Lex Cybernetica Podcast

Hacker Kevin Mitnick’s infamous social engineering escapades, where he’d call up companies and convince employees to surrender information he would later use to hack their systems, took advantage of people’s, rather than computer systems’, weaknesses. Cybersecurity is not a purely technical issue, but also, and arguably, mostly, a social one. One of the missions cyber criminologists have is to understand why some people become hacking victims while others don’t, and why hackers hack. Take, for example, the rudimentary system of password protection. If a service provides an initial default password and doesn’t require changing it, many people will just settle for it, making it vulnerable to hackers who are aware of default passwords, which are easily searchable on the web. When required to choose a password, most people will resort to a common word or phrase, a phone number, or a birthdate, which are easy to remember but also easy to illegitimately obtain through dictionary attacks, if not mere guessing. Peop