155: Kingpin

24:07We don't know who's coming. That's the problem. By that time in 98, a lot of the software guys had found vulnerabilities in Microsoft. And they had actually had meetings with Microsoft at dinners where Microsoft was like, we don't think that's going to be a problem. Nobody's going to exploit that. So we would release exploit code. And we were very early, if not the first, to have this sort of discussion of full disclosure or what would now be called coordinated disclosure or in quotes, It's responsible disclosure. You know, how much time do you give the vendor to fix the problem? Do you trust that the vendor is going to fix it?

24:41One of the things Loft became known for is pioneering responsible disclosure. The problem was that hackers were looked at as criminals, hoodlums, untrustworthy. And Loft thought of themselves as hackers, but didn't see themselves as hoodlums. They're just trying to warn the world of the problems they found. And they wanted people to fix it. They were here to help. But as they told companies about the bugs they found, the companies often misunderstood and thought these guys were there to cause trouble. So Loft was like, look, what do we have to do so you'll understand that we're here to help not hurt you?

25:13And that's where responsible disclosure came about. Companies learned that hackers can be very helpful at identifying vulnerabilities, and it's way better to work with them than to think of them as adversaries. So I picture the old, old, old hacker space is to not have many screens and mostly just circuit boards you're looking at and maybe some visual aspect. And I imagine you falling in love with this electronics aspect of it, the hardware components, how these things work. You can send signals here and make it do that and all this kind of cool stuff. There's chips that have all this really cool CMOS in it.

25:52And then computers went in a direction of, no, screens and programming languages and all this software. Did you go in that direction or did you say, no, no, no, I think you all need this hardware. I'm going to stay with the hardware. Or how did you know that you were going to take a different route and not go at the software side of it, but instead you stayed on the hardware? Was that in Loft that you kind of made that diversion? No. I had been, as soon as I got attracted to computers, I was also getting attracted to electronics. I have an older brother and he was more of like an audio file kind of person he had like radio receivers and things but he had a lot of electronics that he would take apart and he would fix and put different capacitors in and everything and he had this junk bin full of circuit boards and I just loved that tangible side of things which to me makes sense of like okay I'm using a computer and the computer really is like a very simple type of embedded system or electronic system like these other circuit boards.

26:59But I just loved the physical thing. And I would start building projects out of magazines. There's a lot of hobbyist electronics magazines at the time. There were a couple people, like a couple text files you could read about of people making some interesting kind of like, even this was like pre-Redbox stuff, but like different types of tone dialers, blue boxes, and other telephone-related electronics. And so I started building things and I started building my own things. And I knew from an early age, like you couldn't, you couldn't have a career as a hacker. And when everybody would always say like, what do you want to be when you grow up?

27:41And I always knew like, I'm going to be an engineer, I'm going to build electronics. So that was something where it was a parallel path to the hacking was building things. And the electronics that I was building were things like stun guns and some laser listening systems to spy on rooms and kind of mischievous hardware, but things that I could use for the telephone system and subversive technology, like anything I thought was cool. Joe's specialty is hardware hacking. As I sit and look around his workshop, it's abundantly clear too. He's got drawers full of parts. On the table in front of me is something like 60 circuit boards and he says he's building all these for a class and there's a fault injector over there and soldering irons and an oscilloscope and there's something beautiful about the low-level aspect of electronics.

28:28There are no English words that you can use to program a circuit. Like, you can't say, if this, then do that, or write out a for loop. No, here, at the circuitry level, you're dealing with electrons going through some metal, and you have to understand the physics of how to manipulate and move these electrons in order to make it do the things you want to do. And it's amazing to watch the advancements in the electronic world. Like, it feels like every now and then we reach a limit of like how fast a CPU can operate. And it's like, well, that's it, everyone. This is the max speed. There's no way that we're going to go beyond this.

29:01You just can't put more transistors on a chip. But then some scientists discover parallel processing where they can make it go faster by breaking a CPU up into two or three smaller CPUs. And because there are now two or three things getting processed at once, it's faster than processing one at a time. So this allows us to have faster computers. And then when that limit is hit, when we hit a max there, someone else discovers fin-fet transistors, where they can build transistors upwards in like a 3D sort of way, like little fins. And this invention improves processing speed again, and we reach higher and higher of what technology can do.

29:35And just the other day, I heard about CPUs that are starting to be made out of glass. There's no doubt that the last 30 years, we've seen some incredible explosions in electronics and their capabilities and our understanding of physics. It's just a really great space to put focus into as the world is constantly evolving and it's exciting. In the second loft space, we had a hardware room and a software room. The hardware room was me, Brian Oblivion, Space Rogue. We were into scanner radios. POXAG was the data transmission of pagers and it turned out it's still being used to some extent today in certain environments.

30:11And we basically loved and I loved being able to listen in on anything that I could. So in college, it was like cordless phones. At the loft at the time, it was Poxag, you know, listening into transmission so you can kind of see what's going on in the world around you. And the scanner radio, listening to the cops and air traffic and all of these things. It was just getting insight into what's happening. Joe built a little device that lets you snag pager text messages out of the air and see what they say. The messages weren't intended for him. He was just seeing them fly by and his antenna would capture it and decode it.

30:44And this was something that the loft was actually selling to try to make enough money just to pay the rent for the place. Back in the day, you'd see all sorts of stuff because that's how people communicated is with pagers. And there'd be stuff about, you know, buy groceries for me or like we saw like some relationship, you know, sexting kind of one way, kind of like can't wait for you to get home. And you'd see a hospital, a lot of hospital traffic, a lot of EMS traffic and like emergency medical kind of things. and yeah, it was just really fun to do and that made a little bit of money and that was actually my first circuit board that I had mass produced and then we'd get our orders.

31:24They'd all be mail order. We'd get our mail every week. I'd build the circuitry or Space Rogue would build some circuitry and we'd package it up and if they wanted a kit, we'd just give them the components. It was just a way to do something but that really, like that was a contribution that I could help make to the loft to bring some money in. And then that kind of proved the concept of like, ooh, we could make a little bit of money on this. Like, what if we could do it full time? I might have to do a whole episode on The Loft someday. It was quite a remarkable chapter in hacker history. And I bet we could sit here for hours to just talk about what happened there.

32:04It became a company. And for me, as this kid who's still like, even though I was starting to grow up, like I'm still, like I said at the beginning, I still have this kind of punk aspect to me where that wasn't an environment I wanted to be in. And I realized like, OK, the specialness of it, that group is gone. I don't want to work for somebody else. I can't stand if somebody is telling me what to do. In 2003, I split and have been independent ever since. And there's good and bad that has come with that. And after that, Joe ended up hosting a cable TV show. It was a show called Prototype This, and it was on Discovery Channel, and it was made by the same production company as Mythbusters.

32:45And the idea was that this would be the next show after Mythbusters sort of sunsets and goes away, which, of course, we know they didn't. And it lasted another 10 years, and spin-offs are still happening. But the concept of this show was having four engineers building ridiculous prototypes. I got an email, and it was from a casting company. And they're like, yeah, we're looking for engineers. and that was actually, they had talked to Make Magazine, which was like, that had just come out. That's like a maker magazine talking about, you know, electronics and hobby electronics. And I was on the technical advisory board for them when they first started.

33:19And this company had contacted Make Magazine saying, hey, do you know any engineers that might want to be on TV? They already had selected a mechanical engineer, a machinist and a software engineer. So to complete the circle, they needed a hardware person. So they said, oh, you should talk to Joe. So they reached out to me and I got this email and I remember showing it to my wife. I read it and I was like, I don't know. I was like, I don't know if I want to be on TV. And I showed it to her and she's like, are you crazy? Like this is, you can do what you love to do on TV. So I didn't really, just like with the Senate, like I didn't know the impact or the implications of what it would become.

34:01I didn't know how special that was. And I was like, all right, fine. I'll do a little interview with them. So I showed all this stuff. Didn't really think anything of it. Like said bye. I was riding my bike back from San Francisco to San Diego, which is where we lived at the time, just as like a solo bike trip for fun. It was my first experience of like, I want to try to figure out what the hell I'm doing. Like a little bit of self, self-love. Like I'm going to do some little meditation kind of thing. Before that was even a known thing. It was just some, I just needed to escape. and um which is funny because we had just gotten married and i'm talking to my wife about this recently i'm like i can't believe like that i did that that we got married and then i went to san francisco for like a conference and i rode my bike didn't even see you for 10 days or whatever because i just was doing a little bit at a time um she's like well you needed it like very supportive uh which was amazing so did this bike ride i didn't have a phone or anything this was like you know Nokia phone era.

35:01And I didn't even bring a phone because I really wanted to isolate myself and come back from the trip, turn on my computer. And there was like five emails of like, we want you on the show. Can you call us back? Call us back. So, I mean, it's amazing that they even waited because they could have easily been like, all right, he's not answering. Let's go to somebody else. And we spent the next year and a half in a warehouse on Treasure Island in the Bay Area in San Francisco, building ridiculous giant prototypes. Prototype this was pretty darn cool. My favorite episode is where they came up with an idea to make a never-ending water slide.

35:36Can you imagine riding a water slide for as long as you wanted? Everybody needs an endless water slide. I mean, it was like, we called it the backyard water slide. And the concept, you know, like the show really was like, in the future, you could have one of these, even though we were just prototyping. What they did was they connected curved water slide parts into a donut looking shape. like a big circle, and they stood that up so it looked like a big wheel, and then they put water in it and spun it. So if you're inside, you're always sliding down the side as long as it keeps spinning. We did a firefighter episode where we built a high-tech firefighter pack, and we had a drone that would go and help rescue somebody lost at sea.

36:16Like, we did a pizza-delivering robot, which now they're our food-delivering robots. Or maybe they ripped it off the show, I don't know. Yeah, you had one where you would try to ride on a bug robot, right? It was a giant bug-looking thing, and then you would ride on it. That's not even out yet. Fast forward 20 years, right? What is it? Because that was a really hard problem. 15 years ago, and they still don't have rideable robots. Yeah. You were building them then. Yeah. I mean, everybody needs a rideable robot also. I guess the closest thing now are the autonomous vehicles, which are terrifying.

36:51Right. This was called the 6x6, and this was an all-terrain vehicle mimicking – it was actually called biomimicry because we were mimicking the alternating tripod gate walking of some bug that was really stable with three legs on the ground. And there was a project that – an academic project that some guys had done with a small-scale version, and we hooked up with them, and we're like, we want to build a human-sized version of that. and that was a really hard project and actually that was the first project that didn't succeed on the show and I just remember the producers of that show we would propose all these ridiculous ideas and they only wanted us to submit ideas that we thought we'd be able to do in two weeks two weeks is all you had to build everything some of them ended up being longer some of them were five or six weeks because they didn't really understand the engineering process what you're doing is you're inventing entire companies in two weeks.

37:51Here's a full product that you can go to market and sell. I know it's just a prototype, but just take it from there. You're ready to go and you're just creating rapidly innovation in two weeks. That's insane. But it was also like for me, I spent a lot of time trying to at least explain the process of here's how you actually and here's how engineering works so the producers and the company would understand how amazing the stuff is that we were doing. But we were actually like a lot of it was successful until the six by six and that failed. And I remember the production company seeing a rough cut of it.

38:31And they're like, this is amazing. We want you to fail more often. And we're like, yeah, we're like, this is the reality of it. Like the fun of the show really, if we succeeded every time, it would kind of be boring because everybody would know that we're going to build like the drama goes away and gave us a little less pressure of like, all right, we're going to do our best. But some of this is just not realistic to build in that amount of time. The producers would always call us like prima donnas because all of us were very type A, like, you know, hard to wrangle children, basically. But everybody had it was just so much fun.

39:05It was like this traveling circus. Virtual reality games already exist. What can we do to make them better? Making good ideas better is what the guys do best at Prototype This. So back at the concept table, they knock around the game plan in a brainstorming session. All right, what do you guys got? All right, we came up with a great idea for a prototype, giant boxing robots. Wow, this episode is really quite incredible. They create these two giant 14-foot tall boxing robots. And Joe is hooked up to like a motion tracking system where he can control the robot outside the ring simply by punching and dodging and everything.

39:40Like he's shadowboxing on the side and the robot just does what he does. I can't believe they built this thing in two weeks. It looks like so much fun. We had an episode where we were building a personal airbag to prevent people from falling off of roofs and dying. So it would like detect that you're falling and deploy this big airbag. We couldn't do anything that Mythbusters was doing. So we couldn't do it with a dummy. Since Mythbusters had this test dummy that they always used called Buster, The showrunners thought it would be too similar if Prototype This used an adult test dummy too. So instead of using a human test dummy like Buster, we used like little child baby test dummies, which was super creepy because we're like, look at the power of this airbag and we'd blow up this baby test dummy and like the arms would go flying.

40:29So the show ended. We were about to renew for a second season, but it turns out that it was just so expensive to produce the show because we had multiple film crew to film mechanical stuff and electrical stuff. It was just a lot. So they didn't renew the show. And I was relieved, but I was also kind of sad. And I didn't realize how sad I was until like a couple of weeks later, where it's just like, I didn't have anything to do. We're going to take a quick ad break right here, but stay with us because some of the greatest stuff that Joe's done is still coming up. This episode is sponsored by my friends at Black Hills Information Security.

41:03Black Hills has earned the trust of the cybersecurity industry since John Strand founded it in 2008. Through their anti-siphon training program, they teach you how to think like an attacker. From SOC analyst skills to how to defend your network with traps and deception, it's hands-on, practical training built for defenders who want to level up. Black Hills loves to share their knowledge through webcasts, blogs, zines, comics, and training courses all designed by hackers. For hackers! But do you need someone to do a penetration test to see where your defenses stand? Or are you looking for 24-7 monitoring from their active SOC team?

41:36Or maybe you're ready for continuous pen testing, where testing never stops and your systems stay battle-ready all the time. Well, they can help you with all of that. They've even made a card game. It's called Backdoors and Breaches. The idea is simple. It teaches people cybersecurity while they play. Companies use it to stress test their defenses. Teachers use it in the classroom to train the next generation. And if you're curious, there's a free version online that you can try right now. And this fall, they're launching a brand new competitive edition of Backdoors and Breaches, where you and your friends can go head to head, hacking and defending just like the real thing.

42:08Check it all out at blackhillsinfosec.com slash darknet. That's blackhillsinfosec.com slash darknet.

42:21When I first discovered you was at DEF CON 17. It was the first DEF CON I ever went to. and you were like the man of Defcon 17. I was like, that guy there, he's the one who, he's the guy who did all this stuff. And I was just like spellbound by you in this way of just like, wow, there goes Joe Gray. His name's Kingpin. I didn't know you were, so I didn't realize that you've been like in the same path for that one. That was a long time ago now. It was a long time ago. And so I think what you did to DEFCON has affected pretty much every hacker conference on the planet. Yeah. Yes. I've been to other non-hacker conferences before that.

43:08And when you go, they typically give you a bracelet or a lanyard or some kind of badge to indicate that you've paid to be there. DEFCON, a hacker conference, had something totally different. The badge to get into DEFCON was an electronic device. and it was built in such a way that encouraged you to hack it, modify it, take it apart, make it do cool things. You were supposed to mess with it. It had Easter eggs in it. It was cool. And you wore it around your neck. Yeah, so DEF CON 14 was the first electronic badge at a conference that we know of. I mean, it's just like everything else I've done.

43:41My goal has never been, I want to be famous. I want to make money. I want to do it. It's to do something that I enjoy. and that's it. Like I'm not even really thinking about the outcome of it. DEF CON was a huge part of my life. It was a huge part of the hacker culture at the time and it still is. I think it's a little bit different now than it was back then when it was smaller but it was this gathering place for like-minded people and I had known the Dark Tangent since I was younger, much younger. He was already running Black Hat and DEF CON and I'd given some talks at DEF CON, went to some early DEF CON parties.

44:21The Dark Tangent was like, hey, I'm starting up these trainings. You should do one about hardware. And so he was really the catalyst. He could see, he's like this visionary. He has this crystal ball and he can see kind of what's coming. So I was doing training and this was the first circuit board that I had made that had a custom shape to it that wasn't just a square, a green square. So the Dark Tangent saw that circuit board from the training classes and was like, hey, we should do that for DEF CON. So he saw that and was like, Like, let's make this a mass thing. So DEF CON 14 was the first electronic badge.

44:54And it was very simple. It had a really tiny microcontroller, a PIC 10F202, I think it was. Like a super tiny six-pin microcontroller and some blinky lights. You could change different blinking light patterns. And it had a debug interface adapter so people could kind of change the code or hack the code if they wanted to. And I had a badge hacking contest. And it was really the first time that a lot of people were exposed to electronics. And my goal was just like, expose more people to electronics. Like it was that simple. It was a big hit. People loved having a badge that you could hack on. And it's also your pass to the conference.

45:32How cool is that? And over the next couple of years, it was like, all right, what can I do different? What can I, what new technologies can I try? What circuit board fabrication process can I use that I haven't used before? So for me, it was like being able to spend DEF CON's money to try a new thing was great. And then to give something back to the community that they could use and learn from and get involved with electronics. The first year, the badge just blinked. The second year, it had capacitive touch buttons, which was the first time I've ever seen capacitive touch buttons in my life. DEF CON 16 looked like a ninja, and it had an infrared eye as the transmitter and an SD card.

46:10and you could load files, wares or whatever you wanted, onto the SD card and trade the infrared file transfer with people. So you could share files with people at DEF CON. And the year after that, the badge had a microphone and a single LED and it was programmed to react to different sounds. I remember someone found that if you play a tone at 2600 hertz, it would respond by saying something in Morse code. And all the parts were surface mounts. So you could barely even see that there were any electronics involved in this thing. By the time DEF CON 18 happened, I felt like I had sort of exhausted all of the things that I wanted to try.

46:44But it didn't matter. The ideas brought to life during those five years at DEF CON changed DEF CON forever. But it also had a widespread impact. What came next was badge life, which is now a huge community at DEF CON. A lot of people started making their own badges, electronic devices to hang around your neck, to represent certain groups or to get into certain parties or just wear because they're cool looking. And if you go today, you'll see thousands of people wearing a huge variety of electronic badges around their neck. Heck, last year, I was given a badge which had a little antenna on it, and it created a mesh network across all of Las Vegas, so you could talk to your friends who were anywhere around town, and they would also be able to identify where you're located.

47:24It's called MeshTastic, if you're wondering. But not only do you see hundreds of different badges these days, but there are also little add-on badges, too, where people make these little ones to stick onto your main ones. And I don't know if you realize this, but there are at least two hacker conferences every week somewhere in the world. You should absolutely be looking for the ones in your area and going to them. I took a non-tech friend to a hacker conference the other day and he had a blast. And I can almost guarantee there's a B-Sides conference within like a three-hour drive of you. And so many of these hacker conferences today have taken this idea of electronic badges and are using them too.

47:59Gosh, I went to St. Con last year in Utah And they've gone off the rails with electronic badges. First, of course, they have an electronic badge as your entry pass into the conference. And it has a lot of cool functionality, too. But they have this whole mini badge culture. There are thousands of these little tiny badges that you can use to decorate your main badge with. And in my opinion, all this started with Joe's wonderful badges and designs at DEF CON. It's like he birthed the whole community. I think it's cool to have had an impact in a way of like that thing turned into something like the Senate testimony turned into something.

48:38The badges turned into something. I don't really look back. I'm a lot of like, OK, that's done. What's next? And always trying to look for something. so it's cool that you mentioned it of like it is something that kind of helped shape things but I feel like it would be cool if more people had that mentality where it's just to bring something to the community and see what happens see what comes out of it

49:09Yes, that's what's so awesome about Joe, the stuff he gives the world, he does it in such a way that you can take that and run with it and create something new. He's incredibly inspiring, not only to me, but for many. Defcon started making this Uber award, which is sort of like a lifetime achievement award. And I was actually, it was like the first year I missed Defcon in ages. I was on vacation in Thailand and then going to a conference over there. And I woke up to like a whole bunch of text messages and photos of this big block of aluminum. them. And it was like this DEF CON award. And it said, for endless curiosity and innovation, the original spirit of badge life.

49:52And it was like, holy shit, like, wow, that's really cool. So that, that is really the first time where I realized that there was an impact of it. And I thought it was cool. And it's just like prototype this people come up and they're like, I saw that show and I became an engineer. And now I'm doing something at Apple or at Google or whatever. And And like, it's cool that people's lives are changed by what you do. And I think that's a really, I guess it's a good thing to remember because your actions have consequences, good or bad. And it's just, it's nothing I would ever expect. Like, I'm still just a hacker in my lab that does stuff is how I see it.

50:30I don't see it as anything else, even as, you know, my YouTube videos have a lot of views. Like, I don't see it as, that doesn't change me. it might affect other people, which is cool, get them involved, but it doesn't change me and it doesn't change my belief system and my passion for what I do. So my perspective is like, this guy's got it all figured out. He can just design whatever he wants. He's got the, I cannot remember the name of it, Kington Labs. Well, Grand Idea Studio. That's like my engineering company. So it's like he's got an engineering company and I saw your talk. He's got Hollywood deals that he's doing.

51:07I mean, And this guy, this guy is going to like, he's, I can't wait to see all the stuff that comes out. But you had no idea. No, I still have no idea what, what I'm doing. Like, I think, you know, it's a, it's a certain perspective or you see a celebrity on TV or on Instagram and you're like, man, I want to be like them. They have all their shit figured out. And that's just, that's just part of the story. And I think it's important for people to know, like, everybody has stuff going on, right? Even if somebody appears to be perfect in whatever way, there's always a struggle somewhere. I still don't have a path of where I'm going.

51:49I've fallen into all of these things. And some of it maybe was luck. Some of it was intentional a little bit. But most of it was just being in the right place at the right time and somebody somewhere dropping my name because I just were doing what I was doing. and loving what I was doing. But on a book that my wife had written, Troublemakers and Superpowers, it actually took her like four years to write it. When I read her complete book, it got me thinking like, wait, everybody else like has gotten tested for things like they did their psychological testing, their evaluation. I was like, what's up with me?

52:26Like, why did I gravitate towards the hacker world? Why did I gravitate towards punk rock? And, and why did I gravitate towards skateboarding? Why do I not think getting arrested was a problem? You know, like all of these things. So it got me really thinking about that. And during lockdown, I started meditating and I thought that was really helpful of kind of regulating me a little bit more. So a couple months ago, I ended up doing this full psychological testing, which for me was like, as a hacker, I'm like, I just want to know how my brain works. I want to know like, why do I feel these things in my head?

53:04Why do I feel these things? Which is completely different than a public perception, right? You see a lot of actors, a lot of musicians that perform on stage, but then they have all these other problems behind stage and they have substance abuse issues and all these other things. So I was just like, what's up with me? Why do I think this way? And so I kind of treat it as like a science experiment of like, let's see, let's see what my hacker brain is like. So I did like a full testing that was many hours long and I loved it. It was like puzzles and math and questions. And then of course, like the standard psychological tests.

53:41And, you know, at some point, like tests only show you certain things, right? Like I'm not a huge fan of like academic testing, but to give you a sense of things. And a lot of the questions really frustrated to me because they were kind of yes or no black or white questions. And it's like, nothing is black or white, you know? And like, there's things in there like, well, yeah, in certain situations, yes, I would do that. Or no, I wouldn't do that. And the testing came back with the two main things were being diagnosed with being clinically depressed, which I think explains a lot about my kind of anger and the way I see the world in general, and then having autism spectrum disorder.

54:23So being on the spectrum. So this was really interesting for validation of like, okay, yes, Joe has very high skills in certain things, and then some deficits in certain things. And that can be caused with, you know, some of the autism or the depression. And you can manage depression in certain ways, depending on what it is. But like now I don't have this internal anger against myself of like, why am I thinking that way? Or why do I feel this way? Like it's okay to feel this way. And so it totally flipped my perspective of like it validated that I'm okay the way I am. And now there's a name for the things that I have.

55:07So now I can work on those. And as a hacker, it's like, all right, now I understand. Let's look at that depression. What did that cause? What can I do to live better? Sometimes Joe likes to be an engineer. Sometimes he likes to be a hacker. Sometimes he likes to be a teacher. Sometimes he likes to be a father and a husband. And he bounces around doing all these different roles. He teaches electronics classes like all over the world. And he gets a lot of projects that come his way. But most don't spark that level of excitement for him. He never did settle down into a comfortable, reliable job. There's something in him.

55:40I think that hacker spirit, which urges him to stay punk, buck the system, break things, and learn to do something that nobody else knows. I would occasionally get emails with really strange requests of things. Or like, can you hack my girlfriend's... I think my girlfriend's cheating on me. Can you hack her device? I get those all the time. The sign of a healthy relationship. And I would generally respond to some emails at that point. Little projects would spring up here and there, and he'd get involved with them. But he was very picky about what he decided to work on. Because, well, it just might not be hackery enough for him, you know?

56:19If it doesn't push his understanding of electronics or the world or challenges him enough, he's not interested. Or maybe the project just isn't rewarding enough. When Dan had contacted me, I got this email, and it was a very well-written email. And I'm like, oh, this is a legitimate request. This guy Dan reached out to Joe saying he had$2 million in cryptocurrency. And the crypto is on a hardware wallet called a treasure wallet. But he doesn't have the pin to unlock the hardware wallet. So he can't access the money. I was wondering if Joe could help. And I'm like, okay, this sounds like an interesting project.

56:53Like, you know, some friends of mine had already proven that the treasure can be hacked in different ways. Using fault injection. I had never personally done anything with fault injection. So for me, it was a perfect opportunity of like, all right, I'm not traveling. Like there's still kind of lockdown. Things are starting to open up. But to me, it kind of piqued my interest of like, now I have a reason to learn a new skill. So to be clear, this shouldn't be possible. The treasure wallet is built so you only have 16 tries at guessing the pin. And if you don't get it right after the 16th failure, it wipes the device.

57:25It does that to avoid someone trying to brute force the pin and trying every combination until they get it. Now, somewhere in the memory of the treasure is both the PIN code and the private keys. And there's a security mechanism that blocks you from just dumping the memory of the chip and reading it. It'll just be garbled. So the thing is built to keep people like Joe out. I mean, what good is a security device if the security can be defeated easily, right? Which is exactly why Joe felt like this is an interesting challenge and started working on it.

57:58But this required him to pick up a whole bunch of new skills. First, he had to read up on if anyone else has defeated the treasure before and what vulnerabilities it might have, which there were some articles on it, but a lot of it was just theory, like there weren't instructions on how to do this or a YouTube video to follow along. And he had to become very familiar with learning the architecture of this device, understanding all the circuitry involved. And he had an idea to use a fault injection. This is to try to send some electrical pulses to the thing to get it to glitch, to get it to do things it's not supposed to do.

58:27And that might somehow let him get inside. But he didn't know very much about fault injections. So he had to practice that, too. So for months and months, he got into his workshop. This workshop I'm sitting in right now every day to learn more. Pretty much nonstop obsessive work to get things going because the information that was out there was correct. but it wasn't fully, it wasn't a full exploit chain. So there are still some things you had to work out. And also the technique that was being used at the time, which was voltage fault injection is very dependent on things like environmental temperature and even variances within the silicon.

59:07Cause it's all timing based of like, at this point in time, after this signal goes high, I'm going to inject the fault, which is basically with voltage fault injection, you're kind of like brown outing, like turning off the power really fast. in hopes of like messing up some CPU execution. So it was all very timing specific and like you could be off by one clock cycle and it's not gonna work. I started down this path of trying to replicate some existing work and going through, again, this rollercoaster of like, I love hacking, I hate hacking. You know, why isn't this working? Questioning my skills, like do I even deserve to be doing this?

59:41Really, it was more of the mental challenge. And my wife was like, you know, like I would come in, I'd be like, I can't get it to work. And she's like, just take a break. You don't have to work 18 hours at it. Because I was just so focused on it. She's like, take a break. Come back tomorrow. So she was like the voice of reason in all of it. Like, I don't know where I'd be without her. Like, I don't really talk a lot publicly about like our relationship. But I would be in a much different place. Like, I would be screwed without her. He eventually hones in on the attack. He's got hope that he can glitch this device just as it turns on to get it to go into debug mode.

1:00:18by sending electrical pulses through it in a way that it's just not built for. And he's got to time it just right. Even the smallest fraction of a second will be the difference of if it works or doesn't work. So he's trying this again and again and again and again and again and again, pretty much throwing everything possible at it to get it to act in a way that it shouldn't. And the whole time he's trying this, he's just practicing it on a test treasure wallet. The guy Dan didn't want to bring his wallet over until Joe could prove that he could actually get into treasure wallets. eventually, you know, got it working to the point where it was, it was working where I was confident enough.

1:00:51And I got some devices I could test it. I made a video to show to Dan, he lived in New Jersey, uh, and he actually was going to fly out here to do it. Um, and that's when, again, my wife comes in, she's like, you should be filming this. I had just during COVID, I had filmed, um, a video for wired called the pizza compass. And it was this really fun project. that was a device that you'd press a button and it would have a GPS, figure out where you are anywhere in the world. And it would do a Google lookup over the internet, find out where the nearest pizza place is and direct you to it with some LEDs.

1:01:24And that was like a really fun build video that we did. And she's like, a lot of your videos have been engineering focused. Like you should show people that you're still a hacker. So I called Wired and I was like, do you wanna film this? They're like, oh, it's kind of cool. But they kind of dragged their feet. And then I talked to my friend Fred, who is a former client of mine with some product development stuff, and he's a filmmaker, and he's like, hell yeah. So he got a camera crew out to his house and started filming his progress, trying to hack into this treasure wallet. What if you had a couple million dollars stored on a piece of silicon the size of a postage stamp, and it was protected by a password that you forgot?

1:02:02The video walks us through the whole process on how Joe hacks things, and it's quite fascinating to watch. Like Dan flies over to this workshop that I'm sitting in and gives the treasure wallet to Joe to hack into. And Joe just starts pulling it apart, trying to hack into it. The next step is we have to remove a couple of components from this board. The components we're removing are capacitors. And by removing them, it makes the chip more susceptible to those little glitches and stuff that we're doing. What I'm going to do is use my soldering iron and just very carefully keep both sides of the part and pull it off the board.

1:02:33the risk at this stage is pulling off some of the circuit board with it which hopefully won't happen. Iron is on. Yeah there's two that we need to remove. One is easier to get to than the other. First one's off. All right so those components are off. Now all I have to do is add the external connectors that's gonna let us hook it up to the hardware over there. The thing is Joe's method of getting into this thing is highly dependent on luck. There's like a one in a million chance this is going to work. And he's got this station set up that is just going to try again like every second. And it just tries again and again and again.

1:03:15It powers up the device. It attempts to trigger the fault. Did it work? If not, power off and power it on again to try to trigger the fault again. And he's got it automated to just try again and again and again. And if it works, it'll say hack the planet. He's actually only gotten it to trigger the fault a few times in his life during the test runs. It's not like he could just crack open this thing, hook it up into a machine, and then boom, done. This is a lot of work. And he really doesn't even know if this is going to work or not, but it's worth trying, and that's what makes it exciting to watch.

1:03:45But after a lot of waiting and trying thousands of times, they eventually get it. This is torture. Hack the planet. Oh! Oh, yes! It's like it knew. I'm like, this is torture. Hacked up planet. That's awesome. OMG. Like they say on the internet. Joe published this video to his YouTube channel and he got millions of views. It went viral. Way more views than any of the videos I've ever published. And I'm actually trying here. But it's just because how wonderful it is to watch Joe have fun hacking things. Well, you could probably guess. Once he demonstrated that he can hack into Bitcoin wallets, his inbox got flooded with tons of messages.

1:04:29Lots of people wanted help recovering their lost cryptocurrency too. And he took on some of those projects. And you could watch his YouTube channel to see more videos like that. In fact, there's one where he hacked time to get into a Bitcoin wallet, which in my opinion is way cooler than the other one. But even though this earned Joe that cool little YouTube plaque, something else emerged from it. Joe got impersonators. So the video came out, went viral. So out of the blue, I got an email from a guy that was like, hey, I've been talking to you on Instagram and you said you'd help me get access to my account.

1:05:06What's up? I sent you the money. And I'm like, what are you talking about? So one of my kids, who's actually on Instagram, went and found the guy and we looked him up. And it was a guy that was like kind of like a model, like a good looking person. It was to buy more followers. That's what it was. It was like to buy more followers. I don't know, something stupid. And he got screwed over by somebody pretending to be me. And that opened this door of like, what's going on? So I start searching on all these social media platforms. And it's like, there's like a million Joe Grans. And they're all just grabbing my Twitter feed and making fake profiles and all of this stuff that happens to every single person that has any sort of name recognition on the internet.

1:05:47And is it like, if you need help recovering your crypto, I'm the guy? Yeah. So it's multiple things. But that's the main one of like, there's some cryptocurrency video. And then there's all of these bots that respond. You should talk to Joe Grand. He's the man. And then it's like, you know, a fake telegram name or Joe Grand 6969 at gmail.com. You know, something totally obvious that it's not me. But there's this whole psychological side of things. I'm actually reading a book called The Confidence Game. That's all about the psychological side of getting conned and getting scammed. and what I've learned over the years of all of these emails that I get is people who are in a desperate situation are not thinking critically so they go to, they ignore all the red flags and scamming, impersonating is such a common scam and basically it's like, yeah, either they get reached out to directly or like the fake Joe Grand will direct message them and say, hey, I can help you or it's like, hey, you shouldn't, you know, how's your cryptocurrency investing going?

1:06:52You should invest in my platform. I'm reaching out to members of my community. And it's like, anybody who knows me knows like, well, Joe's not going to talk to a random stranger. But people who don't know me and who see the video might be like, oh, Joe is such a nice guy. He's reaching out to help. So it's a cat and mouse game. Like, you know, it's a whack-a-mole. Like we try to take them down, work them up. We now at least are verified. So yeah. So with that, I've had to set up a social media presence on every platform, which is not my personality. Like I had Twitter to communicate to my world of friends, even though that's kind of going down the drain.

1:07:30I set up a discord where my teenager was like, you got to set up discord so everyone could talk. I was like, I don't want to talk to every random person. And he's like, daddy, you just got to do it. Someone else can answer the questions. You just can be on there. So that's actually been really fun because I've been able to talk to people who are asking intelligent questions. And the ones that aren't just get ignored. It's great. But people still are getting scammed. So I've had to set up social media, open up direct message access so people at least get to the correct Joe Grand and not the scammer.

1:08:03And then being verified on these platforms, it's easier to take them down. I mean, it's a never-ending battle. But the hope is to just prevent more people from getting screwed. but it's opened my eyes and really enchanted me or disenfranchised me I guess about cryptocurrency which I am not an owner of any cryptocurrency for people who are thinking of coming over to rob me I'm not involved in cryptocurrency at all I'm just involved in the technical aspect of it but seeing all of the scams really has kind of crushed my idealistic view of what positive technologies could be There are some cool things about cryptocurrency or the cryptography behind it or blockchain.

1:08:47Maybe there are some benefits to it, but there's just so many scams and these shit coins and rug pulls and all these things that sort of overshadow any positive benefits that might come out of it. Very similar stuff has happened to me too. I've seen quite a few Jack Recider impersonators trying to scam people. Be careful out there. Only chat with me through official channels, which you can see the links on the bottom of my website. Just as a rule of thumb, if you find yourself in a weird crypto deal with me, it is probably not me. I don't mind all this stuff wasting my time because it's intriguing for me.

1:09:23It's my area of interest. But it's lame that Joe has to waste his time on this crap because he's so talented and he should be working on some really cool projects instead. And I can't wait to see what his next amazing thing is that he accomplishes. It all falls back to my ethos of like, I want to build something that's interesting and that I could use and that could help other people and then see where it goes. But yeah, I think ultimately it's like my life has no ulterior motive and it has really no specific direction. And I think that's the key. We can see your direction by looking in the rearview mirror, but we have no idea what's going on.

1:10:03That's exactly right, because you can look back and it's like, oh, Joe has it all figured out. Did the TV show? Did DEF CON? Did this and did that? And it's like, no, it's way easier to look backwards and create a path than know that that was where I'm going.

1:10:29A big thank you to Joe Grand for letting me come over and chop it up for a few hours. I encourage you all to check out his YouTube channel. Just search for Joe Grant and you'll find it pretty easy. But even more than that, I encourage you all to be hackers yourself. Don't accept the world as it is. Create the world you want and push things beyond their limits. I know it's hard, but if you can learn to feel comfortable in that space of just not knowing what you're doing, but you just keep trying and trying and trying again anyway, then the world is yours. Okay, I have some big news. I have a new bonus episode available to premium subscribers.

1:11:04If you're not a premium subscriber, there are 11 bonus episodes available for you right now to enjoy. And you also get an ad-free version of the show too. Being a premium subscriber is a great way to show thanks as well because it really does help this show. To get bonus episodes, just visit plus.darknetdiaries.com or just go to darknetdiaries.com and then click bonus episodes at the top of the page. This episode was created by me, The Stack Jacker, Jack Recider. Our editor is the uninstall wizard, Tristan Ledger. Mixing done by Proximity Sound, and our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.

1:11:38Why did the smartphone need glasses? It lost its contacts. This is Dark Knight Diaries.