Alex Kasper
Alex is an American technology executive and former hacker. In the 1980s and 90s in Los Angeles, he ran with a group of young hackers and phone phreaks that included Kevin Mitnick, with whom he created and taught the Certified Social Engineering Prevention Specialist (CSEPS), the world's first social engineering prevention certification. He now researches AI deception and is writing a book on the subject. Alex married a Canadian, recently immigrated to Montreal, and is now learning French.
Intervention
Ancient cons still work. Technology just made them faster, cheaper, and easier to scale. What hasn’t changed is the logic that makes them work.
Treating deception as a “spot the artifact” game has failed. Bad grammar, foreign accents, suspicious links, strange senders, and even valid SSL certificates are all just surface cues that tell us nothing about whether the request itself can be trusted. Attackers can use machines to polish the presentation or leverage compromised trusted accounts to appear genuine.
The deeper problem is that both human judgment and machine guardrails can be fooled by the same thing: a convincing request built on deceptive logic.
Using real-world attack recordings and examples ranging from traditional social engineering to recent attacks against AI agents, we’ll examine how the same underlying attack logic can bypass both human judgment and machine guardrails. We'll look beyond the individual psychological tricks to the simple, repeatable logic exploits that make them work.
Attendees will leave with a practical way to recognize and dissect these attacks based not on how they look or how they arrive, but on what they are trying to make the target believe and do.