”
Holland: Ransomware attacks are inevitable, making prevention far cheaper than response
“Much easier and cheaper to be preventative and to harden your system and be ready for attacks. I mean, that is the reality of today, and anybody who thinks otherwise is, you know, they've got their head in their sand. You're going to get ransomwared. Bad thing…”
Holland: Relying on legacy security vendors for liability safety is naive
“It's the safe way to go, but it is not the best thing for the company. It is not it is not forward facing. It is, I think it's being naive in regards to the type of attacks that are coming.”
Holland: Huawei clearly used leaked Cisco intellectual property in 2003–2004
“It was back in 2003, 2004, but there was a very clear cut case that Huawei was using conveniently leaked intellectual property.”
Holland: Founders bypassed Vista using fake company DenWipAtsiv, 'Vista Pwned' backwards
“So what we did was we wrote a tool called DenWipAtsiv. The name of the company was DenWipAtsiv, which is Vista pooned in reverse. You know, got a signing certificate under this fake company, legitimately registered fake in reality, and released a tool that wou…”
Holland: State-sponsored hackers target law and patent firms over corporate giants
“And I don't think it necessarily extends just to large companies at this point, legal firms accountants, huge targets. I mean, you think about what they're dealing with in regards to confidential agreements, financials of individuals and companies. And that's …”
The other half of the tape: Matthew Holland's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Matthew Holland, by other people (1)
Parrish: Intelligence agency awarded Holland tens of millions after vowing not to
“I remember going to a meeting a couple of weeks after he left and they were like, oh, we're not going to buy anything from him. And I was like, we're going to end up giving this guy like fifty million bucks a year. I want to say I was closer to reality than th…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day | Sep 29, 2020 | 56m |