Social Engineering. The Past. The Present. The Future. | With Jenny Radcliffe

Life was so much better before. As my grandfather used to say: “Back in my day, we used to walk up hills both ways and nobody was bitching."

We all have heard the stories about a simpler, safer life, better values and not so much bad news as we have nowadays — especially when we hear about all these pesky technologies that are sneaking into our life. Evil, I tell you, bad news and nonsense! Sure, we have always had brilliant inventors and technological improvements in our lifetime, but, listen to me son, even machinery and equipment was better before — as God wanted them to be: simple, excellent and practical. You could also fix that stuff with a bit of brain and some tools. None of these telephones with a TV screen on them or computers plugged into that World Wide Web that sucks the soul out of you. They look at you, they trick you and they steal your privacy. They even make you trust things that are not true. Can you believe it? You have to be on guard because there are spammers and tricksters nowadays, son. I tell you__ nowadays.

Or not.

People are funny, aren't they? Weird things happen in our collective brains. Humans have the tendency to overuse their selective memory, forgetting the bad stuff and idealizing the good; we even create our own fake news in our brain without even realizing it. Humans! So smart, and yet so dumb. Humanity — our damnation and our salvation.  

So, what is this podcast about? Ah, glad you asked.

Ladies and gentlemen, in this podcast I am having a fun — and, hopefully, educational — conversation with my favorite social engineer from Liverpool, Jenny Radcliffe — also know as The People Hacker. What? Yes, of course I know tons of her kind in that city! Anyway, back to Jenny__ not only she is excellent at what she does for a living — I think, as I haven't figured that out yet — but she is also a smart, entertaining, and lovely person to chat with. As a matter of fact, we are planning a few more conversations after this; so stay tuned, enjoy this one, and come back for more.

In this first conversation, we talk about her and about social engineering: the past, present and future of it. For starters, she defines herself as "a life long social engineer" and a "non-technical one," which means that she specializes in the psychology side of it and all that has to do with the so-called human factor — aka, the way the earthlings think, act and react.  

As we know, statistically more than 70% of data breaches are caused or facilitated by the carbon-based factor, and this is because technology is still — and dare I say (or hope) it always will be — very much created and used by humans. So what we wanted to discuss in this podcast is the past, present and future of social engineering at a superficial — sorta, kinda — level, starting with a definition of what it is and why it is so intrinsically connected with the condition of being human.

In a very minimalistic way, social engineering can be defined as "the manipulation of people." It is the deliberate exploitation or weaponization of human vulnerabilities or, even more simply, tendencies to psychologically manipulate people and induce them into performing actions or divulging confidential information. Fun!

Guest(s)
Jenny Radcliffe 

Resources
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