The 2007 AZSPF session where Hunter Storm first presented her original creations, the term “Hacking Humans,” The Ports & Services Model of Social Engineering, and the full Hacking Humans framework publicly under the talk’s original title, Social Engineering | Building a More Secure World Thru Innovative Use of the Truth.
A 2007 AZSPF technical session where Hunter Storm dissected IDS/IPS tuning, false‑positive reduction, and event‑correlation logic, clarifying operational realities versus vendor claims.
Spooky Security is a plain‑English, Halloween‑themed walkthrough of real security threats, mapped to classic movie monsters to make the human‑layer patterns impossible to miss.
Designed for a non‑technical audience, the session shows how everyday behaviors create openings for adversaries — not through code, but through predictable human responses. Each “monster” represents a specific failure mode: curiosity, haste, trust, distraction, and the belief that “it won’t happen to me.”
The talk uses humor and familiar tropes to make security concepts stick, but the underlying message is serious: most breaches don’t come from sophisticated attacks. They come from normal people doing normal things in environments designed to exploit them.
Attendees leave with simple, actionable steps to reduce risk, understand adversarial patterns, and recognize when something “feels off.” No jargon. No scare tactics. Just clear, human‑layer security — wrapped in a spooky theme to make it memorable.