The Hacker Mind

You’d think that having an amazing resume, a couple of bug bounties, or a CTF win would land you that dream infosec job. For many, though, that isn’t true. That’s why Tennisha Martin founded Black Girls Hack, an organization designed to help the next generation receive the skills and experience they need to land jobs in the C-suites, and perhaps begin to address the acute shortage of infosec professionals with qualified people of color.

Shortly after OpenSSL’s Heartbleed, Shellshock was discovered lurking in Bash code two decades old. How could open source software be vulnerable for so long? This episode looks at how fuzz testing has evolved over the years, how open source projects have for the most part gone untested over time, and how new efforts to match fuzzing to software development are today helping to discover dangerous new vulnerabilities before they become the next Shellshock.

What is the allure of lockpicking at hacker conferences? In this episode Deviant Ollam explains why these mechanical puzzles remain popular with hackers. Ollam, who was an early member of Toool, The Open Organization of Lockpickers, discusses his career as a physical pen tester and also shares some basic lockpicking hacks.

To help more people become penetration testers, Kim Crawley and Phillip L. Wylie wrote The Pentester BluePrint: Starting A Career As An Ethical Hacker. In this episode of The Hacker Mind, Kim talks about the practical steps anyone can take to gain the skills and confidence necessary to become a successful pentester -- from gaining certifications, to building your own lab, to participating in bug bounties and even CTFs.

How do the current DMCA laws impact those who hack digital devices? And why doesn’t the basic right to repair our devices extend into the digital world? To answer these questions, Paul Roberts, Editor-in-Chief of The Security Ledger, has founded securepairs.org, a group of infosec experts who are volunteering their free time to fight for the digital right to repair in local legislation. In this episode of The Hacker Mind, Paul talks about the consequences of not paying enough attention...

Capture the Flag is a game, a community, and a really cool hacker culture. But will we one day stream CTFs like we do World of Warcraft or League of Legends? Whether it’s designing or just playing CTFs, John Hammond knows a lot about the gamification of infosec. He even has his own YouTube channel where he shares what he’s learned from different challenges. In this episode of The Hacker Mind John shares his experiences building and executing his own CTFs.

After breaches like SolarWinds, companies pledge to improve their digital hygiene. What if they don’t? And what parallels might infosec learn from COVID-19? In this episode, Mike Ahmadi draws on his years of experience in infosec, his years hacking medical devices. Mike notes how some basic rules of physical hygiene that can slow the spread of COVID-19 can also map into the digital world.

For three years OpenWRT had a severe validation problem with its download package manager, until a fuzz tester found and reported the vulnerability. In this episode, Guido Vranken talks about his approach to hacking, about the differences between memory safe and unsafe languages, his use of fuzz testing as a preferred tool, and how he came to discover the validation error in OpenWRT, as well as a serialization error in Cereal, and other vulnerabilities.

For two years Heartbleed was a zero-day in OpenSSL until fuzz testing exposed it. How many others are in the wild now? And how will we find the next one? In this episode I talk about how Heartbleed (CVE 2014-0160) was found and also interview Rauli Kaksonen, someone who was at Codenomicon at the time of its discovery and is now a senior security specialist at the University of Oulu in Finland, about how new security tools are still needed to find the next big zero day.

You’ve probably heard of bug bounties. But did you know there’s an elite group of bug bounty hunters that travel the world? Meet Stok; he’s one of them. In this episode, Stok talks about his beginnings in enterprise security and his transition into the top tier of bug bounty hunters. Star of his own YouTube channel, Stok believes in community and in giving back what he’s learned along the way.

While digital polling booth devices are more secure today, what about the larger ecosystem, starting from the moment you register until your vote is counted? Who’s keeping those systems secure? In this episode of The Hacker Mind, Dr. Jared DeMott of VDA Labs talks about his work securing voter registration tablets and also about the prospects for downloadable, safe voting applications on your preferred mobile device in the future. JBSA5E9aNj9D6pkOTI7p

In 1994, the first commercial internet browser was released. Netscape Navigator went on to be eclipsed by Internet Explore, Safari, Firefox, and now Chrome, but it helped kick start the internet-focused world we live in today. And along with that we’ve also learned a lot about browser security. No matter how strong we build our browsers, that does not prevent hackers from trying to break new things. In this episode, one researcher explains how he successfully escaped the Chrome sandbox,...

If you think hacking only involves the use of a keyboard or code, then you’re probably missing out. What about using light? What about using sound? In this episode, The Hacker Mind looks at some of the work Dr. Kevin Fu has been doing at the University of Michigan -- in particular using laser pointers to pwn voice-activated digital assistants, and using specific frequencies of sound to corrupt or crash magnetic hard disk drives.

In the infosec world, blue team hackers are hands down the more elite--and why not? They are defending the crown jewels, 24/7. They have to think of every attack vector. And the red team? They only have to be right once.

Game Theory is an important part of the underlying strategy used by hackers when playing attack and defend Capture the Flag. It’s thinking how your opponent might respond to an event and then planning for it. Knowing when to patch and when not to was part of the winning strategy behind DARPA’s 2016 Cyber Grand Challenge, which was modeled off the DEF CON CTF. But what happened the day after CGC at DEF CON 24? That was the day the very best human CTF hackers were invited to play against the...

DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge in 2016 showed the world what's coming -- autonomous adversaries -- and raised serious questions. How can organizations react to something that makes decisions in milliseconds? How can you still have humans in the loop when reaction time is key? And how can organizations defend or stop something that increases its own cyber capabilities autonomously? In this episode we go behind the scenes for the first and only completely autonomous capture the flag...

After winning DEF CON's annual Capture The Flag (CTF) competition five of the last seven years, the Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP) returns as reigning champions but under very different conditions because of COVID 19. So, how is the team preparing? In this The Hacker Mind episode, one of PPP's members, Zaratec, tells how she first joined PPP, how the team is making changes for this year's online CTF final, and what skills she’s learned from CTFs in general that apply to real-world...

In this inaugural episode, The Hacker Mind looks at why the West Point Military Academy, and other organizations within the DoD, is training its young cadets to hack. The answer? To help fill a critical shortage of infosec experts that is only getting worse. This is the story of how DARPA created a series of capture the flag contests to train and define infosec talent at the U.S. military academies, and how one young cadet joined a team of competitive hackers at West Point.

Welcome to Hacker Mind, an original podcast from ForAllSecure. It’s about solving software security problems through advanced fuzz testing technology. In each episode, host Robert Vamosi shares stories from the individuals who are influencing the world of software security, and the real world impact that is having in our cars, our planes, our weapons systems, and in our mobile phones and browsers.