Episode 40 - Hacking the Human

It’s really frustrating when something breaks… this is true of everything from a garage door not opening to a lightbulb burning out… we just want things to work. It seems, though, this is somehow doubly frustrating when what fails is our tech. 

The printer runs out of ink when you need to print a boarding pass, your phone freezes up completely after a bad update, or the Roomba gets stuck on the same rug no matter how many times you tell it not to try and go there… 

Yeah, we’ve all been there, and it sucks. But for all the times the technology seems to fail us, recently we started talking about all the times we the human fail the technology. Was the printer blinking a “low ink” light for weeks before it finally ran out? How many other updates did we knowingly skip before this one bricked the phone? And now that I think about it, did I actually update the Roomba’s cleaning map or did I just yell at the robot expecting it to know what I want? 

All of those examples are frustrating for sure, but thankfully none are what I would call “dangerous”. When it comes to our data, privacy, and digital wellbeing though that story can change in an instant. See for all the firewalls, Multi-factor Authentication, and advanced security software we put up in the name of “staying safe”… all of that goes out the window the moment we fill out a bogus survey or hand over critical access information to “Jeff from the IT department”…

So once again, let’s take a minute, “slow down to speed up” and talk through all the ways we can help stop attackers from Hacking the Human…