One of the reoccuring gaps that we see in the market place and in people's planning is their lack of focus on their physical security and cyber security. Dale Buckner from Global Guardian Gain joins the podcast today to give an update on his view of the current security landscape.
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JOSH KLOOZ, CFP®, MBA
WEALTH ADVISOR
Phone 281.719.0036
Text 281.699.8691
Fax 281.719.0156
jklooz@carsonwealth.com
1780 Hughes Landing | Suite 570
The Woodlands, TX 77380
Music by bensound.com
One of the reoccuring gaps that we see in the market place and in people's planning is their lack of focus on their physical security and cyber security. Dale Buckner from Global Guardian Gain joins the podcast today to give an update on his view of the current security landscape.
Please check out and subscribe to my Youtube Channel and Newsletter!
JOSH KLOOZ, CFP®, MBA
WEALTH ADVISOR
Phone 281.719.0036
Text 281.699.8691
Fax 281.719.0156
jklooz@carsonwealth.com
1780 Hughes Landing | Suite 570
The Woodlands, TX 77380
Music by bensound.com
Hello and welcome in again to another episode of Wisdom and Wealth. Thank you for joining us today. Today we're going to focus on private security and I have invited Dale Buckner from Global Guardian to be our guest, and co-hosting today. With me will be Alan Rider, managing director here at Carson. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for your time today. Good afternoon, great to see you and Dale, you've been with us before, but for those newer listeners, could you just give us a brief background as to what Global Guardian does and who you serve?
Dale Buckner:Sure, so we're classified as a duty of care provider, primarily in the corporate space. Deciphering that simply boils down to we provide intelligence, security, medical, cyber services to corporate travelers primarily, and then corporate headquarters. And then on the family side, we do support over a hundred family offices and families with unique offerings, again based on security, cyber and medical.
Josh Klooz:Excellent, and so one of the things that I enjoy most from you all and from your intelligent shop, dale, is just your kind of micro macro trends that you're seeing globally, and so I think it'd be interesting for some of our viewers just to get a list of some of the trends that you're seeing both here at home and then also abroad. Would you mind sharing a little bit with us?
Dale Buckner:No, I'll start with abroad first and then taper off and bring it back home. I think since the last time we spoke, josh, the Ukraine Russian war was in full effect. Gaza and Ukraine was nowhere on anyone's radar. So a material change in the world. And I think since the beginning of this, since October 7th now we're headed towards March there's been some key questions. One would this become a broader conflict? And I think, although it appears and feels like it's relatively relegated to Israel, it's not.
Dale Buckner:And I would tell you and I would tell our listeners, we're doing more support in the Middle East now than we have since the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan. It's affecting the entire region. We, the United States, are flying B1 bombers around the world to strike in Syria and Iraq. We've been attacked almost over 200 times now and you have drone strikes going on in downtown Baghdad as early as yesterday. So this is regional, it has spread and I think the listening audience, you really this is the key question you should be asking yourself how does this end and how do we unwind out of the Middle East? That's a really, really complicated question at a lot of different levels. So the Middle East is back. It's not going to go anywhere. This is going to go on at different levels for years, not months, and it's not going where. That is a material change. Since the last time I spoke to you. On the front with China and Asia, we are seeing we've had multiple clients that have been detained both in Hong Kong and mainland China. That is a red flag for both families and corporate travelers. It's real, it's happening and we, the United States, have had government officials tied up. So it's real and going on. The one kind of good news story with Asia right now, with China, is we have seen a downturn just in the last four weeks where they're not intercepting our aircraft at the frequency they were, they're not intercepting our Navy at the frequency they were and, most importantly, dod, department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have reconnected to their peers in China. That conversation and that pipe of communication is now open. It's a huge upturn. It doesn't mean we're still not in a Cold War setting with the potential of a hot war someday with China, but that communication spigot is open again and that's a good news story.
Dale Buckner:And then, as you look at, I think Latin America, mexico continues to have incredible violence level. It only continues to escalate. There does not seem to be a place where you're seeing an off ramp in Mexico. If you're watching closely, ecuador has been taken over by gangs mass prison riots, gang leaders taking out large scale cartel leaders out of the prison system, gangs taking over entire TV stations in real time. So these things are all happening in real time and ultimately, I think when you think about Mexico, latin America, it continues to spiral. Obviously, there's a lot of news about the border, but beyond that layer, are there pockets of Mexico that are safe? Of course there are. Are there pieces and parts where you should absolutely feel free to go, as long as you're prepared, to Mexico? You should. There's a balance here, but in the aggregate, at the macro level, mexico and Latin America continue to deteriorate in different ways, with cartel activity, without question, and then with Europe and the United States, obviously, with the war in Ukraine.
Dale Buckner:I'd go back to, I think, when number one, the entire intelligence apparatus in the United States to include private firms. We missed Ukraine and Russia. Most firms out there didn't think Vladimir Putin would actually go into Ukraine. He has. We're now in a stalemate, and I will go back to my previous comment. How do you think this ends in Ukraine with Russia. There's no easy answer. There's no single one button solution here. This is going to take time, it's going to be grinding, it's going to be ugly to the end, and who wants to own that terrain if something is given up is really going to be a tough question.
Dale Buckner:And the long-term security of NATO. If you're watching the news cycle, finland, sweden, poland, hungary, romania they're all increasing defense budgets. They're all talking about what happens next and they're all preparing for what could happen next with Russia. Whether it happens or not, tbd. But still all these things are front of mind and it is changing the environment in Europe and it does have a kind of a higher threat factor.
Dale Buckner:And that last comment on Europe and I'll pivot to the United States with everything going on in the Middle East, we here in the Intel shop, here we are postured just waiting for a terrorist attack in Europe and or the United States. When you think about every day that bombing goes on with Hamas in that part of the world, you're going to create a very emotional, visceral response. You're going to have people that are corrupted online and their view of the world is going to change and eventually you're going to have someone postured to strike out. So we are on the lookout. I think that threat is ever increasing, both the United States and abroad. And then lastly, here in the United States, the two big things that are really trending right now cyber at the family and family office continues to be a huge problem.
Dale Buckner:And as you look at urban centers across this country and the urban plight that's going on the risks of being downtown for a show, going to theater, going about those things that a lot of people love about the inner cities with art and theater and things like that and just good food and good restaurants there is a palatable risk that's been elevated when you look at murder rates car theft, carjacking, assaults and burglary. So all those things, if you think about it, really spiked. Two years after COVID. The murder rate was the highest it had ever been since we've been recording record in the United States. That did plateau last year and now you have hot pockets.
Dale Buckner:Whether it's San Francisco, detroit, I'm here near Washington DC. Washington DC has had one of the worst years in the history of the city and you're seeing, we just had this 72 hours ago a former Trump official, very high level, killed near K Street, one of the nicest part of the financial sector of Washington DC shot three times in a carjacking, like it's just. It's a bit unhinged when you think about and see those stats. So those are the things in the United States from physical threat. And then again, I just think cyber continues. If you're not taking cyber seriously, if you don't know how to secure your phone, your child's phone, if you don't know how to secure what they're doing online and have real platforms and you don't know who you're gonna call, if you think you're penetrated, you're way behind at this point in protecting your wealth and kind of your reputation in the space.
Josh Klooz:Alan, you and I were talking about that exact same thing not long ago. Do you wanna share some of the questions that we're getting from clients with regard to cyber specifically?
Alan Wright:Yeah, because I think everyone thinks that they're protected if they do certain things that Apple or Samsung say if they should be doing regarding their phones. And then you have these security companies that are out there, but where do y'all see gaps and people at home that think they're covered.
Dale Buckner:So, alan, the biggest trend we see across the United States if you have a senior executive in C-suite, they get issued a company laptop. There's some level of umbrella and some security comes with that from the firm, and that's a great thing. The problem is most of those executives go home. The desktop they use or the laptop they use to connect back into the firm is typically unsecure their private cell phone, their spouse's cell phone, their kid's cell phone, what they're doing online, what they're doing on social media and the forecasting of what they're doing, where they're at, where they're going next, what assets they own all of those things which we classify simply as the end user Meaning your child, just because they have something on a setting on their cell phone. It's not enough and you've got to have real robust systems to one try and be preemptive to stop them from hitting a link to a honeypot that goes straight to Russia, china, north Korea, wherever it is, and then just the forecasting of where their life is on social media. We have a very basic rule for our families you can tour Europe and take 2000 photos and you want to upload them on Facebook. You can do that, but you don't do it till you come home, the trip is over and you're not forecasting. Hey, we're in Paris, we're going to Berlin tomorrow and then we're going to the Met after that. That is where, when you think about social engineering, I can look up and find your vacation home, your primary residence, your aircraft, your yacht, so on and so forth. And now I know you're in Paris, about to go to Berlin.
Dale Buckner:All of these things are part of it and that's part of the gap that simple software just doesn't fix for you. If you will, and I think just all of our lives are online now and there's so much out there that if you're really not kind of decentralizing your assets from you where there's not a direct tie, again you're probably behind. And then, lastly, everyone in the news cycle is talking about AI. If I can find a CEO I'm on right now with you guys somebody can take my voice, pop it into a system and now replicate my voice and start calling clients or potential clients and asking for personal information. Those things are real and they're happening already. So those are the biggest gaps that we see, where a software put on a phone or a laptop or a computer just isn't enough. If you will.
Alan Wright:Is there software, is there security systems out there already that can prevent? It's really on the AI, because a lot of this other stuff has been around for a while, but the AI threat is definitely newer. Is there stuff out there that's already in place to prohibit that, or is that something that's continued to be in the works to develop?
Dale Buckner:We don't believe there's anything out there that's commercially available at scale to stop AI from taking likeness, voice and so on and so forth, manipulating it right now. It will come. There's no doubt. Firms are gonna dive into this, people are gonna find counters, but, as with everything with cyber, the threat comes in the threat vector. Then you counter, then they change again, then you counter. It's just this never-ending cycle of cat and mouse. So this is the dynamic of the world we now live in, with everything being automated and so much of our lives being online. This is why being static, if you will, and not keeping up to the latest technology and not keeping up to the best kind of tactics, techniques and procedures is where people get in trouble.
Josh Klooz:So, dale, I am curious, if somebody's listening to this and they think that they're covered, they think that they're in a good spot. What are some signs that you might be becoming relaxed? Or what are some signs that you've seen in the past as common denominators of all families prior to an event?
Dale Buckner:Well, specifically the family optics things that we've seen is where they call it a man in the middle attack. Say you have a family officer, you have an executive assistant and all of a sudden the executive assistant gets an email that's just one digit from your name. It's easy to find all of our emails, our professional emails. All I have to do is take your name, add a one or a zero to the end of your email address. Your EA most likely is never gonna catch it or someone in the family office won't catch that one digit or one dash. They won't say someone's giving them instructions to wire money for the sale of art or in assets or whatever it might be.
Dale Buckner:Man in the middle has just been out of control with family and family offices and the lack of awareness, the lack of training and the lack of proper software to defend against this is a huge problem.
Dale Buckner:Two, we've seen an enormous amount where you start getting mail at the family office where someone has opened a credit card or a loan in your name because you can go on the dark web and most people don't really realize this. If I can find your social security number which has been compromised, I have a client right now that's been sold over 300,000 times for literally $9.99. It's amazing how these things happen or a password to a Gmail, a Hotmail, a non-professional email, or you're seeing a lot of times where you'll see the sale of a password of a bank account or a bank number with routing numbers. So all these things are quite viable and when you see a sign like something pops up, you get a bill, you get an invoice that should be a red flag somewhere in the chain of information. The custody of that has been broken and it's now time to do a deep dive and then cleanse and restart all your systems to make sure you don't have information out there that's now available to the public and you can buy it on the dark web.
Alan Wright:Is there a way to find out what of your information is on the dark web?
Dale Buckner:Sure, alan. So we do these scans daily. We have clients where we scan every hour on the hour. So there are platforms where I can literally monitor the health of excuse me your name, your business, your email, your address, your phone, everything about your life that's digital. And then every hour it's scouring the global wide network open and dark web. If we get a hit then we can go in and kind of either delete it, get rid of it, buy it back.
Dale Buckner:There's a whole series of kind of countermeasures, but that part of it is automated. You can monitor almost in real time 24 7365 days and of course we'll do a deep dive on you as a baseline. So we'll go in, look at everything it's out there about your family or business. You both an open web, dark web. Now you have a baseline and now we need to monitor that all in real time going forward in its whack a mole. Every time something comes up, you whack it and then you you kind of cleanse the system, start over and keep moving. It really is a 24 7. Operation to keep people safe on the dark web.
Josh Klooz:Safe to say, we're stimulating registered and unregistered GDP, to be sure. So it. We're coming up on the spring, we're coming up on summer and everybody's looking forward to the trips they're gonna take and some people are gonna travel internationally. What are you telling your clients, and is it other common themes that keep coming up?
Dale Buckner:So, josh, I think I've said this before not to be repetitive, but is the basic travel golden rule. If you can answer the following questions, you should get on that airplane and go on your tour of Europe, fiji, caribbean, wherever it is. You might go this summer or spring on spring break. Number one understand your travel insurance or medical insurance who's covered? And then, most importantly, read the fine print. What you're gonna find is insurance has restrictions. This is the key thing to scan through and get right to go to the restriction section. Read does it cover terrorism, does it cover natural disasters and does it cover war? What you're gonna find is 99% of them do not cover those events. Therefore, you're gonna need another layer with a provider that will support you in those events. That's number one. Number two if you are sick or injured, again understand that, both insurance and medical evacuation providers. Read the fine print. You guys a believer in Houston, in that area.
Dale Buckner:If you're injured or sick in Europe, are you gonna be taken to a hospital of your choosing or you're gonna go with the insurance or the medical evac platform tells you. What you're gonna find is 95% of the time you're gonna go where they say you're going to go. You don't get a vote unless you want to pay for it. So again, there are platforms out there, like us, that will take you, at no additional cost, directly to your home. You can see your home doctor, so on, so forth for you, your child, whatever it is. But understand what you're going to do if you get sick or injured and where you're gonna be taken. It's a key piece of the medical.
Dale Buckner:If there is a terrorist attack, if there's a hurricane, a natural disaster of some kind, whatever that might be wildfires are very hot around the globe right now. If that happens, know who you're going to call, who's going to get you out of Ukraine, or a wildfire or an earthquake or a hurricane. If you know who that is going to do that for you, get on the airplane. And then the last category is if someone in your family was kidnapped or hacked.
Dale Buckner:If you know how a kid Nansum kidnap and ransom or a cyber ransom case, how that's going to play out, what the key metrics are and how you can be covered financially for those events. If you have that in place and you know on speed dial who you're going to reach out to an event like that happened again, get on the airplane. So, to summarize, we want you to know what, what your current coverage is, if any, and what. What. What is that really gritty detail look like for restrictions? Know who you're going to call for medical, know who you're going to call for security evacuation and understand how cyber ransom then you need to talk to somebody like me to navigate that, to make sure you understand it, and especially if you're going to Latin America and or Africa and the kidnap ransom side for sure.
Josh Klooz:So if somebody is listening to this, um, and they travel a lot corporately, or a family listening to this, some of the themes are going to be similar. But what are the best ways for them to? A reach out to a service like yours or? B know that, hey, the existing coverage and protection just isn't enough?
Dale Buckner:Yep. So within the corporate sector, I'll do corporate first. You should be talking primarily to your chief security officer, if you have one, or your HR director is. Hr directors typically manage insurance policies, medical health care, medical evac, things like that. Simply ask them those key questions If I am in the next Paris attack, who's going to come get me?
Dale Buckner:If I'm in a car accident in Berlin or Mexico City, how am I going to be evacuated and where do I get to go and who has authority over that? And if I'm hacked in the corporate space, the chief information security officer, which most corporate headquarters certainly have at this point. Ask them the protocol. How do they reach out if they think there's phishing going on, who do they contact? Make sure you understand that so you have that kind of on speed dial. And again, there are platforms where I have clients. I can wipe out and clean their cell phone. I can wipe out and clean their laptop that they travel with in less than a minute and a half.
Dale Buckner:So all these things are out there and the key question of these officials within the corporate headquarters is, in very layman terms, walk me through a medical scenario and evac scenario and a ransom case, if you will On the family side. The family office, of course, typically does have insurance. Same kind of questionnaires who are the subject matter experts that you are entrusting? The safety and security of the family and their assets when they travel abroad is really the key metrics here. How much?
Alan Wright:lead time, say someone's listening and they've got a trip coming up in six weeks. Yeah, was the lead time from engagement to having all these boxes checked.
Dale Buckner:they feel comfortable then taking that trip 48 to 72 hours is all we need. These are quick, turn and burn. They're easy to set up and, literally, if I was notified today at noon, most cases, if you were available, we can have you up on the platform, fully executed, by 5pm that day. If it bleeds into the next day just because on your side you need a little more time or you need a lawyer to review something. It's typically 24 to 48 hours, but in an ideal scenario 48 to 72 hours is a very relaxed timeline to get all of this up and running before you ever get on that airplane.
Alan Wright:Real quick. Circling back to Josh's point about some of these trips that we know clients have scheduled In Mexico, you have Cabo, you have Mexico City, you have Cancun, cozumel, those types of places, anything specific to those areas. And then the second part of that is Europe. It's been interesting the fact that you've had this war in Ukraine going on now for a while and yet people are traveling all over Europe, more so in the last couple of years, coming out of COVID and it's as if there's nothing going on just several hundred miles away. So just kind of speak to those two if you don't mind.
Dale Buckner:So I'll start with Mexico Number one, cabo, which a couple of years ago did see an increase in security issues and some murder rates and kidnapping ransom started to creep in. That is now in the last call of year has really come way down. It's much safer than it's been quite some time. We give full credit to the federalies and the Mexican government of really putting a pocket around Cabo. It's in much better shape than it's been. Mexico City is Mexico City. You just have to be careful where you go. Guadalajara quite stable for the most part.
Dale Buckner:When you think about Cancun, this for us this is our highest risk, high density western or American European destination where the cartels really are in a food fight. Not to sound dramatic, less than two years ago you had cartel members shooting machine guns off of jet skis, coming up on a beach Like those things are happening Now. That gets press. What's not getting press is just the day to day grind. There is a food fight going on because you have lots of Westerners that go there. They go downtown, they get drunk, they buy drugs and then people are being drugged and there's a whole host of things happening at a lower level in Cancun that where there's a direct threat to tourists and you really need to be careful what you do in Cancun.
Dale Buckner:The golden rule for our travelers in Cancun is go have a great time. Stinn, it sounds terrible, but avoid the downtown areas late at night. Nothing good happens after 10pm in that environment, just kind of the golden rule. If you want to go to dinner at 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock, no problem. Make sure you have a good plan. You avoid certain areas. But you really got to be careful. In Cancun and Acapulco and the Gold Coast, things like that. They've had a surge. It's been very infrequent, but Cancun is really the hotspot where we're servicing clients and having to provide more support, certainly more than Mexico City, cabo, acapulco.
Josh Klooz:You remind me of what my dad told me when I turned 16. He said after 10 o'clock you're on your own.
Dale Buckner:That's right. Bad things happen after 10 midnight, for sure To transition. And then you think about Europe. I think, if you think about October 7th, I'll bring it back to Europe. The correlation was we as a business had this. You know it was the biggest month for mission sets. An emergency response was October of last year 2023, for the business Because we were doing EVACs. We were turning aircraft and doing EVACs to Greece, europe, and we had a small airplane that was doing turns every four hours to Cyprus, as we were evacuating lots of corporate and family offices out of Israel proper and the West Bank to Jordan by ground. And then what you saw was this enormous dip November, december of travel to the Middle East. What was happening is everybody was looking to see is this really relegated to Gaza?
Dale Buckner:When you think about now go back to the Ukraine situation in Europe. When we saw this huge spike, we evacuated a little over 11,000 of our clients, mostly tech oriented out of Silicon Valley and their families 11,000 people out of Ukraine in three weeks. This is enormous spike. And then what you see was it took about four months for the West and the rest of Europe to kind of tease. Is Russia going to go any further. Is this going to spread? Is it going to spill into Poland? Is it going to spill into Hungary, slovakia, all the border, or Romania, all the Western border and countries? When it didn't, after 90 days, everybody kind of was like, okay, I can go to Europe, we're going to open the spicket. Not only are you going to travel for Europe, for business, but we're going to tour this summer and go to your point. Alan of people are going to Europe at scale. We don't think that's going to change.
Dale Buckner:I think, simply put, is there a war going on in Ukraine? Yes, but right now the Russians only control a little less than 20% of the terrain of Ukraine, so it really is relegated to Crimea, in the South Donbass, in the Eastern part of the country, and it's a standstill. If you think about the Russian military, 95% of the equipment and personnel that started the war are all wiped out and been replaced. So it really is relegated and Russia's ability to strike into Poland, finland, whatever it might be, is very minimal. Now, could they create a strike? Sure, could it be a one off? Sure, but I don't think you're going to see tanks rolling into Poland or Finland anytime soon, because they just don't have the capacity. So for all those reasons, simply put in layman's terms, europe feels pretty safe, even though you've got a hot war and I do believe that is the case, and this just goes back to so you have a hot war, it's relegated to a pretty compact area.
Dale Buckner:Could anything happen in Europe? Of course it could, which goes back to those four golden rules Know what you're covered, know what's going to happen. You have a medical issue, a security issue, or you find yourself hacked or kidnapped. If you can answer those questions, you need to go to Europe and feel good about it. But you just need to know you've got a system behind you if you will.
Josh Klooz:Dale, this has been, as always, just such a fun conversation. We could go on for another hour, but I promised you that I'd have a heart out in a half an hour. Anything final that we need to cover before we part ways today?
Dale Buckner:I would simply say and I don't mean to be dark, but I have to say that as you look at the environment in the United States, there's a lot of conflict, there's a lot of hot spots, whether it's politically, it's the border, it's crime, it's cyber, all these things in the United States. It doesn't mean there are not wonderful things going on in this country. We still lead the world. The United States economy is going. I don't think China's economy is ever going to catch it or surpass it. It is one at one point forecasted. There's just a lot of great things happening in this country.
Dale Buckner:I think you just need to be more aware, as the world has changed from 20, 30, 40 years ago. There's more exposure, there are more things to be aware of and plan accordingly. Simply put, but don't stop living your life. I think when you think about travel as all these hot spots that we just hit on, it doesn't mean the world is not available for you to go to explore and do great things. I think you need to get out there and live your life. You just simply need to be able to answer those questions and then you'll have a defensive mechanism of something bad occurred. You know the playbook before you ever go. If you follow that, I think you got to get out there and live your life.
Josh Klooz:Excellent Gentlemen. Thank you so much for your time. Dale will be in touch as always, and I look forward to the next time we get together again. Yes, sir, Great to see you.
Dale Buckner:Thank you, John, Thanks Dale.