Never say this to a robot dog

**Graham Cluley** (0:04)
I would love to be a character actor. I would love to be an over-the-top character actor. None of this is going to be kept in the podcast. I would love to be a pirate.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
Smashing Security, episode 481 Never Say This to a Robot Dog, with Graham Cluley and special guest Jenny Radcliffe.

**Graham Cluley** (0:35)
Hello, hello, and welcome to Smashing Security, episode 481 My name's Graham Cluley.

**Jenny Radcliffe** (0:40)
And I'm Jenny Radcliffe.

**Graham Cluley** (0:42)
Jenny, welcome back to the show. Always a delight to have you here. Now, of course, you are a human hacker, you're socially engineering people, you're breaking into things, you're using all of your charms. And I saw someone high-profile who this week has been socially engineered. I wonder if you perhaps were responsible. The new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, he got an unexpected call this week, didn't he? Someone rang him up, claiming to be from the Trump administration. I think they claim to be the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles. Did you hear about this?

**Jenny Radcliffe** (1:16)
I did. I did. And it wasn't me. Thank you, Graham.
I'm not getting in the way of anything currently happening in our politics. The first thing I thought, which was so silly, was I wonder if they did an accent. But anyway, yeah, a scam call pretending to be Susie Wiles, who is still at the time of recording the current president's chief of staff, directly into our new prime minister. And from a social engineering point of view, all I can say is that is perfect timing. Because if you leave it any longer, more suspicion would have been raised quicker. Social engineering, particularly very successful social engineering, you have to consider the timing. And the timing of this was great. He's just new enough to perhaps not be overly familiar with that voice. But all I could think about was, because accents are a nightmare, you know? I get jobs in as a social engineer and I always say, I will do this as a British person. I'm not going to try and do an accent because we'll all look ridiculous.
Even though I can do a few, but there we go, I think, a bit.

**Graham Cluley** (2:23)
Yes. It's like if I did an American accent, I'd sound like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins pretending to be a cockney.
It's not going to fool anybody, is it? But when someone gets socially engineered this week, like Andy Burnham for at least a brief while, does that surprise you at all? Or is it almost inevitable that people, even at that high level, can fall for things like this?

**Jenny Radcliffe** (2:43)
Everyone can fall for it. Even the language to fall for is hotly disputed because it puts a little bit of blame on the person that it's happened to, really.

**Graham Cluley** (2:54)
Yeah.

**Jenny Radcliffe** (2:55)
But it's just the right script at the right time and the right person. Sometimes that can be random, it can be a drive-by attack and it just resonates to someone. The example I always give, I had a friend of mine who had been the CISO for a massive company in America. I mean, massive, massive company. Got off a plane, was running for a cab and clicked on a link. And this is someone who is absolutely at the top of their game. It's happened to me, it can happen to anyone. So, but like I say, the timing of this was particularly prescient. And I think that sort of tells you everything you need to know about social engineering and the need for continued education.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:35)
This week on Smashing Security.

**Graham Cluley** (3:38)
We won't be talking about how our Windows day called ShieldBreak is leaving PCs unpatched while Microsoft scrambles to fix it. You'll hear no discussion of how a floor in an order tracking plugin exposed the personal details of 40,000 cryptocurrency hardware wallet customers. And we won't even mention how a Mac OS screen sharing bug let hackers walk into thousands of Macs without a password and put them to work mining cryptocurrency.
So, Jenny, what are you going to be talking about this week?

**Jenny Radcliffe** (4:12)
I will be talking about a theft that happened over in Salzburg.

**Graham Cluley** (4:16)
And I'm going to be talking about how cyber security is going to the dogs. All this and much more coming up in this episode of Smashing Security.
Now chums chums, Jenny, earlier this month, of course, the Black Hat Conference was happening in Las Vegas. Were you at Black Hat? Have you ever gone to the Black Hat Conference?