The Scampocalypse: How to Survive the Present Attacks

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3:12this is the daily tech news show weekend edition welcome back as we make our way through cyber security awareness month to our second part of a cyber security special on wolf masking this show gratefully provided to you and thanks for your support and we are bringing back mr brian brushwood once again we are not putting the mask on yet right brian no no no no we have to see this is episode this is the empire strikes back of our trilogy this is when we have to find out what's changed that's put us in such a precarious situation yeah so if you uh haven't seen or listened to the previous episode from a week ago, Social Engineering 101.

3:58That tells us where we've been up until now. Next week, we are going to talk about a lot of the things that you can do about it. But this is the scampocalypse. What has changed from the world of like, okay, I just need to be careful about people in my email? The biggest thing, of course, is robots have entered the chat. And before that, the way we interact with each other got wildly disrupted. It's strange to think about it this way, Tom, but on all of humanity's timeline, we go 99.9999999 of all human interactions are built for looking people in the eyes. If you're an introvert, you have to overcome those barriers to become an extrovert if you want to find your place inside of a small tribe or society.

4:43We have to do multiple interactions. If you want to court someone, whether you want to go to the square dance or not, you got to go. The liquor business allows introverts to turn into extroverts, but then some people share too much information. All of these natural dynamics, the social dynamics have been finely honed to the point where they're largely automatic and even are anti-sniffing out a con man deceiver senses have been built for the human to human interaction. And even in the late 20th century, you could tell whether or not something was a cheap or a premium item from little clues like the way it was physically produced, whether or not it was attractively laid out.

5:26Even in our times near the end of the 20th century, Tom, we could tell if somebody was phoning it in and using papyrus or if they had actually put forth the effort and spent the money for a graphic designer. That would imply to us that this event, this product, this service had a certain level of competence in order to be able to afford the expense of these displays. So, in other words, everything we built to resist social engineering doesn't exactly work as well as it used to? Or is it just that the robots have figured out like, oh, I can pretend to look you in the eye? I mean, what are we talking about?

6:07Well, if we go back 10 years ago, then the first distortion that we see with social media is in general, if you subjectively define your role as in relation to other people's role, like in general, when I as I moved from town to town as a kid, I tended to be one of the spicier, weirder kids there. So I became comfortable with the idea of being an outlier, giving me 100 people of my demographic. I would be the one who would think and do a surprising thing out there. That worked very well for all humanity until social media allowed us to enter pocket realities of 100 % our types. And so in that case, there's an arms race to be the most absurdly interesting, spiciest person out there.

6:53And so we get weird, distorted influencer culture. And so that's where we were in the mid-teens. And then we had another massive societal swing, because at least during that time, we would still meet each other at events. We would still go to Dragon Con and then make real life friends out of our internet friends. And then for five years, we introduced the world to the wonderful world of Zoom meetings. And now when it comes to issues of deception, which is my bread and butter here, if you are a magician, boy, oh boy, do we love Zoom meetings. We build entire shows around using this as a deception because it's a blocked off window to a curated representation of someone on the other side.

7:40And during the pandemic, magicians would create these wonderful distorted realities to convey one world when, meanwhile, if you just turn the camera around, it was the other side of their apartment, right? Yeah. So if we're looking at everything through a computer, suddenly anything a computer can do could be real. It's harder to tell. Well, and that's what we get to right now. This is what I predicted a couple of years ago. And I'm loathe to admit that I was very, very right. For audio listeners, I'm drawing a pie chart here, labeling it 100%. A delicious pie. Let's put all of us as in the top billion.

8:21If you're listening to this, it's very likely you're probably one of the wealthiest one billion people on the planet. Congrats. We're probably not worried about the bottom billion who desperately need our help. But a couple of rungs down in the billion D ladder are a number of two to three billion people who the shortest path to life changing wealth is to snatch a thousand, ten thousand dollars from a wealthy Westerner or a member of the top one billion. And so in this pie chart, if we have 100 % of them, just 10 years ago to play the game, you had to have a subsection of this Venn diagram. You had to be able to speak English.

8:58And I'm drawing a smaller circle now. Hopefully without an accent, you would also need a pool of labor so that they could give thoughtful responses because bots would only take you so far. You would need a team of graphic designers in order to, if you're going to pretend to be a wealthy Western society company, there's certain things that you would expect. You might need a web designer. You might need to know how the grift works, to know the patience, to know what a sales funnel is, to know when a lead is hot and all those things. And so at this point, I'm now drawing a circle within a circle within a circle.

9:33It's a very tiny circle. while 100 % of this crew would love to take our money, only 0.001 % were physically capable of playing the game, dot, dot, dot, Tom, until now. Now that pie has totally flattened. Now anybody who wants to play the scamming game can do so. There are, on the dark web, scamming as a service sales funnels that you can set up with bots to do your lead generation, with narratives written with regular pretexts and with time, energy, effort and affection, you eventually can close that big sale and scam a rich Westerner for a thousand to a hundred thousand dollars. That in that overnight pressure is I've seen.

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13:17In the world of magic, there's a contest called FISM. It's the Olympics of magic. It's the closest thing to actually being respected that a magician gets to appreciate. And in service of that, the most extraordinary deceptions get created that could never work in the real world, but they work for exactly seven minutes at the world's most interesting magic deceptive event. But now, all of a sudden, instead of just a few thousand players of that game, we have billions of players of that game. And what are going to happen are wild distortions. Any idea that anybody can come up with to deceive anybody is going to start happening if it hasn't already happened.

14:00Because, by the way, Tom, if I was a bad guy, first thing I'd be doing right now is having bots establish casual friendships with people, not for anything today, but so that as voice models get better, they could become deeper friendships with robots and eventually video models. So that seven years from now, when somebody has gone from 63, about to retire to 70 and a little bit lonely, then they will not be able to conceive of the possibility that this isn't a real person. And that's when I would close the trap on them. Yeah. And that's why everything we talked about in the first episode of this about social engineering and the idea of like, just be aware, no longer is good enough.

14:44It's not just be aware, it's be on guard, right? Well, and part of being on guard, remember we talked about the difference between system two and system one. System two is awareness. We are past awareness, people. What we need is system one training, which means habit and routine, which means, for example, the habit of if you are talking to your parents and you're about to make a money decision, then that by law can't happen unless you spend at least 15 minutes reminiscing about old times, paying attention to who's contributing which side of the story. Because if you're eventually talking about cousin Oliver and that time that he dropped an anvil on his toe and then it was on the right foot and they say yes and you're like, no, it was the left foot or whatever your personal thing is, you want to get to playing in the realm of system one thinking, which is habit and routine.

15:44And that is difficult to develop and all the more important. Yeah. So in other words, don't just be aware, develop it where you don't have to think about it. You're just immediately, it's like a reflex. Is that what you're saying? Yes. Well, and I call these invisible passwords. So if you have a shared reality moment, there are certain moments, Tom, that I can reference from Nerdtacular where nobody else was there but the two of us, or maybe it's not on the public record. It's unlike most of it we've mined for content on podcasts, which is important to remember. But I can start to tell a story and then you'll pick up the other aspect of it.

16:24And without ever having said what the real thing is, I obliquely have gotten close to it and that satisfied your call and response. That habit is something that we've had no reason to develop and we've let go soft over the last six years because we don't see each other in person. So how do you get that kind of brain space? And without getting into the wolf masking stuff that we're going to talk about in the next episode, What's the broad outline of this? Well, let's talk about what are all the different types of threats that you wouldn't see coming. First of all, I'll tell you a quick story about when the FBI reached out to me.

17:07There I am, minding my own business. And then I get an email, the one I've been dreading, so-and-so at FBI.gov. And it looks and it says, we have something important we'd like to talk to you about. And then I sounds like trappings of authority and appealing to your sense of like, oh, they want to talk to me. But it also kind of smelled like a gig, Tom. So I'm like, well, let's see. So I gave them my phone number and he called and he said, this is special agent so and so from the FBI. And I'm like, great. And we began to talk. And then there was an awkward moment as it sounded like an interesting opportunity that I paused.

17:43I'm like, you'll forgive me. I, uh, he's like, Nope, I understand because what I was, what I was referring to is the fact that the entire scaffolding of the interaction was from the outside, from his email and him calling me. And if he gave me a number, it would be fruit from the poison tree. I wouldn't know whether or not I was just calling another operation, but he correctly handed me the initiative. He said, just find me i won't be hard to find uh-huh and that's it and so i literally just said i picked a random fbi location in another state and i said i'm trying to track down special agents so and so it was like five ten minutes later but because i was the one who had the initiative on the interaction we established parity and we were able to build trust very quickly now that in that case that's somebody from a high level government organization calling me about something in my wheelhouse that we really wanted to make work.

18:42But imagine if that was a low stakes thing, you might walk past that. Or if you were fearful, maybe, maybe when somebody calls to tell you there's a warrant out for your arrest, you're mainly just relieved to hear that it's only a matter of a thousand dollars. Yeah. And you could easily take care of it. Exactly. Remember initiative. And also what you'll eventually do, and we'll talk about this in the wolf masking section, is develop the habit of noticing wiggle words. And I'll hold this back, but there's a secret to building that up. But in this case, so when it comes to the scam apocalypse right now, you can't trust your eyes, quite literally.

19:20Right now, you can't trust your eyes when you look at the quality of a website because while it used to be, I believe there are still cybersecurity education programs out there telling people to look for broken English and misspellings. That ceased to be a thing two years ago. And if you look at design work on what's a good website, they're all good websites. Where the meta is at the state level, there's already Zoom calls with people who are fictitious or not the person that they're dealing with. There was one person who went to a workshop, worked at a, I won't say which rocket company it was, but they said that they had a very real present tense problem with North Korean actors applying for engineering jobs.

20:04And they kept having to suss out deep fakes. And so what I advise them is to create a pretext, just as they're using a pretext to penetrate your network, you can create a pretext to add some randomness to increase the challenge. For example, part of your hiring process can be, now we're at the part of the hiring process where we roll the hilarious die. And then you've got a die with six different things on it. And it says, show me your sync. Sorry, you must do that right now. Now, while deepfake software is pretty good for faces, it's not yet reasonably at the level that it will know to follow a laptop all the way down the hall and then peek into a dirty kitchen sink or something.

20:45Those little bits of randomness right now have to be extremely artificially baked into existing processes. But what we all need is to make those natural.

21:17Natural.

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22:01Yeah, I think the misspelling of the website is a great one, which to me says, if you see the misspellings in the bad English, great. If that still exists out there, that's an easy one to dismiss. But that isn't the thing you can rely on. I think that's what you're saying is if it's like, well, but it's a screenshot of a website. It's a screenshot of a detailed invoice. Uh, it's coming from the person I would expect it to come from. It sounds or looks like the person I would expect it to come from. All of that used to be pretty good, not foolproof. Now it's, I don't know, would you say useless?

22:40Well, the, the thing you want to be on guard against is whether or not you're sleepwalking. Cause notice all of those, a con person would put a lot of effort into making those smooth. So they didn't raise an eyebrow. if you had bad English, then that is what we call friction. And that friction would cause you to just a little bit tickle that skeptical, critical thinking impulse. And we do not want that. We want you sleepwalking through the whole interaction. And in fact, this is one of the graphs that I like to show. This is FBI data showing about how generative AI is allowing fraud to increase like crazy.

23:17In 2017, it was barely$1 billion was attributable to robot fraud. We're now at the part where it's 25 billion and we're on track in just 18 months to be 40 billion. And of course, those are reported numbers. And as we know, reported numbers, most people don't report all of the fraud. So if you are talking to the person listening to this, who's like, great, I understand all the social engineering stuff you taught me in episode one. I get that it is even easier to be fooled than ever. What do you want them to take away from this episode? before we get to the third part where we talk about how to build up those defenses.

23:57Here is the world's simplest stopgap solution. And there's going to be a couple years lag before people begin to see the wisdom of this. But dollar for dollar, I would not spend money on fancy highfalutin technological mumbo jumbo. If what you want to do is make your network impenetrable, by which I mean your network of humans impenetrable, then you need to strengthen the interpersonal bonds between them. I like to draw five circles here. This is my family here. We've got five nodes. If a sixth node were to try to penetrate and act like they belong to that network, that would be difficult, extremely difficult because the five family members in the Brushwood family have such a rich, robust shared reality.

24:40But because of that highly siloed Zoom experience, my guess is if you made a list of the 10 co-workers that you worked with every single day, my guess is you would be surprised at how long it's been since you've had a shared reality moment with any of them. Tom, luckily, I know what ours is. It was just three months ago. Right, it was back in June. Yeah. Yeah. But that took conscious effort to bother to think about. And in the case of doing a brief audit, you may notice that you've never met a single person. And they're theoretically right there on campus along with someone else and another one.

25:16Guess what? Do a field trip. Go build shared reality moments because the more of those you have, the more invisible passwords you're developing. And the easier it's going to be to obliquely reference real life stuff to suss out any fakers out there. And would you say don't post about it? Yes, correct. Well, and that is also a habit that we're going after. To be honest, I've always taken a bit of comfort in that I've treated myself as a public figure for 20 years. And so as a result, I tried not to have any skeletons in the closet, no secrets to keep. So I'm telling the truth all the time. But nowadays, I certainly hope nobody's going to use machine learning to get a rich, robust back catalog.

26:00I expect there could be some Brian Brushwood fakes out there, which is terrifying. And you hope, but they will. Or at least they could. They absolutely could. So next time we meet, a week from now, we will be talking about wolf masking and building up your defenses and a lot of the things that you can do to do what Brian was talking about, where you make this a habit, make it something that it becomes a reflex. What should people be thinking about between now and then? Consider this puzzle. Madison Square Garden just recently went down with a hack. We'll tell you the whole story next week. But it all boiled down to one phone call.

26:43It wasn't some highfalutin technology. It wasn't robot anything. It was quite simply somebody snowed someone with social engineering. They called pretending to be internal security, IT, doing a routine check on a thing. And they got someone on the inside to hit reset on an employee that created a fake employee in the network. And after that, they were able to gobble everything up. So if I'm an angry CEO, I'm going to look to the IT team and I'm going to say, what happened here? They're going to point to the fact that everything's patched. Everything's up to date. All the software is exactly where it needs to be.

27:18If I turn to HR, I say, what is going on here? They're going to tell me, I'm sorry, we're in the business of onboarding and offboarding people. We do morale and life lawsuit mitigation. The CISO is going to say, we gave them the training. He watched the videos. He passed the quiz. There's something missing there. There's something they could have done to prevent that hack from happening. And that's what we'll talk about next week. Fantastic. Brian, if folks want to follow up you directly and learn more about what you're doing in this space, where should they go? Just hit me up directly, brian at schwood.com, B-R-I-A-N at S-H-W-O-O-D.com.

27:56I've budgeted a lot of time over the last year building up these tools and they're ready to deploy. I would love to talk to businesses who are looking to bring people in on this. Fantastic. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, everybody who supports this show. That's why we do these weekend special episodes for you. We appreciate it. If you're not supporting directly, you can right now. It's easy. Go to patreon.com slash DTNS. You get direct input into the show. You get an ad free version of the show. All kinds of special benefits at patreon.com slash DTNS. Back with the news on Monday. Thanks, everybody.

28:32Have a great weekend.

28:46The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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