Manipulating Human Memory for Fun and Profit

Presented at DeepSec 2018 „I like to mov &6974,%bx“, Unknown date/time (Unknown duration).

The human memory is very volatile and not really trustworthy. Judges, interrogators and scientists know that humans often mix up or straight up create new false memories. In this talk I will show what we know about how the human memory works, which factors lead to a loss of quality of stored memories and how they can be altered or manipulated for social engineering attacks. Since, ethically, this is a very controversial topic, I will also speak about the ethics behind this. And be advised that I will not talk about NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), as this stuff is unsubstantiated, unscientific esoteric charlatanry.


Presenters:

  • Stefan Schumacher - Magdeburger Institut für Sicherheitsforschung
    Stefan Schumacher is the president of the Magdeburg Institute for Security Research and editor of the Magdeburg Journal for Security Research in Magdeburg/Germany. He started his hacking career before the fall of the Berlin Wall, on a small East German computer with 1.75 MHz and a Datasette drive. Ever since, he liked to explore technical and social systems, with a focus on security and how to exploit them. He was a NetBSD developer for some years and involved in several other Open Source projects and events. He studied Educational Science and Psychology, has done a lot of unique research about the Psychology of Security with a focus on Social Engineering, User Training and Didactics of Security/Cryptography. Currently he's leading the research project Psychology of Security,focusing on fundamental qualitative and quantitative research about the perception and construction of security. He presents the results of his research regularly at international conferences like AusCert Australia, Chaos Communication Congress, Chaos Communciation Camp, DeepSec, DeepIntel, Positive Hack Days Moscow or LinuxDays Luxembourg and in security related journals and books.

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