Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE)

In this presentation, attendees learn how to hack the mind of a Homo sapiens target in conversation. Advanced understanding is presented of how humans' conscious mind critical factor works, and can be exploited in targeted social engineering. The critical factor is a part of the conscious mind that responds to demands on a person, and regulates compliance versus noncompliance. Social influence, manipulation, or obfuscation of the attacker's intent or motives have traditionally been used in psychological operations, like social engineering. Tailoring communication patterns specific to a person's conscious vulnerabilities inherent in their critical factor increases desired response compliance, as subconscious processes regulating suggestibility are accessed. Identifying a person's specific conscious mind critical factor suggestibility, adapting communication to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, and entraining a desired state of consciousness depth are used in a targeted attack to ob

Software distributors typically provide software in binary form to end users, yet many DevOps activities from performance profiling to security hardening are difficult to perform without access to source code. Furthermore, significant defenses such as the recent Spectre mitigations often require compiler-level changes. Even for open source systems, it takes time to rebuild projects from source and incorporate a modified compiler.