Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I assume there’s probably a huge number of just really simple ones, script kitties, right? Just people trying to just do things. And then there’s a huge amount of social engineering that just goes in where hacking’s done, not with a computer but just by one of the classic ones. Kevin Mitnick had this one in his book which was you’d call up somebody pretending to be like, “Charlene, we’re doing some auditing and I think your pin’s out of date on file. Is it 2323, still?” And they’re like, “No, it’s 4747.” You’re like, “Oh, thanks Sharon.” Boom. You just hacked him. Right? The classic people love correcting bad information. This is like a standard. So there’s all these ways people hack. And so my assumption is that there are really great white hat hackers, there’s really great black hat hackers. But the vulnerability space, the harp, the thing is that discovering a vulnerability and you don’t let anyone know, the white hat hacker still has to make that same discovery. And that’s where I think the real thing is that black hat hacking in some sense has a fundamentally easier job or at least a job in which they can take advantage of for much longer periods of time. One’s the process of discovering who’s breaking the system. The other one’s trying to figure out how to break the system. And it seems like most software is held together by toothpicks and glue and there is a lot of dangers in every piece. And also the social engineering aspect, that’s a real attack vector. I think that’s the attack vector that will do in the longterm the most damage in the world. Especially as AI tooling becomes easier and easier to convince people at scale, sort of do that email Grandma. I think that’s a really serious attack vector, like human psychology and all that. I assume whenever there’s a girl that approaches me, it’s some kind of social engineering project, some attack vector, some intelligence agency. In fact, I’m pretty sure- We’re back to A Beautiful Mind, aren’t we?…

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