Layer 8 Podcast

Jennifer Shannon is a Senior Security Consultant for Secure Ideas. Kevin Tackett is formerly known as Kevin Johnson, the CEO and founder of Secure Ideas. On this episode, we talked about why Kevin tells some prospective clients that he won't do social engineering for them. We also go into some SE stories, some favorite pretexts and why social engineers get stopped by the people they're testing.

Mathieu Gaucheler is the Subject Matter Expert at Maltego where he works with clients on custom OSINT solutions and also runs their public CTFs and conference demonstrations. He co-wrote a whitepaper on discovering some "behind the scenes" of pig butchering scams and how they are often Scam as a Service offerings.
Maltego is a Silver Sponsor of the Layer 8 Conference on June 5-6, so come see them in Boston!

The Layer 8 Conference is excited to announce the first of its keynote speakers for 2026, Christina Lekati!

Christina is a social engineering specialist who works with Cyber Risk, GmbH in Munich, Germany. She got her undergraduate degree in Psychology and has a Masters in International Business Studies. She has been a part of the OSINT Curious team and has taught her classes at Black Hat in Las Vegas but will also be offering her two-day social engineering class at the Layer 8 Conference this year.
Come join us at the Layer 8 Conference, meet Christina and all of our other incredible speakers in Boston, MA on June 5-6.

Rosa Rowles has spent more than six years as a social engineer, mainly performing vishing calls. She reports that she has made more than 20,000 calls in her career.
In this episode, she talks about using OSINT to build a pretext and how she chooses favorite pretexts to fit into a target's own bias. She also explains amygdala hijacking and how the right pretext can put someone's mind into a state where they might not make the best choices.
Rosa will be presenting at BSides Tampa on May 16 at 2 pm!

Sagi Brody is the CEO and creator of Sockpuppet.io, a company that makes sockpuppets available for investigations. If you've ever tried to create your own sock accounts, you know how difficult they can sometimes be to create, maintain and even to keep from being deleted.

Sagi explains how this came about, what changes he has seen in the industry and why outsourcing your socks may be a better use of an investigator's time.

Sockpuppet is a Gold Sponsor of the 2026 Layer 8 Conference.