Oct 6, 2026 · 51 min · 11 segments
Bestselling author, podcaster, and all around great guy Shea Serrano joins Dennis Fisher and Lindsey O’Donnell-Welch to explore why Catch Me If You Can is more than a con-artist story: it’s a hacker…
Dennis FisherHost
Shea SerranoGuest
Lindsay O'Donnell WelchHost
Shea, you, you graciously, uh, agreed to do one of our Hacker Movie podcasts, and I sent you a list of what's on our spreadsheet of stuff we haven't done yet, and you picked this movie.
That was the only, literally the only reason was I gotta, I gotta hear Lindsay's explanation for this.
Um, but I would say for me, Catch Me If You Can is definitely focused more on this, like, social engineering type of, uh, aspect that, you know, defines a lot of the, the hacker culture that we see, um, and we talk about here on Decipher a lot.
This is something we see, you know, even with, um, a lot of the kind of threat actors who are still carrying out attacks will, you know, similar to, you know, how, how they were doing it in Catch Me If You Can, like, they would, you know, try to pretend to be one person.
Maybe they're, um, scamming and pretending to be, like, an IT support person or something like that, and really just spinning it and spinning that narrative to try to launch their attacks.
Like, Shea, in the cybersecurity world, there's this whole kind of, like, subculture of what Lindsay mentioned, social engineering, which is, like, the people that do what [laughs] uh, Leo's character in this movie did but for good.
Th- they would call them, like, uh, physical penetration tests or things like that, the things that the guys in Sneakers did.
they get hired to go and sort of try and gain access to a bank building or some other facility they shouldn't be able to get into as a way to, to test the defenses, you know, like what Redford's crew was doing in Sneakers.
Shea, you, you graciously, uh, agreed to do one of our Hacker Movie podcasts, and I sent you a list of what's on our spreadsheet of stuff we haven't done yet, and you picked this movie.
That was the only, literally the only reason was I gotta, I gotta hear Lindsay's explanation for this.
Um, but I would say for me, Catch Me If You Can is definitely focused more on this, like, social engineering type of, uh, aspect that, you know, defines a lot of the, the hacker culture that we see, um, and we talk about here on Decipher a lot.
This is something we see, you know, even with, um, a lot of the kind of threat actors who are still carrying out attacks will, you know, similar to, you know, how, how they were doing it in Catch Me If You Can, like, they would, you know, try to pretend to be one person.
Maybe they're, um, scamming and pretending to be, like, an IT support person or something like that, and really just spinning it and spinning that narrative to try to launch their attacks.
Like, Shea, in the cybersecurity world, there's this whole kind of, like, subculture of what Lindsay mentioned, social engineering, which is, like, the people that do what [laughs] uh, Leo's character in this movie did but for good.
Th- they would call them, like, uh, physical penetration tests or things like that, the things that the guys in Sneakers did.
they get hired to go and sort of try and gain access to a bank building or some other facility they shouldn't be able to get into as a way to, to test the defenses, you know, like what Redford's crew was doing in Sneakers.
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