By: Hunter Storm Published: April 12, 2025 Hunter Storm is a CISO, Advisory Board Member, Black Ops Team Member, Systems Architect, and Cyber-Physical Hybrid Threat Expert. She is the originator of the Hacking Humans: Ports and Services Model of Social Engineering framework and The Storm Project: AI, Cybersecurity, Quantum,
Hunter Storm coined the terms “spooky toes” and “spooky fingers” to describe her unseen counterparts in cybersecurity, intelligence, and technology. She created these terms during her research in The Storm Project | AI, Cybersecurity, Quantum, and the Future of Intelligence.
“Spooky toes” has many uses in the English language. However, Hunter primarily uses it as a term of endearment and respect for individuals who possess certain industry-specific skills, including but not limited to:
- Stealth
- Surveillance / Monitoring
- Tradecraft
When these skills are used with a sense of playfulness and the outcome of related activities is beneficial, benign, or harmless, “spooky toes” is used in a positive context.
When these activities are malign, neutral, or just plain nosy, “spooky toes” is usually attached to the word “gremlin.”
Example: “Those little spooky-toed gremlins were in there altering my HTML code again. Shoo!”
Note: These terms refer only to human intervention via human-in-the-loop (HITL) and related high-level administrative access interfaces and technologies.
Although their results may look the same to the untrained eye, “Spooky toes” are not:
- Code bugs.
- Hackers who gain access via exploiting vulnerabilities in technology ecosystems.