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Riley laughs and nods. “It is, but trust me, you should do it when prompted to update your passwords. Anyway,” she turns back to me, “it’s not always the most skilled hacker that can breach a company like Merkle. Sometimes all it takes is someone with good social engineering skills to do the job.”
“Social engineering?” Adam Bachleda asks.
Riley nods his way before looking out around the rest of the table. “How many of you have received one of those car warranty calls?”
I glance around to see that almost every hand at the table has gone up.
“I’m betting most of you hang up as soon as you’ve gotten the call,” Riley continues. “But you’re the lucky ones. Hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of customers probably were lapsed on a warranty when they received that call. Without even thinking about it, they fed their information to the caller on the other side, and bam, they’re taken for thousands of dollars.”
“What does this have to do with Merkle?” I ask directly.
Instead of being thrown off, she looks at me with an effervescent smile. Something funny happens in my chest that I don’t like.
“It has everything to do with Merkle,” she says without missing a beat. “A truly determined individual or group won’t need to hack a password when they can hack an individual at the company. If you catch the right employee on a bad day, they’ll quickly give up classified information without realizing it.”
She nods and looks around the table as if waiting for everyone to absorb everything she says.
“At Merkle, the employee who was identified as the entry point of the breach just so happened to be going through a divorce. As most of you can assume, that’s an emotional period for anyone. Said employee took some time to work from home. At which time, she received a call from a man who she believed had just taken over her director role. He pretended to need some vital information in a short amount of time.
“Without thinking too deeply about it, this Merkle employee forked over private information and resources for the company. That was the beginning of the data breach. The caller didn’t need the employee’s passcode. They got in with a few condolences about the woman’s divorce and the guise of being her new director who needed something.”
“Huh,” Adam Bachleda huffs. “So, social engineering is using someone’s vulnerabilities to gain access to secret information?”
“In a roundabout way. Everyone … you, me, even Kyle here,” she says, looking over at me, “have our weaknesses or blind spots, I’ll call them. Now, when you multiply that by what?” She pauses. “How many people did you say Townsend Industries employs?”
I frown because I don’t doubt she remembers what I told her earlier.
“Thousands,” someone from the table supplies.
“Right,” she continues. “That’s over a thousand entry points for someone with malicious intent. While I’m certain Townsend’s security is top notch.” She stops and looks me right in the eye. “One of them already held a gun to my temple.”
One of the wives of the board members gasps.
“And he was fired,” I say, still eyeing Riley, “for reacting too slowly.”
Riley clears her throat. “Not everyone who wants their way into Townsend Industries or any other company, for that matter, will do so with a gun or have the skills of a professional hacker. Sometimes they’ll use your greatest resource without them even knowing.”
There’s a long silence. I’ve lost track of how often I find myself staring at this woman like she’s a puzzle I need to figure out.
Because she is.
I don’t trust her.
I don’t want to be intrigued by her.
But I am.
This is why I feel left wanting when she tears her eyes away from me to face the rest of the table.
“Thank you all for coming to my Ted Talk,” she says, holding her hands out.
Unsurprisingly, the rest of the table erupts into applause and laughter as if she did give a Ted Talk.
I’m not one who’s easily impressed.
I damn sure do not want a relationship or even a woman to warm my bed. There are at least twenty women on this boat and hundreds of others at the events I’ll be attending this weekend that I could use as bed warmers if I wanted.
So, the fact that I can’t take my eyes off of or stop thinking about Riley Martin baffles the fuck out of me.
