iNeedSomeContext

That's what social engineering is

We talked about social engineering but there was no exercise to do for that one.

I guess it would be hard to test that vs aware subjects. And if you let students pull social engineering on random people, there's a very good opportunity to cheat by just making a deal with that person.

I work in penetration testing and adversary simulation and did research in college on binary exploitation/reverse engineering. I gotta say, there are a LOT of layers to hacking. Offensive security is a huge field and can either feel very corporate and boring depending on what you're testing/hacking/researching, and who you're doing it for.

Say you for a cybersecurity firm, most firms offer different services depending on what you want tested, and will staff it accordingly. Examples being APT (application pen testing, web), CSR (cloud security review, mostly configurations, permissive-ness), CPT (cloud pen test, actually looking around the environment and attempting to priv esc around their cloud env), PSR (product security reviews, embedded device hacking/hardware hacking, IoT), IPT (internal penetration test, assume breach/they have a foothold, go crazy and see what you can do) and many many more. Each one requires a different skill set (more or less). Depending on the person, some may seem more appealing than others, and I personally know I prefer PSRs, IPTs, APTs, and CPTs than doing CSRs and EPTs. We've also had an uptick in LLM testing, and how you can leverage it with the increasingly agentic applications and services people are putting out there. Recently I was able to leverage a prompt injection through an LLM that was running an agentic browser (think playwright, puppeteer) to retrieve its Metadata credentials and submit them on the form that it was interacting with, which we could then leverage to access more resources in the AWS environment to gain further access and eventually get admin from the entire organization structure, from an LLM that was overly agentic and with insufficient guard rail. LLM hacking is very new, and very interesting (at least imo)

Those are some things you might be doing/hacking at a firm, and then being a consulting firm you have a wider variety of clients that come in and show you their cool infrastructure, how their products and platforms work, and tell us to go crazy and hack them. You have the opportunity to do staff augmentation at a bunch of different tech giants, to really small promising start ups, and you get to see their technologies/services up close as if you were internal. That to me, is part of the reason I love the field. I get to tinker and hack these products, online or physically that I otherwise would've never had an opportunity to use and test out, much less try get paid to play with it! (And eventually do your job with the tedious test cases, paperwork and reporting).

But thats at a firm, if you are part of a internal security team, something like App Sec or whatever internal name they might use, that work is potentially going to look at lot different, and vary massively depending on the company. If you're directly integrated into the SDLC, the scope of your tests will vary widely, and you might not get to test the wider compenents of the system or application as part of the scope if you work with a very large company that uses microservices, maybe a new feature, maybe infrastructure changes, changed handling of sensitive data, etc. You see that pretty often with cloud providers. But that same company might have a red team where anything the company owns is considered in scope, where they might work alone or in teams for adversary simulation, testing alerting and alarms.

Or you might be doing research at a university or binary exploitation on an assessment, really digging into the software and reverse engineering it, and identifying 0 days, releasing CVEs, etc

And then you could be self employed and do bug bounties on programs that support them and get pay outs if you identify issues and report them

Each and every one of those variations, while all being "hacking" are going to have extremely different day to days with different conditions. And I think thats what makes this industry so awesome. There is so much variety that if you get bored with one thing, you can shift focus a bit and feel like you're doing something entirely new and novel, and expand your knowledge of how to be a modern wizard and understand how more and more things interconnect and operate

But it absolutely can be super fucking boring, depending on what you're doing, how intensive the reporting process is, what your coworkers are like, and the general work environment and culture of your individual company.

The problem is it tends to be a numbers game. Major security vulnerability gets posted, odds are someone hasn't updated for it yet. The technical side of hacking becomes finding that system by trial and error and hoping there's a way in. If you need to target a specific company social engineering is really your only hope.

Tbh I have no idea how someone can actually breach something. I'm assuming you need months of work. Sometimes I struggle to access devices I'm aware of, with a ton of VPNs, MFAs, jumphosts, proxies, etc ...

All the data nowadays shows that the majority of "hacks" are simply social engineering...

The other thing he's done very well is game the system to get more exposure. Which I can't blame him for, that's the social media game at the end of the day. But also. Engineering non-technical workarounds for systems to get maximum value out for minimum value in? Same skillset he actually picked up from blizzard. No coding in sight.

There is always nuance, this is real life of course.

I just wanted to point out the flaw in the other poster's comment that implies social engineering isn't "actual hacking".

He wishes people would stop bringing it up yet he keeps addressing it every time someone in his chat brings it up and he could have had this not escalate by simply apologizing when this whole thing started 🤣

Also worth noting the quantity and quality of their mistakes.

Even decades in, I make many dumb mistakes, but...yeah...not like that.

It’s important to note that yanderedev is not just writing bad code, he has been procrastinating while draining his patrons (he has been developing for 11 years at this point), has shifted the blame on “not writing code” to his fans sending too many emails, once paired with an actual dev and then fired him because he couldn’t understand the code… and that’s just the surface stuff, not even going into the grooming accusations, if I was to complete the list we would be here all day.

I don’t follow the whole drama but I am 99% certain that even if pirate software is proven a hypocrite and a worse developer than yanderedev, he is still a better person just by how low that bar is.

I don't either, in fact he usually would make fun of himself as he learned more by posting screenshots of his bad code.

most famous example

Both? He released at least 5 videos and streams on the matter. But I will link sections of Ross's video to see where PirateSoftware said each one.

1. Time 1. He specifically says that the movement is targeting single player games. Time 2. This is from his second video, where he is still fixated on "single player." While Ross and others in the movement have said that this is especially egregious for single player games, the movement does not target single player games, but instead all games sold as goods and purchased in good faith. He even says "No where in there does it say it is directly targeting always-online single-player games. It is vague." It not saying that does not mean that it is vague.
2. It is completely false to say that SKG advocates continuing services. As the initiative itself says, "The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state." I don't know of any SKG material from the actual leaders of the movement that calls for this. If you have a quote from Ross or anyone else leading the movement that counters the literal text of the initiative, please provide it. Time 3 is where he says the line.
3. It absolutely is not true that the movement is asking for multiplayer games to be made single player. If I buy a game like Stick Fight, a single player version of that would be pointless. I play that game to blast my friends, not to fight with bots! Making the multiplayer game single player is NOT an acceptable solution and would not satisfy an ideal SKG law. Fortunately, Stick Fight includes local shared screen multiplayer, so it is SKG approved. Single player versions of multiplayer games are NOT the game as purchased. There isn't even a quote talking about anything like that in the initiative. I do not know of any literature or statements from the SKG leadership that states this. If this is not the case, I would love to see it, so please provide a quote to that effect. Here and here is where he says that.
4. Once they release working server software or a patch to enable local multiplayer or whatever mechanism they choose to make the advertised gameplay accessible, it is on the players and fans to figure out how to keep the game running as time goes on. They are under no obligation to provide bug fixes or make sure it works on future hardware. Once they release a working server, patch, or other mechanism, they can wash their hands of the game and never look at it again or spend another cent on it. Just like, for example, how the makers of Star Trek: Elite Force (2000) are under no obligation to make sure their game works on Windows 11 or modern hardware. They released a game designed to work on hardware in 2000, and it's on me and other players of the game to keep it working today. But I actually think he might not have said that and instead I am remembering discussions with other people, so I withdraw 4 unless you have a quote of him saying it.
5. The initiative is only vague in its statement of "reasonably functional (playable) state." It doesn't specify how to do that because how could they possibly do that for all kinds of existing games and all potential kinds of future games in less than 1,100 characters? And even if they tried, the solutions they would provide would not work in all cases. Everything else is specific, describing the exact problem, why it's bad, and what their goal is, and a set of legal precedents that apply. Keep in mind that the initiative isn't the bill that will be voted on, but instead is a starting point of a negotiation. It is a complaint specifying a problem and asking for the government to come in and resolve it. I don't see any other vagueness in the initiative. PirateSoftware calls it vague because it doesn't say the thing he thinks it's trying to say. And a document not saying what you want it to say does not imply vagueness. Here is him saying something that is vague is not, and here is a compilation of him calling vague over and over. If you have examples of vagueness, please provide them.

EDIT: And here, he says something entirely false. In fact, I don't think there is a single non-subscription live-service game that has an expiration date on it. But he says that the statement "Most live service games do not do this," where "this" is provide a date at which the service is to be discontinued, is patently false. I can provide dozens of games that proves PirateSoftware's statement false.

Please feel free to provide context if I am missing.