Layer 8 Podcast

Charles Shirer, aka @BSDBandit is the part of the internet that exudes positivity and happiness. He frequently posts happy and affirming messages for people to enjoy. He's also a self-taught OSINT expert. In this episode, he'll explain how he learned OSINT, projects he took on and give suggestions and advice for others who might look to follow in his path. 

Dr. Abbie Maroño is the Director of Education at Social Engineer, LLC . She earned her PhD in Behaviour Analysis from Lancaster University in the UK. In this episode, we talk about human lie detection and that everything we learned on Lie to Me might be a lie! How can we discern good scientific information from bad, so we can learn the skills of social engineering and Dr. Maroño also talks about h...

Venessa Ninovic is @Intel_Inquirer on Twitter and frequently posts her findings and research at https://intel-inquirer.medium.com/ She has been on the OSINT Curious podcast and presented at the 2022 SANS OSINT Summit . In this episode, she tells us how much OSINT one can find just in dating apps. She explains how some military members failed so badly at OpSec that they were forced to delete their...

Alan Neilan is a security analyst who searches for phishing kits in his spare time, using x0rz's Phishing Catcher . Alan often tweets out his work at @aneilan and he also posts his findings under the title "Crap I Found on the Internet" on his blog at aneilan.github.io . In this episode, Alan talks about how he uses certificate transparency certstreams to feed the analysis tool and tells some of h...

John TerBush, known as TheGumshoo on Twitter joins us to talk about his previous life as a private investigator and how he merged into the information security world. He, like so many others, was doing OSINT before we called it OSINT and he describes some of the locations and techniques. John is also a founding member of OSINT Curious and a course developer/instructor for the SANS SEC 487 and SEC...

On this episode, we speak with Dalin McClellan , a penetration tester and social engineer for NetSPI . The idea for this episode came from a blog post that Dalin wrote here: Not Your Average Bug Bounty: How an Email, a Shirt and a Sticker Compromised a High Security Datacenter . Dalin explains the preparation necessary for an on site physical penetration test when the location is highly secured wi...

Sylvain Hajri , aka Navlys_ on Twitter created Epieos.com a freemium site that lets you perform passive OSINT with just an email address. Sylvain wears an incredible number of hats as the creator of not just Epieos but also MyOSINTJob , OSINTFr , the SpyingChallenge and is also an organizer of LeHack in France and also the OSINTVillage.  In this episode, Sylvain has great advice on how to use...

When we think of phishing attacks, we immediately think of email. In this episode, Chris Cleveland , the Founder and CEO of Pixm Security walks us through a massive phishing attack that his company discovered. In this attack, millions of Facebook credentials were stolen using multiple layers of trusted environments. Have you ever gotten contacted by a friend in Facebook messenger with a link to ch...

People claim degrees and credentials that they haven't earned. This could be for a number of reasons, whether professional or personal. In this episode, we speak with the Fake PhD Investigator, a person who uses OSINT to determine whether the doctorate degree that someone claims, has actually been conferred on them. This episode goes through the methodology, some stories and some of the reasons th...

Jason Downey is a penetration testing security consultant with Red Siege and is known as HackAndBackpack on Twitter. In this episode, we talked with Jason about phishing, vishing and on-site physical social engineering engagements. He talked about some of the tools he uses, some of his successes and some campaigns that might not have gone exactly to plan. Plus, find out how the Legend of Zelda's T...

We talk with Steven Harris, aka @nixintel who is an Executive Board Member with @OSINTCurious and is currently employed by Qomplx to perform investigations. He also teaches SEC 487 for SANS. In this episode, we walk through some of the Quiztime investigations that he did on his web site ( https://nixintel.info ) and another where he was able to figure out exactly who was plagiarizing his content....

Griffin is also known online as @hatless1der . You can find his tips and blog articles at hatless1der.com and at the Ultimate OSINT Collection . Griffin is also a part of the National Child Protection Task Force (NCPTF) where he is a speaker at their conference. He also speaks at the ConINT conference . In this episode, Griffin discusses how to do OSINT investigations that require pivoting off dat...

Josten Peña is a Human Risk Analyst at Social Engineer, LLC . Josten performs risk testing with contracted company employees via phone calls and email. In this episode, Josten focuses on various shortcuts our brains use, commonly known as biases, that can help in some situation, but can also be detrimental in others. Josten describes these biases and how a social engineer might use them to achieve...

In this episode, we talk with Erich Kron from KnowBe4 . We go into a number of topics, but mainly focus on phishing. Erich talks about phishing as a service, ransomware as a service and gives recommendations on how to best perform your own phishing engagements within your company. 

Oliver Lebhardt is the creator and CEO of Complytron , a tool used for OSINT investigations to determine if seemingly unrelated websites are actually related. In addition, Complytron has data about politically-exposed people (PEP), people who have been sanctioned and who are on government watchlists. The data can be heavily used in anti-money laundering situations, but is also valuable for human i...

Chris Russell, the CISO of tZero , is @cr00ster on twitter and https://github.com/cr00ster , joins us today to talk about his experience in the military and how he obtained intelligence during the Iraq War. Chris talks about some of the techniques used to help determine when people were telling the truth and when some might have just been looking for a payday. He also talks about his biggest socia...

Known online as @LockDownUrLife , we talk about how she helps people who have been a victim of online scams and harassment. She also talks about ways we can protect our own privacy, and what you can do when you are threatened or harassed. Her web site with a lot more information can be found at https://LockDownYourLife.com

Our guest this week is Andrew Lemon, who often just goes by "Lemon." You can find Lemon on Twitter as @LemonItUp or on his YouTube channel with original hacking videos. In this episode, we discuss a presentation he gave at the 2021 Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association conference titled " A Social Engineer's Toolkit ". He had some fun physical social engineering stories on ways h...

Rosa ( @Rosa_Rowles ) is a social engineer working with Social Engineer, LLC. She has an interesting story that includes moving from Spain to England to the US all at a young age. She was a billing coordinator for a hotel before she moved into social engineering. In this episode, she discusses how she uses various principles of influence to evaluate the security posture of her clients. She gives a...

For this episode, we step away from discussing social engineering and OSINT directly and talk with Jack Rhysider . Jack is the creator and host of the hugely popular podcast, Darknet Diaries . Jack talks about and interviews people about "true stories from the dark side of the internet." Jack discusses how he does it, how he finds his guests, how much work goes into creating his biweekly podcast a...

Content Warning: This episode includes discussion of human trafficking and exploitation. Christine Talley, aka @AthenasOwl_97 joins us to talk about her work as an analyst with the anti-human trafficking task force in California. She talks about how she got started with OSINT after changing careers, tells us one instance where she got to use her former career during a law enforcement engagement an...

For this episode, we talked with Lorand Bodo , one of the creators of OSINT Curious . Lorand talks with us about how he recommends people get started with OSINT, what OSINT is and then takes us through some stories about how he tracks jihadists and extremists. He also tells us about his role with OSINT Curious and the webcasts and streaming events that he puts on with them. Lorand also has a weekl...

Alethe Denis is an amazing accomplished social engineer. She won the Social Engineering Capture the Flag competition at Defcon 27. She was part of a team that won a Trace Labs OSINT Capture the Flag competition. She will again be a judge at the Collegiate Social Engineering competition . She created the Defcon 209 chapter in California, and is the original ambassador to the Innocent Lives Foundati...

For this episode, we get to speak with Rae Baker, also known as Wondersmith_Rae on Twitter. Rae changed careers a few years ago from a graphic designer to the world of OSINT. Along the way, she has competed in and won OSINT competitions, given presentations at BSides, ShmooCon and most recently, Defcon's Recon Village . She has some great advice for how to get into the field and also how to succee...

TW: Brief discussion of sexual assault/abuse. For this episode, we got to speak with Robin Dreeke, a 29 year veteran of federal service, including the US Naval Academy, US Marine Corps and the head of the FBI's Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. Robin owns https://peopleformula.com where he offers skills, newsletters, training classes and his books. In this conversation, we reference...