CyberWire Daily - Let's go to the movies. [Hacking Humans Goes to the Movies]

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Welcome to a fun new project by the team who brings you Hacking Humans, the CyberWire's social engineering podcast. Co-hosts Dave Bittner and Joe Carrigan are joined by Rick Howard in this series. They view clips from their favorite movies with examples of the social engineering scams and schemes you hear about on Hacking Humans. In this first episode, Dave, Joe and Rick are watching Dave's and Joe's picks. They watch each of the selected scenes, describe the on-screen action for you, and then the team deconstructs what they saw. Grab your popcorn and join us for a trip to the movies. Links to movie clips if you'd like to watch along: Dave's pick from "The Grifters" Joe's clip from "Matchstick Men" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire. I'm Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire, and joining me is my Hacking Humans co-host, Joe Kerrigan from the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. Hello, Joe. Hi, Dave. On this show, Joe and I look at clips from some of our favorite movies,

clips which demonstrate some of the scams and schemes we talk about on Hacking Humans. And joining the fun this week is Rick Howard, the Cyber Wire's chief security officer and chief analyst. Hello, Rick. Hey, guys, this is going to be great. I love this idea. It's going to be a lot of fun.

We've got some fun clips to share, so stay tuned. We will be right back after this message from our show's sponsor. Transat presents a couple trying to beat the winter blues. We could try hot yoga. Too sweaty. We could go skating. Too icy. We could try hot yoga. Too sweaty. We could go skating. Too icy. We could book a vacation. Like somewhere hot. Yeah,

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I am really looking forward to digging into some clips here today. I'm going to start things off for us. So the way this works is we're going to watch a clip in real time together. We'll have a link to the clip that we're watching from YouTube. So for our listeners, if you want to watch along with us, you can do that. I'm going to do my best to describe the scene while it's happening, and then afterwards, the three of us will deconstruct what we've seen. All right? Sound good?

All right. Let's give it a cry. All right. So my clip this week is from the 1990 film The Grifters. This is an American neo-noir crime thriller. It was directed by Stephen Frears, produced by Martin Scorsese, and starred John Cusack, Angelica Houston, and Annette Bening. And both Angelica Houston and Annette Bening were nominated for Oscars for their performances in this film.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with it. It is a good movie, but it is quite dark. It is not. You're not watching this with Grandma? Is that what you're saying, Dave? Well, I mean, it is an entertaining movie, but it is not a movie that has a happy ending or, you know, spoiler alert. It's not one of those films you're going to walk away feeling better than

you did when you started but uh so i have to say that i gotta say that i uh annette benning is one of my favorite actresses of all time she makes anything that she's in just lighten up and brighten and makes a whole thing entertaining so i am uh thrilled that she's in it. And just as an aside, I was watching Angelica Houston in, what's the Western they made? Lonesome Duff, okay? And she makes that absolutely fantastic. So I'm thrilled that these two actresses are in this movie. Yeah, yeah. And a big fan of John Cusack as well.

I think that is what drew me to this movie initially. I believe I first saw this movie on video. I did not see it in the theaters when it originally came out. I think it's one of those films that did okay, but not great. But over the years, its reputation has grown, particularly for the strong performances that are in it. So in this scene, the characters played by John Cusack and Annette Bening are on a train ride.

They're heading away for a weekend together. Now, John Cusack's character is a small-time con man, and he tends to do one-on-one scams, and we pick up the scene in the midst of that train ride. Mr. My Legs, you want to come along? No. You you a drink. I'm going to stretch my legs. You want to come along? No. You want a drink? No.

See you in a minute. So Cusack gets up from his seat and he's heading towards the dining car. It seems like he's wearing his raincoat from Say Anything. I don't see it. He sees a group of sailors who are in the dining car. He ducks into the restroom here and he reaches inside the pocket of his raincoat and he pulls out, it's like a sleeve that he's putting over his arm, sort of like an ace bandage kind of thing. It's not sure what's going on with this. Yeah, it looks like an elbow pad. Yep, yep, exactly. Then he pulls out a pair of dice from his pocket, and he sticks the dice to his forearm.

So there's something going on here where these dice are loaded. Now we're back at the bar now. He has just poured a beer, and he's heading towards the sailors who are sitting. And on his way, he bumps into another gentleman, spills his beer all over everyone. Sorry. Are you okay, pal? Yeah. Look, I spilled all your drinks. And then ingratiates himself to all these sailors who he spilled the beers on.

So now he's going to become their friend by buying them beers. Right, right. Heading back to buy them beers. Yep. Four millers. Now we're back in the original car and Annette Bening is here. She's fixing up her makeup and there's another gentleman who's giving her the eye. She gives him a nice little smile back and shakes her head no, saying,

I'm no, no, I'm not available, and gives her a little smile. She gets up to head off to the dining car and walks away. The camera sort of lingers on Annette Bening's shapely form. We're back in the dining car and Cusack's character is getting to know these sailors. I've never used it before. You guys could have gotten it. Now he reaches down towards the floor and pretends to pick up the dice that we saw him have earlier. I couldn't believe that. Hey, when did you guys drop this? and pretends to pick up the dice that we saw him have earlier. Hey, when do you guys drop this?

Now it's on mine. I don't know. I wouldn't have taken a chance on this. Annette Bening is walking towards the dining car now. We're back with Cusack and the sailors. They're drinking together. Come on, guy. You can't buy every round. It's my guard turn. Who is that actor? He's been around forever. Yeah. Right? He's

always plays a bad guy. But I love that guy. He's one of those that guys. Let's go, Junior. So they're rolling dice for who's going to buy the next round. And Cusack loses, of course. You got it it setting them up right

right so he heads off to the bar meanwhile Annette Bening is still making her way to the dining car so now she's watching

and sort of sees what's going on here and she's sort of hip to the fact that he's scamming these sailors alright so he's rolling the dice

and likes it right yep Jesus take it away buddy these sailors. So he's rolling the dice. And likes it, right? Yep. So now Cusack is playing this dice game with these sailors. And of course he's winning because

he's got loaded dice. Come on, you guys! That actor is Jeremy Piven. That's the guy I was trying to come up with. Is that Jeremy Piven? I didn't even recognize him. Rolling the dice.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner. It's getting worse and worse. So I just want to point out that Annette Bening has no dialogue in this, right? But the way she acts in the scene, it just adds a lot of flavor to the whole thing, all right? Just watching her react to what Cusack is doing. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so that's the scene. Let's unpack it and talk about what's going on here.

Joe, what do you make of this? So it's interesting because it starts off with him making a mess of things, right? First off, he preps for the scam. Yeah. And then he goes in and he makes a mess of things and says, I'm going to buy everybody beers because I just spilled their beers. Right. Right. So they're like, okay, well, this guy's okay, right? Then he goes, I'm going to buy the next round too., no, but by this time he already has the die and presumably he has rigged the die so that when he rolls

he loses. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So this kind of lowers their guard. Can we pause on that for a second because I have never understood

the gravity and mechanics of a loaded die like that. Right? So he's got the, he's got the arm band that's clearly magnetic. Right. Right. And he's got the armband that's clearly magnetic, right? And he's got the dice, both die, have metal pieces in them, obviously. So when he rolls the dice in this scene, how is that making that seven come up every time?

How does that work? Well, it's freaking magnets, Rick. It's freaking magnets. I don't know. I do have a personal story about this, though. Yeah. Let's hear it. When we were kids, my brother and I went up to my grandfather in upstate New York one day.

And my brother had like five bucks with him. And it was all in ones. And my grandfather said, hey, you want to play some dice? And my brother said, well, sure. And he goes, okay, here's how this works. If I throw these dice and I roll a seven, then I win a dollar, right? But if I don't roll a seven, then I have to roll that number again before I roll a seven, right? So my brother goes, okay, fine. And he puts a dollar down and my grandfather rolls and it's a seven. And my grandfather picks the money up.

And my grandfather says, do you want to go again? And my brother goes, yeah, sure. He puts a dollar down, rolls it. Sure enough, it's a seven. And he says, well, what are the odds that's going to happen three times in a row? My brother goes, nothing. I'm going to put all $3 down. And my grandfather rolls a dice and it's a seven.

And he takes the money. And my brother notices that one of the dice is all fours, and the other one is all threes. Right? There you go. So we don't need no stinking magnets then, okay? Exactly. Yeah. So I don't know how this works, but, yeah, my grandfather's wife tried to get it.

It was like, give him the money back. You cheated him out of that. My grandfather was insistent that he didn't do that. He's, no, no, he lost his money. That's a lesson learned, young child. It should be a lesson. That's right. We all learned a valuable lesson today.

Yeah, okay. So, yeah, I mean, who knows? When he's in the restroom, he shows that he has two dice. Right. So maybe one always rolls a one and one always rolls a six, you know, when they're within the magnetic field of whatever this thing is that he has strapped to his arm. Yeah, and he's switching them out. Yeah.

You suspect he's probably good at sleight of hand also. Right. You know, he knows what he's doing here. But I also want to focus on sort of the social side of this, about how he's able to ingratiate himself with these sailors and put them at ease and make them feel like he's on their side. Yeah, and they're having a good time losing money to him. Right.

When they start gambling. Right. And it's kind of like the only lesson I learned about grifters is what I learned from the other big grifter movie, The Sting. When they get done with it, the victim has to think that everything was legit, right? And so that ingratiating, paying for the beer and being sorry, and that allows him to get away with it all at the very end of it. So yeah, that's the lesson learned for me. Yeah, I thought it was interesting, too, that he pretends to find

the dice on the floor, right? So, hey, and he says, did one of you guys drop this? And they're saying, no, no, I don't, so it's not like he was someone who carries around dice to gamble with.

Right. This just happened to fall into our scene, and hey, while we've got this, why don't we, why don't we, why don't we tell you what, let's, let's use this to see who buys the next round of drinks. Right. And so one step, one step more clever than, than grandpa. But then he loses that bet on the drinks and he says,

I tell you what guys, I'm going to go buy this round of drinks, but give me a chance to win it back when I come back. Right. Be a good sport. And that's when he comes back, and of course the game is fixed, and he plays who knows how many rounds. We see two rounds in the film here, and presumably takes these poor sailors of their daytime pay, right? These are enlisted men, by the way. Certainly an officer would never fall for a scam like this, right? Right. These are enlisted men, by the way. Certainly an officer would never fall for a scam like this, right? No, because an officer would be throwing big dollars down. That's what would happen, right? Right. 20s and 50s. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well,

that is my clip this week. Any final thoughts here, gentlemen? I think it's a good one. I love that it's a classic con man mode, right? In a different form. We've seen a bunch of these in the movies throughout my movie watching career, right? And this is just another angle at it. And they did it so well. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Joe? Yeah. I think it's a good scene. I think it's interesting. I don't know. If somebody comes up to me and starts rolling dice, I'm a little bit suspicious, but probably because of my personal experience with my grandfather and knowing how that works. Coming from a long line of dice-rolling scammers, you're hip to this.

Word to the wise, if you're one of Joe's kids and you're listening to this podcast, if he whips out a set of dice, don't fall for it. Yeah, run away. Run away. Right. Not only is it a family heirloom, but it's a scam as well. My brother actually got those dice when he passed away. There you go. Did you win him in a bet?

No, no. He inherited them. It's part of the family tradition. All right. That is my clip this week. Joe, you've got a clip for us. What can you share with us? My clip is from Matchstick Men.

This movie stars Nicolas Cage and Alison Lohman. And in this scene, there's another actress named Beth Grant who plays a lady in a laundromat. And in this scene, Alison Lohman walks into the laundromat, and Nicolas Cage is already in the laundromat, and Beth Grant is doing laundry. So why don't we start here? All right. While we are watching this, I'll do my best to sort of fill in some of the details of what's going on here. Here is the clip from Matchstickman. So a young lady's in a laundromat here.

Talking to an older lady. Sure. A lot. This is nothing. You ought to catch me during the little league season. Three boys. And even cute? Uh-huh. Simon's about your age, so you'd never guess he's so hyper. I'm gonna get a soda. Do you want anything? No, thanks, honey. She walks away, and something drops out of her pocket, a piece of paper. Oh, honey,

you dropped something. Hmm, not mine. You sure? You gotta be... Hands it over. It's a lottery ticket. Looks like somebody did the wash by accident. Yesterday's drawing.

That looks like the second, don't you think? Probably a loser. She throws the paper away. The older woman Is gazing at the piece of crumpled up paper there Can tell she's thinking about it Trying to get the washing machine started Still looking at that piece of paper

We should at least see if it hit. Excuse me, sir. Can we borrow your paper for a sec? We're just looking for lottery results. Oh, there's Nicolas Cage. There he is. I didn't recognize him with the hat. Nicolas Cage was there the whole time reading a newspaper. He heads over to the washing machines. 6, 18, 30, 49, 69, 60. Sorry. 30, 49, 60. Missed by one. Oh, you're joking.

Story of my life. Any luck? Four out of five. Can you believe that? Four out of five? Four out of five pays. It does? Sure, yeah. Call the number on the back of the ticket.

Come on. Well, thanks. So they're at a phone booth now. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. What'd they say? Okay. We won $600. Holy shit! Nicholas Cage is walking by. Take it down for

verification and they'll mail me a check. In fact, we should call your mom and we can all go down together. You know, it's okay. I'm supposed to be home anyway. No, no, no. We're in this 50-50. So next we see... I'm still trying to figure out what the con is here. Okay, what are they... Oh, yeah, here we go. They're at an ATM now.

The older woman is drawing money out of the ATM. Nicolas Cage is looking on. All right. That is the clip. Right.

And that's the scam. Joe, why don't you unpack exactly what we're seeing here? What's going on? This is a fake lottery ticket scam. And the way this works is somebody prints up a fake lottery ticket that looks like it's won some amount of

money. And then they come up with some reason they can't collect it. And in this case, Alison Lohman's character can't collect it because she's not 18. She says that early on, she's got to be 18 to play. So Beth Grant's character is, is, just being taken advantage of here and she's being taken advantage of because she is a

person with integrity, right? She says, we're going to split this 50-50 and she's very insistent throughout the whole time.

So, the con is very subtle. Nicolas Cage is, is part of the con as well. He's in on it. And, what looks like

happened here, there's all kinds of different variations. Like, the newspaper could be fake or the ticket could have a number on the back of it where you call and there's another conspirator on the other end of the phone telling you, yeah, yeah, come on down to the lottery place and get your money. But it's also conceivable that that could actually be the legitimate lottery phone number, right? The only thing fake is the ticket. So the ticket is printed up to look like it didn't hit the big jackpot, but it hit a $600 jackpot, which is a large amount of money for anybody. If I found a $600 winner on

the street, I'd be very happy. Sure. And I'd collect my $600. But what's happened here is Allison Lohman's character, Angela, cannot stick around. She's going to leave. So the other character, the laundry lady, Beth Grant, says, well, I'll just give you the money now, and I'll go down and collect the $600. Of course, when she gets there, it's going to be a fake ticket, and she's going to be out the $300. Right, right. So what they've done, they've convinced her to withdraw half of the winnings, the $300, and give that to her. And as you say, because she has integrity, she wants to split it 50-50. Right.

And that's the scam. That's the scam. Yeah. Have you ever heard that, Joe, in real life, scams like that? Is that a typical thing? It's actually a very old scam. scams like that? Is that a typical thing? It's actually a very old scam. We had a story that we did on Hacking Humans about a year ago where I started doing old scams and we covered this. They've had things where they go out and they buy lottery tickets, actual lottery tickets,

and then they print up a fake newspaper or they change the number on the back of the ticket so that when you call, somebody says, well, read me the serial number on the ticket. Yeah, yeah, that's a big winner. Come on in, collect your winnings. There's all kinds of different variations on this scam, but it's essentially, it's an old scam that is based on a fake lottery ticket. Yeah. The thing I find interesting in this version of it is that they don't go for the big win, right? I mean, by playing off the fact that if you get four out of five numbers right in this particular lottery instance, you still win some sizable amount of money. And they dial it in so it's enough money that somebody could have that

in their account. They could take that out and think everything was on the up and up. Yeah, because if you go for the jackpot and it's a million-dollar jackpot and somebody says, well, I'm going to leave. Give me $500,000 now. I don't have $500,000 to give you. Right, right. I think it's been a while. Go ahead, Rick.

Well, I tell you what always comes to me when I see these kinds of things is that crime, that's a hard job. In order to make a living doing this stuff, that's a full-time gig you got to do. And, and, and the chance you're going to get caught is high. So I got to be high pressure, a lot of work. I'm not so sure I'm cut out for that kind of line of work. No, I'm not either. I would, I'd start sweating the moment I started doing anything like this. Yeah. As soon as he walked over to the ATM machine, I'd be going, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I wasn't going to do it, I promise.

Well, you know, it's been a long time since I've seen Matchstick Men, so I don't remember the specifics about the characters. But it's interesting to me that the younger lady who comes into this laundromat, does it seem as though she is familiar with the older woman here? Like maybe they've crossed paths before? Because when the jig is up on this, she's going to have to get out of Dodge.

She's not going to want to cross paths with this woman that she scammed again. Right. No, I'll take it to the next level. I got the sense that they had watched her for a while. She knew that that lady had three good-looking boys, right? And she knew about that kind of stuff. They had already marked her, right?

That wasn't a random pickup, I don't think. Yeah, yeah. All right, well, that was a fun one. Boy, we had a couple of fun ones this week. And for our listeners out there, if you have a clip that you would like us to consider for using on our special Hacking Humans Go to the Movies episodes here, you can send that to us at hackinghumansatthecyberwire.com. That is our show for this week. We want to thank Rick Howard for joining us. Rick, thank you for taking the time.

So every time you want to do these, I'm here. Okay. Thank you, sir. Of course, we want to thank the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute for their participation. You can learn more at isi.jhu.edu. The Hacking Humans podcast is proudly produced in Maryland at the startup studios of Data Tribe, where they're co-building the next generation of cybersecurity teams and technologies. Our senior producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Peter Kilby. I'm Dave Bittner. And I'm Joe Kerrigan. And I'm Rick Howard. Thanks for listening.