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.

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The Shawn Ryan Show · #164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare · 29 Jan 2025 podcast

I like Signal. Signal's great.

I'm sure they did. I mean, so, I think they helped fund it, actually. But they helped fund a lot of things, our government, in many ways. But, I mean, Signal is an amazing tool if you're an agent as well. Like, you're going to be overseas in hostile environments, and you need to communicate. how are you going to do that securely?

Are you going to use a secure tool that stands out like a giant red flag because nobody else is using it? Probably not the greatest thing. It's like, hi, I'm an agent. I don't know what you're saying, but there's an agent right there, right? Like, I mean, obviously, there's answers to that and stuff, but it's valuable as like, oh, that's just the tool everybody uses.

Signal, everybody's got that, right? Like, that's valuable. You know, obviously, there's always tradeoffs, right? It's like it can be used for bad, it can be used for good, and, you know, who's bad and who's good and who's perspectives.

A lot of people, yeah. I'll meet them where they're at. My manufacturers and stuff don't use Signal. They've got different governments over them and things like that. It's interesting. Whatever you use, I'll meet you there. Contextually, it matters. I'm on this platform, which can be seen by These adversaries, cool, noted.

I'll make sure I keep that in mind, which is kind of the whole point of like the psychology when you know you're being watched changes how you behave in ways that can be negative. Like, if you're always being watched by somebody, what does that make you? How does that make you behave? Different. So, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's lots of other cool things in this catalog, like... Oh, Raptor Reflector. So, this is for picking up... Audio, this is standard audio bugs, right? Like, you know, spying on what's happening in the room. What else we got? Lots of cellular-based stuff. Now, this is like 10 years old at this point, so a lot of this stuff is well-known. Really tiny implants.

So this is like probably a VGA cable here, or like an older monitor, which made more sense back in 2008. really tiny implant into that cable, tapped to one of the color signals, and it would allow somebody to kind of energize it with like a radio pointed at it, more or less, and then receive the signal bouncing back with the video signal encoded in the bounce.

So then you'd be able to see what's on their screen.

Really cool stuff, right?

I don't know. I haven't studied those well enough. But, I mean, there's a lot of amateurs that just do that. Like, they'll just set up a balloon. It's kind of like the ham radio space kind of in a way where they're just like, oh, you know, we can track it. There it goes. It goes around.

I don't know, man. That's probably outside of my skill set and awareness and research. But, I mean, it could be used, like, a balloon. I mean, I'd probably be using a drone more. Because the problem with balloons is that they're much more higher altitude, which causes problems for a lot of electronic circuitry because it gets really cold and stops functioning.

Also, you know, you've got power that you've got to deal with So the best you can get is battery. Batteries also start to fail at that level of cold, right? So you need special batteries, something to keep it warm, which means more energy. So you're getting it from solar power, probably. This is really low-power stuff, right? I don't know.

Maybe just the value of how does someone respond to putting something in their awareness? Yeah. Which is absolutely a thing, right? How does someone respond? Which, I don't know, similar to the drones that are popping up. And I'm just like, I don't know where that's coming from. Jersey had one recently. But there's lots of, like, drones in the sky.

I'm like, I don't know what that is, but I would love to find out. Yeah. Is it collecting data or is it just seeing how people respond to unknown unreported drones in the sky for, you know, tactical knowledge in the future?

Yeah, I mean, kind of. Like, I had always been tinkering with things like those BeamBots, right? But... Yeah, so I think it was on Twitter or something. I saw just a picture of somebody with a USB drive. The shell was open, and there's just like a firecracker sitting inside of it. No idea if it worked or not, but I'm just like... Everybody has like the same visceral response to seeing that.

Like, oh, shit. Exploding thumb drive. And I'm like, you know what would be cool? As if it was worse. So... USB rubber ducky. Got to explain what that is first for this to make sense. My now business partner, Hack5, invented the USB rubber ducky, I don't know, like 15 years ago now, something like that. It does the same basic keystroke injection that I had demoed with the cable, right?

Where you plug it in, it types something really fast, whatever you want to control a computer or whatever you want, right? I wanted one of those that also exploded. So first thing I had to do If you open up a rubber duck, there's not much space in there. It's all electronics. I'm like, okay, how can I shrink this really tiny so I have space... for something goes boom.

So I spent a lot of time playing with that, right? Now I didn't recreate a rubber ducky exactly. Like it's a really, really limited version, like 200 keystrokes, really slow, done, right? That's it, really hard to use, but it was tiny. And I shrunk it and shrunk it, shrunk it, shrunk it. And it's just, I don't know, I think it was like eight by 10 millimeters when I was done, like a pill basically.

That left the rest of the thumb drive empty. that I could hook up with a little mini detonator and maybe a firecracker or two and a bunch of confetti. And I rigged this up to a keystroke injection payload that opens a browser to an animation of Jack in the Box. And he's cranking it on the screen, except it goes for an awkwardly long amount of time to build up tension. And it's going, it's going.

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