Skip to main content

Cyber Cyborgs Among Us

 Not quite human...and not quite machine

I recently had the privilege to interview Len Noe on the Set Solutions podcast. Not only is Len an awesome human being...he's also a little bit more than human being. Sometimes referred to as cyborgs, grinders, transhuman, or biohackers. Len has augmented his own biology with technology in order to begin transforming himself into the ultimate cyber weapon.

He has multiple implants in his hands that can be used to support different types of cyber attacks. He introduced multiple different attack scenarios during his talk at the RSA Conference "Biohacking: The Invisible Threat", and will be covering them again at BlackHat USA later this year!!!


While there still remains a stigma and some controversy around this trend, I would argue that Len is just ahead of his time. With multiple major R&D firms investing in similar capabilities (such as Elon Musk's Neuralink), Len and others like him, are blazing a trail for what lies in the future.

“The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.”  

-- Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology


Check out the full interview on the "Ready, Set, Secure" podcast at the link below, or wherever you download your podcasts.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building Bots with Mechanize and Selenium

The Sociosploit team conducts much of its research into the exploitation of social media using custom built bots. On occasion, the team will use public APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), but more often than not, these do not provide the same level of exploitative capabilities that could be achieved through browser automation. So to achieve this end, the Sociosploit team primarily uses a combination of two different Python libraries for building web bots for research. Each of the libraries have their own advantages and disadvantages. These libraries include: Mechanize Pros: Very lightweight, portable, and requires minimal resources Easy to initially configure and install Cuts down on superfluous requests (due to absense of JavaScript) Cons: Does not handle JavaScript or client-side functionality Troubleshooting is done exclusively in text Selenium Pros: Operations are executed in browser, making JavaScript rendering and manipulation easy Visibility of browse
Post a Comment
Read more

Alexa Hacking at DEF CON 29

This year, I delivered a talk at DEF CON 29 IoT village on the social exploitation of victims proxied through Alexa voice assistant devices.  Check out the Video here!!! The talk was live-streamed on Twitch on Friday, August 6th at 3:30pm PT on the IoT Village Twitch Channel . If you missed the live talk, check out the video on YouTube here: What's the talk about??? As voice assistant technologies (such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant) become increasingly sophisticated, we are beginning to see adoption of these technologies in the workplace. Whether supporting conference room communications, or even supporting interactions between an organization and its customers — these technologies are becoming increasingly integrated into the ways that we do business. While implementations of these solutions can streamline operations, they are not always without risk. During this talk, the speaker will discuss lessons learned during a recent penetration test of a large-scale “Alexa for
Post a Comment
Read more

Bypassing CAPTCHA with Visually-Impaired Robots

As many of you have probably noticed, we rely heavily on bot automation for a lot of the testing that we do at Sociosploit.  And occasionally, we run into sites that leverage CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart") controls to prevent bot automation.   Even if you aren't familiar with the name, you've likely encountered these before. While there are some other vendors who develop CAPTCHAs, Google is currently the leader in CAPTCHA technology.  They currently support 2 products (reCAPTCHA v2 and v3).  As v3 natively only functions as a detective control, I focused my efforts more on identifying ways to possibly bypass reCAPTCHA v2 (which functions more as a preventative control). How reCAPTCHA v2 Works reCAPTCHA v2 starts with a simple checkbox, and evaluates the behavior of the user when clicking it.  While I haven't dissected the underlying operations, I assume this part of the test likely makes determination
Post a Comment
Read more