[00:32.240 --> 00:38.600]  We're gonna talk today a little bit about what hacking was like, and freaking
[00:38.600 --> 00:42.380]  was like, and what the what the whole scene was kind of like back in the 80s
[00:42.380 --> 00:47.220]  and 90s. You know, how did this start? What was it like back then? And how does that
[00:47.220 --> 00:50.400]  lead us to where we're at today? And what does that mean for us kind of going
[00:50.400 --> 00:55.980]  forward? All these views and opinions are obviously my own. You know, everybody's
[00:55.980 --> 01:00.140]  experience might be a little bit different. So if anybody during the talk
[01:00.140 --> 01:04.260]  wants to, you know, bring something up or interject something, by all means. You
[01:04.260 --> 01:09.800]  know, this is a very a very social talk, right? So feel free to interject things
[01:09.800 --> 01:14.360]  and to jump in if you like. So the talk is hacking the day, playing words for
[01:14.360 --> 01:21.260]  back in the day, right? So who am I? My name is Brad Swanson. You can find me on
[01:21.260 --> 01:29.220]  Twitter is Digital Templar or you can just shoot me an email at gmail. I am the
[01:29.220 --> 01:35.260]  incident response lead currently for a SAS provider based out in California.
[01:35.260 --> 01:39.420]  Formerly I've been with Amazon with Thermo Fisher Scientific in a variety of
[01:39.420 --> 01:47.200]  security or audit related roles. A lot of PCI, a lot of SOX, a lot goodness. I've
[01:47.200 --> 01:53.160]  been doing security stuff for about 25 years now. Most of it as a good guy. The
[01:53.160 --> 01:57.320]  early years were a little sketchy, obviously, as many of us had. I got started
[01:57.320 --> 02:03.040]  in the 80s. My folks bought me an Osborne back in the day and I got the Osborne in
[02:03.040 --> 02:08.660]  January. I had a colossal caves adventure. Was sick of the pirate killing me in the
[02:08.660 --> 02:12.020]  twisty passages. So by February I was learning how to take it apart and fix
[02:12.020 --> 02:14.640]  the software so the pirate wouldn't kill me all the time.
[02:15.300 --> 02:20.660]  Careered back in the day for frozen crew at a really, really slow baud rate which
[02:20.660 --> 02:26.400]  led to a recreational interest in how phone systems worked to help cut down on
[02:26.400 --> 02:31.400]  my electric or my phone bill. Some of the things I like... social engineering. I love
[02:31.400 --> 02:36.660]  social engineering stuff. I just find it fascinating how you can hack
[02:36.660 --> 02:41.300]  people's brains. Red teaming. I want to be a red teamer when I grow up. And I also
[02:41.300 --> 02:47.320]  like romantic walks on the beach while sniffing Wi-Fi. So the standard
[02:47.320 --> 02:52.000]  disclaimer. These are my experiences. These are my views, my opinions. They do
[02:52.000 --> 02:58.600]  not reflect any stance of my employer, any stance of the team that I
[02:58.600 --> 03:04.380]  work with, etc. etc. My views only. My employer wouldn't even know that I'm here
[03:04.380 --> 03:08.720]  except my boss is in the audience right now. So everybody clap when we're
[03:08.720 --> 03:14.420]  done here. Not now. Not now. Just when we're done. Yeah. Also some other just
[03:14.420 --> 03:18.500]  extra information. If anybody has peanut allergies, look out for me. I'm like
[03:18.500 --> 03:24.020]  peanut dust. It's not good. So we're gonna cover basically three different kind of
[03:24.020 --> 03:29.700]  areas at a very, very high level here. We're gonna look at the social aspects.
[03:29.700 --> 03:36.220]  You know, what was it like back then and how is it now? Obviously, hacking has
[03:36.220 --> 03:39.760]  become a very social thing. We're all here. You know, we're all at CypherCon.
[03:39.760 --> 03:44.480]  We're all interacting with each other. It's not just, you know, I'm in my own
[03:44.480 --> 03:49.120]  little area with my head down, hacking away on a keyboard. We're talking with
[03:49.120 --> 03:53.340]  each other. We're learning from each other. We are, you know, interacting and
[03:53.340 --> 03:58.600]  interfacing as humans rather than just, you know, a name on a screen in green
[03:58.600 --> 04:03.460]  font. We're also gonna look at hacking. What are some differences between hacking
[04:03.460 --> 04:07.880]  back then and hacking now? And we'll touch a little bit on freaking as well
[04:07.880 --> 04:13.980]  and what the good old days were like versus what it's like today. So the
[04:13.980 --> 04:24.120]  social aspect. Back in the day, hacking was not as, I guess, anonymous, if you
[04:24.120 --> 04:28.460]  will, as it is now. It was started by friends. It was groups of friends that
[04:28.460 --> 04:33.440]  had something that brought them together other than hacking. So we have like the
[04:33.440 --> 04:38.140]  414s, for example, right here in Milwaukee. The 414s were actually a
[04:38.140 --> 04:43.840]  group of friends. They were Explorer Scouts. You know, they knew each other and
[04:43.840 --> 04:50.640]  they had an interest in computers. Sure. So they would kind of go with the, you
[04:50.640 --> 04:54.400]  know, go out and explore things and then they found out that they could explore
[04:54.400 --> 04:59.940]  with their computers. And so that led to a little bit of trouble. They hacked a
[04:59.940 --> 05:04.920]  bunch of systems. They got into Sloan-Kettering. I went to touch the log
[05:04.920 --> 05:08.640]  files to make sure that they didn't get caught and did a little bit of damage
[05:08.640 --> 05:13.540]  financially. About $1,500, I believe. And that's what got them popped. They ended
[05:13.540 --> 05:17.520]  up on the cover of Newsweek. People had not really been exposed mainstream to
[05:17.520 --> 05:22.080]  hackers before, right? So it was a big deal. People didn't know how to
[05:22.080 --> 05:27.480]  deal with them. A couple of them were charged with like a toll fraud type of
[05:27.480 --> 05:33.300]  charge. But there were no computer crime laws really back then. So yeah. So then
[05:33.300 --> 05:37.080]  again, a group of friends that started out. You know, there was the firm. They
[05:37.080 --> 05:41.420]  were initially called Kilobot. They did a lot of sys-opping of bulletin board
[05:41.420 --> 05:45.760]  systems. If it was a hacker board, a lot of times it'd be somebody from the firm
[05:45.760 --> 05:51.920]  that would help out with the sys-opping of that. There was the Loft. Loft
[05:51.920 --> 05:56.160]  Heavy Industries out in Boston. That started as roommates. It was a
[05:56.160 --> 06:00.620]  couple of guys that were roommates. Their girlfriends, they had a loft area
[06:00.620 --> 06:04.120]  in Boston. And their girlfriends had a hat company. They sold hats out of this
[06:04.120 --> 06:09.040]  loft. They, you know, made hats and sold them. They used the other half of the
[06:09.040 --> 06:14.620]  loft to store equipment that they got from the flea market at MIT. So they
[06:14.620 --> 06:17.200]  would get all this equipment. They'd bring it in. They'd hack around on it.
[06:17.200 --> 06:20.980]  They'd fix stuff up. They'd do cool things. And then they'd flip it. And it
[06:20.980 --> 06:25.660]  turned into basically what was the equivalent of the first hacker space.
[06:26.060 --> 06:31.380]  Where, you know, their friends would come over and hack around on hardware. We had
[06:31.380 --> 06:34.520]  Cult of the Dead Cow down in Lubbock, Texas. There were a bunch of friends that
[06:34.520 --> 06:38.640]  worked together at a meatpacking plant. Hence the name Cult of the Dead Cow. They
[06:38.640 --> 06:45.700]  dealt with dead cows all day. And so again, you know, groups of friends that
[06:45.700 --> 06:51.540]  were friends before they were a hacking group, right? Then it expanded a little
[06:51.540 --> 06:55.220]  bit, right? So you've got these friends that you're hanging out with and doing
[06:55.220 --> 06:59.600]  computer coolness with. What if we could meet more people? Well, how do we do that?
[06:59.600 --> 07:04.260]  How do we spread the word? How do we get the word out there? BBSes. Let's advertise
[07:04.260 --> 07:08.980]  on BBSes. Let's spin up a hacker BBS. Let's have some some text files that we
[07:08.980 --> 07:13.840]  can, you know, have people come and read and learn a little bit. You know, we had
[07:13.840 --> 07:20.140]  things like the Legion of Doom, which was run by FiberOptic. There was Masters of
[07:20.140 --> 07:24.540]  Deception with Eric Bloodaxe, who used to be part of Legion of Doom that are falling
[07:24.540 --> 07:30.560]  out and they split off. You know, there are courier groups like Fairlight, Frozen
[07:30.560 --> 07:36.680]  Crew, you know, and they were, you know, they started as friends and then they
[07:36.680 --> 07:40.640]  expanded out. They brought in people that they didn't know that weren't part of
[07:40.640 --> 07:44.120]  that core group of friends. Now it's a it's a hacker friend. It's my online
[07:44.120 --> 07:49.540]  friends, my BBS friend. And then, you know, how do we how do we advance that? How do
[07:49.540 --> 07:53.540]  we grow that? How do we take that another step further? Let's meet people face to
[07:53.540 --> 07:56.940]  face. You know, kind of scary, but let's let's give it a shot and see what
[07:56.940 --> 08:01.040]  happens. So there were things like the Chaos Communications Congress. This
[08:01.040 --> 08:06.320]  took place in Germany. It was run by the the CCC, the Chaos Computer Club, and it
[08:06.320 --> 08:09.980]  basically brought European hackers together to kind of learn from each
[08:09.980 --> 08:13.820]  other and share things. We had the Hackers Conference. There was a book
[08:13.820 --> 08:17.880]  that was written, I don't recall the name of the book specifically right now, my
[08:17.880 --> 08:20.900]  apologies, but there was a book that was written that talked about a bunch of
[08:20.900 --> 08:24.340]  hackers and somebody said, hey, let's let's have a conference in California
[08:24.340 --> 08:27.640]  and let's invite these hackers that this book talked about and get them all in
[08:27.640 --> 08:31.860]  the same room. Let's see, once we put all these people together, what they can come
[08:31.860 --> 08:38.720]  up with. That might be kind of cool. We had DEF CON. DEF CON was 1994 and it was
[08:38.720 --> 08:42.960]  meant to be a one-shot deal. It was supposed to be like a big farewell blow
[08:42.960 --> 08:47.360]  out party to say goodbye to BBSs because BBSs started to die out in the mid
[08:47.360 --> 08:52.840]  90s with the advent of the Internet, right? So, you know, Jeff said, hey, let's
[08:52.840 --> 08:57.940]  let's have a big party, say goodbye to the BBSs and we're done. We move on.
[08:58.300 --> 09:02.940]  Well now DEF CON continues and continues and continues and it's it's grown into
[09:02.940 --> 09:08.460]  something very large and cool. So and then we have Hackers of Planet Earth.
[09:08.460 --> 09:12.700]  It's a New York conference that gets that's been around since I want to say
[09:12.700 --> 09:17.260]  95. Another, you know, another conference where let's just get people in the room
[09:17.260 --> 09:20.440]  and talk to each other about what we're doing. What are we, what are we
[09:20.440 --> 09:30.980]  hacking on today? So that's changed. Now what we have is a much more direct
[09:30.980 --> 09:37.620]  experience kind of, right? A lot less, a lot less of the anonymous communication, a
[09:37.620 --> 09:43.300]  lot more face-to-face. So there's a lot of regular meetups. We have things like
[09:43.300 --> 09:48.440]  MilSec, we have BurbSec for, you know, these are some of the local, local get-togethers
[09:48.440 --> 09:51.760]  where people get together and they talk about things. Hey, I figured out how to do
[09:51.760 --> 09:56.520]  A, B, and C. Or, hey, I'm trying to figure out how to stop this person from, you
[09:56.520 --> 10:01.800]  know, coming in and doing horrible things through my OWA portal. You know, it's a
[10:01.900 --> 10:06.160]  it's a way that we can bounce ideas off each other and and learn from each other.
[10:06.160 --> 10:10.540]  There's local 2600 groups that get together. You know, there's, there's local
[10:10.540 --> 10:15.620]  DEFCON groups. There's the DC414 group, which is phenomenal. There are, you know,
[10:16.380 --> 10:20.500]  DEFCON groups pretty much all over the country, all over the world. Twitter.
[10:20.500 --> 10:25.780]  Twitter has become a huge thing. There is some, there's a lot of noise on Twitter.
[10:25.780 --> 10:29.000]  There's a lot of shit posting. But there's also a lot of really good
[10:29.000 --> 10:32.460]  information. You know, looking out just in this room, I see a couple of people in
[10:32.460 --> 10:36.760]  this room that I follow. A couple of people that have really good info. And
[10:36.760 --> 10:41.220]  it's, it's nice to be able to hop on and check a spot and see what's going on in
[10:41.220 --> 10:47.060]  the world. Sometimes it's bad if it's a Friday afternoon and Tavis Orvandy posts
[10:47.060 --> 10:51.400]  something and you're like, oh, I'm not going home tonight. But, you know, it's,
[10:51.400 --> 10:55.800]  it's a good way for various people to be able to stay in touch. So, you know,
[10:55.800 --> 10:59.920]  hackers will use Twitter. Companies will, will post things. You know, maybe a
[10:59.920 --> 11:03.620]  company is coming out with a new product. Zero-day announcements, you know,
[11:03.620 --> 11:10.520]  that Tavis seems fond of on Fridays. And so, you know, it's, it's a good, it's kind
[11:10.520 --> 11:16.520]  of a good way to kind of keep your pulse on things almost, almost real-time. And
[11:16.520 --> 11:19.820]  then we have conferences, right? Conferences have become kind of a big
[11:19.820 --> 11:23.680]  thing now. There are a lot of conferences, a lot of people go to. There's obviously
[11:24.360 --> 11:29.720]  CypherCon, right? There's Black Hat. There's DEFCON. DEFCON actually made it
[11:29.720 --> 11:33.880]  25 years before being canceled this year. I'm not sure if anybody heard that that was
[11:33.880 --> 11:38.560]  canceled. But there's, you know, there's ThoughtCon in Chicago. So there's a lot
[11:38.560 --> 11:43.100]  of kind of face-to-face, meet the people you're talking to that are on the other side
[11:43.100 --> 11:47.380]  of the keyboard. In the old BBS days, you could talk to somebody for years and not
[11:47.380 --> 11:51.440]  know what they look like. Not know who they were with, with the conferences and
[11:51.440 --> 11:54.240]  stuff. It kind of puts a face to the name, which is nice.
[11:55.880 --> 12:00.420]  ANSI art, right? Some people have to remember ANSI art. ANSI art was awesome.
[12:00.680 --> 12:06.940]  It was like a, like a bulletin board for your BBS. The cooler your ANSI art, the
[12:06.940 --> 12:09.820]  cooler your bulletin board. Well, at least that's what people thought back then
[12:09.820 --> 12:16.600]  anyway. So ANSI art was a big deal. And people would get on BBSs sometimes just
[12:16.600 --> 12:20.760]  to grab ANSI packs and move them around and, you know, find something cool on this
[12:20.760 --> 12:25.300]  BBS. Oh, I want that on my BBS. I'll download it and install it. BBSs were
[12:25.300 --> 12:29.960]  really kind of the lifeblood in the growth of hacking. You know, it was, it was
[12:30.120 --> 12:36.180]  a way that you could get outside of, you know, your, your, your basement or your
[12:36.180 --> 12:41.600]  bedroom or wherever your computer was and, and talk to people. You know, you
[12:41.600 --> 12:46.340]  could, you could trade wares on a BBS. You could download e-zines. There were a
[12:46.340 --> 12:51.220]  lot of communications that people started putting together. There was FRAC.
[12:51.220 --> 12:55.600]  There was CDC communications. There were, you know, several different groups that
[12:55.600 --> 12:58.220]  would write up these e-zines about these hacks that they were doing or these
[12:58.220 --> 13:01.360]  projects they're working on. And then those would be distributed throughout
[13:01.360 --> 13:05.140]  the BBSs, you know, via couriers and people, you know, grabbing it from one
[13:05.140 --> 13:10.900]  uploading it to another. BBSs really started to die around 94 when the
[13:10.900 --> 13:16.160]  internet took off. There's still a push. There's still some old people like
[13:16.160 --> 13:21.160]  me that are diehards, right? You can still download BBS software and run it on
[13:21.160 --> 13:26.760]  your servers. You know, instead of dialing in, people will tell not to. And,
[13:26.760 --> 13:30.320]  and, you know, it still has the same functionality. You can run Dora games
[13:30.320 --> 13:35.960]  and, you know, download files and everything. The thing with BBSs is you
[13:35.960 --> 13:40.700]  had to bring skills to the table back in the day, right? You had to be leaked,
[13:40.700 --> 13:47.800]  right? Otherwise, you weren't welcome. You know, it was kind of looked at as we
[13:47.800 --> 13:53.340]  have this hacking group, we have our BBS set up. What can you give us? What can we
[13:53.340 --> 13:57.780]  take from you? What skills are you bringing to make us stronger as a hacking
[13:57.780 --> 14:03.920]  group? You know, we're, we're LOD and we have, we have this big beef right now
[14:03.920 --> 14:08.220]  with MOD. And so we want better things and they've got what have you, what do
[14:08.220 --> 14:11.380]  you have that you're gonna contribute to us? If you had nothing to contribute,
[14:11.920 --> 14:15.840]  that was it. Forget it. Don't worry about it. You know, go somewhere, go, go hop on,
[14:15.840 --> 14:22.900]  you know, Prodigy or something. If you had skills, if you were good, you could get
[14:22.900 --> 14:27.200]  vouched for. You know, and a lot of times it required somebody that was already a
[14:27.200 --> 14:31.980]  member to say, oh yeah, I know Ed, I know Sarah, they're good people. Let them in.
[14:31.980 --> 14:38.440]  They know what they're doing. They're, they're really super elite hackers. And it
[14:38.440 --> 14:44.140]  was, in my opinion, it was kind of crappy because it kind of stagnated that talent
[14:44.140 --> 14:47.420]  pool. You might have somebody very intelligent that doesn't have that
[14:47.420 --> 14:50.940]  skill set yet that wants to learn it. They weren't able to, you know, unless
[14:50.940 --> 14:57.780]  they did a lot, a lot of work on their own to try and figure it out. So part of
[14:57.780 --> 15:01.260]  the reason was they wanted those bragging rights that our, our BBS is
[15:01.260 --> 15:06.320]  awesome. Our hacking club is awesome. But they also were very worried. There are a
[15:06.320 --> 15:11.720]  lot of busts that were going on for hacking and for, you know, piracy, things
[15:11.720 --> 15:17.300]  like that. There were a lot of people that when they would get arrested back
[15:17.300 --> 15:20.740]  then, the first thing they would do is, hey, do you have a notepad and a piece of
[15:20.740 --> 15:24.280]  paper? I will give you the name of everybody on that board and all the
[15:24.280 --> 15:29.020]  stuff that they're doing. So a lot of people kept it a very small, close-knit
[15:29.020 --> 15:32.720]  community just for a safety factor. Just to keep from, from getting arrested
[15:32.720 --> 15:39.480]  themselves. So now, I mean, it's really grown how we, how we do our communications.
[15:39.480 --> 15:43.840]  You know, we use websites and Twitter and Tor and YouTube. You know, we have, you
[15:43.840 --> 15:50.360]  know, different file sharing networks that, that we use. And it's really kind
[15:50.360 --> 15:55.900]  of expanded the reach, right? So BBS's used to be mostly your local area code,
[15:55.900 --> 15:59.620]  right? You'd have, you know, like, people will dial into this 414, but they're not
[15:59.620 --> 16:04.620]  gonna dial into a, you know, a 702 Las Vegas BBS because, well, that's long
[16:04.620 --> 16:08.260]  distance. That's gonna rack up a huge phone bill, unless you do weird trickery,
[16:08.260 --> 16:12.760]  which we'll get to in a bit. You know, so it was, it was local. Whereas now with the
[16:12.760 --> 16:17.600]  Internet, it's worldwide. You know, you, you know, one, one minute I'm talking to
[16:17.600 --> 16:22.560]  somebody on Twitter that's sitting two desks away from me that I work with, and
[16:22.560 --> 16:26.720]  two minutes later I'm talking to somebody in Turkmenistan who I've never
[16:26.720 --> 16:29.020]  met before, but has some good information. We're having a good
[16:29.020 --> 16:33.060]  conversation about stuff. So it's really kind of expanded that world to us. It's
[16:33.060 --> 16:39.180]  really opened things up. And you can do it from anywhere. It used to be, oh, what
[16:39.180 --> 16:44.020]  are you doing tonight? I'm gonna go home, boot up my computer, get on the BBS. Now,
[16:44.020 --> 16:47.660]  I'm gonna whip my phone out of my pocket and check Twitter quick. You know, it's,
[16:47.660 --> 16:51.080]  it's become with, you know, with smartphones, it's become much easier for
[16:51.080 --> 16:58.640]  us to stay in touch and to communicate with each other. Now, instead of having to
[16:58.640 --> 17:02.220]  be elite and having skills that you bring to the table, you need to bring
[17:02.220 --> 17:06.860]  that desire and that drive. And that's, that's all that you really need for
[17:06.860 --> 17:10.780]  somebody to reach out and say, hey, you know, I like the fact that you want to
[17:10.780 --> 17:14.280]  learn. I'm more than happy to teach you. I will teach you whatever you want to
[17:14.280 --> 17:18.900]  know. And we see that a lot. We see a lot of security groups within companies
[17:18.900 --> 17:22.980]  bringing on people that maybe don't have security experience, but they want to
[17:22.980 --> 17:27.860]  learn about it, right? We want those people. Those people have that drive. They
[17:27.860 --> 17:31.980]  have that, that ability to learn. We can teach security. We can't teach drive,
[17:31.980 --> 17:39.240]  right? You know, and it's, it's a lot easier for these people to learn stuff
[17:39.240 --> 17:43.100]  too. They don't have to get access to a board to get all this information. It's
[17:43.100 --> 17:46.400]  all out there. It's all over the internet. You know, you go out to YouTube, you
[17:46.400 --> 17:51.320]  watch a video, you can learn how things work. You know, you can go and, you know,
[17:51.320 --> 17:57.520]  buy something at DEF CON and then get on YouTube, learn all about it. And, you
[17:57.520 --> 18:02.260]  know, now you're able to go in and pop boxes. Which, good and bad, depending on
[18:02.260 --> 18:09.460]  what side of the fence that you're on. You know, it used to be that this
[18:09.460 --> 18:13.060]  knowledge would die out with people, right? But now that we're able to teach
[18:13.060 --> 18:15.660]  the new generation and the younger people that are coming up through the
[18:15.660 --> 18:19.320]  ranks that maybe don't have that skill set, it keeps it alive. And that's kind
[18:19.320 --> 18:25.480]  of the point of this talk. Is we want to keep this, this past in this history. We
[18:25.480 --> 18:28.980]  want to keep this alive and remember, you know, where we came from. Because that
[18:28.980 --> 18:31.900]  helped us get to where we are today. And where we are today is gonna determine
[18:31.900 --> 18:36.140]  where we're going tomorrow. And so, it's very important to not only talk about
[18:36.140 --> 18:40.620]  the past, but to talk about what we're doing today and in the future. You know,
[18:40.620 --> 18:44.520]  30, 30 years ago we're on BBS is doing this stuff. Where are we gonna be 30
[18:44.520 --> 18:48.120]  years from now? Probably talking about how I remember back when we used to use
[18:48.120 --> 18:53.220]  Twitter and, you know, communicated with each other. So, yeah. So, it's opened us up
[18:53.220 --> 18:57.560]  to a very nurturing type of environment. Which, which is good. You know, the more
[18:57.560 --> 19:02.840]  people will learn about this, the better off we're gonna be. So, hacking back then.
[19:02.840 --> 19:08.320]  Hacking back then was super easy, in my opinion, compared to now. You could do
[19:08.320 --> 19:11.540]  simple things. There, there are a lot of issues with things like file
[19:11.540 --> 19:17.260]  permissions, processes having way too many rights. One of my favorite things
[19:17.260 --> 19:21.160]  back then was you could link the password file to the dead letter file
[19:21.160 --> 19:26.660]  and then just send an email from nobody to nobody that contained a password file
[19:26.660 --> 19:31.640]  entry. In less than a minute, you've got a root account on the box and you can
[19:31.640 --> 19:36.200]  pretty much do what you like on it at that point. You know, password management.
[19:36.280 --> 19:39.220]  People didn't really give a lot of thought about that back then. You know, in
[19:39.220 --> 19:42.960]  the 80s, as long as you had a password, that thing was super secure. Never mind
[19:42.960 --> 19:46.900]  the fact that the password is 1, 2, 3. You know, once you got a password, nobody
[19:46.900 --> 19:52.160]  will get into that. Security, then more so even than now, I think, was an
[19:52.160 --> 19:55.800]  afterthought. I mean, it's still, in some companies, kind of an afterthought. You
[19:55.800 --> 20:00.100]  know, oh, we rolled out this new product. Did you secure it? Well, what can we do to
[20:00.100 --> 20:07.000]  secure it now that it's rolled out? That was a lot more prevalent back then. And
[20:07.480 --> 20:12.280]  as I mentioned, a lot of programs that ran as root had a lot of
[20:12.280 --> 20:14.880]  issues. You know, you could get a program running as root and then
[20:14.880 --> 20:20.200]  just crash it and take over that process space. You could overwrite files.
[20:20.860 --> 20:24.100]  SendMail. SendMail was the bane of security people's existence for years
[20:24.100 --> 20:32.380]  and years and years and years. So back then, if a system had a password, it was
[20:32.380 --> 20:36.580]  probably super easy to guess. It was probably 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or it was
[20:36.580 --> 20:42.020]  password or, you know, the the person's birthday or their wife's name or their
[20:42.020 --> 20:47.340]  husband's name or the dog's name. Complexity wasn't forced back then, like
[20:47.340 --> 20:52.280]  it is now. Exploits were a lot simpler. Somebody's got bad permissions, let's
[20:52.280 --> 20:57.960]  just exploit that. Bam, we're in. You know, or processes had way too much
[20:57.960 --> 21:04.480]  privilege available to them. There's no reason that a process that maybe
[21:04.480 --> 21:11.500]  writes a, writes a file, that it needs root access to everything. Servers sat
[21:11.500 --> 21:16.100]  alone and in the dark. They were neglected. They were like mushrooms. If it
[21:16.100 --> 21:20.080]  was a night or a weekend, odds are that server is locked away and nobody's
[21:20.080 --> 21:23.680]  looking at it. You know, the sysadmins went home. You know, we didn't have
[21:23.680 --> 21:28.260]  things like a sock that were watching over all these servers. They were
[21:28.260 --> 21:33.780]  lonesome and sad. And modems were plugged into everything. You know, war dialing was
[21:33.880 --> 21:38.660]  a big thing. War dialing is where you set your modem to just dial every number
[21:38.660 --> 21:42.340]  in a list until it finds a carrier and then it logs that number. Hey, I found
[21:42.340 --> 21:45.340]  something living here. And then you go back, you look at your list and you call
[21:45.340 --> 21:51.180]  them up. You see what lives there. A lot of servers had modems plugged in for
[21:51.180 --> 21:56.380]  maintenance modes. If you had like a like a big HP 9000, odds are there's a modem
[21:56.380 --> 21:59.600]  plugged in the back so that when you have problems, HP can dial in and fix it
[21:59.600 --> 22:06.780]  for you. Exploring humans can also dial into that and try and unfix it for you
[22:06.780 --> 22:11.380]  as well. We also didn't have things like bug brownie programs. So if there's an
[22:11.380 --> 22:15.460]  exploit, it didn't get reported right away to the company all the time, right?
[22:15.460 --> 22:21.020]  That exploit might live on for months or a year or years. You know, it was the type
[22:21.020 --> 22:25.360]  of thing where finally a good person would see that and would notify the
[22:25.360 --> 22:29.000]  company, hey, there's a problem with this. Or they would write, you know, write their
[22:29.000 --> 22:35.020]  own updated drivers or updated code that fixed it. But there weren't official ways
[22:35.020 --> 22:41.600]  really back then to report these bugs that were found. Nowadays, the difference
[22:41.600 --> 22:44.860]  is being that a lot of the vulnerabilities can be very technical.
[22:44.860 --> 22:51.540]  You know, Spectre and Meltdown are good recent examples of vulnerabilities that
[22:51.540 --> 22:56.620]  are tougher to exploit. It's not as easy as something having bad permissions or
[22:56.620 --> 23:00.100]  being able to overwrite a config file. You know, you have to jump through a lot
[23:00.100 --> 23:04.480]  of hoops if you want to exploit Meltdown and Spectre compared to, you know, the old
[23:04.480 --> 23:11.700]  days. Nowadays, it really, really helps if you can program. You don't have to be like
[23:11.700 --> 23:16.880]  an uber developer, but if you know some Python and know PowerShell, if you've
[23:16.880 --> 23:21.900]  used Metasploit a bunch and know some of the better modules, it really makes
[23:21.900 --> 23:27.300]  life easier from a security perspective. And sometimes now, instead of being a
[23:27.300 --> 23:32.420]  one-shot deal where, okay, I'm going to link this file and send an email. We're
[23:32.420 --> 23:36.600]  done. We're in. Now there might be several steps required. Okay, I'm gonna create this
[23:36.600 --> 23:41.300]  config and now I've got to link these files. And now I've got to move this file
[23:41.300 --> 23:47.140]  over here. A lot more, a lot more of a process now to get this kind of all
[23:47.140 --> 23:53.000]  pushed through. Blue teams. Blue teams have really thrown a monkey wrench into
[23:53.000 --> 23:57.780]  hackers trying to get into systems. We have socks. We have blue teams. Blue teams
[23:57.780 --> 24:02.280]  are very skilled. Blue teams have all kinds of training. There's a lot of
[24:02.280 --> 24:08.880]  knowledge that's shared so that they're able to detect things quickly. Systems
[24:08.880 --> 24:12.760]  are monitored 24-7. Even if you don't have a human sitting there looking at it,
[24:12.760 --> 24:17.720]  we have things like Nagios and various monitoring tools that will let us
[24:17.720 --> 24:21.320]  know the minute something goes a little screwy with that box. And as soon as it
[24:21.320 --> 24:24.020]  does, somebody's getting a page, getting woken up, and they're hopping on to see
[24:24.020 --> 24:30.120]  what's going on. So nights and weekends are no longer the sweet spot. We also
[24:30.120 --> 24:34.220]  have new technologies available to us. We have, you know, we have SIEMS. We have
[24:34.220 --> 24:39.560]  IDS IPS. You know, we mentioned like infrastructure and system monitoring. And
[24:39.560 --> 24:42.440]  they're gonna tell on you. They're gonna call somebody. They're gonna
[24:42.440 --> 24:45.360]  wake somebody up in the middle of the night. That person's gonna be mad about
[24:45.360 --> 24:47.580]  being woken up in the middle of the night. And they're gonna come and look
[24:47.580 --> 24:53.000]  for you. You know, again, back in the old days, wasn't quite like that. They might
[24:53.000 --> 24:57.640]  find out that you were in there on Monday when they come in. So the one thing
[24:57.640 --> 25:03.340]  that stays the same is that humans are involved. Humans are always involved.
[25:03.340 --> 25:08.120]  There's always a human somewhere in the chain, right? And humans are unpredictable,
[25:08.120 --> 25:12.100]  unpatchable, and under deadlines. Now you'll notice that unpatchable has an
[25:12.100 --> 25:17.420]  asterisk after it. And this is really small print. I apologize for that. But the
[25:17.420 --> 25:24.180]  the disclaimer is, humans can be patched through continuous security education.
[25:24.420 --> 25:28.000]  Unfortunately, a lot of companies don't do this. But it's a very good point that
[25:28.500 --> 25:33.120]  that was was brought up. I believe Jason, you had mentioned that recently. That
[25:33.120 --> 25:37.480]  humans are patchable. Saying a human is unpatchable is not exactly accurate. The
[25:37.480 --> 25:40.480]  thing that we need to do as companies is make sure that we do patch our humans.
[25:40.480 --> 25:47.420]  So we continue a continuous security education kind of regimen. People are
[25:47.420 --> 25:51.000]  helpful. It's just in our nature. We, you know, it's the golden rule, do unto
[25:51.000 --> 25:55.840]  others. If I need something, I want somebody to help me. Likewise, if somebody
[25:55.840 --> 26:01.140]  else needs something, I'm going to help them. But it's this helpfulness that can
[26:01.140 --> 26:08.420]  be exploited. Humans can bypass two-factor every time. So I worked for a
[26:08.420 --> 26:15.280]  company previously that we had our red team came in to do a pen test. They
[26:15.280 --> 26:18.140]  couldn't get in through the conventional means. They were just popping through our
[26:18.140 --> 26:23.160]  firewall. They called one of our users up. Hey, we need your password. User gives it
[26:23.160 --> 26:27.880]  out. Yeah, we're cool. We got two-factor, right? Saves everybody. They hit the
[26:27.880 --> 26:32.660]  two-factor. They called the user back. Hey, you know, we tried logging in as you to
[26:32.660 --> 26:36.960]  fix this problem, you know. They post as IT. You know, you logged in to fix this
[26:36.960 --> 26:41.360]  problem. We're getting this two-factor thing. Could you do me a favor and read
[26:41.360 --> 26:50.820]  me the code off your phone? And they did. Five times in one day. Yeah, it wasn't, it
[26:50.820 --> 26:56.000]  wasn't a good day for us when we had to report to the sea levels about that. The
[26:56.000 --> 27:01.000]  good thing is, is that person still works for the company. The company did not come
[27:01.000 --> 27:04.040]  down on that person and say, oh, you're a horrible person. You gave out your
[27:04.040 --> 27:07.640]  two-factor code. You're fired. The company used it as a training opportunity. They
[27:07.640 --> 27:10.900]  said, hey, here's an, here's a, an opportunity for us to provide more
[27:10.900 --> 27:16.260]  education to this individual. Let's explain to this person why what they did
[27:16.260 --> 27:21.660]  was wrong and how to not fall for this in the future. Which I think really needs
[27:21.660 --> 27:26.400]  to be the path that's taken. So often companies like, oh, you know, Ed screwed up.
[27:26.400 --> 27:29.460]  Let's can him. That's, that's not the solution because you're just gonna get
[27:29.460 --> 27:34.720]  another Ed in. Who's gonna fall for it? Improve your, your, your training posture.
[27:34.720 --> 27:38.760]  And that's, that's how you fix that. Humans can forget the details of your
[27:38.760 --> 27:42.300]  social engineering attack. You know, that's the, that's the old thing of be
[27:42.300 --> 27:45.820]  likable and forgettable. You want that person to like you, but you want them to
[27:45.820 --> 27:50.380]  forget about you as soon as you're out of their sight. Humans can make you
[27:50.380 --> 27:56.300]  appear legitimate to others. They provide that legitimacy. So if I want to get in, I
[27:56.300 --> 28:00.600]  want to get information off the, the CISO at a company, I'm not gonna go straight
[28:00.600 --> 28:04.940]  to the CISO and, and try, you know, just saying, hi, my name is Bill and, you know,
[28:04.940 --> 28:10.080]  I'm with your, your cloud service provider, but I'm gonna go to some of that
[28:10.080 --> 28:14.060]  CISO's underlings. I'm gonna get in good with them. That might be an easier avenue.
[28:14.100 --> 28:21.260]  Once they are vouching for me, that gives me credibility with that CISO. And humans
[28:21.260 --> 28:25.160]  are everywhere. You know, like I said, if, if it's a company, there's probably a
[28:25.160 --> 28:30.600]  human at it somewhere in that food chain, right? Eventually, you'll find that
[28:30.600 --> 28:36.580]  human and you can try and exploit that. Systems rely on logic, right? Very
[28:36.580 --> 28:41.300]  logical, you know, one zero. Humans rely on emotion. If you can play to somebody's
[28:41.300 --> 28:47.560]  emotions, it's done. You're in. And that's, this has stayed the same. In the, in the
[28:47.560 --> 28:53.200]  80s, people were pretty much guaranteed way in. In the 90s, it was that way. Now,
[28:53.200 --> 28:58.180]  it's still that way. You know, how do we fix it? Again, education. Let's, let's
[28:58.180 --> 29:01.980]  train folks and let's show them the right way to do things rather than scold
[29:01.980 --> 29:08.560]  and fire and be growly and mean. So, I'm sure some of you have seen the movie
[29:08.560 --> 29:14.340]  Hackers. Norm was my absolute favorite. Norm was the security guard. So, so
[29:14.340 --> 29:20.060]  basically what happens is, Dave calls him up, says, you know, hey, the file I was
[29:20.060 --> 29:26.660]  working on is lost. My, my, my BLT drive went AWL. He looks around his room and he
[29:26.660 --> 29:31.360]  sees an empty food container and he thinks, a BLT drive. Norm doesn't have the
[29:31.360 --> 29:36.060]  education he should, as far as security stuff. So, he doesn't know that this is a
[29:36.060 --> 29:41.740]  line of crap that he's being fed. He doesn't, yeah, he doesn't understand that,
[29:41.740 --> 29:47.840]  you know, it's, it's not a real thing, a BLT drive. And back then, people were not
[29:47.840 --> 29:51.660]  comfortable around computers. In the 80s and 90s, computers were still, you know,
[29:51.660 --> 29:55.140]  in the mid 80s, not every house had a computer. I mean, computers were
[29:55.540 --> 29:59.680]  expensive. I had to beg my parents for years to get one and it took my friend
[29:59.680 --> 30:05.320]  getting a K-Pro before I got an Asborne. I was like, ah. People were very scared of
[30:05.320 --> 30:09.240]  breaking things and very scared of being in trouble. You call somebody at work and
[30:09.240 --> 30:13.360]  you're like, you screwed up your computer. Yeah, this, this is Frank from IT and you
[30:13.360 --> 30:18.020]  just broke your junk. They're gonna panic, right? They're gonna freak out. I'm
[30:18.020 --> 30:23.480]  gonna get fired. It's that, that same fear thing. They're, they're a little more
[30:23.480 --> 30:27.700]  comfortable with computers now. Everybody pretty much has a computer at home, or I
[30:27.700 --> 30:32.180]  should say a lot of people. They're more comfortable with doing things on it. But
[30:32.180 --> 30:38.060]  back then, it was real easy to have people fearful of their terminal. So, you
[30:38.060 --> 30:41.960]  could get them to do bad things and they wouldn't be suspicious. Yeah, hi, I'm from
[30:41.960 --> 30:47.860]  IT and you did something wrong. They'll do whatever you want then at that point.
[30:47.860 --> 30:58.010]  I'll just fix it, make it go away. So, that brings us to freaking. So, freaking, back
[30:58.010 --> 31:03.070]  in the, back in the old days, back in the 80s, the phone systems used something
[31:03.070 --> 31:10.030]  called SS5. SS5 was a, like a signaling system that the phones used. And it used
[31:10.030 --> 31:13.930]  what was referred to as in-band signaling. So, the phones had to be able
[31:13.930 --> 31:17.690]  to, to talk back to the central office and, and kind of say, hey, this is what's
[31:17.690 --> 31:22.210]  going on. This person's trying to make a phone call and they've put two quarters
[31:22.210 --> 31:27.690]  into me. Is that enough money? Well, they would do this with, with very faint tones
[31:27.690 --> 31:32.130]  that if you listen close, you could hear it. And that was in-band signaling
[31:32.130 --> 31:35.650]  because it was in the same band as your, as your voice traffic, right? So, you could
[31:35.650 --> 31:40.030]  actually record those tones, play them back to the phone, or make a device that
[31:40.030 --> 31:44.790]  would play those tones to the phone. And the phone would be like, oh, they just put
[31:44.910 --> 31:48.410]  a quarter in because I heard the, I heard the sounds, even though you put nothing
[31:48.410 --> 31:54.390]  in it. So, there are things like blue boxes, red boxes. These enabled free calls.
[31:54.390 --> 31:57.990]  They made it harder to trace calls. You could, you know, you could stack trunks
[31:57.990 --> 32:04.670]  across the country. Some very famous people in the computer industry,
[32:04.670 --> 32:10.030]  financed their way through college by selling blue boxes. It kind of really took off in
[32:10.030 --> 32:15.630]  the late 60s, early 70s, and had a really good run through the, the mid 90s when
[32:15.630 --> 32:20.950]  they switched to a new system called SS7. With the advent of SS7, they moved to
[32:20.950 --> 32:24.970]  out-of-band signaling. So, these, these codes and these tones didn't go through
[32:24.970 --> 32:27.330]  the phone line anyway. They went through the phone line, but not through the voice
[32:27.330 --> 32:34.190]  channel. So, you couldn't just do craziness. Just a little bit of, I don't know, trivia,
[32:34.190 --> 32:39.150]  if you will. There are red boxes and blue boxes in these badges. That's just
[32:39.150 --> 32:42.690]  one of the, one of the things you can figure out on them. Kind of, kind of neat
[32:42.690 --> 32:46.170]  stuff to be able to hear that. It won't work on a real phone, but, you know, kind
[32:46.170 --> 32:50.490]  of, kind of neat for history's sake. The phone system, it was a new frontier, right?
[32:50.490 --> 32:55.190]  So, hackers are inquisitive, right? We want to know how things work. You know, I'm
[32:55.190 --> 33:00.510]  sure a lot of us, when we were young, took stuff apart. My mom hated it. I would take
[33:00.510 --> 33:04.430]  things apart and never put it back together again, right? I would have crap
[33:04.430 --> 33:08.590]  strewn from one end of the table to the other. And my mom would be like, what are you
[33:08.590 --> 33:11.230]  doing? I'm done with that. I already took it apart. I know how it works. I'm done.
[33:11.230 --> 33:16.390]  Bored. The phone system was like that, right? It was, it was this new world that,
[33:16.390 --> 33:21.110]  you know, what does this do? How does it work? What does, where does this go? And we,
[33:21.110 --> 33:25.410]  you know, we had that inquisitive mindset that made it such a wonderful thing.
[33:26.130 --> 33:31.310]  Telephone companies would often leave trucks unlocked. Trucks contained service
[33:31.990 --> 33:36.090]  manuals. They would also throw old manuals into dumpsters. So, you know, late
[33:36.090 --> 33:39.450]  at night, you're bored, you're out cruising around. Hey, there's the telco. I wonder
[33:39.450 --> 33:44.030]  what's in the dumpster. Oh, it comes with a set of bell manuals. Now, you know how a
[33:44.030 --> 33:49.350]  lot of that stuff works. So, there were, there were a lot of late-night dumpster
[33:49.350 --> 33:55.890]  runs back, back in the day. So, back to the boxes here. So, red boxes generated a
[33:55.890 --> 34:00.770]  coin tone, right? And like a quarter tone, as an example, was kind of what? It was
[34:00.770 --> 34:05.970]  like five high-pitched beeps. You could use them on Fortress phones or CoCot.
[34:05.970 --> 34:11.170]  CoCot is a customer-owned, coin-operated telephone. Basically, a person could buy a
[34:11.170 --> 34:15.390]  payphone, install it at their business, and then they got all the money out of it.
[34:15.390 --> 34:17.470]  You can play nickels, dimes, quarters. I don't know why you'd ever play a nickel
[34:17.470 --> 34:20.450]  or a dime, unless you're just trying to make it look legitimate. We always just
[34:20.450 --> 34:24.330]  did quarters. And you can make it super easy. If you went to Radio Shack, Radio
[34:24.330 --> 34:27.990]  Shack had a pocket dialer. We could program phone numbers in, and then you
[34:27.990 --> 34:30.610]  push a memory button, and it would play it back, so you didn't have to be
[34:30.610 --> 34:35.110]  troubled with pushing the buttons on the phone. Because that was a lot of work
[34:35.110 --> 34:41.470]  back then, right? So, if you replace the crystal inside that pocket dialer, and
[34:41.470 --> 34:44.630]  then programmed, like, I think it was five asterisks into a memory location, that's
[34:44.750 --> 34:48.470]  a quarter. And so then you go and you call somebody in, I don't know, Algeria,
[34:48.470 --> 34:51.230]  and you just start hitting the button, and it starts racking up quarters, and
[34:51.230 --> 34:56.350]  now you've got a free phone call. Blueboxes basically allowed you to be an
[34:57.150 --> 35:02.310]  operator console. You could stack trunks, you could, with the right combination of
[35:02.930 --> 35:05.110]  things, you could, you know, there are ways you become like a directory
[35:05.110 --> 35:09.310]  assistance operator. You know, there are a lot of different things you could do
[35:09.310 --> 35:16.310]  with a blue box. Black boxes would set it so that if somebody called you, so
[35:16.310 --> 35:19.410]  maybe, maybe you got a BBS, right? But you're in the middle of nowhere, but you
[35:19.410 --> 35:22.690]  want people to call your BBS without racking up long-distance charges. The
[35:22.690 --> 35:28.690]  black box would turn off the ringing. You could set your BBS to then pick up, but
[35:28.690 --> 35:31.350]  it wouldn't trip. There are two relays, one controlled ringing, one controlled
[35:31.350 --> 35:35.430]  billing. It shuts off the ringing relay, never trips the billing relay, so the
[35:35.430 --> 35:40.110]  person's never, never billed. The phone company in the phone system, the CEO,
[35:40.110 --> 35:44.210]  thinks that you never picked the phone up, even though you did. So a lot of these
[35:44.210 --> 35:51.030]  boxes were pretty heavily used up until about the mid-90s. When, again, they
[35:51.030 --> 35:56.910]  rolled out SS7, where the in-band signaling made life a lot easier for the
[35:56.910 --> 36:00.490]  phone companies at that point. And they had things in place that they could
[36:00.490 --> 36:05.410]  detect things before SS7, but it was not as sketchy, or I'm sorry, not as
[36:05.410 --> 36:10.010]  reliable. It was a little more, a little more sketchy. There are times that, you
[36:10.010 --> 36:13.350]  know, you crank out three or four dollars in quarters, and all of a sudden you have
[36:13.350 --> 36:18.470]  an operator on the line. Sir, how many coins did you put in the phone? Yeah, 400
[36:18.470 --> 36:22.790]  buy. Then you'd move on to the next phone before anybody in a Bell truck shows up.
[36:27.440 --> 36:31.560]  So with the, with phreaking, there are a lot of interesting, cool phone numbers
[36:31.560 --> 36:36.580]  that were out there. And these phone numbers would be traded on BBS. If
[36:36.580 --> 36:39.500]  somebody finds a cool number, you hop on your local phreaking BBS. Hey, I found
[36:39.500 --> 36:43.300]  this, you know. Feel free to use it. Or I found this. I don't know what the hell
[36:43.300 --> 36:48.440]  this is. Can somebody figure it out? There are loop numbers. What a loop number was,
[36:48.440 --> 36:51.780]  there, there's a high side and a low side. You could dial into one side, somebody
[36:51.780 --> 36:56.780]  dials into the other, and you could talk to each other. Conference bridges. That
[36:56.780 --> 37:01.200]  was a big thing, like the late 80s, early 90s. Everybody was dialing into conference
[37:01.200 --> 37:04.660]  bridges. And what that was is, a business would have a conference bridge for doing
[37:04.660 --> 37:09.220]  conference calls. It was just a phone to recall into, and you enter a password, and
[37:09.220 --> 37:12.720]  now everybody can dial in, you can all talk to each other. Well, the passwords
[37:12.720 --> 37:17.520]  were, you know, four or five digits long. Doesn't take much to brute-force that. So
[37:17.520 --> 37:20.160]  the hackers would find them. They're not being used on nights and weekends, because
[37:20.160 --> 37:23.200]  it's owned by a business, right? That business turned off the lights in the
[37:23.200 --> 37:27.620]  server room, and they all went home. So the hackers would brute-force these
[37:27.620 --> 37:32.460]  conference bridges. They'd log in, have their, their conversations. They'd talk
[37:32.460 --> 37:37.420]  about hacker stuff, and freaker stuff, and just kind of hang out, and do
[37:37.420 --> 37:45.040]  nefarious things. A&I numbers. A&I numbers were very handy. If I want to hack into
[37:45.040 --> 37:49.780]  my local Pizza Hut, and play around with their supply ordering system, but I don't
[37:49.780 --> 37:54.580]  know the number, I go outside of the DMART, the little phone box on the wall
[37:54.580 --> 37:59.780]  out back. I open it up, I plug in a butt set, and I call what's called A&I,
[37:59.780 --> 38:03.880]  automatic number identification. It's kind of what drives caller ID, and I could
[38:03.880 --> 38:06.860]  find out what their phone number. I'd read back the number I'm calling from.
[38:06.900 --> 38:11.300]  Now I know what the phone numbers are for this Pizza Hut on this line that I
[38:11.300 --> 38:15.360]  dialed out, and I'm gonna go home, start calling around that area with my modem,
[38:15.360 --> 38:19.480]  until I find a carrier. Now I know I'm into their, their supply system, and next
[38:19.480 --> 38:23.600]  week they're getting 30,000 pounds of mozzarella, which usually leads to a
[38:23.600 --> 38:28.260]  sale on, like, pizzas, which is nice. And then there are interesting numbers too.
[38:28.260 --> 38:31.400]  You might find a number that's really bizarre and weird, and these still exist
[38:31.400 --> 38:36.160]  out there. You know, government installations, there might be a
[38:36.160 --> 38:40.520]  voicemail box that's weird. You know, there's a voicemail box for a long time
[38:40.660 --> 38:43.980]  that was just a duck quacking, like you'd call this number, and a duck would quack
[38:43.980 --> 38:49.100]  and beep, and you can leave a message. Nobody really knew what it was, it was just a
[38:49.100 --> 38:52.080]  duck. Government installation, there are numbers you'd call, and they would rattle
[38:52.080 --> 38:57.960]  off weird numbers, you know, Bravo, 6, Alpha, 9, 12. Okay, what is that? You know, so
[38:57.960 --> 39:00.640]  then you'd share that number with your friends. They'd be calling, you'd all try
[39:00.640 --> 39:05.200]  and figure out what it was, and it was neat. It was, again, it was that
[39:05.200 --> 39:10.300]  exploring kind of mindset. And then there were sweep tones. So sweep tones were a
[39:10.300 --> 39:15.640]  number that you would call, and it was just a sweeping tone. It's like, right, all
[39:15.640 --> 39:22.360]  the way up, like super high-pitched. Sweep tones were the thing of urban legend.
[39:22.360 --> 39:30.680]  They existed. It was just a test, a test tone, a test number. The rumor was that it
[39:30.680 --> 39:35.960]  could detect a bug on your line. Not true. Not true. So if you think your line is
[39:35.960 --> 39:42.920]  tapped, don't call a sweep tone because it won't really tell you anything. So
[39:42.920 --> 39:47.140]  basically, in closing, you know, there have been a lot of changes over the last 30
[39:47.140 --> 39:52.200]  years. A lot of things that have advanced, but a lot of things that kind of
[39:52.200 --> 39:57.260]  stayed the same, too, right? You know, we all kind of started out with that
[39:58.000 --> 40:02.080]  inquisitive mindset. You know, some of us were black hats, some of us were white
[40:02.080 --> 40:07.660]  hats, some of us were gray hats. You know, it all brought us here today. You know, no
[40:07.660 --> 40:13.340]  matter, I'm sure we have a wide variety in the audience, you know, everybody's
[40:13.340 --> 40:19.020]  experiences have kind of made the whole community what it is. So that's a
[40:19.020 --> 40:22.420]  that's a good thing. Who knows what we've got for the next 30 years. It's exciting
[40:22.420 --> 40:25.700]  to think about with how fast things are going. It's important to remember where we
[40:25.700 --> 40:29.860]  came from and to pass that on to the next generation as they come up. We need
[40:29.860 --> 40:34.920]  to remember our history and to keep that going forward so that we don't don't
[40:34.920 --> 40:36.120]  forget who we are.