Hacking Humans

Guest Stacey Nash, Head of Fraud and Central Operations at USAA, joins Dave to discuss romance or sweetheart scams, Joe and Dave share some listener follow-up, Joe's got a story about emails sent to British awards organizers asking them to transfer prize money to a PayPal account, Dave's story is about a Rolling Stones tribute band targeted in a bogus check racket, and our Catch of the Day comes f...

A cyber attack designed to impair or eliminate access to online services or data.

Guest Margaret Cunningham from Forcepoint talks with Dave about cognitive biases that lead to reasoning errors in cybersecurity, Joe shares some follow-up from a listener named Alex about the Alexa phone call Joe mentioned a few episodes back, Dave shares a note from listener Brandon about finding similar DNS names (check out https://dnstwister.report/), Dave's story is about dark patterns to get...

A type of side channel attack in which an attacker with physical access to a computer performs a memory dump of a computer’s Random Access Memory or RAM during the reboot process in order to steal sensitive data. 

Guest Herb Stapleton, the FBI’s cyber division sector chief, joins Dave to talk about the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) annual report and its findings, Joe's story is about an ongoing IRS impersonation scam targeting educational organizations, Dave shares a story from the BBC about people using their pets names as passwords (tell us that hasn't crossed your mind or your keyboard befo...

On-demand pay-as-you-go Internet delivered compute, storage, infrastructure, and security services that are partially managed by the cloud provider and partially managed by the customer.

Guest Peter Warmka, founder of the Counterintelligence Institute, joins Dave to talk about how insider targets are chosen and assessed, Joe shares a weird phone call he received, Dave's story from a Twitter use named Jake on flower shop scams, Joe has a story about student loan forgiveness scams, and our Catch of the Day comes from a listener named Andrew about a pricey software subscription renew...

An acronym for Advanced Persistent Threat to describe hacker groups or campaigns normally, but not always, associated with nation state cyber espionage and continuous low-level cyber conflict operations.

Guest Fleming Shi of Barracuda joins Dave to talk about about travel-related phishing attacks now that vaccines are more readily available, Dave and Joe share listener advice about preventative email blocking, Joe shares a story about romance scams by someone that includes fake W2s and other documents in the process, Dave's got a story about a phone scammer posing as McDonald's CEO, and our Catch...

An undocumented or publicly unknown method to access a computer system undetected or to break a cypher used to encode messages.

Guest Ming Yang of Orchard joins Dave to talk about ways to help your parents with technology (aka providing tech support for our parents). Dave shares the FBI's advisory warning of an expected increase in the use of deepfakes for social engineering attacks, Joe's got a story about phantom debts, and our Catch of the Day is from a listener named Anthony about an email from federalcrimeofinvestigat...

From the intrusion kill chain model, a technique where the hacker compromises sites commonly visited by members of a targeted community in order to deliver a malicious payload to the intended victim.

Guest professional magician Brandon Williams talks with Joe about the art of deception. we have some follow-up on a watering hole attack we discussed a few episodes back, Joe's story is about the Attorney General of Vermont's top scams of 2020 report (no surprise #1 was SSN phishing), Dave's got a story about the level of sophistication of cybercriminals (hint: not all are that sophisticated), and...

Network observation systems designed to monitor globally unreachable but unused Internet address space or the Deep Web in order to study a wide range of interesting Internet phenomena.

Guest Inon Shkedy, security researcher at Traceable and API project leader at OWASP Foundation, talks with Dave about the risks various types of insider threats pose to APIs, we have some follow-up from a listener closing on their home, Dave's story is about a new wave of scams saying they are from the Social Security Administration, Joe's got Deepfakes of Tom Cruise (thanks to Rachel Tobac for th...

A best practice for framing cyber intelligence critical information requirements that recommends collecting and consolidating data from three specific sources: endpoint, network and log.

Guest Brittany Allen of Sift joins Dave to talk about a new fraud ring on Telegram where bad actors leverage the app to steal from on-demand food delivery services, Joe's story involves two of the five parts of URLs in phishing attacks, Dave's got a story about a malvertising group called "ScamClub," and our Catch of the Day is from a listener named John about a letter he received in the mail from...

Also known as a third-party attack or a value-chain attack, advisory groups gain access to a targeted victims network by first infiltrating a business partner's network that has access to the victim's systems or data.

Guest Professor Lior Fink from Ben Gurion University shares insights from their study on "How We Can Be Manipulated Into Sharing Private Information Online," Dave's story is some good news about a Nigerian man sentenced for phishing the US heavy equipment company Caterpillar, Joe has a story with bad news about a sextortion email scam with a fake Zoom zero day component, and our Catch of the Day i...

The process of software engineers checking the flow of user input in application code to determine if unanticipated input can affect program execution in malicious ways.

Guest Sara Teare who is known as 1Password's Minister of Magic talks with Dave about things that people don't consider like custody of the digital keys to your stuff online, Dave and Joe share some listener feedback from Jonathan about replacing outdated equipment (aka an old phone), Joe's story is about ongoing campaign targeting security researchers working on vulnerability research and developm...

The process of stealing ATM customer credentials by means of physically and covertly installing one or more devices onto a public ATM machine.

Carole Theriault returns with a discussion on disinformation with guest, BBC host, podcaster and author Tim Harford, Dave's got a story about Covid vaccine phishing campaigns, Joe's story talks about data breaches that have increased 50% year over year since 2018, and our Catch of the Day is from a listener named John his wife saw on Facebook who translated it from Lithuanian. Links to stories: Co...

A nation-state hacking group’s practice of funding its town activities through cybercrime or cyber mercenary work.

Guest Nico Popp of Forcepoint joins Dave to discuss why understanding human behavior is a major key to security, Dave & Joe discuss some listener follow-up about a Craigslist posting, Joe's story is about a scam website that is promising refunds to consumers all over the world, Dave shares a story about scam calls coming from call centers in India, and our Catch of the Day is from a listener about...