Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The Shawn Ryan Show · #164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare · 29 Jan 2025
podcast
14. Yeah, so almost 15.
Yeah, that's crazy. I haven't known her since 2004.
Oh, my God.
No, I was not expecting that one. I'm going to have to think about that one, man. I don't know, man. Just... because I can connect this back with everything, is just kind of understanding... I mean, humans are a mystery to me, but at the same time, there's so much complexity, and it creates... It's like a... Everybody's different. Like, everybody wants to put everybody into a bucket.
Like, there's the us and there's the other. But, like, humans are messy and complicated and unique, and understanding that helps a lot with everything, whether it's being in a marriage or... attacking somebody to get into a company. It's like the same thing, right?
Like understanding, but, you know, very different motives and goals behind that one is just truly understanding the person and working with them. And, you know, the other is kind of the inverse of that.
Uh, not like hands-on keyboard. I like to watch those. So for most of my time, like any of the hacking stuff, that was me... I kind of viewed it as, like, entertainment. Like, it wasn't, like, power, money, or anything like that for me. It was just, like, have some fun, right? Yeah, you can mess around. Like, I would do stuff in, like, some of the communities as well.
Like, I knew the people who would run the servers, so, you know, you can mess around in there. What kind of stuff? I mean, okay, for instance... I've got to remember all the complexities here, but... This community was like very liberal with like temporary bans and stuff like that. So, you know, I got myself banned and I'm like, get around that, right?
And then they could not get me banned in this environment because they had some add-ons that they were using for this vBulletin. I think it was vBulletin. It might have been phpbbb. Anyway, one of the large platforms at the time just had a lot of plugins that just... gave me raw write access to the database effectively. And, you know, I could post through that.
And, you know, they had a lot of fun chasing me down in that situation. I'm just like, how are you still here? So very, you know, lighthearted in that instance. You know, they were more interested in how it was done than like, oh, you're breaking into my stuff. So...
Yeah, definitely. And actually, you know, going back into the youth for a little bit, something probably important, I had a phase where I was really into magic, right?
Sleight of hand, deception, that type of stuff. I think that was middle school, right? Actually, got my first taste of authority not being super ideal for me. Brought in a... a fake cigarette to middle school, right? And it's the peak of the dare situation, right? It looked perfect.
It looked like it was actively lit and you blow on it and like, you know, talc, I think powder came out, but it looked like smoke. That got confiscated. We got, friend and I got pulled down to the principal's office. I don't know. I think I got suspended for not taking the situation seriously enough. I'm like, I don't know. I don't even take this seriously. It's a fake cigarette.
But I think my friend pointed out, oh, yeah, that's right. They brought on the cops to test it because some of the talc powder came out. And they're like, that might be cocaine. And my friend made probably an unhelpful comment of like, that's not even how you would smoke cocaine. But, yeah, anyway. Sleight of hand.
That gets into deception and the human aspect, which is often forgotten a lot in hacking. People are like, oh, yeah, it's just knowing computers really well. Definitely a huge piece, but it's people as well that have to be manipulated. You got to understand them. You got to convince them to do things, which is the most common way of getting into so many systems.
Say, hey, like, I'm from your IT department, let me in. And you got to know how to make that sound legit. And, you know, if somebody is like, I don't know, like, okay, let's do some urgency to, like, make them kind of panic a little bit where their decision-making goes down.
And they're panicking and they're like, oh, I just got to do the thing or, you know, I might get fired or this bad thing is going to happen or, you know, there's so many different, like, psychological triggers that come into play and create this misdirection.
And you're like, oh, it's like, Sleight of hand for psychology, right? So you push people into different directions and you get them to reveal their password or run an application on their computer that gives you access to everything. And that overlaps with the technical and the hardware and all these other things.
I guess being a generalist, now that you make me think about it, it just allows you to kind of glue all of those things together. And I guess, yeah, at the time before I officially got into like paid security, I always thought that was a weakness of like, oh, I've never specialized in anything. I couldn't possibly keep up with people who did specialize. I mean, that is true.
Every person I work with that specializes, they go so far into just absolute wizardry that amazes me. And I can never keep up because I just cannot sit down and focus and be like, I'm going to do this thing and that's all I'm going to do. And I get 80% of there and I want to go play with another thing. But, yeah. It worked out. It's great for the entrepreneur type perspective as well.
Showing 441–460 of 855 · page 23 of 43
← Previous
Next →