Forget Code: These Teens Are Hacking Minds
Beau Friedlander
Reading time: 4 minutes

The ultimate cybersecurity wake-up call
At DEFCON 33, the world’s biggest hacking conference, I saw a scene you may not picture when you think of a hacker convention: average-looking humans (some of them wearing costumes) in competition with each other. The goal: to trick real companies into giving away sensitive information without writing a single line of code.
Maybe you think of teenagers first. Many people do, and that’s because many hackers started their careers in parent-sponsored (as opposed to state-sponsored) settings: a messy bedroom, a basement play area, an attic.
This year, DeleteMe was sponsoring the Social Engineering Community Village at DEFCON, and I was excited to have a front row seat. But I wasn’t prepared to see teenagers barely old enough to vote among the contestants’ ranks. These hackers weren’t engaged in credential stuffing or cracking passwords. There was no malware. They were picking up phones in a soundproof booth, calling real employees at real companies, and convincing them to share details that could later be used to break into a system. No code required. Just confidence, psychology, and the right script.
Watching them at work, it underscored an old truth in the realm of cybersecurity: the human element is still the biggest vulnerability any of us face.
Teenagers at a hacker convention was novel, but their presence underscored an important situation. If skilled communicators can talk their way into getting information that can be used to hack an established company with cybersecurity protocols and systems, then nothing is safe.
One participant–not one of the teenagers, but not an oldster either–explained his strategy bluntly: He called businesses in the South because, in his words, “people there are nicer and will stay on the line.” It worked. He got further into conversations simply by exploiting cultural psychology.
That moment stuck with me. It was all about people. And it reminded me that threat actors succeed because humans, under pressure or distracted, tend to react instead of responding to stimuli.
Psychology scales faster than technology
Security teams globally spend billions of dollars on firewalls, intrusion detection, and AI defenses.
But all it takes is one phone call to a helpful employee willing to share something about the way a company does business, and the whole system unravels. Threat actors know this fact well.
They don’t need to out-code your company’s engineers. They just need to get someone who works there talking long enough to build trust.
As I watched those teenagers, I gained a new appreciation for just how fast these skills can be learned and weaponized.
What happened in that soundproof booth is happening right now in offices, customer service departments, via LinkedIn DM, and in your inbox. In the weird world of social engineering, the helpful IT tech and the frustrated CEO are straight out of central casting. Ditto the IT compliance officer who just needs to “confirm a few details.”
Human vulnerability is universal. If a teenager can exploit it under pressure in front of an audience, so can a criminal who has all the time in the world.
Awareness is everything. The moment you see how easy it is for a threat actor to extract and weaponize something as seemingly trivial as the waste management service used at a company, you can’t unsee it. You realize how data points are like so many breadcrumbs guiding threat actors in the commission of crime, one that could be an extinction-level cybersecurity failure.
And that realization—that human trust can be hacked more readily than any machine—is the first step in protecting yourself.
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