The Scampocalypse: How to Survive the Present Attacks

Tom Merritt (0:08)

This is the Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition. Welcome back as we make our way through Cybersecurity Awareness Month to our second part of a Cybersecurity special on wolf masking. This show gratefully provided to you, and thanks for your support. And we are bringing back Mr. Brian Brushwood, once again.

We are not putting the mask on yet, right, Brian?

Brian Brushwood (0:33)

No, no, no, no. We have to see this is episode, this is the Empire Strikes Back of our trilogy. This is when we have to find out what's changed that's put us in such a precarious situation.

Tom Merritt (0:46)

Yeah, so if you haven't seen or listened to the previous episode from a week ago, Social Engineering 101, that tells us where we've been up until now.

Next week, we are going to talk about a lot of the things that you can do about it. But this is the scam-pocalypse. What has changed from the world of like, okay, I just need to be careful about people in my email?

Brian Brushwood (1:11)

The biggest thing, of course, is robots have entered the chat. And before that, the way we interact with each other got wildly disrupted. It's strange to think about it this way, Tom, but on all of humanity's timeline.

The social dynamics have been finely honed to the point where they're largely automatic, and even our anti-sniffing out a con man deceiver senses have been built for that human to human interaction. And even in the late 20th century, you could tell whether or not something was a cheap or a premium item from little clues, like the way it was physically produced, whether or not it was attractively laid out. Even in our times near the end of the 20th century, Tom, we could tell if somebody was phoning it in and using papyrus or if they had actually put forth the effort and spent the money for a graphic designer. That would imply to us that this event, this product, this service had a certain level of competence in order to be able to afford the expense of these displays.

Tom Merritt (2:46)

So in other words, everything we built to resist social engineering, doesn't exactly work as well as it used to? Or is it just that the robots have figured out like, oh, I can pretend to look you in the eye? I mean, what are we talking about?

Brian Brushwood (3:03)

Well, if we go back 10 years ago, then the first distortion that we see with social media is in general, if you subjectively define your role as in relation to other people's role, like in general, as I moved from town to town as a kid, I tended to be one of the spicier, weirder kids there. So I became comfortable with the idea of being an outlier, giving me a hundred people of my demographic. I would be the one who would think and do a surprising thing out there. That worked very well for all of humanity until social media allowed us to enter pocket realities of 100% our types. And so in that case, there's an arms race to be the most absurdly interesting, spiciest person out there. And so we get weird distorted influencer culture. And so that's where we were in the mid teens. And then we had another massive societal swing, because at least during that time, we would still meet each other at events. We would still go to DragonCon and then make real life friends out of our Internet friends. And then for five years, we introduced the world to the wonderful world of Zoom meetings. And now when it comes to issues of deception, which is my bread and butter here, if you are a magician, boy, oh boy, do we love Zoom meetings. We build entire shows around using this as a deception, because it's a blocked off window to a curated representation of someone on the other side. And during the pandemic, magicians would create these wonderful distorted realities to convey one world, when meanwhile, if you just turn the camera around, it was the other side of their apartment, right?

Tom Merritt (4:48)

Yeah. So if we're looking at everything through a computer, suddenly anything a computer can do could be real. We don't, it's harder to tell.

Brian Brushwood (4:58)

Well, and that's what we get to right now. This is what I predicted a couple of years ago, and I'm loathe to admit that I was very, very right. For audio listeners, I'm drawing a pie chart here, labeling it 100%.

Tom Merritt (5:11)

A delicious pie.

Brian Brushwood (5:13)

Let's just put all of us as in the top billion. If you're listening to this, it's very likely you're probably one of the wealthiest 1 billion people on the planet. Congrats. We're probably not worried about the bottom billion who desperately need our help, but a couple of rungs down in the billion D ladder are a number of 2-3 billion people who the shortest path to life-changing wealth is to snatch $1,000, $10,000 from a wealthy Westerner or a member of the top 1 billion. And so in this pie chart, if we have 100% of them, just 10 years ago to play the game, you had to have a subsection of this Venn diagram. You had to be able to speak English, and I'm drawing a smaller circle now. Hopefully without an accent, you would also need a pool of labor so that they could give thoughtful responses, because bots would only take you so far. You would need a team of graphic designers in order to, if you're going to pretend to be a wealthy Western society company, there's certain things that you would expect. You might need a web designer. You might need to know how the grift works, to know the patience, to know what a sales funnel is, to know when a lead is hot and all those things. And so at this point, I'm now drawing a circle within a circle within a circle.