I worked at a company that had hired Mitnick as a security consultant.
His report for a client that turned out to have been rife with SQL injection at the time was largely movie plot physical security stuff. Not wrong exactly, but not the center mass of the threat model they needed either.
He seemed to lack systems thinking, producing a report that focused on calling out specific employees as dumb or incompetent. Counterproductive at best. It seemed like his PR exceeded his utility by a great deal.
In all fairness, a genuine attacker WILL be abrasive and abusive. They WILL single out employees that are gullible and exploit them. It's not pretty because a genuine attack is not pretty. Of course a simulated attack will be indecent and discourteous in nature, that is how attacks are.
Yeah, this is a part about itsec I don’t understand in my firm. They run social engineering tests, but never notify management when individuals fail, only in general terms. While being psyopped needs to be activelly discussed among coworkers imho.
That's because susceptibility to attacks is a question of training. What would the goal of placing individual blame be? Shame? Drive them to seek training outside work? Further, if you periodically single out people, the organization will hate you.
“Shame” is a big word. I wouldn’t shame a member of my team. Why would I!? They are great people. Same with “blame”. Everyone faults, everyone can be blamed something. That doesn’t change the basics of a person.
Giving people a chance to discuss, as adults and professionals, how they got sniped beats any second hand training and experience by miles.
Now we get to hear that x% of a sample failed including #y elevated privileges people. How will somewhat naive management handle that?
Sometimes I get a feeling many HN-ers work in ultra toxic environments. HR is not your friend, your manager is there to screw you over and the firm will fire you for pennies. That’s just not my experience in working.
Selective training makes sense. But, I heard a pentest professional provide this counter-argument: if you tell management which individuals failed the test, even if your intention is to provide those people with the training they lack, the management might, due to ignorance, shift blame for suboptimal security on those people, label them as lazy/incompetent/etc, and ultimately not put the necessary processes (testing, training) in place which are the true determinants of penetration rates. The idea is that you get inefficiency by selecting for training broadly, but you prevent extreme sabotage by ignorant management.
>Sometimes I get a feeling many HN-ers work in ultra toxic environments.
Many people in the world work in toxic environments, not just HNers. Especially when the jobs market is shit, people turn on each other like animals.
>HR is not your friend
Where did you work at that HR was your friends? Did they invite you for beers or visit you in hospital when you were sick?
HR everywhere protect the company from liability, that's it. They're your "friends" as long as you don't risk becoming a liability.
>your manager is there to screw you over and the firm will fire you for pennies.
Your manager maybe not, if you're lucky and cares about those below him more than his own corporate ascension, but managers levels above sure screw over the ones in the trenches when shit hits the fan, that's how they got to the top in the first place. The more unscrupulous one is the more likely they are to climb up.
You are right. Toxic workplaces are abundant. But non toxic I hope as well. I am always interested in how we can or cannot transfer local cultural differences and things we hold as basic truths via a forum.
The second question: yes, in a time of need my manager and HR-consultant did indeed help me find appropriate psychological care. (And we also visit coworkers in the hospital.) This was part humanity, but also part of what ‘we’ (a firm is a collection of people) constitute as being part of what it entails to be an employer. It feels like a reductio ad absurdum to think that this was purely transactional on their part. It was deeply human, or at least I choose to see it as such.
>The second question: yes, in a time of need my manager and HR-consultant did indeed help me find appropriate psychological care. (And we also visit coworkers in the hospital.)
This is unfathomably rare. I hope you realize this just how lucky you are.
> But non toxic I hope as well.
This never happen to me and I live, on paper, in the most livable country in the world. All bosses only care about my performance, not my healthcare. The moment I got too many sick days, I got dismissed and sent off on welfare.
>This was part humanity,
But most employment relationships are exclusively transnational. You're only virtue is usefulness to the boss's bottom line, not your "humanity", as that can't be monetized, unless maybe you work in government, healthcare or NGOs.
Regarding shaming: A new strategy I've noticed recently is that my organization randomly deploys emails from time to time that are basically "fake" hacking/phishing attempts. Sometimes it's a PDF link, or a request for an invioce, need a phone call, etc.
If you fall for it (clicking the link) then you get sent to a webpage saying "Hey this was a test and you fell for it... think twice before you fall for this again. Please watch this short security video". Then you get followup emails until you finally get around to watching the video.
Something tells me if you are a frequent offender they have you do additional training.
As annoying as the emails are, I appreciate that this avoids the shaming aspect. Its important to keep the normies on guard against this kind of stuff. And this gets the job done without drawing attention to human level failures. And it keeps everyone a little more on their toes.
Shame works for me. If I was ever the one that got sniped and my colleagues saw it I'd forever be paranoid about it. Like when my dad sat me down and told me that I couldn't keep losing hats all the time when I was a kid and that I wasn't a baby anymore and it was expensive, and that shame made me look behind me when I leave somewhere until today and stop losing stuff.
Specially for security, yes, shame the personal in a small setting, shame them in a positive way, as in lets all learn from this, but shame is very powerful. Much more powerful than saying "someone in this team failed this" and everyone thinks it was the other guy.
I think people saw that old culture and thought "man, that's horrible. We must never do that".
And the assessment was right, but also wrong.
Previously, shame (and other pressure) was just applied without first empathically inspecting why the node was acting in the way it did, thinking that just enough force will surely solve the problem.
It kinda did, but with lots of collateral.
Essentially, the security consultants (and everyone else involved) were just being lazy and not doing their job correctly.
But now we have this overcorrection, because people are still lazy and do not want to do their job correctly, which leads to the systems failing in a different way.
___
The solution would be to understand the individual node and apply the correct corrective measure. This can be shame, but it might also not be. And the level of it is also highly dependent on the situation.
This is a hard problem to solve, but it needs to be solved for good results.
The problem here being that scaling that up is hard, but everything needed to hyperscale. With either the individual nodes or the system integrity picking up the slack.
> I think people saw that old culture and thought "man, that's horrible. We must never do that". And the assessment was right, but also wrong. Previously, shame (and other pressure) was just applied without first empathically inspecting why the node was acting in the way it did, thinking that just enough force will surely solve the problem. It kinda did, but with lots of collateral. […] But now we have this overcorrection, because people are still lazy and do not want to do their job correctly, which leads to the systems failing in a different way.
Very well said, and I think your exact description applies to management in general: management is hard, and require hard work to be done correctly, tailoring you response to every person, because two people being bad are their job aren't always bad for the same reason.
But most managers are not suited to the job, because it's mostly a status symbol and not something you give to the most qualified person, and most are too lazy to even try learning about it, so they don't make the effort of adapting to every individual, and in the end they end up either tyrannical or complacent.
Some folks like to work that way, but I don't think most do. This obsession for outward correct behavior, even if it works at the end (at least externally), doesn't sound like a recipe for happy inner life but maybe I am reading too much into that.
(Won’t fully repeat my other post.) Shame is such a big word. ‘Give people the chance to _teach_’ would be my reply. Which you probably would see as even more vicious, but it’s 100% sincere.
As a junior I made the front page of national news. I answered a question with a very big number on a Friday afternoon. Hit headlines on Saturday. Our prime minister had to defend my mistake in public. (He never admitted any mistake. With just enough spin nothing sticks.)
The head of the organization literally cursed and spat at me. In that same meeting from the no. 2 down they stood up for me. It’s still a great story about how to treat mistakes 20+ yrs on. Admit mistakes. What did __we__ (not: he) do wrong? (Hint: from medior to board everyone had an afternoon off and we had never discussed stakeholder management. I was in no position to say no to a ministerial request.)
Maybe you just were never carefully told about something you did wrong in a way that everyone feels like they learned from it. The top reply to my comment put it better than I could, I think there was an overcorrection. I believe in fixing the process first, but there are situations where shame is the right solution. The current en-vogue thing of pretending all is good but penciling in that person for the next layoffs is I think worse than a bit of shame if that fixes the problem and avoids more drastic actions later on. Silicon Valley is very PC but then lays off without remorse so its funny to see this combo of "we care about never hurting your feelings all the way to the point where we fire you without a care in the world".
Shame is a subjective feeling. There's no "right" and "wrong". Shaming is the action being criticized. No one is arguing everyone should just shut up when a big mistake is made.
Shame isn't wrong, shaming is. Your dad telling the truth isn't shaming. You just felt shame because you're a decent person that is embarrassed you were causing problems for other people.
Does for me, too. But not for 30 people around me. They just shut down and isolate. It’s a matter of how self-reflective one is. And who knows who’s going to exploit this to get their way.
I am surprised how controversial this is. I feel like I'm in that episode of Always Sunny in Philadeplhia where they decide to do an intervention by cornering and berating, while a mental health professional looks on terrified.
Yeah, it's some bullshit 90s-era basement-dwelling "techie" attitude that even Linus Torvalds said he doesn't want to do anymore almost 10 years ago by now.
As someone who has been training and mentoring and managing people for over 25 years: shame is useless as a tool. There's no "you gotta have thick skin" in people management. That attitude is just covering for the deficiencies of the manager. Most people's natural reaction to shame is to shut down and either slink away or become vindictive. You don't get the right corrective behavior out of using shame.
One's employment of shame as a corrective technique also has a wide blast area. When one singles out and criticizes people in public, the people who aren't being criticized still see it and form new, negative opinions of the criticizer. You undermine your own authority as The Boss when you do that.
Truly being "results focused" means studying actual management theory, negotiation techniques, coaching techniques, and conflict management. Praise in public, criticize in private. Always. And when you do have to criticize, keep the emotion out of it and stick to just the facts.
I have two employees I've had to put on PIPs right now. One of them is actually improving. The other one is a habitual liar, for whatever reason HR won't let me fire him outright, but even him I won't break my rules for, regardless of how angry he has made me, because the rest of my team will see it. During the meeting where I informed them I would be formalizing the process, they were not surprised and agreed that it made sense, because I had done the work before then to establish expectations and work with them to try to improve. There's are also people in the past whom I have fired who have messaged me on LinkedIn, thanking me for being kind to them during the process, because it was what they needed to turn their lives around.
You can tell people they aren't meeting expectations. You can put people on official notice. You can fire people. And you can do all of those things in ways that preserve their dignity. And in that mode, you can get mediocre employees to be good, good employees to be great, and great employees to stay. Or you can treat people like shit and constantly have to go back to the recruiting well. I'm sorry, but I'm far too busy to be constantly interviewing and onboarding new people.
Because 99.99% of the industry is not about improving the end state. It's about covering ass. Same as accounting, safety, environmental, and every other compliance industry.
Do you hold that same opinion for the training and testing of pilots and surgeons? Do you want to step on a plane with a pilot who is only there because we are too nice to assign individual blame for his inability to do the job properly? Do you want to be going into open heart surgery in a system that dismisses the idea of individual blame when analyzing the outcomes associated with each surgeon? Having no idea if the man cutting into you, has previously had great outcomes or poor outcomes?
Scenario 1: 20% of staff tested failed. Individual targeting is pointless because the issue is systemic. This has happened in aviation, it’s common for accident investigators to conclude that the entire company culture (or even the entire industry) has failed to handle a problem. They don’t waste time in cases like this pointing at individuals.
Scenario 2: you test very regularly and nobody fails the tests. Except Bob, he fails the tests. In this scenario, your threat analysis document will recommend retraining, firing, or restricting Bob specifically.
Scenario 2 almost never happens because nobody has data that good. If your sampling frequency or ability to conduct tests are limited, no specific sample is enough to cover the entire problem. If you focus on a punishing (or just re-educating) the 20% who failed then your next test will fail for (potentially) 20% of the 80% who weren’t retrained, and thus didn’t learn anything.
TLDR: you need to choose the approach based on the situation, but we collectively tend to treat security poorly enough that we’re almost never in the fortunate situation where scenario 2 fits.
Yes in general, because usually it's culture and not an individual failing.
No in specific situations, because it's not just culture but also some people are just the weakest link.
Only focusing on either of these while ignoring the other is going to lead to bad results.
And now all that shitty KnowBe4 nonsense we have to sit through every couple of months is all "What do you do if your manager phones you up and says they're on a business trip and need you to use the company credit card to buy Amazon gift cards", over and over and over.
Bold of them to assume I'll answer the phone if I see my manager's number come up.
> What do you do if your manager phones you up and says they're on a business trip and need you to use the company credit card to buy Amazon gift cards"
If I've learned anything from the scambait people such as kitboga on youtube, if you're bored you play along with it, pretend to have acquired the gift cards, and then tell the "boss" you've scratched off and emailed their company address the codes, as the scammer on the phone wails "do not redeem! SIR DO NOT REDEEM!"
Dude I was called out by name in the report either right before you got there or the first one you were there. I was called out in the one where they got B's Audi keys in his office.
Whole thing was so dumb. A floor full of smart monitors that they could have put a keylogger on. A plethora of physical network access and I get called out for leaving my laptop on the lock screen and going downstairs for food.
And they got found out because I ran little snitch I paid for myself and it caught their hijacked chrome making all sorts of weird network calls. But I don't remember being given credit for that.
perhaps, back in the day, when windows machines would automatically run autorun.inf if present on a cd or usb drive regardless of whether the machine was locked or not.
There's often ways around things. Back in the day I worked in a callcenter. You'd screen-lock & take a short break.
Screen-lock itself required a password. But lo & behold, if you'd pick up the headset & hit a button "accept call" (usually meaning you're back in action), screen would be unlocked.
Convenience (read: profit) trumps security every time.
Mac's had several vulnerabilities during that time including the ability to log in from lock screen with the user "root" with no password. There was also a vulnerability with executing a rubber ducky even with file vault. It was almost 10 years ago so I don't remember the specifics but the point was they had physical access to the building so they could do anything.
People walked to conference rooms and to get food without taking their laptop with them all the time (of course) so it's not like I did something out of the ordinary or against policy. I remember them accusing me of leaving my laptop over night but I was just working late.
And this was in a secure area with cameras within earshot of the over night crew and behind a door in a private shared office (glass door, glass wall so someone could have seen them) so it's not like I was at a common area and just walked out leaving my laptop on a random table).
He social engineered your company into contracting him, and that adds to the legend, but people don't see how many other companies he failed to social engineer.
This is what happens when the 90's PC community renamed crackers as hackers. Proper hackers would have been the ITS/WAIS ones doing crazy things with computers for its era.
“He seemed to lack systems thinking, producing a report that focused on calling out specific employees as dumb or incompetent.”
VS
2002 “Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption, and secure access devices and it's money wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain: the people who use, administer, operate and account for computer systems that contain protected information.” — Kevin Mitnik
“Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.” — Bruce Schneier
Dumb people are dumb. And will be. Their ability to learn from experience is almost non-existent.
They are biggest security threat.
Corporate structure didn't identify their mental limits and gave them way more access.
So Mitnick, as outsite observer identified them and did good job.
I might say "sorry for your loss of job" .... but seriously not.
You shouldn't got that job in first place.
Atleast you can brag about getting unemployed thanx to Mitnick.
I mean, the landscape changed quite a bit since early days of what Mitnick did as a blackhat. He did his best to adapt and make money, which given his prison term, isn't really that surprising.
"He didn't breach us the way we wanted him to do it so it was dumb." Idk man, sounds like you locked your doors but left the windows open. That's the point of these things.
The point is really after working through remediations, there were pretty massive issues remaining that weren’t hard to find and were relatively vastly easier to exploit if the attacker is a Russian teen and not Bruce Lee. And the budget for such things was blown. Priorities, etc
"a client that turned out to have been rife with SQL injection" sounds more like they left the doors open, but the report focused on the lack of security bars on the windows.
I have so many stories about his absolutely terrible behavior at conferences. He once refused to pay the entry fee to a charity event and had to be physically ejectedy.
Absolutely better at PR than any actual work, pay careful attention and none of his early stuff was particularly novel, from a technical perspective.
But for whatever reason, we venerate him just because he was victimized by the state. The world is not a dichotomy -- sometimes bad things happen to bad people.
He got all of the "Free Kevin" attention because of how long he was left in jail before trial and then being stuck in solitary confinement after sentencing for months.
If he had been treated fairly by the justice system he wouldn't have gotten nearly as much attention.
He was also autistic, a lot of the behavior can be explained through that lens.
>He got all of the "Free Kevin" attention because of how long he was left in jail before trial and then being stuck in solitary confinement after sentencing for months.
That was uncalled for on the part of DOJ.
>He was also autistic, a lot of the behavior can be explained through that lens.
I'm autistic. Maybe I should go commit a bunch of felonies to increase my chances of a good job and stature in the hacker community, since things like publishing code, publishing peer reviewed papers, and mentoring newbies have not been productive ways of finding gainful employment nor respect of my peers.
I have friends who did things like take a gap year to travel the world or met their spouses on nights I stayed in to study, and some evenings when browsing HN I feel very sad that I wasted my 20s on a society that does not care about me.
Anyways, sorry to wall of text, but what you said really struck a nerve with me -- there are hierarchies in any community, and one thing I've noticed with the hacker scene is one group of people can mess up over and over using the same sets of facts or diagnoses, but others can expect to have worse outcomes with better behavior for reasons that elude me to this day.
> I have friends who did things like take a gap year to travel the world or met their spouses on nights I stayed in to study, and some evenings when browsing HN I feel very sad that I wasted my 20s on a society that does not care about me.
I'm glad you have finally recognized the problem.
Stop living for your idea of others and start living for yourself.
>Stop living for your idea of others and start living for yourself.
Unfortunately, I exhausted my emergency fund trying for certs and attempting to escape a domestic violence situation, so I do not have that option. I'm trapped.
Kevin was famous for being mistreated by the DoJ and writing some books which were perhaps not particularly true in hindsight. After he got out of jail and rejoined the community he lost a lot of respect for being himself, though it's not impossible that years of imprisonment and a long time in solitary had some permanent negative effects. In other words... you shouldn't envy Kevin's life.
For the rest: nothing's stopping you from having fun, regardless of age.
Maybe, but if I am looking for a female spouse, a mens conclave is probably not the best place to find one. (I would assume the audience there is largely male?)
But well, he also is looking for respect and regocnition among his peers and vienna is a nice city.
The US existed just fine before 2003. We can structure any replacement organization to hold it accountable with checks and balances, like every other agency.
Yeah, but there is quite a gulf between possible and even likely.
I can think of very few time seen the state give up extra powers it gives itself in emergencies, and the few places where I see it give up powers are at the behest of industries demanding "de-regulation".
Even, say, cannabis decriminalization can be understood (from the stand point of the legislators) as pro-business.
So serious question: when has the US given up powers? It'd do my brain a lot of good to have a picture of how this has happened in the past so I can be less cynical in the present.
You might site the Church commission, maybe, but that seems to be exactly the kind of thing that is both likely and wholly ineffective beyond a the 5-10 year timescale.
Maybe this is not helpful either, but I wonder if that person is correct. The national debt is already bad. With the trillions of new national debt from the Trump administration, and also the destruction of basically every foreign relationship, how will the country manage its finances? I feel like the only way out is to print money and cause extreme inflation. But that also means the death of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
Look at any other country that went through a similar period. These regimes never voluntarily relinquish power, but they're forced to within 20 years due to some crushing military defeat, economic collapse, assassination, violent revolt, etcetera. It's never ended with a peaceful transition of power and a smooth winding down of the bad stuff.
>After Pat Buchanan delivered an infamous speech at the 1992 Republican convention, couching the struggle with Democrats in terms of a “cultural war”, columnist Molly Ivins wrote that it “probably sounded better in the original German”. She did not live to cover a Donald Trump rally.
To your point, the thing that jumped out at me reading this book is how familiar the German characters are. People have loved to imagine that the Nazi era in Germany was so anomalous it could never happen again. But no, the Germans were just like us.
This is my problem with a lot of literature and movies. The Nazis are always unfathomably evil, when in reality, most of them were just people doing their jobs.
I read Eichmann in Jerusalem recently, and the reality is that what Eichmann did was incredibly mundane for the most part. There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing: Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law, and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries. The final solution came very far into the whole sequence of events, and Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions. I would be willing to bet there are any number of people inside the US federal government who are thinking exactly that line of thought.
>Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions
Which by the way was largely false, for both low and high-ranking Nazis. It was usually possible to slowly or even quickly distance yourself from directly committing atrocities (or coordinating them) and get fobbed off into some low-key administrative position without fearing anything like serious punishment. The Nazi machinery was harsh towards openly voiced disobedience and discontent, but surprisingly tolerant of a "weak stomach" or a lack of what their fanatics called moral fiber (being able to protect the race by butchering innocent others).
Christopher Browning in his book about Reserve Battalion 101, mentioned in the comment right above yours, emphasizes this point about a lack of severe punishment for not participating, repeatedly about the members of that death squad.
The ugly black magic of the Nazi system was specifically that it often made previously, otherwise ordinary people internally normalize mass murder into something they could do.
The above aside, image too the kind of empty shell of fundamental human morality you'd need to be to continue sending innocent people, including women and children to their deaths in gas chambers, just so you can avoid looking bad on the social scene around you.
> Which by the way was largely false, for both low and high-ranking Nazis. It was usually possible to slowly or even quickly distance yourself from directly committing atrocities (or coordinating them) and get fobbed off into some low-key administrative position without fearing anything like serious punishment. The Nazi machinery was harsh towards openly voiced disobedience and discontent, but surprisingly tolerant of a "weak stomach" or a lack of what their fanatics called moral fiber (being able to protect the race by butchering innocent others).
Totally agreed. I can see how Eichmann, and many other government functionaries committing evil acts willingly (historical and modern) are perfectly able to believe the lie wholeheartedly. That is all that really matters. The state supports the lie, the culture supports the lie, and the person believes it, despite proof otherwise.
That is the banality of evil. Just follow orders, and you will be fine. There are monsters (historical and modern) who do not see the issue with separating children from parents (or whatever evil you choose) over trivial paperwork, but the ugly reality is that most of the people doing the work know that what they are doing is wrong on some level, but feel shielded by the authority of the institution issuing the orders.
> Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law
It's not "illegal", it's just illegal. The US does not have open borders. It's illegal to cross without a visa or some other authorization. That's a fact, and in fact the law is a very reasonable one, because people who are knowledgeable about how humans work generally understand that open borders are a bad idea.
> There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing [...] and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries.
Is this meant to make it sound like it's somehow bad? If someone breaks the law, they deserve to be punished. In the case of people who entered the country illegally, the sane and rational thing to do is remove them from the country. This is, in fact, one of the most logical punishments imaginable, up there with being forced to leave while trespassing and being required to return stolen property.
Your comment is real "Hitler breathed air, and this other guy breathed air, therefore this other guy is bad because he's like Hitler" levels of manipulative suggestion that's completely devoid of any sort of points or content whatsoever.
Category error to think there's a strategy. Trump doesn't even know what a tariff is. People try to project a strategy because it's probably too discomfiting to believe that the greatest superpower the world has ever known elected a complete nimrod king.
Yeah you are right about this, psychological safety is a key ingredient in what “good” looks like. Blameless culture stuff is a bit of another ball of wax, so I didn’t get into it too much.
