All right.
Can you guys hear me back there?
In the very back?
Okay, cool, cool, cool.
All right, I'm gonna skip the intro stuff.
My name is Eddie Miro.
I do a lot of public speaking.
I've been in the cyber world for, you know, about ten years.
I started in IT way back in the day.
You'll actually hear a lot about this in this talk, so I'm just gonna jump right into it.
This is a thought I had this morning, and it kind of sets the tone for this talk.
There are some interesting things that I've done recently in regards to this content and my story, and this may make a little bit of sense as we get through it.
But first thing I want to do is go back in time to, like, the 1800s.
So my great-great-grandfather, who's also named Edward Miro, because in Italian families everyone in my family's named Edward or Samuel.
He's from Naples, Italy.
He came to this country in the 1800s.
This was my grandpa.
He was born in 1924 in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
A very interesting fellow.
He was in World War II.
He was in the Air Force when it was called the Army Air Force.
He was a tail gunner on a B-17, shot down in France.
This is one of his air medals that he got.
He then went on to work for NASA.
He worked for the Apollo program and helped design the F-102 jet.
My dad's from Cocoa Beach, Florida, so if you've been to, like, HackspaceCon, that's kind of where my family's from.
When my grandpa and my grandma moved to California, they opened an airport in Rialto called Miro Field.
It was very cool.
My dad got to grow up as a little kid learning to fly planes and taking girls on dates in high school.
How epic would that be, right?
This is my grandma.
I also have this picture tattooed on my arm right here.
This is from the 70s.
She just got done doing her solo flight, which is a big deal as a private pilot.
I guess being a woman who flew planes in the 70s was enough to get in the paper.
But she loved it, and this was her wallpaper, and I miss her very much.
In 1974, my grandpa was doing a demo flight with some people who were going to buy some planes.
It crashed.
He died.
Very, very tragic for my family.
The airport was... the control of the airport was turned over to my great uncle, who then sold it to the city, really kind of fucking my dad over.
All that's left now is a street with my name on it.
Now it's an Amazon warehouse.
This is looking down the runway.
I found a pile of rubble, and I think I have a piece of the old runway in my storage.
Maybe I don't, but it still means something to me.
The sad part is I grew up 40 miles from this place, and I could have experienced much more, but I didn't.
All right, so my dad did a very understandable thing.
This is the 70s.
He had just lost his dad in a tragic way, lost his inheritance to the airport.
Right before that happened, he found out that my grandfather had another son before him with another woman.
So really a kind of traumatic time for my dad.
He bought a Harley, went on the road, and ended up in Fort Worth, Texas.
This is actually where I was born, although I don't really identify as a Texan, because I grew up in California.
He met my mom through one of his friends.
He was a prospect for a one-percenter club called The Banditos.
They're like Sons of Anarchy, if you've ever seen that show.
He did that for a few years, ended up not liking it, and moved back to California, where he got into the drug game.
He was dealing with these guys that ran this restaurant in Riverside County called Giuseppe's.
It's not there anymore.
My mom said he was friends with lots of cops.
They'd come over.
You know, typical crime drug dealing stuff, right?
It's me and my brother.
I'm about eight years old when the next part happens, which is our house was raided by the district attorney's office.
I remember... sometimes I get choked up when I talk about this, so just forgive me.
I'm sure you understand the trauma, right?
I was like eight years old.
I remember the morning.
I was in the bathroom, taking a shit like you do, and you hear the... and I'm coming down the hallway, and I'm looking towards the door, and I'm hearing banging, and they come right in with the battering ram.
They've got those raid jackets, says district attorney's office on the back.
Yeah, I remember my dad being handcuffed.
I was turning the newspaper for him.
It was all very interesting, right?
When I got older, my mom gave me a copy of the police report.
This is some of the stuff that was in my dad's safe.
Does anyone know what these are?
Any gun people here?
What about the one on the right?
Anyone like rap music?
My dad was white, but that's a tech nine.
He was really all about the game.
My dad was like... he was pretty hardcore.
So that happens.
There are years I'm skipping past just for time.
But in the sixth grade, we ended up moving into my grandma's house.
She's the lady I showed you flying the plane, the one I have tattooed on me.
Yeah, my dad served eight months in the federal penitentiary in Chino.
My grandma was a court clerk for 30 years, so he got off pretty light.
I'm sure there were some strings pulled.
Not that she ever admitted while she was alive.
But he went to one of those jails where, you know, they have a pool, and he had a key to his cell.
It was ridiculous, right?
But anyways, fast forward.
So I'm in the sixth grade.
Now I go from a pretty fucked up childhood to now being just a normal middle class kid.
Like many of you, we had a computer in our house, which, you know, being a middle class white kid in the 90s with a computer is why most of us are qualified to be in the industry that we're in.
I mean, it's a privilege, right?
And my wife, who's Hispanic, is like, yeah, we didn't have a computer until I was, like, 25, so...
I played football.
I wrestled.
I was just a normal kid.
I went to prom.
This is me as an 18-year-old.
I used to be very handsome.
Okay.
But something changed in me when I was 15 years old.
I saw this movie.
Fucking great movie, right?
And, you know, it's loosely based on a true story, too.
But the romanticism of the crime lifestyle and the gangster world took hold.
You know, I'm like 16 years old, reading books about the outfit.
And something that Michael will appreciate.
I got really into gambling.
I love blackjack.
One of my dreams as a young man was to have one of these setups.
Has anyone seen Boiler Room?
It's a great movie.
I still kind of want to have a casino in my house.
While I'm going to high school, you know, my mom is... my dad had served his time.
He went completely square.
You couldn't even get him to admit to anything that had happened.
Even though I was there and saw him arrested and I had the police report, he just... he buried that part of himself.
Which, to be fair, I did the same.
And this talk and some of the other things I've done are me trying to right those wrongs and own who I am.
So summers were fun.
We'd go visit my mom.
She lived all over the place.
My mom never kind of stopped living that lifestyle.
She moved to a town called Wickenburg, Arizona.
She worked as a waitress at this motel, hotel, gas station, restaurant sort of setup.
It's all gone now.
Completely wiped out.
But it was owned by an Italian family.
My mom really has like a type of guys that she's, you know, attracted to.
It was really fun.
You know?
When you have a mom like mine and you're a teenager getting to smoke weed and drink, it's fucking great.
But then you grow up and you realize that that's not normal.
But we met someone.
And my mom was married to this guy named Michael.
We called him Junior.
And he and I, you know, he's also Italian.
We'd watch gangster movies and we'd eat pasta and talk about wanting to be gangsters, right?
And then we finally got an opportunity to do that.
We met this guy.
His name was Jesse McBride.
I graduated high school in 1998.
I moved in with my girlfriend.
My mom got us this job moving around the country remodeling chief auto parts into auto zones.
There used to be a bunch of different auto parts stores.
Now there's only a couple.
But that was a fun job.
When I really decided to commit myself to the lifestyle, I was working at PetSmart at the time.
It was one of my first jobs when I was 19 years old.
I stole a Western saddle, which is thousands of dollars.
That was my first big score.
And I gave it to Jesse as a dowry.
Just to let him know I was legit.
I mean, Junior was already going to vouch for me, but I really wanted to be a gangster.
So yeah, I did that.
And yeah.
So I'm going to skip through a few years.
We moved all over the country.
We lived in Alabama.
I've never actually been convicted of any serious crimes.
So I asked ChatGPT if I'm really an ex-criminal.
And technically I'm a reformed individual.
Because you have to have convictions to be an actual criminal.
But I did have a I had like $10,000 worth of bad checks that I wrote in the state of Alabama.
So I did have warrants there.
But I ended up paying all those off later on in life.
In 1999, we ended up in Phoenix, Arizona.
Which was a great place.
Two weeks after we moved there, my girlfriend and I, at this point, we're just shoplifting as a sport, just because it was fun.
We didn't need to steal things, but we just liked to do it.
So we're in Walmart.
In 1999, DVDs were still pretty expensive and still kind of new.
So I had DVDs stuffed all around my pants.
And one of the loss prevention guys caught me.
The most embarrassing thing I ever did was... does anyone remember those posters at work in the break room?
You know when you go to the bathroom at Walmart and be like, shoplifting is not a thrill, it's a crime, right?
When I walked out the front doors of the Walmart, I turned to my girlfriend and I said, wow, that is such a thrill.
Like, so cliche.
And the loss prevention guy grabbed my arm and he's like, it was a thrill, wasn't it?
Come with me.
So we did.
To complicate things, I was carrying a gun.
Because why wouldn't I be?
Come on.
It was funny because the loss prevention guy searched for my girlfriend first, and then he went out to the hallway to call the sheriff's department.
And when he went out to the hallway, I put my gun in her purse.
Because he had already searched her stuff.
He came back and searched me, and I was like, yes.
We're good.
It's just a ticket, right?
But the sheriff's department, of course, he does his own search, and he takes the gun out and he holds it up to the loss prevention guy and he's like, how did you miss this?
And I'm not going to let my girlfriend take a fall for me, so I just fessed up.
It was me, I put it in there.
Yeah, good times.
So I got to ride in this guy with a bunch of other interesting folks.
I was the last one in, and we were kind of all handcuffed in a line.
And I'll never forget the guy I was handcuffed to, because he was a nice-looking black gentleman.
He looked really cool, like he had very awesome clothes.
He comes back to the story later on.
But I spent that night here at the Madison Street Jail in Phoenix.
They used to call it the horseshoe, but it's no longer there anymore.
It's now an office building.
When I got out in the morning, I had lived there for two weeks, so I didn't know our phone number, and you had to know phone numbers in those days.
So I just got out of jail, and I'm standing there on the street, and the guy that I was handcuffed to, Leon, who told me he was a pimp, he actually gave me his card.
It was of a hotel that he lived at, and he had his room number written on there.
He paid for my bus ride up to Bell Avenue, which is like really north Phoenix.
That's where we were living at the time.
So yeah, there's a few years of that.
I have a lot of really interesting crime stories, but I'm going to skip it because we don't have a lot of time.
And if we have time for questions, definitely get those at the end.
So we're working with Jesse.
A couple of years in, Jesse comes to me and he asks me to...
He comes to me and he tells me he wants me to break into my mom's house and steal Junior's suitcase, which was puzzling to me because Junior was my partner, we were a crew.
I don't know what this was.
I'm not going to say no to the boss because, you know, I'm all about that life, right?
But after that happened, I talked to Jesse.
I told him I was losing my girlfriend at the time, which I did, and I just told him I didn't want to do it anymore and I just didn't have it in me.
He let me walk away.
A few years later, though, Jesse died outside of Phoenix.
The official story is that he committed suicide during a traffic stop.
Some people don't think that's true.
Turns out, well, the reason they don't think it's true is because of this part.
So Jesse McBride was not his real name.
We didn't know any of this.
His real name was Jesse Stoneking.
So you can look this guy up.
This is all in the public record.
He was kind of an underboss of the Kansas City, St.
Louis area outfit.
He was known as the bully of the mob.
He was really scary.
And they threatened his family and he turned state's evidence and took down an entire family.
He had a $100,000 hit on his head, and when we met him, he was under witness protection.
Now, we never knew this because Junior and I were not, like, made men.
If you've ever seen The Sopranos, you know like the random dickheads who are just part of the crew?
That's kind of like all we were.
And we were never introduced to anybody higher up than Jesse.
We only dealt with Jesse.
So we never knew.
I mean, this whole time, we could have been murdered or caught up in this.
We had no clue.
Yeah.
He was an interesting guy.
You actually would have really liked him.
He was really cool.
He was really funny.
He was super charming.
Unless you pissed him off and then it was insanity.
So after that, I stayed in Phoenix for a few years.
This is another screenshot from the movie The Boiler Room.
I got into telemarketing, and it turns out I'm really excellent at being on the phone, scamming people, vishing.
It's kind of my bread and butter.
I love it so much.
So I did that for a while.
Then I found out about IT.
This is the era of those commercials where it's like a guy in a parking lot at night, and he's like, you've got to go to college.
Man, what are you doing?
You're sitting watching TV.
And I was like, fuck, I am sitting watching TV.
So these were the days.
Like, right now it's really hot to get into cybersecurity.
In the early 2000s, it was really hot to just get into IT and networking.
My first job was dial-up tech support for Earthlink way back in the day.
Did that for a few years, and then I ended up back in California.
Kind of stepped away from the IT field for a little while.
It was really hard to transition from being a reformed individual.
I don't know.
I identify as a criminal.
So I was still kind of living that lifestyle.
I was still trying to recruit people to do scores that I was planning myself, because now I'm like the organized crimes subject matter expert in my friends group.
So here's a topless shot of me.
You're welcome.
This is an apartment we lived in in a city called Apple Valley, California.
This area is called Felony Flats.
Hanging with the boys.
And yeah, I'm wearing Dickies and Chuck Taylors.
I'm eating a Jack in the Box chicken sandwich.
This is California as fuck, if you didn't know that.
So yeah, I was only ever arrested one time, and it was for... technically it was for carrying a concealed weapon, which I was really worried about, because in California that's like a serious felony, and you get like years per bullet.
But in Arizona, it was just a misdemeanor.
They couldn't really care less.
Six months later, I went to evidence, and I got that gun back.
When I went to the judge in the morning, he scratched the concealed weapons charge, and I had to go to like a shoplifting diversion course, and that was it.
So... and then like the bad checks that I had in Alabama with the bench warrants paid all those off.
So I have a perfectly clean record.
I have a public trust security clearance.
I've been a federal contractor before.
Totally clean background, which is really helpful.
Not many people get to experience crime and come out of it alive or untainted, right?
But of course I kept it a secret, because why would you tell everyone this?
How stupid can you be?
But now I'm 45, and I'm pretty well established in my career, and I got to tell you, being open about this has been so cathartic, it's insane.
This is like therapy for me that you're just like unintentionally a part of.
I know I'm trauma dumping on you guys, but it's great.
I went to a community college.
I worked various IT networking jobs throughout the years.
A lot of MSPs, a lot of ISP work.
I went to Victor Valley College.
I was ASP president one year.
Got really into leadership.
My first major was religious studies and philosophy.
I love that stuff.
No, seriously.
I'm still really into it.
I did a theater phase.
I was in four plays.
I love acting.
All these are like social engineering skills, right?
I have this weird aggregate skill set that you just happen to get randomly that make you really good at one specific thing, which I didn't even know you could do until I got into cybersecurity.
But I kind of ended up really liking anthropology, studying human beings.
People are genuinely fascinating to me, which is really great for social engineering, because if I can really be into you specifically, and it's called a liking principle, you'll like me because I like your favorite thing, which is you.
And we're interacting, and your brain is releasing good chemicals.
So my late 20s, early 30s, I went Kerouac on everyone's asses.
I lived in my Corolla, dirt bag lifestyle.
This is me at the Colorado River.
You can smell the weed and the patchouli just kind of coming from it.
But I loved that era of my life.
I eventually kind of grew up.
I met my wife in 2010.
We got married in 2012.
That's the day we got married.
That's my dog Emma on the right.
She died.
I have her tattooed on my hand here.
My dad died in 2012.
We didn't have a good relationship.
I didn't see him before he died.
I wish I would have done that just to have the moral high ground, but neither did my brother.
We just didn't have a good relationship.
In 2013, I moved to Northern California.
My wife went to Chico State.
It was very cool to live there.
I joined my first D.C.
group, D.C.
530.
It was hard to become friends with them.
You may have experienced this if you are trying to get involved in the community, but I had to go and just keep showing up week after week before anyone would start talking to me.
It was really awkward.
Very social, so it was very painful for me.
I love making friends.
If you have interacted with me at all during this conference, the interaction that we have is totally genuine.
I am a social engineer, but it's completely authentic because I am fascinated by humans.
I love making friends.
If you heard Johnny Christmas talk about how to win friends and influence people, the important part of that book, which I totally agree with him on all points, is that the appreciation and the praise and the compliments that you give to people have to be genuine,
have to be sincere.
People are really good at detecting bullshit, because we are a tribal species.
Homo sapiens are hardwired for this stuff.
You can bullshit people for a while, but their subconscious is going to notice the incongruencies between your words and your nonverbals.
I did my first talk in 2017.
I told the story about my first time on stage and how nervous I was.
This is me, like, sweating profusely.
The first part of this talk, I'm, like, narrating my anxiety attack and, like, you know, awkwardly to the audience and, like, wanting to run away.
It was a really fun talk.
It was on vehicle-based surveillance.
I rented a thermal imaging camera, and I tried to detect people doing surveillance in vehicles.
I found the local FBI office, and I went up to their door, and I rang that, like, that video, and I tried to talk to the agents that were in there.
They wouldn't talk to me, and they referred me to their public relations person who told me to kick rocks.
I was just, like, hey, you know, maybe, like, a wild hacker showing up would throw him for a loop, but it didn't.
A couple years later, I did this talk also at NORCON.
This is on how to weaponize the rideshare relationship.
I had done some Lyft driving in between jobs, and I noticed with my very specialized skill set that there was this interesting relationship that happens kind of like this pseudo-relationship that a bartender has with you, where you're kind of willing to say things that you wouldn't normally be willing to say,
because it feels anonymous, but it's not, and I have got some really good stories, which you don't have time for.
The best one was a guy who invited me to come in to do a, quote, shitload of cocaine, which sounded really great, but probably shouldn't do that.
I also did this talk at DEF CON 27 in the SE Village.
That was my first big talk.
There was like 900 people in the room.
It was pretty insane.
For a couple years, I tried to become a freelancer.
I did some physical security assessments.
This is me inside a building that we broke into.
It turns out it's really hard to get a company to hire you when you're our next criminal.
You know, I have the requisite skill set and the actual real-world experience, which I'm not saying I'm the best at any of the things that I do, but it is kind of different when you don't have a letter of authorization in your pocket, so I kind of think that's cool.
I know I'm like totally throwing shade at people right now, but I'm not the best at physical security, I'm not the best at social engineering, I'm just some guy.
But at that same time, I was approached by one of the program coordinators at Butte College.
I started teaking at the community college level.
I mean, my life is just a series of random shit that happens to me, and I'm just always like saying yes to things.
That's good life advice, by the way.
So I taught all the CompTIA certs at Butte College and Lake Tahoe Community College.
This is some of my students who did the National Cyber League.
Spoilers, I now work for Cyber Skylines, so that's kind of a really cool thing that happened.
I published an article in 2600.
I did some research about QR codes.
I had the Butte College Computer Science Club distribute these random QR codes all over the town, and we set up a website to see if people would scan them, and they did, and it was really interesting.
During the pandemic, I had a group of friends, and we really wanted to play Backdoors and Breaches.
This is a tabletop incident response game made by Black Hills.
You guys probably know about it, right?
Yes?
No?
Yeah, maybe.
So I scanned in all the cards, and I built this pirate mod for a tabletop simulator.
Jason and Deb really liked it, and then they hired me to develop it officially for them.
So they don't use it very often, because there's a web app version of the game that's much easier, but if you have Tabletop Simulator, it's free in the workshop.
I worked for a few companies during that time.
I also started a contest at DEF CON called Octopus Game.
A few years later, I moved to Salt Lake City, where I live now.
I used to work for a company called Arctic Wolf.
They're a big MSSP.
I was their senior technical trainer.
So if you worked there, you probably know who I am, but I probably don't remember who you are, so I'm sorry about that.
But it was a really fun job.
I also taught at Salt Lake Community College for a little while.
Not a very fun job.
Like I said, we've done Octopus Games since DEF CON 30.
Last year, we were selected as a black badge contest, which if you don't know, it's kind of like a pretty badass thing to happen.
Our winning player got a black badge at DEF CON for a game of Simon Says.
I mean, the original concept for Octopus Game was, I'm going to rip off Squid Game, the popular Netflix TV show, and we're going to have a battle royale and people are going to play kids games and fight each other.
And it was pretty fun.
It has pivoted and grown since then.
My wife runs it now.
She does a really great job.
She's standing behind me up there on stage.
She doesn't like public speaking, and I do like public speaking, and that is like the coolest picture of me that I've ever had taken.
These days, I work for Cyber Skyline.
We developed a National Cyber League competition.
Has anyone played NCL or heard of NCL?
Our platform is pretty dope.
Our last NCL, we had like 6,000 concurrent players at one time, and we've had 100,000 people come through our platform.
I'm also a DEF CON goon.
I'm part of the exhibitors department.
So it's really fun.
I love the community.
All right.
So actually, this talk and these stories actually was encouraged by one of my mentors.
His name is Phil Wiley.
He spoke earlier today.
He wrote the Pentester Blueprint.
He asked me at DEF CON once if I ever thought about telling my stories and writing a book.
And I hadn't, because that just makes... it's really counterintuitive to tell everyone about your crimes.
I know that's like really obvious, but yeah, just... I didn't like the idea.
My wife like slaps me and says, see, I've been telling you to tell people this stuff.
So I did.
Phil introduced me to a couple of publishers.
They thought it was an interesting story, but that I wasn't famous enough, which to be fair, I'm not that famous, so I'm not mad about that.
I hired an editor myself.
I hired a typesetter to do all the graphic design.
I used AI to create this cover, and I self-published my own book, which was okay.
I've sold... you can't buy it anymore because I just don't care anymore, but I've sold maybe 50 copies.
Like all the people who originally supported the idea bought a copy and that was it.
I got some bad reviews on Amazon.
One guy was kind of a jerk.
If you're here, fuck you.
But there was a review on Goodreads where she's like, it's a really good story, and I just wish it ended better.
And to be fair... no, no, no, it's just like... because I just told the story without taking like a moral stance or telling anyone what they should or shouldn't do.
I just wanted to tell the story and to get it out, right?
Granted, if I had gotten a publisher with a real editor and a whole team, they would have identified this and helped me write a better book, but whatever.
I actually glossed over a lot of things, too, and I noticed myself doing it in this talk, too.
There are some good stories that I should tell, but it's just like...
my gut... I don't know.
I was on the Brett Johnson podcast.
He has a Darknet Diaries episode.
He was like... they call him the original internet god.
He invented a bunch of cybercrime and fraud.
He served time for it.
He also worked with the Secret Service.
He's an interesting guy.
Kind of controversial.
He also noticed that I gloss over a lot, and I'm still kind of afraid to take ownership for some of the things that I've done, because it's not things I'm proud of, but it is what it is.
I submitted to speak a couple years ago at DEF CON.
The CFP board thought it was interesting, but unless you're able to prove it, why should you believe me?
And I don't have court documents.
And Brett said it doesn't matter.
He's served time, and you can see the records, and people still don't believe him.
So some people will believe you.
Some people won't.
Nothing you can do about that.
I submitted a FOIA request for myself and also for Jesse.
There had to be something out there.
The FOIA for Jesse was rejected.
Not only was he a confidential informant, but he was also dead, so he's protected by privacy.
I didn't hope that there would be a lot in there.
I mean, he was a big part of my story, but I'm just like a tiny footnote in his.
My FOIA request came back completely empty, so apparently the FBI doesn't give a fuck, so... Yeah.
They won't tell you anything.
So yeah, I was never really sure how to end the story.
Even this talk.
I'm not sure what the call to action should be, or what the takeaway should be.
This is purely like a selfish thing for me now.
Telling my story.
Telling you how I felt about it at the time.
I've had a lot of people reach out, and they thank me for telling my story.
A lot of us have checkered backgrounds.
A lot of you here probably do too, but you're smart to not tell anyone about it , because it'll fuck your career.
Wait until you're old, and then tell people about it.
So, I don't know how to end it.
I don't know how to wrap this up in a bow.
I had a really weird life.
I was born into a really weird family.
I had a really traumatizing childhood.
I became the sort of adult that you would expect a person who went through that to go through.
That realization was very powerful for me, because I held a lot of shame.
But I don't anymore, because that's the appropriate response to my childhood.
And I'm not that person anymore, even though I'm kind of still that person in some ways, but I'm also who I am now.
And people really like a redemption story.
So that's pretty much my story here.
I'm not a moral authority.
I'm not going to tell you what to do.
That's pretty much my talk.
I think we still have time if anyone has any questions.
I kind of powered through it just in case we didn't have time.
Anyone want to ask anything?
I know I promised you social engineering content.
I totally lied in my description.
But what did you expect, you know?
Of course I'm going to lie to you.
Yes.
Okay.
He asked, where was I at in my life when I decided to come clean?
And I'm still not sure that I'm totally safe.
I mean, there could still be repercussions from this.
Probably not.
You know, a lot of people don't really believe the stories.
And I'm a social engineer, so maybe I'm lying about the whole thing.
I'm really not.
But yeah.
I was... like I said, I had started... you know, I'm really big mental health advocate.
And I do go to therapy.
And you know, working with my therapist, you have to kind of like reconcile like who you are in regards to the image that you portray and the masks that we all wear.
And then also like the history that's like undeniable.
Like I can't escape what my history is because I did all those things.
I was that person.
So I think it's a valuable thing to have as a security professional because I know how to... I look through the eyes of a threat actor just right now, like looking at you.
And I learned in a world of the most severe consequences, like how to see the world and how to, you know, play the... you know, you guys learned to play the what would I do game, right?
Like as far as physical security goes.
How would you break into this room?
How would you rob this place?
Like that was just like our lives, right?
And the specifics of the way that crime worked for me and Jesse and Junior was Jesse would get jobs for us.
He had people that would give him intel on targets.
We would plan scores.
We would go execute them.
One story that I tell, we, Junior and I, went down to South Phoenix, California for a couple weeks.
We met this guy.
He was a drug dealer.
He also trafficked in a lot of stolen stuff.
The job was to steal his cash.
And the way we did it is after we hung out for a while, Junior took him outside to buy like a generator or some other shit that he had.
And I saw where he kept his money stash, stuck it in my pocket, and then we just bounced.
And the funny thing was he called Jesse the victim, which I don't feel bad about robbing a drug dealer.
I also don't feel bad about stealing from Walmart.
It's just one of those things, right?
I'm sorry.
If I'm a bad person, hey.
Yeah, that guy called, the victim called Jesse my boss.
And he's like, hey, where's your fat fucking friend?
And it's like, you know?
So that was an interesting feeling to do something like that.
To have like that much money in your pocket that you just took, you know?
And then now you're back, we're back at my mom's house in the bedroom, and there's just like three stacks of cash on the table.
It's exhilarating.
I mean, crime is fun.
It really is.
Like, you know, my parents were fucked up, right?
But, you know, they never lied to me.
When we were growing up, my dad always told us drugs are fun.
This is why people do drugs.
My dad was a drug dealer, so he knew all about this.
And I'm not going to lie to you.
Like, crime is fun.
Stealing is fun.
I don't do it anymore because the consequences of it are not worth it anymore.
I have too much to lose now.
I don't know if I answered your question at all, but...
Any other questions?
Yes.
I thought about that.
I think that would be really interesting, but I think it would, like, expose me as, like, a possible future criminal, because, like, I don't know.
It is, yeah.
I think, I don't know.
I've never dabbled in fiction before.
Maybe I should.
I don't know.
People keep telling me I should write a second edition of my book and tell, like, there's like hundreds of stories that I thought of after the fact that I could have, like, tripled and quadrupled the length of the book.
Had I had, like, an editing team and a publisher to help me, it would have been much better, but I don't know.
One of the more interesting things that I experienced through this process is most people not really caring.
And I spent 20 years carrying this guilt and this shame and these secrets, and I just, I thought it was going to be this big revelatory moment, and people were going to be shocked, and I was going to lose friends, and I was going to get a Darknet Diaries episode,
and, like, I was going to be on all the podcasts.
I've been on a few podcasts, but, yeah, most people don't care, you know.
I mean, I can't say that.
A lot of people care.
A lot of people supported me.
But the reaction from the community was, yeah, okay, cool.
And we have plenty of criminals in our world, so I guess it's not that interesting, and, yeah.
So, yes.
All right, this guy's giving me work, so does anyone else have a question?
Yes, back there.
Yeah.
Okay, so the question was, how much of my social engineering skills do I attribute to my criminal experience?
I'd say maybe 25%.
That gave me, like, a good framework to understand, like, how people work, and how scams work, and how conning people works, and physical security, for sure.
Like, that's where I learned everything there.
But a lot of the social engineering skills that are really powerful, I kind of learned through some of those experiences that I never planned.
Like, going to college, taking a public speaking class, taking a theater class, taking an improv class, being part of student leadership, going to leadership conferences, learning about self-development, and , yeah, telemarketing.
That was an amazing experience.
It's not a great job, but if you want to get into vishing, there's no better way to train that skill set.
We were selling credit card protection in the early 2000s, which was a scam product.
Like, you don't need credit card protection, but, yeah, I didn't feel bad about it at the time.
A lot of people will ask me about how to get into... so, technically, there is some social engineering content in this.
So these are the books that I recommend if you want to up your skills, and even if you don't have any desire to do social engineering as a job, which is a very rare job to get for the most part.
Red teaming and doing covert entry is even more rare.
I recommend How to Win Friends and Influence People.
I'm just going to echo everything that Johnny Christmas said earlier.
It's a great book.
It gets a bad rap because it's been used by salespeople, and I think a lot of people don't really remember it and think it's stupid, but it's actually really great, and really the TLDR of that book is be a really great person that people like, want to be influenced by,
and want to be around.
So the next is influence.
Has anyone read that?
Dr.
Robert Cialdini.
He pretty much codified all of the principles of influence that we weaponize in social engineering.
So authority, liking, all these principles that as the social engineering world has expanded upon that, that's kind of like our foundations.
Anyone heard of Robin Dreek?
He was a Marine.
He was also the head of the FBI's counter intelligence unit.
His job was to convert spies from Russia to give us intelligence.
His book, The Code of Trust, in fact, all of his books, if you want to learn about rapid rapport, he has a really short 50-page book just on that.
I recommend everything by him.
The cool thing about Robin Dreek and his methodology is that he would never use a negative influence tactic.
He would never use fear or intimidation or manipulation.
All completely positive.
It's all about validating other people and really great stuff.
And then Joe's book, Practical Social Engineering, if you really just want to get into the nuts and bolts of it.
I used to do a lot of trainings on social engineering.
I used to train on the anti-siphon platform.
I did it freelance for a while.
It's kind of boring.
It's not that exciting to learn how to use the social engineering toolkit or GoFish.
There's plenty of good videos already on that.
I don't need to teach you how to send a phishing email.
The psychology that you need to understand is very basic for that type of attack.
I'm not really interested in that.
If you look up any of my talks on YouTube, I tend to be more interested in really esoteric, weird psychological stuff.
I did a talk a little while back about social engineering yourself, using some of the techniques.
And your brain is social engineerable by you, which will blow your mind.
The idea that you can stand in front of a mirror and do daily affirmations and that having a tangible effect on you bothers me as a skeptic, but it's completely legit.
That's the whole field of sports psychology, and it's very effective.
So, I'm more interested in that kind of stuff, how to apply the things that I've learned through Carnegie and through Cialdini and through Trust, and how to better myself personally and professionally.
So, that's kind of the things that interest me.
Any other questions?
I put Joe's book up there.
There's another guy that wrote a lot of books on social engineering.
We don't like that person, so I don't talk about him.
Just so you know where I stand on that.
Anyone?
Anything?
All right.
Thanks.