How to hire a hitman on the dark web | Techcess rounds up UK Cyber Week

We should start by admitting that this episode won't help you hire a hitman. Sorry.

In this episode of Techcess, Mark Riddell talks us through his experience attending the UK Cyber Week event, and his summary of the keynote talks.

Among other things, we'll learn why you need to be careful if you're a high profile target that happens to attract the attention of a hot blonde on a dating app, and why you shouldn't share your birthday on social media...

This is an episode you don't want to skip if you want to be kept informed of the latest risks cyber criminals pose to your business!

The VIP experience

Thanks to the Techcess podcast, host Mark Riddell was invited to attend the UK Cyber Week as a VIP. Being that Mark also wears another hat as one of the founding members of m3 Networks, he jumped at the chance and booked himself into some juicy talks...

Confessions from an actual hacker

If you've listened to Techcess before, you'll know how much Mark really doesn't like hackers. And I mean REALLY doesn't like hackers. So imagine how intrigued he was to know that the first presentation he would get to see would be from an actual anonymous hacker, there, live on stage.

During the presentation, the hacker told a story of how his team managed to get access to a very high profile figure - who was trying to remain in hiding! - using nothing more than social media, a dating app, and some clever social engineering.

Geoff White - Lazarus Heist podcast (BBC) talks phishing

Another stand out moment from the event was the talk given by Geoff White from the Lazarus Heist podcast. Here's a link to listen to that if you haven't listened before yet.

Mark was impressed with this talk because it featured a live demo of an actual phishing operation being carried out. And as Mark mentions, it's not easy to make live demos go smoothly during a live event!

He also went to a talk from Tanmoy Hossain, from "Bob's Business" and his talk was called “Building Cybersecurity into Your Corporate Culture”.

But of course the talk you're wanting to know more about - the talk that inspired this episode's title.... Jake Moore from ESET and his talk "How to hire a hit man on the Dark Web". And if you want to know more about that, you're just gonna have to click play to listen...

Excerpt from episode 88 of Techcess

(Download transcript)

"So our anonymous hacker told us several stories of real world hacking missions that he had been involved with. Now, of course, we don't know who he worked for, we don't know which country he was from, we don't know who they were targeting. And I'm certainly not able to recall everything that he told us about. But I will tell you about one story that he told us. This was a mission where they had a target, and the target was a CISO. It's a chief information security officer of a large company. Don't know what industry they were in or why they were targeting this guy. And they believed that he was living out of a safe house, out in the countryside, but they didn't know where. And what the hacking group did was they created a fake LinkedIn profile and over the course of a few weeks, they used LinkedIn to build a relationship with the target."

Tech Topics covered in this episode of Techcess:

• The VIP experience at UK Cyber Week
• What is the event and who should...