Modern Wisdom - #105 - Thomas Johnson - What Is An Ethical Hacker?

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Thomas Johnson is an ethical hacker and social engineer. Hacking is often thought of as a dark art. Dark basements and illegal activities. But there's an entire other world of hackers who are using their skills to subvert security systems both online and offline for good. Expect to learn just how Tom hacks both people and computers to break into secure buildings, how safe your information is online, what tools Tom uses to bypass the systems that are meant to keep him out and his best advice for staying secure online. Also get ready for him to hack into a university's CCTV system only using Google while we are recording. Extra Stuff: Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello people of podcast land. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Tom Johnson and he is a social engineer and ethical hacker. Don't worry, I didn't know what that meant before this podcast either. So today you're going to learn. Tom is going to tell us how he gets into buildings that he shouldn't, how he gets access to information and computers that are prohibited and protected, how he subverts both online and offline security, and hacks into a university CCTV system live on air. This entire discussion with him was pretty terrifying. He is a good guy, but the fact that he is able to do these things with computers and in the real world shows just how vulnerable we are. We think that we have a lot

of protections in place and that our information is at least partially secure and Tom dispels a lot of those myths today. Lot of takeaways to do with both personal and commercial security on and offline, so I really hope that you enjoy it. Thank you so much to Tom for coming on. Please welcome one of the good guys in the world of hacking by Tom Johnson, Ethical Hacker and Social Engineer Extraordinaire. Welcome to the show Tom, it's great to have you on. Hello, thank you very much for inviting me. It's going to be an exciting one today. This world of ethical hacking and social engineering is something that I've seen a little bit

about online, but I don't really know all that much, but I guess we're going to delve into it today, right? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, would you like to start at the beginning? How have I got involved in it? Yeah. Or would you like me to tell you what it is for us at all? So, yeah, let's find out. How do you define ethical hacking and social engineering and what you do, and then let's find out

about the Genesis story? Absolutely, okay. So social engineer, or a guy called Christopher Hadnany in America, is the art of using human psychology or misusing human psychology to get a target to do something or say something, or shouldn't do or say it. And now there's grassroots. So if you can talk someone giving you the passwords or plugging in your space stick into the

computer, then all of this very expensive cyber security mitigation is useless because they are literally giving you the case to the kingdom So that need to look at what it is. I understand yeah, I suppose as these technological firewalls and safety measures become more sophisticated the ways around it that don't require you to just brute force try and break through something that's don't require you to just brute force try and break through something that's heavily encrypted. I guess this sort of falls to the one remaining weak link in the chain, which is always going

to be the several million year old brain that sits inside of the person control in the system, right? Well, in my opinion, humans can be the weakest link, but they can also be the strongest link as well, because they think in a different way to how compute has processed information. So have you ever had a good feeling before Chris? Yeah. Well, that good feeling is your subconscious mind

telling you that there is something not quite right in a pattern. So your subconscious mind is constantly processing everything around you. And then when you get that good feeling, that is your subconscious mind, say to your conscious mind, there's something not quite right here.

So that is a really good way to defend against social engineers, that good feeling. Got you. Okay, so let's start off the Genesis story. How do you set up what happens whereby you are now sat opposite me with a microphone in front of you talking about

ethical hacking and social engineering? Where does it begin? Right, it begins when I was about 12 years old and I was pulled out of school by an overprotective mother. I was a very small child in a predominantly council area in walls end and it wasn't a very good time at school for me and she was very overprotective pulled me out and had nothing to give me workwise so she just sat me in front of a computer. So I started playing games, what every child tends to do and then I started getting bored of games and I couldn't afford new games so I started working out how I could break the system and copy those games so I could

get them for free. Not because I was a criminal but because I wanted to play games. The games started getting boring so I wanted to learn how the games worked, so I programmed the games and things developed on and on and on and then something amazing happened. This rudimentary thing called the Internet come about and it'd become my playground. I was spending all of my time online. ac yn ymwch yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffodd yn ffoddf ffodd yn ffodd yn ff and downloads through all the files and then it started getting boring so I started going a bit further, I started college, I got thrown out to college for hacking an internal meal system, I was, yeah, I was naughty but I was sending messages from one lecturer to another saying that they were in love with each other or all sorts of different things, again so funny looks, I was great at doing things with terrible, I kept in a way with them.

So I had to go out and throw out the college. So I went back again, lasted about two weeks and I was thrown out again. I locked the network manager out of his computer and he didn't say the funny side. So you've got to understand at the same time that my skills were developing and to a point where college wasn't really teaching me anything so it was a bit bored if that makes sense. So it just

started encouraging me to do more and more risky things silly things when I look back and the White Hat now, yeah, just add that, the White Hat is somebody who puts ethics over morals over everything. So I'll only add within the boundaries of law, but in those days anything on that in the spare game. I was running my mother's phone bill up because of course it was on dial up at the time. She used to put a little key code on so I wrote a little program that would go through every single key code and brute force it. So within an hour I was back online again. And then one day I heard a knock at the door and said, the door, and there was two big, burly police officers standing in front of us. The subsequently arrested me, took me to the police station, locked

me up for about 15 hours, threatened to extradate me to America where I'd get death by lethal injection and everything. And I was absolutely terrified. How old are you? How old are you here? I was about 16, 17ish. Shit, the birds. It's a young age to be having such heavy words.

A lot of the head and everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And 20 years later, I fun girl, it was a social engineer. An attack on us, it was actually two of my mother's friends who were coppers, whom she put them up to the task of scaring you straight. So it wasn't a real arrest. No. You're now phone bill.

So that was my first taste of social engineer. And in Believe believe you me was very effective. So did that scare you straight? It scared me straight for a very long time. In fact, I lost my love of computers for a while. I talk it hooklain and sinker and I was genuinely in fear of me life and I just stayed away from computers as a set of a company. I don't know all right out of the company and then that went under and I just thought to myself what do I want to do? Do I want to earn minimum wage for the rest of my life? So I looked at the skill set that I had and I thought I wanted to go back

into cyber security. Now it is a job, it wasn't bad, it was a crime, but now it's a job. So I had no qualifications to be named. So I'm glad to be way out and we're taking side university course. They give me a shot and I've received a first with honors in every module so far. So I've done all right. Amazing. That's fantastic. So that's the journey that you've taken yourself on there. So how do you go from the online to the offline, is it offline hacking? Right, yeah.

Well, it's more impersonating. It's like the good old fashioned con. That's exactly what it is, but it's got a cyber element to it. So if you remember the old con men or con women who would trick you into doing something, that is exactly what social engineer and can be. It's tricking somebody into doing something or seeing something. Shouldn't. So I set up a little company. I started doing a little bit of work with the police, little

bits and bobs here and there, and then I do a talk at Cyberfest, the Hedios Cyberfest, the Convention, it's a North East Convention, North East of England, and then I was invited from that talk to do a talk at the local government level. Now the talk that I've done was based upon a hack that I carried out in ethical hack on the university that I've studied at. So I was a first-year student bearing in mind when this took place and I approached the School of Computing, can I test your security please? And they said yes, they didn't realise that I've been a hack-up from being about 12 years old. Oh, did they just think that it was some student who didn't really know what he was doing?

Didn't realise they were coming up against boss level 55 hacking skills. I wouldn't say I'm that good. But yeah, they got a bit of a shock. Within 24 hours, I worked out how their smart card system worked. And I built a corner that could clone the cards. So I then dressed up as a security guard. ac ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymdyn ymd And with those cards I had access to all areas free parking for six months. Me and I had free food free food library books everything you could ever want was all there free. I didn't tell tea side university until cyberfest, which was a little bit naughty. And then I saw the giveaway all the secrets and it got a little bit of attention.

I bet it did, yeah. It did. But then I got invited to the ICDDF, the information, communication, data and digital forensics convention, which is Europe's largest clause cybersecurity convention for police law enforcement and military. So I was invited by the National Police Chiefs Council to do a talk there. Real epicenter of this sort of stuff then. Absolutely, absolutely. It's about as big as you can get. It was invite only, you know, you couldn't get through the doors unless you were invited. So I arrived, I expected to be shot in a little side room, just doing a little fill at all. And I was in the big county suite, and I was a keynote speaker. So it was absolutely

terrifying. So at the talking front of 600 of some of the world's best professionals on cybersecurity and especially social engineering. Shit the bed. Absolutely. Do you want to see what I've got as well? I've got that. What's that? That's a plaque, certificate of appreciation. That's so cool. Is that from the home office? That's from the home office, yeah. Let me just say I've got something else getting about something. Oh, there it is. There was me one moment. I've dropped it. This is even cooler. This is an

unaccount that I was given, believe it or not, off the home office. Okay. And the FBI. Oh, it's an AT&T, NTSC. What does what does that mean? And what is it? It's like a big plastic plastic coin. No, I know what is it? It's like a big plastic plastic coin What do you know it's not it's a metal coin Metal for our inside of a plot inside of a plastic You don't see one get it out all right. Yeah, so what does it mean? So this is what you call an unaccom and it's what I was awarded for doing the talk

And it I'll show you so that's the side there that's the important one that's the National Police Chiefs Council our central government and the National Crime Agency and on that side we've got 18 inter-youth sponsors at the event we've got the Metropolitan Police the the British Government, that little round one there is the FBI Operational Technological Division. Fuck me. That's some big names on this thing. Yeah, and the bottom one is the National Technological Assistance Centre.

So to me, that is like my value of possession. I've went from port scanning the FBI when I was a kid, to now sort of working alongside them. It was really exciting. Unbelievable. So off the back of this talk that you've given presumably, it's been interesting to it quite a few people in the audience. What happens from there?

Is there any job offers? Do you get any emails? Is there anyone? I'm getting a fair few job offers all the time to be fair, but I'm currently putting them on hold. I've went on another journey now, which is the technical side. I'm currently studying OSCP,

which is a fence of security certified professional hacker. I should receive that in two months. And then the world is my oyster. What's that most recent qualification? What does that mean? That is, we have an operating system. I mean, you see it just behind me here. That's a Cali Linux, which is not a Windows-based system. It's a it's a Debian-based system. And offensive security to make Cali Linux have an accreditation called OSCP and it's called PWK penetration with Cali Linux.

So once I get that, it's a globally recognized certification. Okay, and that is like you said on the technical side. So is it rare to find hackers who have the in-person skills alongside the technical know-how? Or do you find people who have that mindset With regards to just trying to open doors whether it's online or offline. They're just interested either way I think You have more technological hackers than you have social engineers

Sorry, let's rephrase that you have more good technical hackers than you have good social engineers. Sorry, let's rephrase that. You have more good technical hackers than you have good social engineers. So every hacker has the potential to attend social engineer and techniques and tactics, but some are better than others. And it's relatively rare to find a nerd like myself with the ability to be able to talk to people as well. So I take pleasure in teaching and communicating and helping organisations. And that in itself helps me sort of sharpen my social engineer and tool set. I've recently done a hack on a large unnamed company, an ethical hack I was employed to test their security and part of my training them allowed me to advance my social engineering and I explained that

I was approached by this company and asked if I could test their human firewall. So I spent about three weeks exalt training information, doing reconnaissance on them, passive and active, finding out who the staff were, who were talking to, I trod all of the Facebook's the LinkedIn, all of the social media, I built up profiles on them, a prioritised five staff who I thought would be the weakest and I approached them all that linked in for my pretext, which was my lie. So I tried multiple, I'm not going to the trade secrets, but I tried multiple lies and a couple of them were successful, I managed to hook a couple of them, but one I prioritised,

I went in a hell of a mean with them pertaining to something that didn't exist and then left and in that short amount of time I had already cloned all of the cards to get into the building. So within 50 minutes of my actual exploitation phase, I was in a sanctum through multiple corded doors, drinking cups of coffee in the Ate station for three and a half hours, unquestioned. It was good, it was interesting. It was exciting. Is that what you call a successful hack? Yes.

And to be taught the honest with you, there were very good on a lot of areas, but the didn't expect an attack of that magnitude to take place. So the final straw was asking staff to step away from the computers, and I was plugging in covert hacking tools like the USB robot Ducky and the bash bunny, which looked like USB devices devices but the aunt, the tells us about those, I want to know what those do.

Right, well, USB robot Ducky was created by a company called Hack5, Shoutout, Shani Moss and Darren Kitchen. They created a device called an AID, a human interface device, now it looks to the computer like it's a keyboard with somebody typing on the other end, but it can type at thousands of characters a minute. So I could spend a full day coding exploits to compromise their systems, and then I plug this device in,

and it types it out locally. Yes, okay. Yeah, so it thinks it's a person typing and the bash bunny isn't a multi-attack platform which can emulate Ethernet or the USB which is trusted by Windows, iOS and Linux. And you can run payloads, steel, password, dashes, do all sorts with it even through a lot screen on a computer. Shit, the bed. Yeah, serious stuff.

Oh, I get worse, I get worse. Oh, come on. I want to find out what are the other, what's the other like atomic weapons or what if we were to open up the ethical hackers toolkit or the bag? What have you got inside of it? You've got the rubber ducky, you've got the, the bash, you've got the bash bunny. I've got some bits here if you want to show you them. Would you like me to show them?

You can just run through them if you want to, you can just run us through it. I'll be in there. Right, okay, well, I've got them and I'll show you at the same time. So we've got little single-board computers, Raspberry Pis, really useful, the runoff of battery, they've got Wi-Fi Bluetooth and that's a full PC there. But the do get smaller, you can get the little Raspberry Pis, the heroes which are absolutely tiny. Not much bigger than the size of a matchbox, but it's essentially a computer in your pocket. Pretty much, but to get even smaller.

And that's one. That is a full PC there. That is one, which is probably the size of just bigger than a lighter, but totally too dimensional. Well, there's a USB stick. Yeah. But there's just a bit bigger than a USB stick, yeah. Wow.

So that's what you're looking at. So just standard USB sticks with malicious software on them. Okay. You can generate malware and then you can use a crypto like VLavision to mask its file signature. So the antivirus systems don't pick up on it. So the very system that you use to protect your works against it because it doesn't flag your very problems. And you think that you're to protect your works against yet because it doesn't flag you of any problems. And you think that you're safe as well. So you're probably a little bit more complacent about the security that you should have in place. Oh, well, even if someone does get through the antivirus

will catch it. Yeah, absolutely. So I've got a normal like that, GP6 quick off A-B, really useful. It's got a little cover camera in the bottom of it. No, it comes to me just like a motherboard encased in a plastic shell. It does, but it isn't. I'll explain what it is. It's actually, I'll give you two definitions, one the tech definition and two the everyday English definition. Got you. So this is a software defined radio transceiver operating

from one megahertz to six gigahertz. And in English, it's a radio transmitter and receiver that talks to technology. But you can talk to Bluetooth with it, you can talk to Wi-Fi, you can talk to NFC, you can talk to the little readers on the doors that allows you in the buildings, you can talk to GPS with it, you can literally with this device snatch telephone calls out of the air, decrypt the conversation and listen to both sides of the call, not that I would, it would be illegal, but it's possible. Yeah, yeah. So how does that need to be powered? Is it battery powered? How does that work?

You just look at it in the USB part of your computer. That power is it. It does heat the battery quite a bit. It's quite sort of power hungry. Power hungry, depending on which frequencies you operate. No, and if you operate on low frequency, there's less frame. So it's less power. If you operate on a high, there's less frame, so it's less power. If you operate on a high frequency, it's obviously squatters, more data in,

so it has to use more power to do that. So you need to be that particular device that you've just brought up there. Does that need to be in the facility? About a hundred yards away. Okay, so you can... Depending on what you're talking to, if it's low frequency, as opposed to high frequency, depends on what you're talking to, if it's low frequency, as

opposed to high frequency, it depends on what you're talking to. If it's a dole lock, you need to be relatively close to the system. We can just park the car outside and start doing stuff with that. Well criminals use those very tools to steal cars. So they're sitting as the car park and they run a slipper and they literally capture the cords off the car keys. The older cars works with what you call a replay attack, so you literally just capture the dollock cord and then replay it through the device and the doors on the cars were open. But have you seen all the modern cars that you've gotten stolen with the people

who stand outside of the houses with the antennas to look for the keys? So I've seen a blog post about it but if you understand Tom it'd be great for you to tell the listeners because it's a really cool story. Well it's called a relay attack. Sorry not a replay attack, a relay attack. So what they do is the pretty much sit the device in between the car sit the device in between the car and the key in the house. And what they do is the scan with an antenna to how it works is the car sends what you call a Y-Gam signal which powers up the key. So when you come in, like get in range of the car, it powers up the key. The key responds, the car knows you, knows that that's the correct key. So you sit there and you're really from the car to the key, the key to the car, and then the car opens and then you drive off with it. So that's how it works. I'm not going to tell you how it's done.

Yeah. There was a, I saw this blog post, I think it might have even been on top gear or something like that. And they were talking about some of these really new fairly high, like a Ford Cougar or something else, like a pretty new 19 plate cars that were being stolen in under 30 seconds by using this sort of approach. Terrify. Absolutely because that car is firing this single power up that key. If that keys out a range, the car's locked. As soon as that key goes in the range, it opens, but the SDR, the software defined radio, is extending that range like a relay runner. It's passing that button, that signal backwards and forwards. So the car knows no difference. So for anyone that's listening, if you've got a vehicle which has got

keyless entry and engine start, how can they protect themselves? That's the question. Stoyte in Aviskeptin on an 18. At Sikafariday's cage, it stops the signal getting out. He can buy little wallets for the keys. Manif, manufacturers are now looking at creating keys that disable themselves unless they actually move. So when you move them and wobble them, they'll react to hate themselves. But it's just a matter of time before the black hats and the cybercrime must come up with ways around that, you know. Yeah, clamber stuff, really, really, really, clamber stuff.

Yeah, that's really interesting. So we've got the the rubber ducky, we've got the bash bunny, we've got the, at that wireless, the camera that's inside of a lighter is unbelievable. Literally just looks like a lighter and it's got a camera on the bottom of it. We've got you, you're relay for getting stuff from the facility and sending that back in. What else have you got? Or what else would you want to use if you were use if you were needing to get a hack? Maybe stuff like blank cards and stuff like that, I guess, for replacing blank cards for using on access panels. Oh, blank cards, yeah, absolutely.

Blank cards, you can pick them up from Good Old China for about 25 pence each. And you can rewrite them and reprogram them anytime you want. I use simple things like little button cameras, really cheap, buy them off eBay, just shut them on day, you feel shit, and then you can capture people. It's all good for listening to conversation at a late a date, so things you may have missed.

It may just be that one tiny little bit of information that you can use to leverage that person or that company. I mean, I've tried everything, I've tried bribery, go up to somebody and just say, look, let me enter the building, I'll give you 200 quid. You try everything within scope, so you have a document of scope set up by the company, and they literally say what you can and what you can't do. And then you just try and leverage the information that you pull down. But we do all sorts of things like we check to see if emails have been involved in data breaches. So if you register with a website and then that website gets hacked and your details

get leaked, then we can check to see those emails have been involved in data breaches and which data breaches have been involved in. I mean for a cyber criminal it would take a minute and a half to download the entire Twitter database in plain text. If you know why the look, it's there. And that's pretty scary to be totally honest with yet. Okay, so, Linkdin had a date of reach not so long ago at a bunch of logins account information was taken from that. Mine was one of them, one thing that I didn't do,

although I have done now with a updated password protector, shout out to one password, Tiago Fortes, Suggestion to me, which has been an absolute lifesaver. I had the same password for LinkedIn as my Deliveroo. I know, I'm doing a chair password. I know, I know, that was a bad idea. Yeah. So I got a message, woke up one morning for a message off my business partner and he said, uh, is this you ordering Nando's in London on my card? Because his card was on my account. I must have ordered some for him. So I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no'm sorry. It's pretty, it wasn't my money. It was all I did. He then did make sure that I was billed for it on the company account. But yet, and sure enough, they'd used my details

and they must have just brute force checked a whole bunch of other platforms to see, does this email and password combination appear on this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and sure enough, undiliverou it did. And 45 quid to worth of Nando's later, they'd had it away. And 45 quids worth of Nando's later, that's had it away.

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

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

So if you look at our longer passwords, if it's constructive English words and numbers and letters, we use dictionary attacks so we'll say, okay, we'll try dictionary one and dictionary two and we'll use a rule we'll try dictionary one and dictionary two and we'll use a rule set to capitalize the first letters or not and put numbers at the end from one 3,000 and then that reduces that character set down massively so you can crack a lot of passwords relatively quickly. Is that brute force stuff there where you just start, you'll set some sort of program away and it will just start cycling through version one, version two, version three, version four. No, brute force isn't very efficient. The eight-carremg I said, which I said can be

cracked in its entirely. That is a brute force attack. As you start getting the nine, ten, it's inconceivably long. So what you do is you use rule sets and dictionaries. So it's not a brute force. You're not going through like 0000A, 0000A, but you're literally combining different words together and using sort of different numbers and rules sets alongside it. But a lot of people use, it's called hacker-ish. It's where you substitute a'r ymdyn ni'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy'n rwy to try. They're going to use a rule set to try that. So now we've got what you call GPU hacking. Sorry, cracking. We use something called hashcat and you can put together graphics cards, a number of graphics cards which are very, very good at mathematics so that the much, much quicker than say per you cracking. So it's just, you know, it's getting much, much tougher. Now I can give you a really good hint.

One pass, things like a password saves the all good and well, unless somebody gets your master password, and then they've got all the keys to the kingdom. So you can create something called new Monarch password generation of you out of that. So you think of a sentence specific to you. For example, Tom ate 27 pies and now he is fat, which is not very good. And then you take the first letter and all the special characters from the first letter of each word and all the special characters and numbers in his generative password. So in our minds we can remember the sentence because we've evolved over millions of years' language, but on paper it looks like a very long string of random numbers, letters and special characters, and it's super secure.

Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, it's terrifying to know that every different permutation of eight characters, or eight character, special characters, letters, etc, can be run through in the space of two hours. That's, I mean, that is really, really concerning. So, I guess, you know, first of all, that's like every possible. That's what it is. That's under eight characters. And I think most websites now just dictate that it needs to be a minimum of eight characters, one uppercase and sometimes one special character. So I'm going to guess most people will take the path of least resistance and choose exactly eight characters, exactly

one special character, exactly one number as well. Most people do, yeah. I saw a, what's it called, a word storm, where the most common words are the biggest, and the most common password apparently across the entire internet is password one, capital P. I can quite believe it. So if you are listening, and you have the password, password one with a capital P, and I've just guessed it, and I haven't got a, you know, Tom is a different species to me when it comes to try and hack in, but I've just guessed it and I haven't got a, you know, Tom is a different species to me when it comes to trying to hack in, but I've just guessed your password. For the love of God, please go and change it from password one with a capital P.

You need to set at least 12 digits in your password and I would not use English words. I would put a little bit of slang in there or I would change it about if you're not going to numerically generate a password, try and make it as random and not likely to be in a dictionary as possible. Got you. Okay, well that's some good takeaways already for today. So keep your keyless entry, car keys inside of a word as originals like 10 and make sure that you've got a 12, a 12 digit password, which isn't, isn't pure English. So getting back to the, the ethical hack in and the social engineering and stuff like that, have you

got some, some cool stories, some experiences that you've been through recently that you think some of the listeners might be interested to hear? Yeah, I mean, we can continue with the attack on that large company and we can explain sort of certain things pertaining to that. So initially we set up this meeting, created a product or a project that didn't exist and I talked about it for an hour. I don't know how I did, it just all flowed out. But when I first arrived there, I asked to use the loop.

And that was because I was given a visit as pass. And the first thing I wanted to do was use me mobile phone to take photographs of that pass. Mobile phones now have got a resolution high enough to pretty much print out the pass and make it look relatively realistic. I noticed that the Lanyard was a generic Lanyard that you could buy of eBay, or buy 20 different colours for like De Tener and I had a load of them in the back of my car. So after the meeting I went home, I produced a new pass, I clicked the Lanyard on and the next day I went in, I waited till they swapped the lunch, the people on the desk and I just walked straight past used the clone card that I had accessed the room. I was drinking cups of

coffee for a while, one of the stories within that is there was somebody photocopying on a photocopier and I started getting so bored of just sitting there. I walked up to Ann, pretended I was from the photo copy and company, so I thought, I'm going to say, hi, it's Tom from the photo copy and company. How is your machine behaving today? I've been told it's been a little bit nodulately. And she said, yeah, yeah, I think it was a bit bad, but now it's working fine. And I said, cool, excellent. It's just like a courtesy call.

Would you mind showing me the other photo copy I ran in your building? And she was like, yeah, sure, no problem. Now, why do you think I wanted to show me? And you're where it was. All right, okay, to get access through the different doors maybe to where it was in the building. No, it was on the same floor. Why do you think, try and think? Have a think.

Do you want me to tell you? Tell me, come on. It was because I wanted to be seen being associated with that member of staff. So when she was walking across the floor with me, I was really loud. I was joking. I was talking. I was having a laugh and people were talking, look at that loud man over there, he's with Shirley or whatever her name was. And that means within their mind, I'm meant to be there. Does that make sense? Absolutely, yeah, this is a reputation by association type of thing. Absolutely, absolutely. So a little bit later on, I actually got questioned of a guy who was quite sort of security aware. And he come up and he's like, oh, how are you watching him? I'm like, oh, yeah, my name's Tom. I'll wait, he'll work. I say, it's all work in IT.

How long have you worked here for? It's a lovely building. He suddenly switched the conversation over to him while people love talking about themselves. So he spent about 15 minutes telling us about he worked there for 15 years, he was telling us all about his wife and his children and everything. And he completely forgot about questioning who I was. In all that time I was recording on my phone meetings between people, extiltrate information, that way I was planting devices like this, a little remote transmitter book, I can dial in, go in to start a mobile phone and you can listen to things going on in meeting rooms and things like that. This even installed one of these in one of the meeting rooms, it's just a

thing to say it, can you see? Yeah, yeah, what is it? It's a cheap little covert camera, but it transmits. So it can transmit a video feed. What I've done is I'll note a little facial recognition system in Python. What I do is I scrape the website for pictures of the employees, and then I pop them

in the little Fisher Inc mission system and link it with a little bit of information about them that I've already searched and I wear a cap with a camera in it yeah and I wear one of these which is a little covert headset and that bit there goes underneath your shirt and those are too tiny tiny tiny little magnets don't know if you can see them. There's a big one in the middle and those tiny little ones drop inside the ear canals and then roll down the ear drum inside your head and it uses a... oh my god yeah it's a bit bigger it uses induction to vibrate them against the ear drum and you can hook it up to take an audio feed. So what was happening is I was walking along, the camera was picking up their faces, sending the feed to the computer.

The computer was recognising their face and then it was speaking in my ears who the were and which department they were in. So without even knowing them and you who the were does that make sense? Fucking hell Tom. You're fucking so scary. He's a little bit. Oh wow. It only took me two nights to write that video. Absolutely.

You've blown my mind. You've scraped the website for all of the different employees. Then you've linked that to a camera in your hat and you've put tiny little magnets to rest. So I'm going to guess the reason for the magnets is that a typical earpiece would be too conspicuous and absolutely. This is completely covered, totally invisible. This is inside of your ear canal.

Yeah. Now I can tell you a funny story about it. It actually got stuck in me left here. This is completely covered, totally invisible. This is inside of your ear canal. Yeah, now I can tell you a funny story about it actually got stuck in me left here. Oh, God. And that little magnet in the middle, you meant to extract them out of your ears. Okay, yeah, so jumps and catches the magnet. Yeah, and it wasn't working.

So I spent like a day and a half with this magnet stuck in me, yeah, can I? And I couldn't hear. And I was thinking I'm gonna have to go to hospital but I had a huge fishing magnet I don't know if you've seen them before yeah and I'll use them and I stuck it against the side and it's stuck it out and it was covered in all sorts of wax and horrible stuff but yeah I got it out here fantastic oh well yeah I'm glad that you've got it out of your ear. But I mean, that sort of, the sophistication of that's really terrifying.

And the other thing as well, the implication is that if you're doing it as a whiterak, a whiterat, then the black hat hackers are people that are doing this for corporate espionage and stuff like that. Like if you're, I don't know, the top buffens in Apple, let's say, and you're designing the new iPhone and Samsung or wow, it's helpful, let's say Huawei, the Chinese are always up to something and technology at the moment,

and everyone's worried about that. And they can put all of these different bits of technology in the meeting room and they know all the different bits and pieces or they put some sort of keyboard key, key stroke tracker on someone's so they can hack into the back end of all of the communication channels. And you know, you're just a guy that's doing this. If you had the weight of an entire company, like government behind you, what can they do then? Nations state are on a whole new level, a whole new level. Have you heard of Stuxnet? I've heard the name, I don't know why, what is it? Stuxnet, without going into too much technical detail,

it was a virus that had infected a large volume of compute as across the globe. It took semantic several weeks to work out what this virus was. Normally it takes about 10, 15 minutes to see oh this is a worm, this is how it works, this is how it propagates. But Stuxnet, they didn't know what it was for a long time. It had bits of code that they didn't know what it was and how it worked. And it was

infecting computers on a level that they'd never seen before. It was infecting USB sticks, removable media, transferring it everywhere. And it wasn't doing anything. Yeah. And they were like just sitting there being been very intimidating And no it was being very quiet. That's the scary thing about it. Yeah, okay Yeah, and it turned out it was looking for one system And that system was the Iranian nuclear enrichment program and this bug was so sophisticated it had four zero days in it and a zero day is worth about a million dollars. It's like a whole, an unknown hole in an operating system or a service. And it had fine it, which pinted the nation state.

And what it done when it found this power plant, all this unknown code was to control the industrial controllers of the factory. So what it does is it recorded stats covertly of the factory for about 30 days. It then disabled the safety mechanisms because they were all through a computer and then it replayed the good stats. So do you know like in films where they capture a bit of footage and then the loop that footage while they commit a crime on a C-C TV camera, or this was doing it on a nuclear enrichment system. So once it was playing back the good stats, it started speeding up and slowing down all the centrifuges until it exploded and it blew up thousands of

centrifuges, physically exploded. This actually happened. When was this? This actually happened, 2009, I think. I might be wrong. Wow, I'm not massively off A with news and stuff like that. So I very well might have missed it, but that is terrifying. And obviously the implications are that could be for pretty much, you know, if they can get into the Iranian nuclear enrichment plant,

like what really is left after that, What's got more security than that? Well, this scary thing was, is it wasn't even connected to the internet? Okay, right. So it's totally online. That's totally, yeah, it was called, air gaped. So that's why they were infecting removable media.

So one person pulled up that stick into that computer and that system was doomed, absolutely doomed. I mean, there's amazing things which happen all of the time. This device that I showed you before, the little radio transceiver. There was a guy called Barnaby Jack, who was a New Zealand-based ethical hacker. He was the guy who used to hack bank machines, and he could dial something into his phone, and then the bank machine would put jackpot on the screen and start emptying the cassettes.

It was a showman, an absolute showman, super genius. He discovered that pacemakers and morphine pumps were, and insulin pumps, a lot of them, not all of them, were susceptible to an SDR attack. So he potentially could defibrillate the person by pressing and around his keyboard from about a hundred yards away. And he approached the big companies and said, look, you know, this is a major security flaw.

And they said we're not interested So he was gonna Sort of tell everyone how it was done at a big convention and unfortunately died before the convention Was that a suspicious death Who knows? He died he died a drug overdose of a speedball of drugs Two days before he's big convention, so I'm led to believe of what I've read Wow, and he was just a young guy wasn't like

He was a young guy was famous. He had an amazing career beautiful family, you know, he had it all wow I mean, it's It's weird isn't it like when we talk about all of this stuff It's it's fascinating really I love learning about it and it's really interesting but there's just when you finish laughing about whatever the point is and you remember If this gets into the hands of the wrong people if this is used on the wrong sort of facility It's the implications are really scary aren't they? Make no doubt about it, this is the hands of the wrong people, they have it now, they

use it now. And what gets me is the media tend to demonize hackers. Yeah, we're told, like, they tell everyone that we are the bad guys, we are, the hackers are the good guys, the cyber criminals are the bad guys. They're the ones who, if you, how can I put it, isn't an ally, right? Okay, think of Gordon Ramsay and Jeffrey Dahmer, yeah?

Yeah, so Gordon Ramsay will use a knife to cook you a meal and it'll be beautiful. Jeffrey Dahmer would use a knife to kill you in eat you. Yeah, yeah, that knife is hacking does that make sense? Yeah, and then Gordon Ramsay is the Hagar and Jeffrey Dahmer's the cyber criminals. And that's the best way to solve it to explain it to the layman's or to understand there is a battle between good and evil. Same tool but different direction. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so going on to, we touched on it earlier on, the stuff to do with nation-state and things like that, just how much power and resources do you think countries are throwing into this, both on the defense and on the offense side? Obviously, I've listened to, I don't know how much you listen to Joe Rogan, but he often has a couple of guys on from the CIA and the FBI who are now retired.

And they talk about Huawei and Samsung TVs being installed with these particular chips and the back doors and the Chinese having government officials working inside of every big company and all this sort of stuff all the time. Absolutely. To me, you've got to understand that data now is worth more than oil. Yeah. So data about people, big data to train machine learning algorithms, etc, etc. It's worth more than oil. So it's a very, very valuable resource that people want.

So they're going to put a lot of money in the secure format and they're going to put a lot of money in the dependent one. Now I'm genuinely proud of living in England and in Britain because we have some of the best security professionals in the world, genuinely. That's true. Absolutely true, absolutely true. They don't make a big thing about it and that's what's great about it. Probably a good sign. Yeah, you've got some amazing, amazing people,

absolutely unbelievable people protecting us now and it genuinely does blow my mind. But you have a lot of threat, that does as well. So you've got China, you've got Russia, you've got North Korea, you've got all the states that wouldn't necessarily get on with us politically. And you have to understand that for the price of one fighter plane, you can hire 200 hackers to get me point. So

infimation warfare is going to be the future of war. It's as simple as that. If you don't spend the money, you're not going to be able to defend against it. And do you need to spend a lot to be able to defend effectively? I can't quantify that because I don't know and know for about it, but I know that you have to spend some money and especially invest in education and teaching people and making people aware. You're gonna remember that, all the meddling in the elections in the US and everything was all, all the anal leaks, nothing was all based upon a fishing campaign

which was a social engineering attack. So, you know, it was one said that hack as use technology, but the professionals hack the person. Does that make sense? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we've just got everybody needs to do the bit in my opinion. Well, entering into an information age, we all have mini-stupid compute as attached to us at the hip, you know, for Google things like, you know, you don't know the answer, you just Google it straight away, and you know the answer. It's there,

we are now integrating more and more and more with technology. And if we don't protect that, and if we don't look at ourselves, you know, we're going to be eaten for breakfast in my opinion. Does this need to happen at a state level or are there things that an individual level which we all should be doing as well apart from 12 string passwords and not using the password password one? I think governments do have a responsibility to protect us and that's what we're elected for. And so far, I think the UK have done a fantastic job. There is going to be attacks all the time, but how many they stop and how many they defend against it.

We will never know, but they are doing there a bit. But I think common sense is a big thing. You know, don't just have super complex passwords, but just don't share them between all sorts of different platforms, because if I get your LinkedIn, there's very little chance your email's gonna have to say in password if you're LinkedIn or something similar. So I'm gonna tell you your email, because I'm gonna recover all your passwords,

the email from all the other accounts. Does that make sense? Remember a few things, whatever you put on the internet will always remain on the internet. There's no getting rid of it. It's going to be there, it's going to be spied at, it's going to be captured. If you're using your T devices, so internet with things like CCTV, cameras and things like that Buying them from reputable places, do your homework. If you buy a camera from China, that's 20 quid.

In the same one from a British manufacturer, whatever's 150 quid, there's a reason why. Do you know what I mean? That reason tends to be the fact that the rubbish, the crap, they don't protect you. In fact, the very devices that we use to protect us sometimes works in the favour of the cyber criminals. One of my demonstrations is something called Google Docking, the end of Google Docking. No, take us through. Really, really simple technique. It's using advanced search, operate as in Google

to look for misconfigured systems. Now, anybody can do it without any technical capabilities whatsoever. They just need to know where to look. Now, I'm not going to tell you where to look. But it's called Google hacking, if you're interested in looking. And you can put in a string and you can exaltry it, broken cameras or cameras, when you say broken, I mean cameras that aren't set up correctly. Now with one line of code, I can find 500 web

cameras that I can log into, some of them are CCTV cameras. So, you know, it's really, really scary stuff. It is scary stuff. Some of the listeners will know I had Roger McNamy, who was one of the early investors in Facebook, personal advisor to Mark Zuckerberg, he was the guy that got Sheryl Sandberg on board. Then just before that, I spoke to Professor David Carroll, who was the man, the professor from the Great Hack on Netflix,

spoke to both of those guys within a couple of days of each other. And it definitely does feel at the moment like everything is gathering pace and the online attacks or the online threats, just they're increasing in their magnitude across all platforms as far as that. Absolutely. So, it's not just that you have this sort of below the line underground black hat hacker things that are going on, but also even the data which we're willingly giving away is being manipulated in more and more sophisticated ways.

And, you know, it really is, it's getting getting more serious isn't it? It absolutely is all these apps like the FESA and the Ten-Year Puberty Challenge. Ten-Year Puberty Challenge was used to capture data of people at Ten-Years ago and now so that they can build a machine learning model. That machine learning model potentially could be used to FESA to predict better aging people. And that's why you take a photograph of yourself in it ages here, because it's all based on an idea that's set. So it's it's scary stuff. I've just sent you a little link that I've just pulled up on a Google Doc. Okay. And this is actually a misconfigured CCTV camera on a university in America. So you've just done a live hack there,

and now I've clicked on this link, won't say where it is. And now I can, wow, I can actually pan left and right until this camera up and down. I can see people walking around, Tom, this is fucking terrifying mate. You've just, I can see this, I can see this student walking towards class. He's got a hoodie on. He's got his hands in the hoodie and there's some people, some guys sat down having a star books just on

this thing here and I can zoom myself back so I can have a little bit wider of a look. Oh my God. I think I found this look face on. No, you've already got it. That is so simple that anybody can do without any coding skills, without anything, it's just creative Google searching. A while back, somebody using Google Docking found all of the firmware and the software for all of the Boeing planes, I believe. Oh my god. Including the new 7771, you know, I've found all of the source code for the plane. So, although it doesn't take much

the fund all of the source code for the plume. So if a law, it doesn't take much to master it a very, very powerful little tool. It is. And I suppose the thing as well is that as the effectiveness and the power of the systems that we're using increase, the concern with someone doing it using that for an aferious purpose is it goes up in line with that right. So, Navarrava Kant, there's an unbelievable podcast that I'll send to you once we're done. Actually, it's Rob Reed from the After On podcast with Navarrava Kant. I'll put it in the show notes below for anyone who wants to listen as well. I've heard me mention it before. Basically, he talks about all of the different ways that they're concerned about

the future. All the different ways that the world could end as far as they were concerned. They go through Sinbio, this synthetic biology stuff which they're fucking terrified about, that includes nanotechnology. Absolutely. That's really worrying. There's some stuff to do with being able to deploy drones with tiny amounts of C4 in them out at the back of a plane and then those drones are attached to facial recognition software and as opposed to dropping a big nuclear bomb on a city whereby it would make the city uninhabitable for a few years, they could just drop 20,000 of these little drones out. These drones would detect all of the people, all of the men,

or all of the black men, or all of the white women, or all of the people that voted one particular way. Facial recognition, tiny little penny-sized amount of plastic explosive, fly up to them straight in the middle of the forehead, just blow the head off. Great defense against that, you know, wear a mask mask or have a bloody good tennis racket with you I've got a strong forehand side back myself at the tennis racket all the tennis players would be safe Another word Andy Murray sweet isn't it Andy Murray all the family are the safest people in all of the UK But yeah, they're talking about all of this stuff and one of the things it's really interesting It kind of rounds this discussion off nicely. I guess with regards to some

really interesting, it kind of rounds this discussion off nicely, I guess, with regards to some of the importance of what we're talking about with regards to data security at the moment. What they say is that in the past, the most damage that anybody could have done two, three hundred years ago, the most damage anybody could have done would have been shot one person once out of a musket. And then that would have been it. That was really the peak of what we could do. Maybe hit someone with a cannonball, and then that would have been it. That was really the peak of what we could do. Maybe hit someone with a cannonball, but that was fairly inaccurate. And as technology grows, and as these weapons, and as the delegation, and the, how do you put it, the ability for people to understand how to do destructive things becomes more and more well understood,

and then more and more well distributed. It means that it won't be long before someone will be able to, they were already doing it, 3D printing guns. There we go, a perfect example. You've got technology with some coding that's come together, you can 3D print a gun. How long before you can 3D print a bomb of some kind? Or, you know, all of these things,

I suppose what that means is we need to be even more security conscious, because the stakes of getting it wrong increasingly get worse and worse. Absolutely. I mean, that runs it up lovely, you know, as things are progressing, we're going to be faced with lots of new challenges. And if we don't adapt as a race, we're going to end up destroying ourselves. I mean now you know it's possible very unlikely but it's possible for a rogue hacker to shut down the power plant or to do a ransomware attack on a water treatment factory and and flood the water with loads of chlorine or you know

there's so many different things you can do that are damaging with technology now. And if we don't stay one step ahead of it, if we don't have a good educational system and people to inspire your minds and to get them involved in being a white hat in an ethical hat guy, you know, we're going to be in a world of hurt. We're genuinely are. Are you guys, I'm going to guess the answer the answers yes but you guys will be paid fairly well for your services it will be a specialised and small group of people who have skills up to the standard that are required. Well the average wage for a qualified penetration tester with a bit of experience is between 65 and 120,000 pound the air and there is going to be a 1.8 million yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n gweithio'r yw'n with your minimum wage job, but like yourself at the university, and smash it, the best you possibly can. Jump in head first, take on every opportunity,

do the best you possibly can and change your life because you can do it. Tom, what an unbelievable way to end the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on, man. If anyone who is listening wants to learn a little bit more, are there any blogs that you like, or have you got anything online? Are you on Twitter?

No, I'm very careful on what I go online, believe it or not. I imagine, I thought, for some reason, I was, I thought that you might say that. I mean, apparently I'd only got a phone about a month ago. Okay, okay, so. Yeah, and one I would suggest is,

if you want to learn more, get yourself on hack the box. It is a website designed to teach hacking and you can legally hack their networks that allow you to do it and have different caption of flag challenges, things like that. You've got over the way our wargames have a go at that, learn Cali Linux, the best decan, and if you're a student or you've got access to an academic email, get yourself on Mercer Labs, which was set up in conjunction with our sort of GCHQ,

technical sort of departments of the government, and they have sort of labs that you can learn on there as well. And you can have a little play around, play around in these safe environments where you can do a little bit of hacking and see if you're any good and then maybe plug your skills for 120 grand a year. Absolutely, absolutely. Oh believe what? You know, it is. I don't think that we could have done a bit of recruitment video if we'd tried. Links to everything that we've spoken about today, Navarrev account on Rob Reads after on,

links to hack the box over the wire and some of the other bits and pieces we've spoken about today, Navale Ravakant and Rob Reads after on, links to hack the box over the wire and some of the other bits and pieces we've gone through will be in the show notes below. As always, if you enjoyed this, please don't forget to give it a like and hit subscribe. It really does make me happy. Tom, man, thank you so much. I'm really excited to see what happens next.

I guess we'll have to wait a couple of years until the non-disclosure agreement probably frees up and you can actually talk about it. But yeah, what an awesome day. Thank you so much, man. Fantastic, thank you, mate. you