LLMs and the economics of Evil, Inc., with Manish Goregaokar

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) is joined by Manish Goregaokar, a senior software engineer and member of the Rust security response team, to discuss what LLMs do to the cost side of running a sophisticated con. They walk through a scam built for programmers: a plausible company, a few rounds of interviews, and an NDA signed via "sign in with email" that quietly hands an attacker the identity account everything else resets against. A version of it hit at least five people in the Rust community within days of Manish publishing on the subject, and Patrick describes being targeted himself by someone posing as a Bloomberg reporter who wanted him on a Zoom call with a codec problem. They also cover money mules and the three stages of laundering, the $25 million Hong Kong transfer authorized on a fully deepfaked video call, and why the only durable individual defense is refusing to trust any communication you did not initiate.

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Full transcript available here: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/what-llms-do-to-the-economics-of-scams-with-manish-goregaokar/

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Links:

Manish Goregaokar’s blog: https://manishearth.github.io/  Manish on X: https://x.com/ManishEarth–

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