We hear about big corporations being victims of massive hacking jobs regularly, whether it's attacks on JPMorgan Chase, Target, Sony Pictures or Ashley Madison.
Journalist Kevin Roose wanted to see how bad a cyber attack could get, so he rolled out an open invitation to a few of the world's best hackers to hack him and expose some of his vulnerabilities — all being depicted as part of a segment on the television show Real Future on Fusion.
The clip starts with Roose meeting up with Chris Hadnagy, founder of Social Engineering, Inc., and his team at the annual DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas. Social Engineering doesn't use any codes to hack — instead, it simply relies on a telephone and Internet connection.
Hadnagy introduces Roose to Social Engineering hacker Jessica Clark ... and immediately realizes he's in trouble. Clark is a vishing expert, using voice solicitation over the phone to retrieve personal details and data points, which could be applied to a future attack.
Right in front of him, she calls his cell phone provider, playing a baby crying on YouTube in the background. Creating a frantic scenario, Clark says she and her husband have been logged out of their account and they forgot the email address that they originally used to sign up.
Within 30 seconds, she has Roose's personal email.
Wait ... it gets better.
Claiming that she wants to add their daughter to the plan, Clark is able to change Roose's password, essentially locking him out of his mobile account — and that was a hacker who wasn't using coding.
Two weeks prior to DefCon, Roose gave an expert coding hacker the green light to turn his life upside down.
When meeting the hacker, Dan Tentler, in Vegas, Roose's vulnerability only grew, as Tentler revealed that he quickly found his Squarespace blog, created a bogus double as a phishing tool and emailed him the link to run a certificate installer. Roose blindly did so, giving Tentler access to his personal computer.
Tentler then explains how he created system pop-ups, asking for more of Roose's credentials for compromising his life further, even tapping into his bank account.
Tentler reveals the manipulation grew to the point of him tapping into Roose's Webcam, using it to take several pictures of him and keeping track of his whereabouts, whether at a coffee shop or his mother's house.
Scary stuff, but Roose's goal with the experiment to show how bad hacking could get was fully successful.
