Hacking the Gibson

Season 7 Episode 12 - Firewalls, Part 1

Whether you’re working in cybersecurity or acting as your own tech support at home, you’ve probably heard about firewalls. A properly configured firewall acts like a fastidious border guard, making all the little data packets show their credentials before they can enter the country - er, the computer. In this episode, we’ll learn about the history of firewalls (including where that name came from), how they work, and how they’ve adapted from the days of big hair to the era of big data.

Season 7 Episode 11 - McFraud

In the 1990s and early 2000s, fast food giant McDonald’s teamed up with iconic board game Monopoly to run a promotion that lured customers with prizes ranging from a free small fries to a million dollars in cash. Pairing fast food with a game that’s famous for taking hours and straining family relationships might not seem like an obvious choice, but it generated a ton of buzz in the U.S. It all ended in scandal when the FBI charged the head of security for the contest with fraud and conspiracy for rigging the game. We’ll talk about how he dunnit, and what it teaches us about basic infosec principles.

Hacker Summer Camp 2023 Part 2

Welcome to part two of Hacker Summer Camp, reviewing the highlights of hacking conventions our hosts attended this summer. Ymir and Hackalope share what they learned on a range of topics, from updates in the field of satellite and spacecraft security, cloud service event logging, and newly discovered vulnerabilities in keycard security systems. They also discuss how the hype cycle is distorting our understanding of AIs capabilities, and why humans are uniquely bad at distinguishing between writing generated by people and large language models.

Hacker Summer Camp 2023 Part 1

At this year’s annual Black Hat convention in Las Vegas, artificial intelligence was top of mind for attendees and presenters alike. Join us as Hackalope recounts the talks and topics that got his brain churning. We discuss using AI in incursion and defense, and how it works as a modeling tool. We also talk about how the cost of cyber defense is straining budgets at smaller organizations, and a new wrinkle in the history of systems that are hard to get to, but easy to crack.

Season 7 Episode 10 - The New Phreak

We’ve Been Trying To Reach You About Your Firewall’s Extended Warranty Voice over IP (or VoIP) lets a user make phone calls over a computer data connection rather than a phone line. This union of computing and calling enables lots of flexibility and fancy features, but it also makes phone calling vulnerable to all the security challenges of being on the Internet. We’re talking about the protocols and infrastructure of VoIP this week, and why phone fraud that doesn’t compromise a computer system can still be an infosec issue.