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Brett Johnson

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2022-03-27
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2022-03-27
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  1. “I got played. He had a little website set up with reviews. And I'm like, oh, it's all legitimate. He's building that trust that I talked about. The end result, I got pissed, and there was no sight that dealt with anything criminal or cybercrime related. The only real avenue you had was an IRC chat session, Internet Relay Chat. And that, I'm sure you've been on that, it's this rolling chat board. You don't know who the hell you're talking to. Most of them are full of shit. You can't trust anybody and you're sitting there trying to conduct business. So, you know, if somebody claims they've got a product or service, do they have it? Does it work? Are they just going to rip you off because in those channels everyone's a criminal?”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So get it in my head. I'm like, best thing that I can do is get a fake driver's license, open up a bank account using that driver's license, cash out the ATM. Good. No idea where to get a fake ID. Not a clue. So I get online, looked around, spent a couple weeks looking around, thought I found a guy. He went by the screen name of fake ID man. Dude rips me off.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I'm having them send money. That's when PayPal's first into play. And it amazes me that everybody is using PayPal. It's like, you don't even have to really ask. They're like, can we pay back? Yeah, you can pay all day long by PayPal. And PayPal had no clue what they were doing with security. So it's like, okay. So they're sending money to PayPal. I'm having the PayPal cashed out to bank accounts in my name at that point. And I get scared because by that point, I'm still in four to six thousand dollars a week. And I'm like, somebody's going to be looking at money laundering.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Overnight, little cottage industry pops up in the United States. You go down to Best Buy, buy the system for $100, take it out in the parking lot, open the system up, pull the box up, pull the system out, pull the card out, throw the system away, program the card, ship its ass to Canada, $500 a pop. Started doing that. Business is good. Making $300,000, $4,000 a week doing that. I'm like, yeah, that's good. So many orders, I can't fill all the orders. And quickly think to myself. Why do I need to fill any of them? They're in Canada. I'm down here. Who are they going to complain to? Because I already found out people don't complain. All right. They're not going to complain to anybody. So I start not. Especially in Canada”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Started with love, so now we're doing these schemes online I'm selling to these, I'm programmed these satellite DSS cards. And one of the interesting things, and you still see that to this day, is something will happen that will create an industry for criminals. So what happened is Canada, Canadian judge rules about the same time that I'm doing these satellite cards, Canadian judge comes out and says, hey, it's legal for my citizens to pirate those signals. And his reasoning was, is since RCA doesn't sell the systems up here, my citizens can pirate it. Okay, so what happens is overnight, about the same time, PayPal comes into play. So PayPal's coming right online at about the same time.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, one of the first principles that we started to teach on Shadow Crew is all crime should begin with identity theft. That's one of the main first principles that a lot of people to this day still don't really get. Why would I commit a crime under my name if I can do it under your name? So that's one of the big buffers. And that takes trial and error to get to that point where you start to understand that's the way crime should operate if you're a criminal. With me, it's trial and error. It's that childhood where that mindset is kind of ingrained in you, where you're looking for ways, non-traditional, let's say non-traditional ways of getting around things or getting through things.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Later on, it becomes that. Once you lay that groundwork of the way these schemes are working, all right, it becomes that, and you can apply that to other things in cybercrime as a whole. But initially, it's basically trial and error. You've got a problem. How do you solve that problem? All right. So how do I, I'm committing these crimes under my name. How do I solve that?”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, the approach is you do something And you fuck it up, and you're like, you think back, okay, how do I fix that? So you fix that aspect, you commit the crime again. And it goes a little bit further and it screws up. Okay, how do I fix that? What's the issue on that? How do I fix that?”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Kept going and got better at it, started to understand how to hide identities, things like that, started selling pirated software, pirated software led into installing mod chips. It was for the initial pirated software was Sega Saturn, PlayStation 1. Well, you had a mod chip in those to play the pirated discs. So I started selling and installing mod chips. That led into installing mod chips into cable television boxes so you could watch all the pay-per-view, which in turn led into programming satellite DSS cards, those AT inch RCA satellite systems pull the cart out of it, program it, turns on all the channels, started doing that.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So there's a whole slew of reasons, all right? There's exhaustion, certainly. There's the embarrassment. So if you figure out, if you look at it today, where does the embarrassment come from? Well, the media, family members, we're all very good about blaming the victim for crimes. Why would you click on the link? Why would you send money to somebody you don't know? Blah, blah, blah. So you've got that's going on. You've got the issue of who do you complain to? Back then, you didn't know. Do you complain to local police because she's in another state? So which local police do you complain to? Do you complain to the feds? Well, it's the dollar amounts aren't high enough to complain to feds. Feds are going to tell you to go local. Local is going to tell you, hey, it happened in Kentucky. Complain to them. Kentucky is going to tell you, well, shit, you're over there. We need you to come in. So this whole issue of jurisdiction of the blame factor, everything else. So I got away with that crime and did it under my own name at that point.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “As I get the money orders, I'll send you your animal. She believed that, didn't ask any questions at all. She believed that. Sent me the money orders, I cashed them out. Send her the creature immediately got a phone call. I didn't order this. My response lady, you ordered a blue elephant. I sent you a blue pish elephant, and she got pissed, and she kept calling. I found out, and that's really the first lesson of cybercrime that most of these criminals, including self, learns, if you delay a victim long enough, just keep putting them off. A lot of them, they get exasperated, throw their hands in the air, walk away. You don't hear from them. And none of them, to this day, none of them complains law enforcement. They eat it.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And what happens is, so I'm trying to dye the damn thing. I'm like, well, that's not going to work. That's just not going to work. So I got online, found a picture of a real one, posted it on eBay. And I was like, well, what I can do is I can claim that's the one I've got. And then maybe claim that it got messed up in the mail and work out like that. So posted a picture of a real one online. Woman thought I had the real thing. She wins the bid. That social engineering kicks in immediately. I didn't want to be on the defensive. I wanted to put her on the defensive. So as soon as she wins the bid, I send her a message. Hey, we've not done any business before. I don't even know if I can trust you. What I need you to do protects us both. Go down the U.S. Postal Service, get two money orders totaling fifteen hundred dollars, send them to me issued by the US government. That way we're both protected.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “My initial thought was well, there's got to be one in one of these hallmark stores in Kentucky someplace. So I skipped class the next day, went around all the Hallmark stores looking for peanut. No, idiot. He's on eBay for $1,500. After a few hours of that, I'm like. Turns out they had little gray beanie baby elephants for $8. Picked up one of those for $8, stopped by Kroger on the way home, picked up a pack of blue written dye, went home, tried to die the little guy. So that was a nightmare. Turns out they're made out of polyester, get them out of the bath, looked like they've got the mange”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I would find somebody that had a stereo system on eBay, something like that, and I'd pay for it with Batcheck and would rely on them not to chase me because they were out of state at that point in the dollar amounts were very low. So got the money to finally those schemes enough to get the money to move back to Lexington. Got to Lexington, and by this point I'm doing these schemes on eBay. And I'm like, there's got to be a better way to make money on eBay. Got to be. So didn't really know how. Not I'm watching Inside Edition with Bill Riley. They're profiling Beanie Babies. So I'm sitting there watching the one they're profiling is this one called Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant selling for $1,500 on eBay. I'm sitting there going like shit. I need to find me a peanut.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I'm like, I'm with the Kawadas Club. He's like, No, you're not. So got arrested, spent three months in a county jail for theft by deception. Got out. And we had to move from Lexington back to Hazard and live with Susan's parents. They had gotten a desktop computer, HP. And I started surfing around online. Found eBay and didn't really know how to make money on eBay. At about the same time, I'm... Committing low-level frauds online. I don't really talk about that in the past. The first time I've really talked about that, but I would pay for it with bad checks.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Was working the first job I had was a telemarketer at a cemetery selling gravesites. And then that ended, went over to work for the Shriner Circus, Shriners Hospital. And it was a third-party company that was doing all the telemarketing, made really good money doing that. That job ended. And then they pivoted over to working with Kiwana's clubs, selling food baskets to the food banks and everything. So I stole the phone list and started at my own Kawanas Club, and would do the telemarketing, go out twice a week and pick up checks. What happened was I'm going out picking up checks. Go knock on a door turns out one of the persons that I called was a law enforcement officer. So he was like, who are you”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Something overboard. Back then with Susan initially, it was don't worry about working. I got it. You just worry about going to school. She was a music major. I was like, you just worry about going to school. So don't worry about cooking and cleaning. I got it. I got it. So not only was I this guy that was going overboard, but it's kind of a control freak too, right? So now I got it. I got it. I got it. So here I am, you know. 60 hour week job, 18 hour class load, cooking cleaning, something had to give. I quit the job. I couldn't do it. Quit the job and start back in fraud and trying to hide that from her at the same time. So it was initially telemarketing fraud.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Time it is and everything else, and file the claims. So that gets the money to get married and me and my wife move from hazard to Lexington. And I'm the kid that. My crime usually, if I was a single guy, wouldn't break the law. I would be all right, you know. But females involved, oh yeah, oh yeah, got to spend the money, got to show them gifts, everything else was never enough to show love in some sort of healthy way. I always had to go overboard, and typically it was buying something or stealing some sort of expensive fret.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Exactly, exactly. And the chiropractor will sign off on any damn thing. All right. My cousin Ronnie figures out that I'm going, he finds out I'm going to fake this car accident. So he comes to me. He's like, Hey man, can I get in on that? I was like, yeah, man, you get in on that. So this kid, he's five days younger than I am. This kid, he goes to the dentist the day that we're faking it, has a tooth pulled, tells the dentist not to numb it, not to stitch it, just pull it. So he shows up. He shows up the day that we're driving out to fake the accident. He's got blood all over his shirt. He's still bleeding out of the mouth and everything else. I'm like, are you okay? And he's like, yeah, man, it's going to be good. It's going to be good. I'm like, okay, my mom, by this point, I'm living with my grandparents. My mom is up in the head of a hollow. So we're like, we'll just do it up there. We'll go act like we're visiting my mom on the way back out. Ran over a mountain. Okay. So we go visit and everything, come back out that night, run over the side of the hill. Me and Ronnie walk back up. Of course it totals the car. Walk back to my mom's acting like we've wrecked.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And the faking on that, man. I had bought a Chevy Spectrum at a car auction, gave like 500 bucks for it. My aunt had previously defrauded USAA insurance on a car accident, and she was telling me all about it. She's like, look, go down to this chiropractor, make sure you get the insurance where they'll pay for a rental car. They'll pay lost wages. I was like, they pay lost wages? She's like, yeah, they pay lost wages. I was like, she's like, by the way, you work for me. And I was like, I work for you.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That's what it does. She didn't know I was a crook. She had no idea. She knew I was very bright. She knew I did a lot of theater, stuff like that. Got a job at, I was on hazard. There were no jobs to be had. So I got a job in Lexington because we were going to be moving to UK. Got a job in Lexington at Lexmark testing printer boards, circuit boards. So I would leave on a Thursday night, work three eighteen hour shifts at Lexmark, come back home on Monday. Got married, faked a car accident to get that the other, the rest of the money that I needed to get married.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So start dating, and she was the girl that screwed my brains out. And I fell I head over hills we got married six months later, six months.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah. So, yeah, I've got that Langston Hughes problem, you know. I'm looking for Jesus to show up and he just doesn't. So I was at the community college and I was a straight asshole. I was arrogant, conceited, everything else. And I had posted an advertisement on one of the billboards looking for an adult babysitter, hot blonde, you know, come visit me in the library. Buddy mine shows up, and he's like, Brett, I was like, yeah. He's like, hottest girl in school right down the hall. And I was like, serious? He's like, yeah. And I was like, let's go see. Walk over and there's these two guys that are hitting on her. So I just walk up and me and Todd, that was my buddy. Walk up and I'm just sitting there and listening and they're, you know, they're giving the spill and everything. And she's just kind of taken down. Finally, I looked over and I was like, you want to get out of here. And one of the guys looks at me. He's like, hey, we're talking to her. And I was like, well, you're talking at her. You're not talking to her. I'm about to save her ass from you.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “My first girlfriend was a preacher's daughter. And crazy over her, dated her for five years, and she figured out pretty quickly that, well, not quickly, it took her five years to figure out that Brett Johnson is not the man of God. I could talk it, but more of that agnostic than anything, she breaks up with me. So I was at the community college.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Like my dad, man. I'm the guy that I get from mom. I get the criminal mindset. From dad, I get that, don't want him to leave.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “But you see, we as human beings, we want to trust. We do. We need human interaction. And for that human interaction, you have to have a degree of trust.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “What's terrifying me? I used to preach it on Shadow Crew is the idea that the perception of truth is more important than the truth itself. It doesn't matter what the facts are, it matters what I can convince you of. That's what's terrifying to me. So you look at deepfakes, you look at fake news, all this stuff that's going out, that becomes truly terrifying.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Of damage. And that's when you find out real quick that's what separates the men from the boys in this game. All right, because all of a sudden it's not, I don't have to worry about social engineering. I've got source codes and I've got professionals that are looking at that. And that's your ass.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Absolutely. They've stolen a shitload of Bitcoin, everything else. So absolutely, they're actively involved with that. Very skilled attackers, very skilled. But even if you look at, you know, I told you that stat about 90%. So even though solar winds is going to be... The number one attack. The follow up to that is this not Petia attack that happened. And so that was the most sophisticated attack launched by the Russian sandworm group using all known exploits throughout. So it's not, again, it's not... You're right, and the sophistication is typically not technical sophistication, but it's that social engineering sophistication. How do you get these things put together in line to attack and succeed?”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Know it's interesting. So you've got Iran, you've got North Korea, China, Russia. You've got the big four. You also got Brazil. You've got all these other countries that are interested in the United States as well. Nation states are interesting depending on who the nation state is. I used to be. You know, they'll enlist these guys and steal information and what have you. Then Russia will take the information they want to, and they'll basically go off and sell whatever you want to and make some money. China's all about IP. North Korea's about stealing money because they really don't know what the hell else to do right now.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Absolutely. So think about one of the attack vectors has been Microsoft Outlook 365, things like that. This allowed the attackers to look at the source codes of that. So they have the source code now, so they can go through it line by line. What are the vulnerabilities? Let's find new vulnerabilities, new zero days. I said zero days aren't common, but this opens up an entire new threat surface all of a sudden. So it's a completely catastrophic attack. Once all the chips are down, everything's tallied up. People are going to be like, yeah, we're done. We're done”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Basically, they hack into solar winds and get access to it, and it allows them to view every single thing. I mean every single thing about every single client that solar winds had at that point. So entire snapshots of all the IP that was going on, all the emails, all the communications, every single secret that was going on with those companies, if company had software like Microsoft, it allowed them to look at the source code of everything that was going on. I mean, it's just a complete and total nightmare. All right. And something that you are not going to recover from. You're not. I mean, it's done at that point. You know, there's not been a lot of news lately about it, but the fact of the matter is, is that's the type of attack that's a catastrophic attack.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “SolarWinds was very, it provided a backbone of security for. Hundreds, thousands of different companies. If you looked at a lot of security companies were using solar winds that would allow you to get a snapshot of the entire system that they were working on. So what happens is you get a Russian group that comes in and they”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “My view on that is that the only person responsible for the crime are the criminals who did the attacking, the actual criminals, not solar winds. Now, does that mean the solar winds isn't all fucked up? They are. And there needs to be some accounting in place. But the only individual, the only people responsible for crime are the criminals. And that's either online in the physical world, what have you. Being an idiot is not a crime. Bean. Being criminally negligent is And I think that SolarWinds is certainly responsible. They're culpable. For what happened.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “See, I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that at all. So, solar winds. Yeah. So I've got 130 page class action lawsuit printed out at the house. I've been going through it, that catalogs how solar winds lied for years about their vulnerabilities, and they lied to investors. The people who came in, the auditors, they would hire not pay attention to them when they said you've got these issues. They would say go away, shit like that for years until solar winds, you know, the attacks become apparent.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “That becomes questionable. So no monetary loss, or was there a monetary loss? Probably not. All right, so you have to figure out who the victim is before charges are pressed. Now, the crime would be unauthorized access. But no real victim on that unless the person whose account you took over takes exception to that. No monetary loss.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “So that's business email compromise. And those crimes, and it's one thing you see about cybercrime, cybercrime is not really sophisticated. It's not. The attacks are not sophisticated. The stat is 90% of every single attack uses a known exploit. It's not the stat. It's not zero-day attacks. Out there, but if you're a criminal waiting on a zero day to profit, you're going to starve to death. The meat and potatoes are at 90% known exploits”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “So then he spear fishes in, gets those credentials. At the same time, he creates a Unicode domain in whatever the company name is. All right. So instead of that English alphabet I, he's got that Russian letter that looks like an eye, but without the dot on top. All right. Comes back into the email, into the payroll email, blocks the real CEO's email, replaces that with the Unicode email that he's got, and then sends out a message using the correct language, the correct relationships, everything else, and says, hey, you know, we're updating our account status. I need you to send this payment instead of over here. They've set up a new account, send all payments over here now. And that is business email compromise in a nutshell, all right? Works great.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Spear that CEO just to get their login credentials to their email, just to read the emails, and he'll go in there and he'll start reading all these emails. He'll specifically read the emails to the payroll department, see what that relationship is. Are they talking about their kids? Talking about relationships, talking about vacation, what are they talking about? How are they talking? Are they friendly? Are they sterile? What do they do? So then he decides, well, I'm going to go ahead and spearfish the payroll department as well.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “And so think about that, all right? So when fishing first comes out, you could look at the language of the text or the website and say, if you were paying attention, that's so okay. So that's not an English speaker who wrote that typically, all right? But as time has went on, as the awareness of what a phishing attack looks like, we have people that are sitting down now and making sure that the language is proper. It gets worse than that, though, if you look at business email compromise, all right? So the way a business email compromise typically works is the attacker will find a payroll person, find a CEO. He will fashion a spear phishing email, which is that's a phishing attack that's targeting one specific individual, all right? So he'll fashion a spearfishing email. And the way he does that is he pulls all the information he possibly can on that person, all right, that CEO. Maybe he'll...”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “With different payment mechanisms. You find an easy way to exploit a system and typically the financial organization, not our problem. Our system's secure. It's their errors. Well, not really. You've got some culpability in that and you're just trying to avoid paying the part of the bill is what's going on.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yeah, so what you do is you find some fat cat that's got his retirement invested in blue chips. Same time you find a penny stock. You open up a brand new account, buy into that penny stock, cash the fat cat out, buy into that same penny stock, pump and dump schemes all of a sudden. So you're destroying people's retirement accounts for just a few thousand dollars. Bam, bam, bam. And of course, E-Trade's response is not our problem. Your problem, you shouldn't have given up your password or what have you at that point. And you still see that issue today with Zelle scams and things like that. So, you know, the instant payment that”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Login password, complete social date of birth, mother's maiden, account information, everything else. So we had access to those e-trade accounts. e-trade initially had no security in place so you could cash out the account ACH the money out Went through just fine. Ae them alive on that for four to six months. E-Trade got to the point where you couldn't do any ACH coming out. They locked everything down. Well, you're still sitting on thousands of E-Trade accounts. How do you make money on that?”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “pH. That's another social engineering tech that's sending that fake email out that looks like it's coming from a website or your financial organization or whatever and saying, hey, we've got a security problem. We need you to update your account information. Well, back then, no one had ever seen a phishing attack. So you could ask for all the information. You were getting just complete identity profiles on a phishing email. Nowadays you can't do that. Nowadays you look for basically credentials because everyone is aware of phishing. But back then it was complete information. We had fished out, I don't know, 200,000 E-Trade accounts as what we had the login credentials.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “The lady was one story another truly despicable story. We'll get to script in a second, but another truly despicable story. We had, um...”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “But if you take the time to listen, you know somebody at that point. Absolutely, you do. Then you have to be able to dismiss it. You have to dismiss it after. You're looking for that just to see how I can manipulate that is what you're trying to do.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “It's good. It's good. So, and a lot of the times that social engineering is just feeding into what the victim wants to believe. All right. It's not really coming up with a brand new story at all. It's just knowing what that victim is, what the motivations of that victim is, feeding into it at that point. So you have to, again, that social engineer has to almost immediately know what's driving that person that they're talking about. If I'm working on a phone, talking to someone over the phone, I have to know within seconds what I need to say, how I need to act to interact with that customer service agent or whoever I'm talking to on the other end of the line.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Yeah, so the big picture of that is trust. How do you establish trust with a potential victim? Now, I would argue online that that trust is established through a combination of technology, tools, social engineering. All right, so we trust our tech. We trust our cell phones. We trust our laptops. A lot of times we don't understand how they operate, but we trust the news that comes across the line. We trust the phone numbers that show up. We trust IP addresses if we're advanced enough to look at an IP address or a domain or anything else like that. Criminals use tools to manipulate that. Spoofed phone numbers, spooked browser fingerprints, whatever that may be, whatever the tool may be. Then that lays a base level of trust at that point you shoot in with a social engineering and lay whatever story that is in order to manipulate that victim to act not.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Exactly. And I would argue that that is not a sociopath because a cyber criminal, and I was no different, most cyber criminals justify those actions. So the justification becomes what's important. With me, the justification was why I did it for my family. I did it for my wife. Did it for my stripper girlfriend? So, and I believe those justice”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “First, let me say that I became a social engineer as a child, all right? Because the adults in my environment as a child, I had to know exactly what they were thinking and be able to try to manipulate that for survival. So I became a social engineer for survival initially. And one of the things that I've seen with a lot of cyber criminals is the exact same thing. The really expert ones, they become a social engineer as a child. Then later on, they use those tools to victimize others.”

    2022-03-27 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #272 – Brett Johnson: US Most Wanted Cybercriminal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source