Kevin Mitnick

I have talked about this before.

If you have not read or listened to Kevin, because I don't care whether it's an audio book or you read it, Kevin Mitnick's The Art of Deception.

Okay.

It's eye-opening.

You mean

Kevin? Kevin Mitnick?

Mitnick.

That's it.

Hmm.

So I went and worked for them, and while I was working for them, I was reading all these books on conmen, scammers, uh, famous social engineers like Frank Abagnale, Victor Lustig, Kevin Mitnick.

And I said to my boss, "Why aren't we testing people?"

Hmm.

So, uh, it's out there three months.

This is 2008.

And, uh, Kevin Mitnick, who was the most famous social engineer in the world, he, um, passed recently, but he went to prison for a while and ended up reforming and coming out and being a good guy.

Um, his publisher called me and she said, "I want you to write a book." And I went, "Ah, I don't know how to write a book.

Es también historia de una investigación que empezó con un pequeño proveedor de Internet, pasó una operación policial internacional y terminó siguiendo las comunicaciones de un adolescente en Montreal.

Desde la caza de Kevin Mitnick, que os dejo por aquí una fichada esa, como se llame, a principios de los 90 no había habido ninguna caza igual.

La de Kevin Mitnick fue a principios de los 90.

Y nos recuerda algo que a veces olvidamos cuando estamos hablando de tecnología.

Una herramienta no es buena ni mala por sí sola, pero las decisiones de quién la utiliza sí tienen consecuencias.

It's a thriller with bots breaking rules, naming themselves, and enough twists for a Tom Clancy novel, and it's all true.

I chose Alyssa for this interview because she's one of a kind, a hacker who's been CTO of Cointelegraph and Glimpse Labs.

She also advised Rand Paul's presidential campaign.

She's a regular at DEF CON, the big hacker conference in Las Vegas, and she was close friends with perhaps the most famous hacker of all time, Kevin Mitnick.

Our story starts with a hacker game called Capture the Flag.

OpenAI's bots take the game somewhere unexpected.

They create a bulletin board and cheer each other on.

Or so it seems.

... like they used to in the good old days.

Like, Kevin Mitnick wouldn't get arrested.

If, if humans, if humans did this, they would be...

The FBI would've shown up at their door and, I mean, we've seen hackers, right?

Yeah.

Um, I think Mitnick would be one of them, Kevin Mitnick.

Okay.

You know who he is?

Like, it's...

I mean, I gotta say, y- y- you, to be fair, Kevin Mitnick made a career out of, like, social engineering, so I guess it-

Right

... can be done.

Well, so we're going to couch this entirely in, let's say, pre-2010s days, right? I would say that the difference between an injection attack or a software attack would be simply one set of software trying to brute force its way to guess the right password to get around.

Whereas a social engineering hack, the canonical example that we love, to point to is Kevin Mitnick, who wrote A Computer Virus.

And to get it inside of a system, that would require a lot of brute force to walk your way past security, stick something into a computer or whatever.

But if ultimately you just want somebody to hit go on an executable, It's much better to use seductive reasoning.