Hacking Harry Potter: The Untold Story of Fantastical Social Engineering

now y'all are not gonna want to miss the next one anybody here a fan of a little guy called Harry Potter ever heard about this Harry Potter character yeah a few Potter heads POP heads what do you call yourself all right this next talk is going to be about Harry Potter I see a lot of people don't want to hear any Harry Potter spoilers we're gonna have an amazing reveal something you never knew about Harry Potter and cyber security and social engineering and a fabulous speaker who's going to join me right here on this stage in a few minutes or actually he's ready right now so uh for those of you on the move I want to highlight the fact that we have Raffles we have prizes but you want to hear this talk right now it's an incredible speaker and a Fantastical reveal something that you never imagined about Harry Potter so our next speaker is Andy Alice Andy Alice is an author a speaker advisory ciso at Orca security operating partner at yl ventures previously academized first security officer Andy is also the author of Harry Potter Secrets Revealed and it's all autographed and everything yes how fancy is look at this fancy speaker all right so Andy can be defined in a few ways first of all let's show the camera your beautiful book it's important this camera that camera the paparazzi paparazzi all right so for all of you fans out there Andy has won the spirit of Disneyland award wine spectator a word of Excellence the the csos chief security officer Hall of Fame and the Air Force Commendation Medal now whose Air Force is that Hogwarts Air Force the United States yes the 48200 was around we were doing information in the last Millennium before foreigners from Harry Potter just a little one a little bit okay we may need a drink after that you will need a drink okay hold on to your seats father heads and poth heads besides Cowboy consoles and cowgirls here we go Andy Ellis thank you Karen thank you everyone so Harry Potter many of you have read it uh if you're interested the QR code has the talk page if those of you who don't like QR codes this is just a naked one there is no redirect you can go to csoandy.com click on appearances and then talks in the menu and it will show up it's the third talk I believe on that page so Harry Potter Harry Potter is fantastic because it contains a lesson for all of us about how to be an adversary because there's an amazing social engineering plot that happens throughout the whole thing but first I think we have to think through what's going on in Harry Potter right it's young adult fiction we tell it from the putative story of a here of a hero right everybody thinks it's about Harry he's so cool he's so interesting he gets to grow up story is actually about a villain and if we want to tell the story about a villain we have to think about what the villain is doing and if you are a wizard or a witch and you want to do bad things for some reason we have to think about why you have power you can do almost anything you have unlimited wealth because Gringotts is foolishly pins the price of silver at 17 coins to gold and therefore you could just like funnel money back and forth between green gods and the bank of England and have an infinite wealth so what do you want you want to live forever immortality is the only thing that a villain really seeks when they think about doing something in Harry Potter because otherwise you build an Empire and then it crumbles somebody else takes it over for you now we see a couple of different ways to live forever in the Potter verse the first one is through the use of the Philosopher's Stone are the Sorcerer's Stone as it gets renamed for Americans for some strange and unusual reason you can build a potion that will keep you from dying really really cool except it doesn't keep you from aging and at some point you're spending all of your hours fighting with the National Health Service over getting care for all your broken bones and all of your arthritis it is so bad that Nicholas Flamel the inventor of the longevity potion would rather die than live forever as an increasingly decrepit old man so if you're a villain this probably isn't the route you want to go but we hear about a different route it shows up in a lot of ways it is the ability to hop from one body to another and unfortunately it's not as cool as when Denzel Washington does the movie fall in where he just gets to sort of look over at somebody it's like hi I'm taking over your body this is kind of cool and he gets to hop around like every minute no no no instead you have to do some really hard things the first of which is die and unfortunately death is a really good accountant those of you who are doing startups he should be your CFO because like the moment somebody dies death is like I gotcha like I've added one to the book whoa where did you just go and he's gonna go chase down whoever just died because he wants to bring their soul back so that's the first problem with you know dying and coming back if you want to be the villain there's some other problems the first one is you come back you don't get to create a body you have to borrow someone's body and they still have it and it might be that they get the front half and you get the back half and you really just sort of hope they're not you know eating chili every day and you get to smell that more than they do that could be pretty unpleasant also because death is chasing you you're sort of being pulled back to death you have to do some seriously unpleasant things like hunt down unicorns and drink their blood which makes you kind of unacceptable to everybody out there but we can low death works and figure out yo what do you do so you horcrux yourself Audi or your soul into multiple parts so that when you die you have an anchor to come back to this is a really cool method you can do it a lot of times like talk about redundancy no more of this like high availability with two you can have seven gives you lots of chances to come back really awesome right except the problem is the horcrux is not you it's an anchor for you it's like a pointer that you're going to get to exploit later if somebody adopts that into their own code base but you don't know who the somebody is you might get to go through puberty again if I'm an all-powerful wizard that is certainly not on my list of things that I want to do that was kind of bad the first time around don't want to do it again don't even experience it from the other side I'm done with that so probably not the right way to go but we have the elements at this point so let's design a plan like we know how to be adversaries so let's put ourselves into the shoes of the villain and say we are the villain and we are going to put together the most amazing plan for immortality what do we do well the first step is if we know we're going to body hop we should figure out whose body we're going to take right we should not let this be random I don't want just anybody I would like to have a body that has an innate talent for magic because while I might have a lot of magic I would like some more certainly would have to be somebody known in the magicing world because like if I just showed up as some Muggle and I'm like oh look I'm a really cool powerful wizard everybody's gonna Wonder like what just happened where did I get trained how did I become this person fortunately there's a Wizarding family that has a lot of kids the peverals now the pebbles for those who don't remember were the original holders of the Deathly Hallows we'll come back to those in a minute they're very important here and they have a lot of children and this amazing line and so what we're going to do is we're going to find a peverel who just got married and is going to have a child soon because we want to start with a baby our plan is going to involve taking that baby and planning about how we're going to take their body later because if we took over an adult everybody would notice all of a sudden this massive personality change is they went from being some mild-mannered person to really cool arch villain second thing we need are the three Deathly Hallows for those who don't know what that Deathly Hallows are these are the gifts stolen from death the first one is the invisibility cloak the most important feature of the invisibility cloak sorry I guess on that side is the fact that death can't see your soul that's its best thing like humans can't see you either but death can't spot you so in that moment of transition you can get away with things that other people can't won't notice on the other side you get the resurrection Stone the very misnamed Stone the resurrection Stone gets used by most people to bring Souls back from death and so everything's that's its power its power is to move Souls most of the time from Death back to the land of the living but we're going to use that power as part of our plan the most important tool though is the Elder Wand the Elder Wand gives us two Powers as a wizard one power is the ability to cast spells without verbal or somatic components you do not have to wave the Elder one to do magic you can just do magic it takes Wizards and it gives them the basically the same Powers as house elves the other power is you are immune to other people's magic the killing curse doesn't work on you the only way to defeat somebody with the Elder Wand is to stab them and this happens all the time every holder of the Elder Wand at some point gets murdered because they're so busy and so confident that they let somebody come stab them in their sleep we're going to use all three of these tools twice the first time is to prepare the body when it's a child so we're going to take our baby and we are going to horcrux it because we don't want a soul in that body and so the easiest way to keep a soul from being anchored to a body is to make it a multi-tenant establishment put a second soul in very early on and you can pour cracks very easily like Voldemort's doing it all the time so let's just add a soul into that body let's also make sure that we kill off the parents because we don't want the parents taking care of this child in fact we want this child to learn nothing about magic for as long as possible and so we're going to place the child where in a muggle family Muggles that hate the magicing world so this child can grow with two souls in its body not knowing anything about magic until unfortunately we have to bring them into the Wizarding World now they're going to go to Hogwarts where Unfortunately they will learn things about magic how do we make sure they don't learn anything about magic well this is the easy part let's give them sidekicks one Sidekick is the most brilliant Witch of the generation the person who actually studies and can learn cool magic and will solve any problem that comes up for your Target preventing your target from bothering to learn magic because your Target's gonna be kind of lazy and on the other hand the most loyal sidekick one could imagine like these are people who ought to be in Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff but let's put them all together into the house of stupid I mean Gryffindor um they'll get into trouble and our Target will never realize that our whole plan is to keep them from learning magic now at some point they're going to need a teacher who will look after them and teach them important things like occlumency protecting your brain how do we make sure our subject doesn't learn occlumency or anything else is our teacher is a plant a person who hates them so much that they will never learn anything and so every time our subject you know thinks about something nope our teacher is going to sabotage it now here here's the important thing you have to do if you're going to take over this body later is you need to shape its brain teenage brains are very malleable if you would like to take it over you would like it to have your thoughts are home to it so you'd like them to learn and experience your memories and so you have lots of tools for this you know connections with other brains the pensive that lets you you sure memories and let somebody else absorb them and then to tell your target the easiest way to social engineer a teenager is to tell them not to do something so you say hey hey protect your brain from other people's memories don't learn them they'll happily go learn them at some point you're ready now it's time to conduct your attack which is put your soul in their body you're going to have to fake your own death as a villain this can be hard but when you fake your death you hold all three Deathly Hallows one is on your target which is the invisibility cloak so that when your soul wanders over there death doesn't notice the presence of Two Souls one is the Elder Wand so that when somebody casts a kill and curse on you it is ineffective but everybody thinks it would work and the third is the resurrection Stone which will allow you to move your soul from where it is over into your target body now at this point this is cool like you've conducted your attack but you need some dwell time because Souls don't just take up residence it's like moving into a new apartment it takes a little while to set down Roots so leave a note for your Target and tell them to go spend a year wandering around in the woods you know on some quests to do something it's okay they're gullible teenagers they'll do anything let them wander around in the woods for a year until you're ready and at the end of that year you send them off to go die I mean to go fight the the villain that you have set up the whole time like they think there's a villain they're out to go fight them they show up in the villain cast The Kill and curse on them and they die except they don't die there's three souls in the body at this point yours the your original Target and the horcrux that you put in and here's where you have to social engineer them for seven years you have told your target that you want to die that you are ready to die the death is an old friend and so they have built a mental model of you as somebody who is old and wise and sacrificing and you've sacrificed parts of your body and you've done all of this stuff and you are ready to die and so when they encounter you in King's cross station and you say look this is really just a vision of me I mean I'm not really here despite the fact that there's only three entities here which is the horcrux Soul you and me but now you have a choice to face Harry and your choice is very simple you can take the train that goes back to your body that's that way or you can take the train to the afterlife which is this way and as you know I'm ready to die so I'm getting on the train that goes to the afterlife make sure you don't follow me get on the train that goes that way book seven Elvis Dumbledore wakes up in Harry Potter's body having committed the greatest act of social engineering for 17 years he had prepared Harry Potter's body to take it over and all he needed to do was convince Harry to commit suicide by telling Harry that that was not the way of death and so what this shows us is that when we look at a story from only one narrow Viewpoint from Harry's we see this model that Harry thinks he's the good guy and the Dumbledore is the weird crotchety old Mentor who gives them all of these great opportunities whereas all that Dumbledore is doing for 17 years is distracting Harry giving Harry fun things to do interesting entertaining things to do having Voldemort out there who by the way Tom Riddle was Dumbledore's first Target except Tom Riddle figured it out and horcruxed himself in defense to ensure his body could not be taken over and this is the social engineering that gets you immortality because now nobody is looking for Albus Dumbledore and everybody is celebrating Harry Potter so an important thing for us to remember is that when we tell stories nobody tells the story that they are the villain they always tell the story that they are the hero and sometimes you can cast them as villains but I would also argue for you if you see somebody that you think is a villain figure out how you can tell the story from their point of view about how they're probably a hero even doing this Dumbledore probably thinks he's a hero because he will create more value for The Wizarding World in Harry's lifetime than Harry ever would have because Harry was not a very diligent student so thank you very much I hope you enjoy this you Andy well I think we need a drink after that okay so I have uh this is for Andy this is for me now y'all this is a Tel Aviv beside selfie tradition all right how do you say it in Harry Potter language is an Harry Potter language okay this is very good that's a bit of moonshine some monkey shoulder thank you so much let's thank Andy for that incredible reveal nobody is the villain in their own story