Layer 8 Podcast

Rosa (@Rosa_Rowles) is a social engineer working with Social Engineer, LLC. She has an interesting story that includes moving from Spain to England to the US all at a young age. She was a billing coordinator for a hotel before she moved into social engineering. In this episode, she discusses how she uses various principles of influence to evaluate the security posture of her clients. She gives advice on how to build rapport in mere seconds and how to get into the social engineering field without any background in information technology.

For this episode, we step away from discussing social engineering and OSINT directly and talk with Jack Rhysider. Jack is the creator and host of the hugely popular podcast, Darknet Diaries. Jack talks about and interviews people about "true stories from the dark side of the internet." Jack discusses how he does it, how he finds his guests, how much work goes into creating his biweekly podcast and more.  Jack Rhysider is a veteran to the security world. He gained his professional knowledge of security by working in a Security Operations Center for a Fortune 500 company, a place to where threats are detected and stopped. During that time he was exposed to hundreds of client’s networks ranging from schools, to government, to banks, and commercial organizations.

Content Warning: This episode includes discussion of human trafficking and exploitation. Christine Talley, aka @AthenasOwl_97 joins us to talk about her work as an analyst with the anti-human trafficking task force in California. She talks about how she got started with OSINT after changing careers, tells us one instance where she got to use her former career during a law enforcement engagement and also tells us about contact exploitation. This is a method where she often can begin or continue to follow an OSINT trail with just one small piece of information. Her investigations often have a focus in social media intelligence, or SOCMINT. Christine also recently gave a presentation at the SANS OSINT Summit on April 7, 2022 titled "I Know You: Contact Exploitation in SOCMINT Investigations."  Christine Talley works human trafficking investigations as the analyst for a county-wide task force in California. She is Crime & Intelligence Analysis and GIAC Open Source Intelligence Certified.

For this episode, we talked with Lorand Bodo, one of the creators of OSINT Curious. Lorand talks with us about how he recommends people get started with OSINT, what OSINT is and then takes us through some stories about how he tracks jihadists and extremists. He also tells us about his role with OSINT Curious and the webcasts and streaming events that he puts on with them. Lorand also has a weekly updated list of curated tweets from extremists on his web site, lorandbodo.com

Alethe Denis is an amazing accomplished social engineer. She won the Social Engineering Capture the Flag competition at Defcon 27. She was part of a team that won a Trace Labs OSINT Capture the Flag competition. She will again be a judge at the Collegiate Social Engineering competition. She created the Defcon 209 chapter in California, and is the original ambassador to the Innocent Lives Foundation. In this episode, Alethe takes us through her pretext preparation for Defcon and how she creates pretexts for social engineering. She breaks down some of the principles of persuasion that she talks about in her presentation "Phishy Little Liars" and lets us in on an attempted financial scam against her that she exposed. 

For this episode, we get to speak with Rae Baker, also known as Wondersmith_Rae on Twitter. Rae changed careers a few years ago from a graphic designer to the world of OSINT. Along the way, she has competed in and won OSINT competitions, given presentations at BSides, ShmooCon and most recently, Defcon's Recon Village. She has some great advice for how to get into the field and also how to succeed in an OSINT Capture the Flag competition. Rae is on the executive board of OSINT Curious and is also a volunteer with the Innocent Lives Foundation.

TW: Brief discussion of sexual assault/abuse. For this episode, we got to speak with Robin Dreeke, a 29 year veteran of federal service, including the US Naval Academy, US Marine Corps and the head of the FBI's Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. Robin owns https://peopleformula.com where he offers skills, newsletters, training classes and his books. In this conversation, we reference his books as we talk about building rapport and Robin's five basic principles of trust: 1) Suspend Your Ego, 2) Be Nonjudgemental, 3) Validate Others, 4) Honor Reason, 5) Be Generous.  Robin's books discussed in the episode are:  It's Not All About "Me" Sizing People Up Code of Trust When we discuss validation, we referenced a video on YouTube that demonstrates the concept titled "It's Not About the Nail".

For this episode, we talk voice phishing, or vishing, with Curt Klump. Curt is a hacker with Social Engineer, LLC and he gets to hack people simply by calling them on the phone. We got to talk with Curt about how he went from being an actor to a social engineer, how to get started in the industry, great resources for learning, tips for particularly difficult environments and he shares stories of some of his favorite compromises and shut downs. 

For this episode, we are joined by Lisette Abercrombie, probably better known as Technisette. She is a Dutch OSINT investigator and one of the creators of OSINT Curious. We get to talk about her OSINT methodology, some tips and tricks and she shared two stories of her investigations. One that included the value of the color of garbage barrels in an image. We also learned the Dutch term "onderdompelen" meaning to submerge or immerse yourself. Jump in the deep end and start swimming! 

For this episode, we get to talk with Maxie Reynolds about her new book, "The Art of Attack: Attacker Mindset for Security Professionals". She talks about her four laws of attack and the skills necessary to be successful. These skills can help you as a social engineer as well as in other areas of life. Maxie is the Technical Team Lead at Social Engineer LLC where she also co-teaches the Advanced Practical Social Engineering course, co-hosts the Social Engineer Podcast, is involved with the Innocent Lives Foundation and you can find her on Instagram.