Mandiant's 'most prevalent threat actor' may be living under your roof – the teenager

While some spend sleepless nights worrying about the big four nation-state cyber threats, you shouldn't underestimate the ones possibly living under your roof: teenagers. "One of the most prevalent threat actors in the United States today that is…really hard to defend against: it's the teenagers," said Charles Carmakal, CTO of …

[b0llchit]

Prospective defence

...really hard to defend against: it's the teenagers...

You need to eliminate the threat in order for defence to be effective. In case of this threat-class, it may be opportune and necessary to perform a broad and complete post-natal abortion. This will eliminate the entire class of threat in less than 20 years.

And since this, as indicated, is the 'most prevalent threat actor', it must be deemed crucial to take action now and look forward to a threatless future where teenagers no longer can roam and question the old generation's status quo.

[John Hawkins]

Re: Prospective defence

May I suggest a more pro-active method involving small orange rubber rings? They work well enough on lambs and could even be marketed as a way to prevent male-pattern baldness if applied to the appropriate appendage at an early enough age.

[b0llchit]

Re: Prospective defence

The church does not approve of that kind of planning. However, they do give their blessing to one and another war. The war on hacking is a war on hackers and that is a war on teenagers. See, divinely approved.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Prospective defence

I blame books.

If we didn't teach these proto-hackers to read while they are still in school then they won't be able to learn from each other

[RichardBarrell]

Did they do the Scooby-Doo villain "IF IT WEREN'T FOR YOU MEDDLING KIDS!" voice all through this talk?

[Little Mouse]

teens "are incredibly effective social engineers" - ?????

It's so UNFAIR! - You've ruined my life! - I HATE YOU ALL!!!!

</Stomp Stomp Stomp. Door-slam. Stomp Stomp>

[Dave559]

Re: teens "are incredibly effective social engineers" - ?????

I saw what you did there: nice use of a carefully malformed XML tag there to try to crash the parser and infiltrate the system through code injection… ;-)

[Doctor Syntax]

Looking at that Twillio report as well as this article it appears that users are able to believe that security related messages will be sent to them by a channel that the business does not control, SMS.

There appears to be a need to establish a secure channel for such messages and well defined processes for expiry (or not) and reset of passwords, that the users are trained to recognise those and report any that fall outside them and that the training is reinforced, not only by repetition but also by tests with fake phishing programmes.

These attempts are succeeding because there are gaps in the users' knowledge of what to expect by way of genuine communication so close up those gaps.

[IglooDame]

This feels like it shouldn't be news to any parent (or in my case grandparent) here.

Though those of you that might be raising (or have raised) this particular flavor of hellion, do cheer up, at least they didn't turn out to be lawyers.

[b0llchit]

Unfortunately...

They'd be very rich if they'd become lawyers defending all those victims of the teenagers and the teenage perpetrators. Especially if they'd been hackers as teenagers before they were enticed to become lawyers. They then surely know the trade and can pick both sides of the fence.

[Omnipresent]

A monster of your own creation

HA HA HA. God bless GENZ. You are dealing with a Frankenstein of your own creation. A result of surveilling, manipulating, and targeting them for more than a decade. They have been twisted at an early age from your constant EVIL IN THE NAME OF GREED. Exposed to all your manipulative lies and games. Now, they will shove this AI right up your kazoo, because you're old, and they are new. Welcome to the new world order you created. You have made powerful enemies.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: A monster of your own creation

some kids have always been the sources of this stuff going back a few decades at least. Obviously only a tiny portion of kids (or adults even) have an interest to pursue this kind of activity.

Was curious so I poked at this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking

"The tone was discovered in approximately 1957,[7] by Joe Engressia, a blind seven-year-old boy. Engressia had perfect pitch, and discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of 2637.02 Hz) would stop a dialed phone recording. Unaware of what he had done, Engressia called the phone company and asked why the recordings had stopped. Joe Engressia is considered to be the father of phreaking."

Social engineering was more commonly known as scams.

[Omnipresent]

Re: A monster of your own creation

"Obviously only a tiny portion of kids (or adults even) have an interest to pursue this kind of activity."

I honestly don't think they have a choice. It's learn how to work the system, or get pawned. I can't even tell you where the kids are hanging out these days, being social media is all but dead. I'm sure they have their chat apps and such, far from prying eyes.

I just can't wait for these tech CEO's to get put into the old folks care of AI designed by these kids. The kids won't be nice about it. The old guys will be given some of their own medicine.

[Daniel Pfeffer]

Nothing's changed

You've got to pick a _packet_ or two, oy

You've got to pick a _packet_ or two

(With apologies to Oliver!)

[Grogan]

"These teens "are incredibly effective social engineers, and they are able to convince people to do things that they ask them to do, like visit certain malicious websites"

Oh, I saw something about that just the other day. Take a look at this site [a href="goatse"]Here[/a] :-)

(malformed html on purpose, it's a joke, I didn't really want it showing up as a link, but thanks. My initial attempt failed to post)

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is only one thing worse than a hacker... boom" *rips off sheet of paper*

"A child"

[regadpellagru]

"Plus they are cliquey as all hell"

This is really what infuriates me the most: not reading (or let anyone else) the error message, insta-clicking on it, and saying: "see, doesn't work !" ...

This seems to disappear after 2 decades it seems, otherwise, they wouldn't get a pay check :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Targetin fam'ly

That thar's risky doins, sho nuff. Some folks'll cave, other folks gonna make it all personal, hunt you down and take you on a hillbilly holiday what ends with you in a hole after ya squeal like a pig all night, and some will take out great big life insurance policies on themselves and the l'il woman.