What Is An Ethical Hacker? | Thomas Johnson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 105

Thomas Johnson is an ethical hacker and social engineer. Hacking is often thought of as a dark art. Dark basements and illegal activities. But there's an entire other world of hackers who are using their skills to subvert security systems both online and offline for good. Expect to learn just how Tom hacks both people and computers to break into secure buildings, how safe your information is online, what tools Tom uses to bypass the systems that are meant to keep him out and his best advice for staying secure online. Also get ready for him to hack into a university's CCTV system only using Google while we are recording. Extra Stuff: Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  To me, you've got to understand that data now is worth more than oil. So they're going to put a lot of money into securing that and they're going to put a lot of money into defending that. Now, I'm genuinely proud of living in England and in Britain because we have some of the best security professionals in the world. But you have a lot of threat actors as well. So you've got China, you've got Russia, you've got North Korea. You've got all the states that wouldn't necessarily get on with us politically. And you have to understand that for the price of one fighter plane, you can hire 200 hackers. So information warfare is going to be the future of war.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  I am joined by Tom Johnson, ethical hacker and social engineer extraordinaire. Welcome to the show, Tom. It's great to have you on.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Hello. Thank you very much for inviting me.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  It's going to be an exciting one today. This world of ethical hacking and social engineering is something that I've seen a little bit about online, but I don't really know all that much. But I guess we're going to delve into it today, right?

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, would you like to start off at the beginning, how I got involved in it?

• 1:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Or would you like me to tell you what it is first of all?

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, let's find out. How do you define ethical hacking and social engineering and what you do? And then, and then let's find out about the genesis story.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Okay. So social engineering, according to a guy called Christopher Hadnaghi in America, is the art of using human psychology or misusing human psychology to get a target to do something or say something they shouldn't do or say. And that is grassroots. So if you can talk someone into giving you the passwords or plugging a USB stick into the computer, then all of this very expensive sort of cybersecurity mitigation is useless because they are literally giving you the keys to the kingdom. So that in a nutshell is what it is.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  I understand, yeah. I suppose as these technological firewalls and safety measures become more sophisticated, the ways around it that don't require you to just brute force try and break through something that's heavily encrypted, I guess this sort of falls to the the one remaining weak link in the chain, which is always going to be the the several million year old brain that sits inside of the person controlling the system, right?

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Well, in my opinion, humans can be the weakest link, but they can also be the strongest link as well, because they think in a different way to how computers process information. So have you ever had a good feeling before, Chris?

• 2:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  Well, that good feeling is your subconscious mind telling you that there is something not quite right in a pattern. So your subconscious mind is constantly processing everything around you. And then when you get that good feeling, that is your subconscious mind saying to your conscious mind, there's something not quite right here. So that is a really good way to defend against social engineers, that good feeling.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Okay, so let's start off the genesis story. How do you, what happens whereby you are now sat opposite me with a microphone in front of you talking about ethical hacking and social engineering? Where does it begin?

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Right, it begins when I was about 12 years old and I was pulled out of school by an overprotective mother. I was a very small child in a predominantly council area in Walls End. And it wasn't a very good time at school for me. And she was very overprotective, pulled me out and had nothing to give me work wise. So she just sat me in front of a computer. So I started playing games, what every child tends to do. And then I started getting bored of games. And I couldn't afford new games. So I started working out how I could break the system and copy those games so I could get them for free, not because I was a criminal, but because I wanted to play games. Uh, the games started getting boring, so I wanted to learn how the games worked.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  So I programmed the games. Um, and things developed on and on and on. And then something amazing happened, this rudimentary thing called the internet come about. And it'd become my playground. Um, I was spending all of my time online. Um, I had no moral or ethical compass at that point in time. I was young. I, I wasn't a bad lad, but I'd done things because I was a bit mischievous. So I would hack random computers on the internet and download through all the, look through all the files. And then it started getting boring, so I started going a bit further. I started college. Um, I got thrown out of college for hacking an internal mail system.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  I was, yeah, I was naughty, but I was sending messages from one lecturer to another, saying that they were in love with each other. Or, or all sorts of different things, getting some funny looks. I was great at doing things, but terrible at getting away with them. So I got caught and, and thrown out of, uh, college. So I went back again. I lasted about two weeks and I was thrown out again. Um, I locked the network manager out of his computer and he didn't see the funny side. So you've got to understand that at the same time, uh, uh, my skills were developing. Um, to a point where college wasn't really teaching me anything. So I was a bit bored, if that makes sense.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  So it just sort of encouraged me to do more and more risky things, silly things when I look back. I'm a white hat now, may I just add that? A white hat is somebody who puts ethics over morals, over everything. So I will only act within the boundaries of law. But in those days, anything online was fair game. Um, I was running my mother's phone bill up because of course it was on dial-up at the time. Um, she used to put a little, um, key code on, so I wrote a little program that would go through every single key code and, and brute force it. So within an hour, I was back online again. And then one day I heard a knock at the door, uh, answered the door and there was two big burly police officers standing in front of us. Um, they subsequently arrested me.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Took me to the police station, locked me up for about fifteen hours, threatened to extradite me to America where I'd get death by lethal injection and everything. And I was absolutely terrified.

• 6:26Chris Williamson?

  How old were you, how old were you here?

• 6:28Speaker 00

  I was about sixteen, seventeen ish.

• 6:31Chris Williamson?

  Shit the bed. At a young age to be having such, such, such heavy words thrown at you.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Slap about the head and everything.

• 6:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  And twenty years later, I found out it was a social engineering attack on us. It was actually two of my mother's friends who were coppers, who she put them up to the task of scaring me straight. So it wasn't a real arrest.

• 6:52Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Run our phone bill up. So that was my first taste of, of, um, social engineering and believe you me, it was very effective.

• 7:02Chris Williamson?

  So did that, did that scare you straight?

• 7:05Speaker 00

  It scared me straight for a very long time. In fact, I lost me love of computers for a while. Um, I, I, I took it hook, line and sinker and I was genuinely in fear of me life. Um, and, and I just stayed away from computers. I set up a company. Um, I done all right out of the company. And then that went under and I just thought to myself, what do I want to do? Do I want to earn minimum wage for the rest of my life? So I looked at the skill set that I had and I thought I want to go back into cybersecurity. Now it is a, a job. It wasn't back then. It was a crime, but now it's a job. So I had no qualifications to be in. So I blagged me way

• 7:45Speaker 00

  onto a T side university course. Um, they give me a shot and I've received a first with honors in every module so far. So I've done all right.

• 7:55Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. That's fantastic. So that's, that's the journey that you've taken yourself on there. So how do you go from the? Online to the offline, is it off offline hacking?

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, well, it's it's more in person, it it's like it's like the the good old fashioned con. That's exactly what it is, but it's got a cyber element to it.

• 8:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  So if you remember the old con men or con women who would trick you into doing something, that is exactly what social engineering can be. It's tricking somebody into doing something or saying something they shouldn't. So I set up a little company, um I started doing a little bit of work with the police, um little bits and bobs here and there. Um, and then I done a talk at Cyber Fest, have you heard of Cyber Fest, the convention?

• 8:45Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  It's it's a north northeast convention, northeast of England. Um, and then I was invited from that talk um to do a talk at the um local government level. Now, the talk that I done was based upon a hack that I carried out, an ethical hack on the university that I studied at. So I was a first year student, bearing in mind when this took place and I approached the School of Computing. Can I test your security, please?

• 9:12Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  And they said yes, they didn't realise I'd been a hacker from being about twelve years old.

• 9:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, did they just think that it was some some student who didn't really know what he was doing, didn't realise they were coming up against boss level fifty five hacking skills?

• 9:27Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say I'm that good, uh but yeah, they they they got a bit of a shock. Um, within twenty four hours, I worked out how their um smart card system worked. And I built a cloner that could clone the cards. So I then dressed up as a security guard, and this is the social engineering side of things, put the high vis on, got me Superman changed, shaved me head, looked completely different, and then went round and skimmed all of the staff's cards. Um, and with those cards, I had access to all areas, free parking for six months, may I add, um free food. Free food, um library books, everything you could ever want was all there free.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Um, I didn't tell to Eastside University until Cyber Fest, which was a little bit naughty.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  Uh.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  And then I saw they give away all the secrets and. It got a little bit of attention.

• 10:23Chris Williamson?

  I bet it did, yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  It did. But then I got invited to the I C D D F, the Information Communication Data and Digital Forensics Convention, which is Europe's largest closed cybersecurity convention for police, law enforcement and military. So I was invited by the National Police Chiefs Council to do a talk there.

• 10:48Chris Williamson?

  Real epicenter of this sort of stuff then.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. It's about as big as you can get. It was invite only, you know, you couldn't get through the doors unless you were invited. So I arrived, I expected to be shot in a little side room, just doing a little filler talk. And I was in the big county suite and I was a keynote speaker. So it was absolutely terrifying.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  So I had to talk in front of 600 of some of the world's best professionals on cybersecurity and especially social engineering.

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  Shit the bed.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Do you want to see what I got as well? I got that.

• 11:26Chris Williamson?

  What's that? That's a plaque. Certificate of Appreciation. That's so cool. That's from, is that from the Home Office?

• 11:33Speaker 00

  That's from the Home Office, yeah. Let me just see, I've got something else kicking about somewhere. Oh, there it is. It bailed me one moment. I've dropped it. This is even cooler. This is an honor coin that I was given, believe it or not, off the Home Office.

• 11:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  And the FBI.

• 11:53Chris Williamson?

  So it's an A T and T, N T A C. What, what does, what does that mean and what is it? It's like a big plastic, plastic coin.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  No, no, it's not. It's a metal coin.

• 12:03Chris Williamson?

  Metal coin, oh, inside of a pla- inside of a plastic.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  It's in a plastic container. I'll see if I can get it out.

• 12:07Chris Williamson?

  All right, yeah, yeah. So what, what does it mean?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  No, it's stuck. So this is what you call an honor coin. And it's what I was awarded for doing the talk. Um, and I'll show you. So that's the side there. That's the important one.

• 12:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  That's, uh, the National Police Chiefs Council, our central government.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  And, um, the National Crime Agency.

• 12:28Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  And on that side, we've got, um, AT&T who sponsored the event.

• 12:33Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  We've got, uh, the Metropolitan Police, the British Government, that little round one there.

• 12:39Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Is the FBI Operational Technological Division.

• 12:42Chris Williamson?

  Fuck me. There's some big names on this thing. Geez.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the bottom one is the National Technological Assistance Centre. So to me, that is like my valued possession. I've went from port scanning the FBI when I was a kid.

• 12:57Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  To now sort of working alongside them. It was really exciting.

• 13:01Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable. So off the back of this talk that you've given, presumably it's, it's been interesting to quite a few people in the audience. What happens from there? Do you, are there any job offers? Do you get any emails? Is anyone?

• 13:12Speaker 00

  I'm getting a fair few job offers all the time to be, to be fair. Um, but I'm currently putting them on hold. I've went on another journey now, which is the technical side. I'm currently studying, uh, OSCP, which is Offensive Security Certified Professional Hacker. Um, I should receive that in two months. And then the world is my oyster.

• 13:34Chris Williamson?

  What's that most recent qualification? What does that mean?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Um, that is, we have an operating system. I mean, you see it just behind me here.

• 13:42Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  That's, uh, Cali Linux, which is not a Windows based system. It's a, it's a Debian based system. And, uh, Offensive Security, so made Cali Linux, have an accreditation called OSCP. Um, and it's called PWK, Penetration with Cali Linux. So once I get that, it's a globally recognised certification.

• 14:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay. And that is, like you said, on the technical side. So is it rare to find, uh, hackers who have the in-person skills alongside the technical know-how? Or do you find, do you find, do you find people who have that mindset with regards to just trying to open doors? Whether it's online or offline, they're just interested either way?

• 14:29Speaker 00

  I think.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  You have more technological hackers than you have social engineers. Sorry, let's rephrase that. You have more good technical hackers than you have good social engineers. So every every hacker has the potential to attempt social engineering techniques and tactics. But some are better than others. And it's relatively rare to find a nerd like myself with the ability to be able to talk to people as well. So I take pleasure in teaching and communicating and helping organisations. And that in itself helps me sort of sharpen my social engineering toolset.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  I've recently done a hack on a on a large unnamed company.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  An ethical hack. I was employed to test their security.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  And part of my training them allowed me to advance my social engineering, and I'll explain that. I was I was approached by this company and asked if I could test their human firewall. So I spent three about three weeks exfiltrating information, doing reconnaissance on them, passive and active. Finding out who the staff were, who they were talking to. I trolled all of the Facebooks, the LinkedIn, all of the social media. I built up profiles on them. I prioritised five staff who I thought would be the weakest. And I approached them over LinkedIn for my pretext, which was my lie. So I tried multiple, I'll not go into the trade secrets, but I tried multiple lies.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  And a couple of them were successful. I managed to to hook a couple of them, but one I prioritised. I went in, I held a meeting with them pertaining to something that didn't exist. And then left and in that short amount of time, I had already cloned all of the cards to get into the building. So within.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Fifteen minutes of my actual exploitation phase, I was in their inner sanctum, through multiple coded doors, drinking cups of coffee in their tea station for three and a half hours unquestioned. It was, it was good, it was interesting, it was exciting.

• 16:51Chris Williamson?

  Is that what you call a successful hack?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Yes, to be totally honest with you, they were very good on a lot of areas, but they just didn't expect an attack of that magnitude to take place. So the final straw was, I was asking staff to step away from the computers and I was plugging in covert hacking tools like the USB Roboducky and the Bash Bunny, which look like USB devices but aren't.

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  Tell us about those, I want to know what those do.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Right, well, USB Roboducky was created by a company called Hack5, shout out to Sharon Morse and Darren Kitchen. They created a device called an HID, a human interface device. Now it looks to the computer like it's a keyboard with somebody typing on the other end.

• 17:44Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  But it can type out thousands of characters a minute. So I could spend a full day coding exploits to compromise their systems. And then I plug this device in and it types it out locally on the system.

• 18:00Chris Williamson?

  Yes, okay.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it thinks it's a person typing. And the Bash Bunny is a multi-attack platform which can emulate Ethernet over USB, which is trusted by Windows, iOS and Linux. And you can run payloads, steal password hashes, do all sorts with it, even through a lock screen on a computer.

• 18:24Chris Williamson?

  Shit, that's serious stuff.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Oh, it gets worse, it gets worse.

• 18:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, come on, I want to find out, what are the other, what's the other atomic weapons? Or what, if we were to open up the ethical hackers? Toolkit or the bag, what have you got inside of it? You've got the rubber ducky.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  I've got all sorts of.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  You've got the bash bunny.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  I've got some bits here if you want us to show you them. Would you like me to show them?

• 18:50Chris Williamson?

  You can just run through them if you want to. You can just run us through everything that can be in there.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Right, okay, well, I've got them and I'll show you at the same time. So we've got little single board computers, Raspberry Pis. Really useful, they run off a battery and they've got wifi, bluetooth and that's a full PC there.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  But they do get smaller, you can get the little Raspberry Pis heroes which are absolutely tiny.

• 19:13Chris Williamson?

  Not much bigger than the size of a matchbox, but it's essentially a computer in your, in your pocket.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Pretty much, but they get even smaller.

• 19:21Chris Williamson?

  And that's one.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Full PC there.

• 19:23Chris Williamson?

  That is one which is probably the size of, just bigger than a lighter, but totally two dimensional.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  Well, there's a USB stick.

• 19:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's about just a bit bigger than a USB stick, yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's sort of. So just standard USB sticks with malicious software on them. You can, you can generate malware and then you can use a crypter like Vale evasion to mask its file signature. So the antivirus systems don't pick up on it.

• 19:53Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  So the very system that you use to protect you works against you because it doesn't flag you of any problems.

• 19:59Chris Williamson?

  And you, and you think that you're safe as well, so you're probably.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 20:03Chris Williamson?

  Probably a little bit more complacent about the security that you should have in place. Oh, well, even if someone does get through, the antivirus will catch it.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So we've got a normal lighter, cheaply six quid off eBay, really useful. It's got a little covert camera in the bottom of it.

• 20:20Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Comes off and it's a, it's a USB stick. Really handy, leave them in cigarette areas and stuff to, to record staff and then exfiltrate information from that. We've got this device, it's held together with tape because I abuse it quite a bit. But this is a scary, scary device.

• 20:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  I'll give you.

• 20:39Chris Williamson?

  It looks to me just like a motherboard encased in a plastic shell.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  It it does, um, but it isn't. I'll explain what it is. It's actually, I'll give you two, two definitions. One, the tech definition and two, the the everyday English definition.

• 20:56Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  So this is a software-defined radio transceiver operating from one megahertz to six gigahertz. And in English,

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  It's a it's a radio transmitter and receiver that talks to technology. Um, but you can talk to Bluetooth with it. You can talk to wifi. Um, you can talk to NFC, you can talk to the little readers on the doors that allows you into buildings.

• 21:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Um, you can talk to GPS with it. You can literally with this device snatch telephone calls out of the air, decrypt the conversation and listen to both sides of the call. Not that I would, it would be illegal, but it's possible.

• 21:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. So what, so how does that, does that need to be powered? Is it battery powered? How does that work?

• 21:45Speaker 00

  You just plug it into your USB port of your computer. Um, that powers it. It does eat the battery quite a bit. It's quite sort of

• 21:52Chris Williamson?

  Hungry.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Power hungry, yeah. Um, depending on which frequencies you're operating on, if you're operating on low frequency, there's less frames, so it's less power. If you operate on a high frequency, it's obviously squatters more data in, so it has to use more power to do that.

• 22:05Chris Williamson?

  So you need to be, um, that particular device that you've just brought up there, does that need to be in the facility?

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Um, about a hundred yards away.

• 22:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  So depending on, depending on what you're talking to, if it's low frequency, uh, as opposed to high frequency, it depends on what you're talking to. If it's, if it's a door lock, you need to be relatively close to the the system.

• 22:26Chris Williamson?

  Gonna say you can't just park the car outside and start doing stuff with that.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Well, criminals use those very tools to steal cars. So they sit in as the car park and they run a a sniffer and they literally capture, um, the the codes of the the car case. The older cars works with what you call a replay attack. So you literally just capture the the door lock code and then replay it through the device and the doors on the cars would open. Um, but have you seen all the modern cars that keep getting stolen with the people who stand outside of the houses with the antennas to look for the keys?

• 22:59Chris Williamson?

  So I've seen a blog post about it, but if you understand, Tom, it'd be great for you to tell the listeners because it's a really cool story.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Well, it's called a re- a relay attack. Sorry, not a replay attack, a relay attack. So what they do is they pretty much sit the device in between the car and the key in the house. And what they do is they scan with an antenna to... How it works is the car sends what you call a Y-GAN signal, which powers up the key. So when you come in, like get in range of the car, it powers up the key. The key responds, the car knows you, knows that that's the the correct key. So you sit there and you relay from the car to the key, the key to the car, and then the car opens and then they drive off with it. So that's how it works. I'm not going to tell you how it's done.

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there was a, I saw a, um, I saw this blog post, I think it might have even been on Top Gear or something like that. And they were talking about some of these really new, fairly hot, like a Ford Cougar or something else, like a pretty new nineteen plate cars that were being stolen in under thirty seconds by using this sort of, this sort of approach. Terrifying.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Absolutely, because that car is is firing this signal to power up that key. If that key's out of range, the car's locked. As soon as that key goes into range, it it opens, but the SDR, the software defined radio, is extending that range like a relay runner. It's passing that baton, that signal backwards and forwards. So the car knows no difference.

• 24:35Chris Williamson?

  So for anyone that's listening, if you've got a vehicle which has got keyless entry and engine start, how can they protect themselves?

• 24:45Speaker 00

  That's the question. Um, stored in a biscuit tin on a night time. Um, it acts like a Faraday's cage, it stops the signal getting out. You can buy little wallets for the keys. Manufacturers are now looking at creating keys that disable themselves unless they actually move. So when you move them and wobble them, they'll reactivate themselves. But it's just a matter of time before the black hats and the cyber criminals come up with ways around that, you know?

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Clever stuff, really, really clever stuff.

• 25:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's really interesting. So we've got the the rubber ducky, we've got the bash bunny, we've got the that wireless, the camera that's inside of a lighter is unbelievable. Literally just looks like a lighter and it's got a camera on the bottom of it. We've got your your relay for getting stuff from the facility and sending that back in.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:36Chris Williamson?

  What else what else have you got or what else would you want to use if you were if you were needing to get a hack? Maybe stuff like blank cards and stuff like that, I guess, for replacing blank cards for using on access panels.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Blank cards, yeah, absolutely. Blank cards, you can pick them up from good old China for about twenty five pence each.

• 25:53Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  And you can rewrite them and reprogram them anytime you want. And I use simple things like little button cameras, really cheap, buy them off eBay, just shot them underneath your shirt. And then you can capture people. It's all good for listening to conversation at a later date. So things you may have missed, it might just be that one tiny little bit of information that you can use to leverage that person or that company. I mean, I've tried everything. I've tried bribery, go up to somebody and just say, look, let me into the building, I'll give you two hundred quid. You try everything within scope. So you have a document of scope set up by the company.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  And they literally say what you can and what you can't do. And then you just try and leverage the information that you you pull down. But we we do all sorts of things like we check to see if emails have been involved in data breaches. So if you register with a website and then that website gets hacked and your details get leaked. Then we can check to see if those emails have been involved in data breaches and which data breaches have been involved in.

• 27:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  I mean, for a for a cyber criminal, it would take.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  A minute and a half to download the entire Twitter database in plain text. If you know where to look, it's there. And that's, that's pretty, pretty scary to be totally honest with you.

• 27:23Chris Williamson?

  Fucking hell. So LinkedIn had a data breach not so long ago. And a bunch of, a bunch of logins, account information was taken from that. Mine was one of them. One thing that I didn't do, although I have done now with a, a updated password protector. Shout out to OnePassword, Tiago Forte's suggestion to me, which has been an absolute lifesaver. Um, I had the same password for LinkedIn as my Deliveroo.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  No, no, don't share passwords.

• 27:53Chris Williamson?

  I know, I know. That was a bad idea. And so I've, I've got a message, woke up one morning for a message off my business partner. And he said, uh, uh, is this you ordering Nandos in London on my card? Cause his card was on my account. I must've ordered something for him. So, uh, I was like, no, no, no, not at all, not at all.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  I'm sorry.

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  It wasn't my money, it was his. Although he did, he then did, uh, make sure that I was billed for it on the company account. But, uh, yeah, and sure enough, they'd, they'd used my details and they must've just brute force checked a whole bunch of other platforms to see, does this email and password combination appear on this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this? And sure enough, on Deliveroo it did. And 45 quid's worth of Nandos later, they'd, they'd had it away.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  That is social engineering 101. The human psychology make, the way that you're wired makes it difficult to remember complex random passwords. So what we do is we create something that we know. Most passwords have a capital first letter and have numbers at the end. Why? Because through school, we're taught to capitalize the first letter of a sentence. So when we're generating our password, we capitalize the first letter because we know it needs to capital. We put the number at the end because it's at the end and we'll remember it. It's normally two digits or four digits, a date of birth or a memorable date. Um, or something simple like one, two, three, four at the end of the password.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Passwords are normally constructed out of, if you're English, English words, um, which can be found in a dictionary. Um, and it doesn't take very long to crack a password. The entire character set of eight characters, including uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters in its entirety, can be cracked in two hours now. So.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  If, if, if you're looking at longer passwords, if it's constructed of English words and numbers and letters. We use dictionary attacks. So we'll say, okay, we'll try dictionary one and dictionary two. And we'll use a rule set to capitalize the first letters or not, and put numbers at the end from one to. Three thousand. And then that reduces that character set down massively. So you can, you can crack a lot of passwords. Relatively quickly.

• 30:16Chris Williamson?

  Is that brute force stuff there where you just start, you'll set some sort of program away and it will just start cycling through? Version one, version two, version three, version four.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  No, brute force isn't very efficient. Uh, the eight character set, which I said can be cracked in its entirety. That is a brute force attack.

• 30:34Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  As you start getting to nine, ten, it's inconceivably long.

• 30:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  So what you do is you use rule sets and dictionaries. So it's not a brute force. You're not going through like zero, zero, zero. Zero A, zero, zero, zero, zero A, but you, you're literally combining different words together and using. Sort of different numbers and rule sets alongside it. But a lot of people use, um, it's, it's called hackerish. It's where you substitute a, a letter for a number. So I becomes one, O becomes zero. A becomes three. A lot of people use that in the passwords because it's easier to remember. But that's the first thing somebody's gonna try. They're gonna use a rule set to try that. So now we've got what you call GPU hacking, uh sorry cracking, we use something called

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Hashcat and you can put together graphics cards, a number of graphics cards which are very, very good at um mathematics, so they're they're much, much quicker than CPU cracking. So it's just, you know, it's it's getting much, much tougher. Now I can give you a really good hint. One pass, things like password safes, they're all good and well unless somebody gets your master password and then they've got all the keys to the kingdom. So you can create something called mnemonic password generation. Have you heard of that?

• 31:55Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  So you think of a sentence specific to you, for example, Tom ate twenty seven pies and now he is fat.

• 32:05Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Which is not very good.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  And then you take the first letter and all the special characters from the first letter of each word and all the special characters and numbers and it generates your password. So in our minds, we can remember the sentence because we've evolved over millions of years language. Um but on paper, it looks like a very long string of random numbers, letters and special characters and it's super secure.

• 32:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, I uh I I'm it's terrifying to know that every different permutation of eight characters or eight characters, special characters, letters, etc. can be run through in the space of two hours. That's, I mean, that that that is really, really concerning. So I guess, you know, first off.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  That's like every possible password.

• 32:53Chris Williamson?

  Yes, that's under eight, that's under eight characters. And I think most websites now just dictate that it needs to be a minimum of eight characters, one uppercase and sometimes one special character. So I'm going to guess most people will take the path of least resistance and choose exactly eight characters, exactly one special character, exactly one number as well.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Most people do, yeah.

• 33:14Chris Williamson?

  I um I saw a, uh what's it called? A word storm where the most common words are the biggest and the most common password apparently across the entire internet is password one, capital P.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  I can quite believe it.

• 33:30Chris Williamson?

  So if you are listening and you have the password, password one with a capital P and I've just guessed it. And I haven't got, I'm, you know, Tom is a different species to me when it comes to trying to hack in. But I've just guessed your password. For, for the love of God, please go and change it from password one with a capital P.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  You need to set at least 12 digits in your password. Um, and I would not use English words. I would put a little bit of slang in there. Or I would change it about if you're not going to mnemonically generate a password. Try and make it as, as random and not likely to be in a dictionary as possible.

• 34:07Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Okay. Well, that's, that's some good takeaways already for today. So keep you, your, uh, keyless entry car keys inside of a Werther's Originals like tin. And make sure that you've got a 12, a 12 digit password, which isn't, isn't pure English. So getting back to the, uh, the ethical hacking and the social engineering and stuff like that. Have you got some, some cool stories, some experiences that you've been through recently that you think some of the listeners might be interested to hear?

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, we can continue with the, the attack on that large company and we can explain sort of certain, uh, things pertaining to that. So initially we set up this meeting, um, uh, uh, created a product, um, or a project that didn't exist. And I talked about it for an hour. I don't know how I did it. It just all flowed out. Um, but when I first arrived there, I asked to use the loo. Um, and that was because I was given a visitor's pass. And the first thing I wanted to do was use my mobile phone to take photographs of that pass. Mobile phones now have got a resolution high enough to pretty much print out a pass and make it look relatively realistic.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Um, I noticed that the, uh, lanyard was a generic lanyard that you could buy off eBay. You could buy 20 different colors for like a tenner. Um, and I had a load of them in the back of my car. So after the meeting, I went home. Um, I produced a new pass, I clipped the lanyard on and the next day I went in. I waited till they swapped for lunch, the people on the desk, and I just walked straight past, used the cloned card that I had, um, accessed the room. Uh, I was drinking cups of coffee for a while. One of the, the stories within that is there was somebody photocopying on a photocopier. And I started getting so bored of just sitting there. Um, I walked up to her and pretended I was from the photocopier company.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  So I said, hi, it's Tom from the photocopier company. How is your machine behaving today? I've been told it's been a little bit naughty lately. And she said, yeah, yeah, last week it was a bit bad, but now it's working fine. And I said, cool, excellent. It's just like a courtesy call. Would you mind showing me the other photocopier in your, in your building? And she was like, yeah, sure, no problem. Now, why do you think I wanted her to show me? I knew where it was.

• 36:30Chris Williamson?

  All right, okay. Uh, to get access through the different doors, maybe, to where it was in the building?

• 36:35Speaker 00

  No, it was on the same floor. Why do you think, try and think, have a think.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Do you want me to tell you?

• 36:43Chris Williamson?

  Tell me, come on.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  It was because I wanted to be seen being associated with that member of staff. So when she was walking across the floor with me, I was really loud. I was joking, I was talking, I was having a laugh and people were looking. Look at that loud man over there. He's with Shirley or whatever her name was. Um, and that means within their mind, I'm meant to be there. Does that make sense?

• 37:10Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, yeah. This is a reputation by association type of thing.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Absolu- absolutely, absolutely. So a little bit later on, I actually got questioned off a, off a guy who was quite, um, sort of. Security aware and he come up and he was like, oh, how you watching him? I'm like, oh yeah, me name's Tom. Oh, where do you work? I says, oh, I work in I T. How long have you worked here? I thought it's a lovely building. He said, and and I suddenly switched the conversation over to him. Hmm. While people love talking about themselves. So he spent about fifteen minutes telling us about he worked there for fifteen years. He was telling us all about his wife and his children and everything. And he completely forgot about questioning who I was.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Um, in all that time, I was recording on me phone, meetings between people, exfiltrating information that way. I was planting devices like this, a little remote transmitter bug. Um, I can dial into it just on a mobile phone and you can listen to things going on in meeting rooms and things like that. Um, this, I even installed one of these in one of the meeting rooms. It's just, I don't know if you can see it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What is it? It's a, it's a chippy little covert camera, but it transmits. So it can transmit a video feed. Okay. What I, what I done is I wrote a little facial recognition system in Python. Um, and what I, what I do is I scrape the website for pictures of the employees.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  And then I pop them into me little facial recognition system and link it with a little bit of information about them that I've already searched. And I wear a cap with a camera in it, yeah? And I wear one of, one of these, which is a little covert. Headset and that bit there goes underneath your shirt. Mm hmm. And those are two tiny, tiny, tiny little magnets. Don't know if you can see them. Yeah, yeah. There's a big one in the middle and those tiny little ones drop inside your ear canals and then roll down to your eardrum inside your head. And it uses, um. Oh my god. Yeah, it's a bit binging. It uses induction to vibrate them against your eardrum.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  And you can, you can hook it up to take an audio feed. So what was happening is I was walking along, the camera was picking up their faces, sending the feed to the computer. The computer was recognizing their face and then it was speaking in my ears who they were and which department they were in. So without even knowing them, I knew who they were. Does that make sense? Fucking hell, Tom.

• 39:47Chris Williamson?

  Oh my God, that's so scary.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  It's a little bit.

• 39:52Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  It only took me two nights to write that facial recognition.

• 39:56Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely blown my mind. You've scraped the website for all of the different employees. Then you've linked that to a camera in your hat and you've put tiny little magnets to re. So I'm going to guess the reason for the magnets is that a typical earpiece would be too conspicuous.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Absolutely. This is completely covert, totally invisible.

• 40:16Chris Williamson?

  This is inside of your ear canal.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, now I can tell you a funny story about it. It actually got stuck in me left ear.

• 40:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, God.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  And that little magnet in the middle, you're meant to extract them out of your ears.

• 40:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, so it jumps and catches the magnet.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it wasn't working. So I spent like a day and a half with this magnet stuck in me ear canal. And I couldn't hear. And I was thinking, I'm gonna have to go to hospital. But I had a huge fishing magnet. I don't know if you've seen them before.

• 40:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know what you mean.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  And I stuck it against the side of my head and it's like your dung and it sucked it out. And it was covered in all sorts of wax and horrible stuff. But yeah, I got it out of here.

• 40:54Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Oh, well, yeah, I'm glad I'm glad that you've got it out of your ear. But I mean, that that's sort of the sophistication of that's really terrifying. And the other thing as well, obviously, the implication is that if you're doing it as a white hack, a white hat, then the black hat hackers or people that are doing this for corporate espionage and stuff like that. Like if you're, I don't know, the the top boffins in Apple, let's say, and you're designing the new iPhone and Samsung or Huawei, it's let's say Huawei, the Chinese are always up to something in technology at the moment, aren't they? Everyone's worried about that. And they can put all of these different bits of technology in the meeting room

• 41:39Chris Williamson?

  and they know all the different bits and pieces, or they put some sort of keyboard key keystroke tracker on someone's so they can hack into the back end of all of the communication channels. And, you know, you're you're just a you're just a guy that's doing this. If you had the weight of an entire company, like government behind you, what can they do then?

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Nation states are on a whole new level, a whole new level. Have you heard of Stuxnet?

• 42:06Chris Williamson?

  I've heard the name and I don't know why, what is it?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Stuxnet, without going into too much technical detail, it was a virus that had infected a large volume of computers across the globe. It took Symantec several weeks to work out what this virus was. Normally it takes them about 10, 15 minutes to say, oh, this is a worm, this is this, this is how it works, this is how it propagates. But Stuxnet, they didn't know what it was for a long time. It had bits of code that they didn't know what it was and how it worked. And it was infecting computers on a level that they'd never seen before. It was infecting USB sticks, removable media, transferring it everywhere, and it wasn't doing anything.

• 42:54Chris Williamson?

  Oh, right, just sitting there being, being very intimidating.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  No, it was being very quiet, that's the scary thing about it. And it turned out it was looking for one system, and that system was the Iranian nuclear enrichment programme. And this bug was so sophisticated, it had four zero days in it, and a zero day is worth about a million dollars, it's like a hole, an unknown hole in an operating system or a service. And it had four in it which pointed to the nation state. And what it done when it found this power plant, all this unknown code was to control the industrial controllers of the factory. So what it done is it recorded stats covertly of the factory for about 30 days.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  It then disabled the safety mechanisms, because they were all through a computer, and then it replayed the good stats. So do you know like in films where they capture a bit of footage and then they loop that footage while they commit a crime on a CCTV camera? Well, this was doing it on, doing it on a nuclear enrichment system. So, once it was playing back the good stats, it started speeding up and slowing down all the centrifuges until it exploded and it blew up thousands of centrifuges, physically exploded.

• 44:13Chris Williamson?

  This actually happened, when was this?

• 44:14Speaker 00

  This actually happened, oh, two thousand and ninetyish, I think, I might be wrong.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  Wow, I'm not massively au fait with news and stuff like that, so I very well might have missed it, but that is terrifying. And obviously, the implications are, that could be for pretty much, you know, if they can get into the Iranian nuclear enrichment plant, like, what really is left after that? What's got more security than that?

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Well, the scary thing was, is it wasn't even connected to the internet.

• 44:44Chris Williamson?

  Okay, right, so it's totally offline, totally isolated.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was called Air Act, so that's why they were infecting removable media. So one person plugged that stick into that computer and that system was doomed, absolutely doomed. I mean, there's a maze and things which happen all of the time. This device that I showed you before, the little radio transceiver, and there was a guy called Barnaby Jack, who was a New Zealand-based ethical hacker. He was the guy who used to hack bank machines and he could dial something into his phone and then the bank machine would put jackpot on the screen and start emptying the cassettes with money. Yeah, he was a showman, an absolute

• 45:25Speaker 00

  showman, super genius. He discovered that pacemakers and morphine pumps, and insulin pumps, a lot of them, not all of them, were susceptible to an SDR attack. So, he potentially could defibrillate the person by pressing enter on his keyboard from about a hundred yards away. And he approached the big companies and said, look, you know, this is a major security flaw, and they said, we're not interested. So, he was gonna sort of tell everyone how it was done at a big convention and unfortunately, he died before the convention.

• 46:10Chris Williamson?

  Was that a suspicious death?

• 46:13Speaker 00

  Who knows?

• 46:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, he dies, he died.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  He died of a drug overdose of the speedball of drugs. Two days before his big convention, so I'm led to believe of what I've read.

• 46:23Chris Williamson?

  Wow, and he was just a young guy, wasn't like.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  He was a young guy, he was famous, he had an amazing career, beautiful family, you know, he had it all.

• 46:32Chris Williamson?

  Wow, I mean.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Money, cars.

• 46:37Chris Williamson?

  It's weird, isn't it? Like, when we talk about all of this stuff, it's fascinating, really, I I love learning about it. And it's really interesting, but there's just, when you finish laughing about whatever the point is and you remember. If this gets into the the hands of the wrong people, if this is used on the wrong sort of facility. It's, the implications are really scary, aren't they?

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Make no, like, make no doubt about it, yeah? This is, is in the hands of the wrong people. Yeah, they have it now, they use it now. And what gets me is the media tend to demonize hackers, yeah? We're we're told, like, they they tell everyone that we are the bad guys, we're, the hackers are the good guys. The cyber criminals are the bad guys, they're the ones who, if you, how can I put it, isn't it, right, okay, think of Gordon Ramsay. And Jeffrey Dahmer, yeah? Yeah, so Gordon Ramsay will use a knife to cook you a meal.

• 47:45Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  And it'll be beautiful. Jeffrey Dahmer would use a knife to kill you and eat you.

• 47:51Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, that knife is hacking. Does that make sense?

• 47:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  And then Gordon Ramsay's the hacker and Jeffrey Dahmer's the cyber criminals. And that's the best way to sort of, to explain it to the layman, so they'll understand that there is a battle between good and evil.

• 48:06Chris Williamson?

  Same, same tool, but different direction.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 48:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so going on to, we touched on it earlier on, the stuff to do with nation states and things like that, just how much power and resources do you think countries are throwing into this, both on the defence and on the offence side? Obviously, I've listened to, I don't know how much you listen to Joe Rogan, but he often has a couple of guys on from the CIA and the FBI who are now retired, and they talk about Huawei and Samsung TVs being installed with these particular chips and the backdoors and the Chinese having government officials working inside of every big company and all this sort of stuff all the time.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. To me, you've got to understand that data now is worth more than oil, yeah? So data about people, big data to train machine learning algorithms, et cetera, et cetera, it's worth more than oil. So it's a very, very valuable resource that people want. So they're going to put a lot of money into securing that, and they're going to put a lot of money into defending that. Now, I'm genuinely proud of living in England and in Britain, because we have some of the best security professionals in the world, genuinely.

• 49:25Chris Williamson?

  Is that true?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Absolutely true, absolutely true. They don't make a big thing about it, and that's what's great about it.

• 49:35Chris Williamson?

  Probably a good sign.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, you've got some amazing, amazing people, absolutely unbelievable people protecting us now, and it genuinely does blow my mind. But you have a lot of threat actors as well. So you've got China, you've got Russia, you've got North Korea, you've got all the states that wouldn't necessarily get on with us politically. And you have to understand that for the price of one fighter plane, you can hire 200 hackers, to get my point. So information warfare is going to be the future of war. It's as simple as that. If you don't spend the money, you're not going to be able to defend against it.

• 50:19Chris Williamson?

  And you need to spend a lot to be able to defend effectively.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  I can't quantify that because I I don't know enough about it, but I know that you have to spend some money. And especially invest in education and and teaching people and making people aware. Um, you've got to remember that all the meddling in the elections in the US and everything was all all the email leaks and everything was all based upon a phishing campaign, which was a social engineering attack. So, you know, it was once said that, uh, hackers use technology, but the professionals hack the person. Does that make sense?

• 51:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, we've just got to, everybody needs to do the bit, in my opinion. We're entering into an information age. We all have mini supercomputers attached to us at the hip, you know. For it, we'll Google things like, you know, you don't know the answer, you just Google it straight away and you know the answer. It it's there, we are now integrating more and more and more with technology. And if we don't protect that and if we don't look after ourselves, you know, we're going to be eating for breakfast, in my opinion.

• 51:37Chris Williamson?

  Does this need to happen at a state level or are there things that at an individual level which we all should be doing as well, apart from twelve string passwords and not using the password password one?

• 51:48Speaker 00

  I I think, I think governments do have a responsibility to protect us, and that's what they're elected for. And, uh, so far, I think the UK have done a fantastic job, you know. There is going to be attacks all the time, but how many they stop and how many they defend against it, you know, we will never know, but they are doing their bit. Um. But I think common sense is a big thing, you know. Don't just have super complex passwords, but just don't share them between all sorts of different platforms. Cause if I get your LinkedIn, there's a very good chance your email's gonna have the same password as your LinkedIn or something similar.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna target your email, cause then I can recover all your passwords to your email from all your other accounts. Does that make sense? Remember a few things, whatever you put on the internet will always remain on the internet. There's no getting rid of it, it's gonna be there, it's gonna be spied, it's gonna be captured. Um, if you're using I O T devices, so internet things like um CCTV cameras and things like that. Buy them from reputable places, you know, do your homework. Um, if you're buying a camera from China, that's twenty quid and the same one from a British manufacturer, whatever's. A hundred and fifty quid, there's a reason why. Do you know what I mean?

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Um, that reason tends to be the fact that the the rubbish, the crap, they don't protect you. In fact, the very devices that we use to protect us sometimes works in the favour of the cyber criminals. One of my demonstrations is something called Google docking, you heard of Google docking?

• 53:33Chris Williamson?

  No, take us through it.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Really, really simple technique, it's um using advanced search operators in Google. To look for misconfigured systems. Um, now, anybody can do it without any technical capabilities whatsoever. Um, they just need to know where to look, now I'm not gonna tell you where to look, but it's called, it's called Google hacking. If you're interested in looking. Um, and you can put in a string and you can exfiltrate um broken cameras. Or cameras, when I say broken, I mean cameras that aren't set up correctly. Now with one line of code, I can find five hundred web cameras that I can log into. Some of them are CCTV cameras.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  So, you know, it's, it's really, really scary stuff.

• 54:21Chris Williamson?

  It is scary stuff. Some of the listeners will know, I had Roger McNamee, who was one of the early investors in Facebook, personal advisor to Mark Zuckerberg. He was the, the guy that got Sheryl Sandberg on board. Um, then, uh, just before that, I spoke to Professor David Carroll, who was the man, the professor from The Great Hack on Netflix. Spoke to both of those guys within a couple of days of each other. And, um, it definitely does feel at the moment like everything is gathering pace. And the, the online attacks or the online threats are just, they're increasing in their magnitude across all, all platforms, as far as I'm concerned. So it's, it's not just that you have this sort of below the line,

• 55:06Chris Williamson?

  underground, black hat hacker things that are going on. But also even the data which we're willingly giving away is being manipulated in more, more and more sophisticated ways. And, you know, it, it really is, it's getting, it's getting more serious, isn't it?

• 55:20Speaker 00

  It absolutely is. All these, uh, apps like, uh, the Face App and the 10 Year Puberty Challenge. 10 Year Puberty Challenge was used to capture data of people 10 years ago and now, so they can build a machine learning model. That machine learning model potentially could be used to Face App to predict better aging of people. And that's why you take a photograph of yourself and it ages you because it's all based on the data set.

• 55:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  So it's, it's scary stuff. I've just sent you, um, a little link that I've just pulled up on a Google Doc.

• 55:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Um, and this is actually a misconfigured CCTV camera.

• 55:56Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  On, um, a university in America.

• 55:59Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So you've just done it, you've just done a live hack there. And now I've clicked on this link, I won't say where it is. And now, and now I can, I, wow, I can actually pan left and right.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  And you can zoom in as well.

• 56:15Chris Williamson?

  And tilt this camera up and down. I can see people walking around. Tom, this is fucking terrifying, mate. You've just, I can see, so I can see this, I can see this student walking towards class. He's got a hoodie on, he's got his hands in the hoodie. And there's some people, some guys sat down having a, a Starbucks just on this thing here. And I can zoom myself back so I can have a little bit wider of a look.

• 56:40Chris Williamson?

  Oh my god.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Can I put my smug face on now, please?

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  You've already, you've already, you've already got it.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  That is so simple that anybody can do without any coding skills, without anything. It's just creative Google searching. Um, a while back, the, uh, somebody using Google docking found all of the, uh, firmware and the software for all of the Boeing planes, I believe.

• 57:07Chris Williamson?

  Oh my god.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  Um, including the new seven, seven, seven, one. Um, the, you know, they found all of the source code for the plane. So it, although it doesn't take much to master, it's a very, very powerful little tool.

• 57:23Chris Williamson?

  It is, and I suppose the thing as well is that as the effectiveness and the power of the systems that we're using increase, the concern with someone do it, using that for a nefarious purpose is, it goes up in line with that, right? So Naval Ravikant, there's an unbelievable podcast that I'll send to you once we're done, actually. It's Rob Reid from the After On podcast with Naval Ravikant. Uh, I'll put it in the show notes below for anyone who wants to listen as well. They'll have heard me mention it before. Um, basically talks about all of the different ways that they're concerned about the future, all the different ways that the world could end as far as they were concerned. They go through, uh, synbio, the synthetic biology stuff, which they're fucking terrified about.

• 58:08Chris Williamson?

  That includes nanotechnology.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  No, absolutely.

• 58:11Chris Williamson?

  That, that's, that's really worrying. There was some, some stuff to do with, um, being able to deploy drones with tiny amounts of C4 in them out of the back of a plane. And then those drones are attached to facial recognition software. And as opposed to dropping a big nuclear bomb on a, on a city whereby it would make the city uninhabitable for a few years, they could just drop 20,000 of these little drones out. These drones would detect all of the people, all of the men, or all of the black men, or all of the white women, or all of the, the people that voted one particular way. Facial recognition, tiny little penny sized amount of, uh, plastic explosive, fly up to them straight in the middle of the forehead, just blow their head off.

• 58:56Speaker 00

  Great defence against that. Either wear a mask or have a bloody good tennis racket with you.

• 59:01Chris Williamson?

  Big tennis racket. I'd back myself. I've got a strong forehand, so I'd back myself with a tennis racket.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  All the tennis players would be safe.

• 59:07Chris Williamson?

  I know they would. Andy Murray, sweet, isn't it? Andy Murray and all of his family are the safest people in all of the UK. But yeah, they're talking about all of this stuff. And one of the things that's really interesting, it kind of rounds this discussion off nicely, I guess, with regards to some some of the importance of what we're talking about with regards to data security at the moment. What they say is that in the past, the most damage that anybody could have done 200, 300 years ago, the most damage anybody could have done would have been shot one person once out of a musket. And then that would have been it. That was really the peak of what we could do. Maybe hit someone with a cannonball, but that was fairly, fairly inaccurate. And as technology grows and as these weapons and as the the delegation and the

• 59:52Chris Williamson?

  how would you put it? The ability for people to understand how to do destructive things becomes more and more well understood and then more and more well distributed. It means that it won't be long before someone will be able to, they're already doing it, 3D printing guns. There we go. Perfect example. You've got technology with some coding that's come together. You can 3D print a gun. How long before you can 3D print a bomb of some kind? Or, you know, all of these things. So I suppose what that means is we need to be even more security conscious because the stakes of getting it wrong increasingly get worse and worse.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I mean, that rounds it up lovely, you know, as things are progressing, we're going to be faced with lots of new challenges. And if we don't adapt as a race, we're going to end up destroying ourselves. I mean, now, you know, it's possible, very unlikely, but it's possible for a rogue hacker to shut down a power plant or to

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Um, do a ransomware attack on a, on a water treatment factory and, and flood the water with loads of chlorine or, you know, there, there's so many different things you can do that are damaging with technology now. And if we don't stay one step ahead of it, if we don't have a good educational system and, and people to inspire your minds and to get them involved in being a white hat and an ethical hacker, you know, we're going to be in a world of hurt. We genuinely are.

• 1:01:15Chris Williamson?

  Are you guys, I'm going to guess the answer is yes, but you guys will be paid fairly well for your services. It will be a specialised, uh, and small group of people who have skills up to the standard that are required.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Well, the average wage for a qualified penetration tester with a bit of experience uh, is between sixty five and a hundred and twenty thousand pound a year. Um, and there is going to be a one point eight million job deficit within the next three years. So nobody will have the skill set to do that. Um, my suggestion would be if you want a career change, do what I've done. You know, quit your minimum wage job, belag yourself into university and smash it the best you possibly can. Jump in headfirst, take on every opportunity. Do the best you possibly can and change your life because you can do it.

• 1:02:09Chris Williamson?

  Tom, what an unbelievable way to end the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on, man. If, uh, if anyone who is listening wants to learn a little bit more, are there any blogs that you like? Or have you got anything online? Uh, are you on Twitter?

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  Uh, no, I'm very careful on what I go on online, believe it or not.

• 1:02:25Chris Williamson?

  I imagine, I thought for some reason I was, I thought that you might say that.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  I'm a paranoid, only got a phone about a month ago.

• 1:02:33Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. And what I would suggest is if you want to learn more, uh, get yourself on Hack the Box. It is a website designed to teach hacking and you can legally hack their networks. Um, that allow you to do it and have different capture the flag challenges, things like that.

• 1:02:52Chris Williamson?

  Awesome.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  You've got over the wire war games, have a go at that. Um, learn Kali Linux the best you can. And if you're a student. Or you've got access to an academic email, get yourself on Merciful Labs, which was set up in conjunction with our sort of GCHQ technical sort of departments of the government, and they have sort of labs that you can learn on there as well.

• 1:03:19Chris Williamson?

  And you can have a little play around, play around in these safe environments where you can do a little bit of hacking, see if you're any good, and then maybe flog your skills for 120 grand a year.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:03:29Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable. You know, it is, I don't, I don't think that we could have done a better recruitment video if we'd tried. Tom, links to everything that we've spoken about today, Naval Ravikant on Rob Reid's After On, links to Hack the Box Over the Wire, and some of the other bits and pieces we've gone through will be in the show notes below. As always, if you enjoyed this, please don't forget to give us a like and hit subscribe. It really does make me happy. Tom, man, thank you so much. I'm, I'm really excited to see what happens next. I guess we'll have to wait a couple of years until the non-disclosure agreement probably frees up and you can actually talk about it. But yeah, what an awesome day. Thank you so much, man.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  Fantastic. Thank you, mate.