In conversation with ThreatLocker’s founder and CEO, Danny Jenkins

And at some point, cyber became cyber security and not IT security. So I started getting an interest in computers in the 90s when I was at school. We didn't have a computer at home. I started getting interested at work, and then we got one at home when I was like 14 or 15… and I started writing malware.

Cyber Daily: Ah, you came from that side of things!

Danny Jenkins: Well, it was very momentary.

So I was short. I'm six foot now, but I was five foot two at 16 – so I would get the shit beaten out of me every day. I went to a really rough public school in Telford, and so rough that the students actually burned the school down – I'm not joking.

Cyber Daily: Okay, that's interesting. We didn't have that at my school. We did have flag burning, so I kind of get where that’s coming from.

Danny Jenkins: Yeah, they burned the entire school down while we were there.

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It was great because we got like six weeks off school. But it was a rough school, and I was short, so I got beaten up a lot. So I used to write batch files that would delete people's work from the computer, and that got me kind of more interested in technology.

And then I just got a job in IT. I left school at 15, and I sent a letter because there was no email back then. There was email, but not used by every computer company in town, and I got an apprenticeship in IT. And I just always wanted to learn more and faster. And I was doing Novell NetWare and building – started off with just building computers, and then doing Novell NetWare, and then I got another job in IT because I stopped learning there, and I just kept exploding from there.

And the reason I got dedicated to cyber is I moved to Ireland and I worked for a company called Kingspan, and I got a job in a bar because I couldn't when I moved to Ireland. I got my suitcase stolen with everything I own, so I ended up getting a job in a bar, having to live in a caravan with seven Hungarians. And so I was in this bar, and then I went to another bar. I moved to another bar, and then an IT manager walked in from Kingspan.

I asked him, "Do they have any jobs down there?” So he gave me a minimum-paid IT job, but I was willing to take it. Their HQ was down the road from the place I was working, and they had 20 people in the company HQ, and they didn't have their own IT department. So, what happened was, every time they had an issue, they'd call down to the division, and the IT guy there was like, "Oh, you can go up and deal with that. I don't want to go there. So I went off, and there were just like shitloads of really basic IT issues that hadn't been fixed for years. Like the spell checker didn't work in Word…

Cyber Daily: And no one had done anything?

Danny Jenkins: No one had done anything.

So I went and fixed all of these issues because they were just simple to fix, and I guess I got more credibility than I probably deserved when I was 20 years old at the time.

At the same time, malware started coming out at a much faster velocity, and so first they asked me whether I would move up to the headquarters, so I moved up to the headquarters because they were saying, "Oh, we're getting on. We're just all fixed now. I want this guy here”.

You know, these are billionaires, so they don't like it when their computer doesn't work, and they didn't know how to use computers either. And then malware started becoming an issue. So suddenly, what had historically been a corporate headquarters, and then I think 14 autonomous IT departments around the world, now became a corporate issue, because if one IT department in one place didn't do their job right, it became a security incident for the whole company.

At that point, it wasn't like ransomware. It was more… “Oh, our computers were shut down because we got malware of some description”. So we started putting policies in place and building things out. And I just wanted to learn and learn and learn. I would just read everything about Active Directory and Exchange and centralised networks and networking, and then ultimately I ended up being the one who designed the global network and now we had a central Active Directory and I travelled around the world building it, so I ended up getting loads of experience.

And that's how it really turned into security, and then I founded an email security company, and the rest is history.

Cyber Daily: So what's the message at Control Alt Delight – which is a great name, by the way. What's the mission for Threat Locker today, and what are you trying to get across to the Australian businesses you're chatting to?

Danny Jenkins: I think the mission for Threat Locker is very simple. We have to change the way that people think about security.

We have to change the way that people do security because if we do not, the whole world is screwed. It's becoming more and more obvious right now with AI attacks, but the entire world is absolutely screwed. So what we're trying to do is make sure people are aware of the risks and aware of how they can fix them.

I typically have a rule: if I'm in a city for any reason, they put on a CAD because there's nothing I hate more than sitting in a hotel room for four hours, wasting my life. So we were in Brisbane yesterday, and we did a CAD in the evening, and we're in Sydney today, and I'm flying home.

And the goal for me at these events, which help us achieve a mission, is, first of all, I get to hear feedback from customers – I'm here to meet our customers. I'm here to hear their problems, their ThreatLocker problems, their problems with security and where I can challenge them, and that helps us really, ultimately, drive our mission forward.

But also to meet prospects and educate. So we're going to do some hacking demonstrations. We're going to use PowerShell to steal some screenshots of data, and we're going to talk about AI.

Cyber Daily: Is it getting a harder message to sell, or an easier message to sell, especially with… Every major masthead is now talking about the dangers of AI. So is it getting easier to sell those issues and to educate people?

Danny Jenkins: I think the message is easier, but the problem is that right now, if I go back 2017 – and Australia is one of those countries that is easier than anywhere else because you have some government push on it with the Essential Eight – but if I go back to 2017, the idea of zero trust was just absolutely ridiculous.

That was the thought of zero trust. Now today, people believe in zero trust, but the other problem is I'm now in a much louder room. There is so much noise in every direction. So people understand that zero trust – and I don't necessarily like using the word zero trust because I think zero trust is this idea of taking away privilege where privilege is required. But the tangible things you're actually doing are stopping untrusted software, limiting what Claude can do, shutting down ports on your firewall…

Cyber Daily: Speaking of what Claude can do, the six months since I last spoke to you have been really quite fascinating in terms of AI.

Six months ago, everything was going great guns for AI. It was going to fix everything. Then we started seeing the breakouts. Now we've got people calling for kill switches and slowdowns. How hectic have those six months been on your side of things?

Danny Jenkins: Again, we're dealing with two problems here.

Right now, we're dealing with a public problem in perception, and the world has different stages of security threats. And let's just say, five years ago the threat was here – and today, the threat is here. The perception of the threat is here. The threat is going to continue to increase. The perception is going to come down.

So right now the world's on fire in that you don't know what you don't know, and the AI is a real threat. But not necessarily in the way people are talking about it. People are thinking AI is the real threat because of Judgment Day, because of nuclear war, because of crazy things that are happening.

AI is a real threat in that you can find vulnerabilities in code instantaneously that you could not find before. You can create malware at speed, faster than ever. Anyone with a computer can now write the most sophisticated phishing campaigns in the world. So this creates a huge threat matrix. And then, on top of that, we have agents on machines that have access to all your data and can be manipulated and changed.

So AI is a threat in those areas – but do we think it's going to bring nuclear war? Probably not.

Cyber Daily: The word ‘probably’ seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Danny Jenkins: Yeah.

I did a presentation earlier; I showed a video from Terminator 3, which was released in 2002, 2003, and there's a scene in it where the Terminator gets a Nokia phone, dials up, and makes a modem noise to get the data.

The reason I don't want to predict the future is that this is what we thought the future was in 2003. So we really have no damn idea what the future is.

Cyber Daily: We had a really weird incident here in Australia – a guy was using Claude to manage his personal appointments, and his agent hacked his local gym to make sure he could get a slot when he wanted it. It’s just the wildest thing – accidentally hacking your own gym. It's small, but imagine a lot of those incidents happening all over the place.

Danny Jenkins: We're inevitably going to have fallout.

We're going to have problems from hospitals messing up appointments, computers going down as a result of this malware outbreak, or that AI issue. I think we're going to have some pain, and it's going to get worse.

I agree that we shouldn't necessarily slow down innovation of it, because if we do, everyone else won't. If America does, or Australia does, it doesn't really matter. You can't stop innovation, but we also have to do things to make sure that the world of new threats is now addressed. And that means putting basic controls in place. We had two AI companies arguing over who hacked the most companies accidentally the other day. What was that about?

Cyber Daily: Yeah, it almost feels like that's a marketing ploy, doesn't it? Oh, our agents are more powerful than even we thought – invest now before we lose all our money!

Danny Jenkins: I think we're definitely at the peak of the hype cycle here.