Cybersecurity is *fascinating* to anyone who has a rudimentary understanding of how computers work and morbid curiosity on how systems work (and more specifically, how they break). This is my collection of interesting podcasts, stories, and links to learn more or deep dive into various topics. I’ll be updating it over time like my Distributed Computing paper collection.

Podcasts

• Darknet Diaries – A podcast on cutting edge security research topics. This podcast is great because the author adds commentary over the interviews to break concepts down to where they’re understandable by security laypeople. That, and the people he interviews are fascinating!
  • Episode 151: Chris Rock – gray hat who tells a great story about stealing a bunch of money
  • Episode 144: Rachel – Social engineering with AI deepfake voices
  • Episode 141: The Pig Butcher – #2 cybercrime of 2023, which is mostly social engineering.
  • Episode 137: Predator – mobile phone spyware, 1- and 0-click hacks
  • Episode 136: Team Xecuter – modchips for video game consoles, legal issues
  • Episode 135: The DR Incident – nation state level cyber response
  • Episode 134: Deviant – physical penetration testing – breaking into buildings!
  • Episode 132: Sam the Vendor – stories of a dark net drug merchant
  • Episode 127: Maddie – Google Project Zero researcher talking about the state of the art with 0-days
  • Episode 123: Newswires – market manipulation & how to hack money in the stock market
  • Episode 118: Hot Swaps – Sim swapping for fun and profit
  • Episode 114: HD – Metasploit creator (popular hacking framework) talking about exploits
  • Episode 112: Dirty Coms – what kids are up to these days, next generation of hackers. Lots of Trust and Safety issues.
• DEFCON Videos
  • https://www.youtube.com/@DEFCONConference/videos
  • Videos are up for Defcon 32, my own blog post with a summary is in the works.

CTFs / Wargames

• List of Wargames / Long Running Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges
  • Web Games
    • PicoCTF.org – online CTF, I’ve heard this is the gold standard for learning how to do modern CTF challenges. Haven’t done a ton of it myself but seems fun.
    • Over The Wire wargames (Natas is a favorite)
  • AI CTF
    • AI chatbot CTF: gandalf.lakera.ai – prompt engineering / safeguard bypassing
  • Misc Challenges
    • Cyber Quest – online cyber challenge. I competed in a lot of these back in high school and they were fun. Not sure how they are recently, but I should try one again…
    • Crypto Pals – cryptography challenges
• Tools
  • Pwntools – Python CTF framework / exploit development library
  • AI Tools
    • AI prompts and jailbreaks: GitHub: BlackFriday-GPTs-Prompts

Misc Links

• Interesting Topics:
  • Randomness in Encryption: Lava lamps power the Internet
  • Steganography – the practice of hiding information in plain sight
• Lockpicking
  • Lock Picking Lawyer YT channel
  • Warding / Keyways (explainer article)