Layer 8 Podcast

Note: This episode contains language that would be considered not safe for work (NSFW) and around some children.

Bluma Janowitz, aka @x25Princess is a social engineering instructor and one of the original phone phreaking hackers. She has also worked as a phone sex operator and as a dominatrix. Her work in these areas, as well as her own personal survival, has taught her the social engineering skills she uses today. She also wrote some interesting blog posts about various aspects of social engineering and rapport building, which can be found at https://blumajanowitz.com/?blog=y

Alex Lozano is the founder and CEO of the Barcelona-based Cibergy and is a professor of OSINT at the University of Autonoma de Barcelona. In this episode, Alex talks about the role of OSINT in corporations and businesses. How it can enhance the business and also show trends and potential threats. We also discussed the future of OSINT and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be able to help and where it might come up short.

At the Layer 8 Podcast, we aim to get a global perspective on social engineering and OSINT topics. For this episode, we spoke with Ajaka Shamsudeen, also known as @Mydeen4u on Twitter. Ajaka is a part of the SE awareness and education community in Nigeria and here he shares his perspective of the state of social engineering in Nigeria.

Ajaka is also an alumnus of Cyblack, an organization that is building the next generation of Black and African cybersecurity talent.

Hervé is the creator of the non-profit and non-governmental organization OpenFacto in France. This organization teaches investigational skills to journalists to help them find the truth in facts.

We also talk about using OSINT for good and in this episode,

OpenFacto offers their training to all French-speaking individuals and more information can be found on their site at https://openfacto.fr/

Bex Markwick joins us today to tell us what she feels is wrong about the way we do phishing testing today. We'll talk about some of the areas where those might not go in the right direction and why, but also how we can do them better and what we should be focusing on.

Bex has presented twice at PancakesCon and gave a keynote presentation at BSides Basingstoke. You can find all of Bex's presentations at https://infobex.co.uk/speaking/

Tom Hocker is the Director at Trace Labs. Trace Labs is a non-profit organization who crowdsources OSINT skills from the public to find information and clues on people in missing persons cases.

As mentioned in this episode, you can get more information about Trace Labs, get in contact with Tom and jump into a Search Party all by joining their Discord channel here: https://discord.gg/tracelabs

Chris Pritchard is a UK-based social engineer with Lares Consulting. He has accessed some of the most secure facilities, sometimes seemingly too easily. In this episode, Chris (aka @Ghostie_) talks about what was his process to access seemingly secure facilities like airports and casinos. He also gives his thoughts on dealing with the adrenaline rush of getting in and also has advice on how to get started in the industry.

Rae, aka @Wondersmith_Rae is back! After chatting about maritime OSINT in episode 75, Rae came back to discuss her book "Deep Dive - Exploring the Real World Value of Open Source Intelligence" and to talk about what skills or mindset is important in the OSINT world. We also talked about how to practice your OSINT skills in a realistic way by using Kase Scenarios, a learning site she built along with Espen Ringstad.

Dylan is named the Magician yet he doesn't do card tricks, doesn't pull a rabbit from a hat and doesn't cut his assistant in half. Dylan is a social engineer who earned that moniker during an engagement. In this episode, Dylan will explain the job where he was tagged "The Magician." We'll also talk about the planning that went into his engagement and other aspects of social engineering he uses every day.

This episode is brought to you by Compass Cyber Guard. To find out more about Cyber Guard's social engineering or pentesting services, contact ⁠[email protected]

Ritu Gill is back! A return guest who first appeared on episode 20, Ritu (also known as OSINT Techniques) is back to talk about Operational Security, about how to create and curate sock puppets, how to keep the integrity of an investigation and to tell us about Forensic OSINT, a Chrome extension that can easily help with investigations!

This episode is brought to you by Compass Cyber Guard. To find out more about Cyber Guard's social engineering or pentesting services, contact ⁠[email protected]