While swapping stories about Kevin Mitnick — the legendary hacker who got famous not for coding skill but for social engineering (he talked his way into phone-company buildings just by carrying a clipboard, and got employees to hand over their own logins by posing as IT) — one of the hosts gave a genuine personal recommendation for Mitnick’s book: “a very good book if you’re into that kind of thing, the psychology of how people can get you to believe things or just where you don’t ask questions.”
That’s The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security, Mitnick’s first book, written with William L. Simon. It’s become something of a classic in the security world — less about computers, more about how scammers and social engineers manipulate people into handing over access. Given how often “how a lot of these scams are working now” came up in the same breath, it holds up.
Several editions are in print, so here’s a search starting point rather than a single pinned listing: The Art of Deception on Amazon.
[Planet Rage #238 40:07]
